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Dreams of Gods and Monsters (new prelims and endmatter).indd iii
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First published in America in 2014 by Little, Brown and Company First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton An Hachette UK company 2 Copyright © Laini Taylor 2014 The right of Laini Taylor to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 72272 7 Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 444 72273 4 eBook ISBN 978 1 444 72274 1 Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Hodder & Stoughton policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. Hodder & Stoughton Ltd 338 Euston Road London NW1 3BH www.hodder.co.uk
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For Jim, for the happy middle
Dreams of Gods and Monsters (new prelims and endmatter).indd v
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Dreams of Gods and Monsters (new prelims and endmatter).indd vi
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Once upon a time, an angel and a devil pressed their hands to their hearts
and started the apocalypse.
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Dreams of Gods and Monsters (new prelims and endmatter).indd viii
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01 02 03 04
a 1d
05 06 07
Nightmare Ice Cream
08 09 10 11 12 13
Nerve thrum and screaming blood, wild and churning and chasing and
14
devouring and terrible and terrible and terrible—
15
“Eliza. Eliza!”
16
A voice. Bright light, and Eliza fell awake. That’s how it felt: like
17
falling and landing hard. “It was a dream,” she heard herself say. “It
18
was just a dream. I’m okay.”
19
How many times in her life had she spoken those words? More
20
than she could count. This was the first time, though, that she’d
21
spoken them to a man who had burst heroically into her room,
22
clutching a claw hammer, to save her from being murdered.
23
“You . . . you were screaming,” said her roommate, Gabriel, dart‑
24
ing looks into the corners and finding no sign of murderers. He was
25
sleep-disheveled and manically alert, holding the hammer high and
26
ready. “I mean . . . really, really screaming.”
27
“I know,” said Eliza, her throat raw. “I do that sometimes.” She
S28
pushed herself upright in bed. Her heartbeat felt like cannon
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01
fire—doomful and deep and reverberating through her entire body,
02
and though her mouth was dry and her breathing shallow, she tried
03
to sound nonchalant. “Sorry to wake you.”
04
Blinking, Gabriel lowered the hammer. “That’s not what I meant,
05
Eliza. I’ve never heard anyone sound like that in real life. That was a
06
horror-movie scream.”
07
He sounded a little impressed. Go away, Eliza wanted to say.
08
Please. Her hands were starting to tremble. Soon she wouldn’t be
09
able to control it, and she didn’t want a witness. The adrenaline
10
crash could be pretty bad after the dream. “I promise, I’m fine. Okay?
11
I just . . .”
12
Damn.
13
Shaking. Pressure building, the sting behind her eyelids, and all
14
of it out of her control.
15
Damn damn damn.
16
She doubled over and hid her face in her bedspread as the sobs
17
welled up and took her over. As bad as the dream was—and it
18
was bad—the aftermath was worse, because she was conscious but
19
still powerless. The terror— the terror, the terror—lingered, and
20
there was something else. It came with the dream, every time,
21
and didn’t recede with it but stayed like something a tide had washed
22
in. Something awful—a rank leviathan corpse left to rot on the
23
shore of her mind. It was remorse. But god, that was too bloodless
24
a word for it. This feeling the dream left her with, it was knives of
25
panic and horror resting bright atop a red and meaty wound-fester
26
of guilt.
27
Guilt over what? That was the worst part. It was . . . dear god, it
28S
was unspeakable, and it was immense. Too immense. Nothing worse
29N
had ever been done, in all of time, and all of space, and the guilt was
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hers. It was impossible, and with any distance from the dream Eliza
01
could dismiss it as ridiculous.
02
She had not done, and nor would she ever do . . . that.
03
attered—not rea‑ But when the dream entangled her, none of it m
04
son, not sense, not even the laws of physics. The terror and the guilt
05
smothered it all.
06
It sucked.
07
When the sobs finally subsided and she lifted her head, Gabriel
08
was sitting on the edge of her bed, looking compassionate and
09
alarmed. There was this pert civility about Gabriel Edinger that
10
suggested a better-than-fair chance of bow ties in his future. Maybe
11
even a monocle. He was a neuroscientist, probably the smartest per‑
12
son Eliza knew, and one of the nicest. Both of them were research
13
istory— fellows at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural H
14
t he N MNH—and had been friendly while not quite friends for the
15
past year, until Gabriel’s girlfriend moved to New York for her p ost-
16
d oc and he needed a roommate to cover the rent. Eliza had known it
17
was a risk, c ross-pollinating life hours with work hours, for this exact
18
reason. This.
19
Screaming. Sobbing.
20
It wouldn’t take much digging for an interested party to ascertain
21
the . . . depths of abnormal . . . upon which she’d built this life. Like
22
laying planks over quicksand, it sometimes seemed. But the dream
23
hadn’t troubled her for a while, so she’d given in to the temptation
24
to pretend she was normal, with nothing but the normal concerns of
25
any twenty-four-year-old doctoral student on a tiny budget. Disserta‑
26
tion pressure, evil lab-mate, grant proposals, rent.
27
Monsters.
S28
“I’m sorry,” she said to Gabriel. “I think I’m okay now.”
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01 02 03 04
“Good.” After an uncomfortable pause, he asked, brightly, “Cup of tea?” Tea. Now there was a nice glimpse of normal. “Yes,” Eliza said. “Please.”
05
And when he ambled off to put on the kettle, she composed
06
herself. Pulled on her robe, rinsed her face, blew her nose, regarded
07
herself in the mirror. She was puffy, and her eyes were bloodshot.
08
Awesome. She had pretty eyes, normally. She was accustomed to
09
getting compliments on them from strangers. They were big and
10
long-lashed and bright—at least when the whites weren’t pink from
11
sobbing—and several shades lighter brown than her skin, which
12
made them seem to glow. Right now, it chilled her to note that they
13
looked a little . . . crazy.
14
“You’re not crazy,” she told her reflection, and the statement had
15
the ring of an affirmation often uttered—a reassurance needed, and
16
habitually given. You’re not crazy, and you’re not going to be.
17
Deeper down ran another, more desperate thought.
18
It will not happen to me. I’m stronger than the others.
19
Usually, she was able to believe it.
20
When Eliza joined Gabriel in the kitchen, the oven clock read
21
four am. Tea was on the table, along with a pint of ice cream, open,
22
with a spoon sticking out. He gestured to it. “Nightmare ice cream.
23
Family tradition.”
24
“Really?”
25
“Yeah, actually.”
26
Eliza tried, for a moment, to imagine ice cream as her own fam‑
27
ily’s response to the dream, but she couldn’t. The contrast was just
28S
too stark. She reached for the carton. “Thanks,” she said. She ate a
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couple of bites in silence, took a sip of tea, all the while tensed for
01
the questions to begin, as they surely must.
02
What do you dream about, Eliza?
03
How am I supposed to help you if you won’t talk to me, Eliza?
04
What’s wrong with you, Eliza?
05
She’d heard it all before.
06
“You were dreaming about Morgan Toth, weren’t you?” Gabriel
07 08
asked. “Morgan Toth and his pillowy lips?” Okay, so she hadn’t heard that. In spite of herself, Eliza laughed.
09
Morgan Toth was her nemesis, and his lips were a fine subject for a
10
nightmare, but no, that wasn’t even close. “I don’t really want to talk
11
about it,” she said.
12
“Talk about what?” Gabriel asked, all innocence. “What is this
13 14
‘it’ you speak of?” “Cute. But I mean it. Sorry.”
15
“Okay.”
16
Another bite of ice cream, another silence cut short by another
17
non-question. “I had nightmares as a kid,” Gabriel offered. “For
18
about a year. Really intense. To hear my parents tell it, life as we
19
knew it was pretty much suspended. I was afraid to fall asleep, and I
20
had all these rituals, superstitions. I even tried making offerings. My
21
favorite toys, food. Supposedly I was overheard offering up my older
22
brother in my place. I don’t remember that, but he swears.”
23
“Offering him to who?” Eliza asked.
24
“Them. The ones in the dream.”
25
Them.
26
A spark of recognition, hope. Idiotic hope. Eliza had a “them,”
27
too. Rationally she knew that they were a creation of her mind and
S28 N29
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01
existed nowhere else, but in the aftermath of the dream, it was not
02
always possible to remain rational. She asked, “What were they?”
03
before she quite considered what she was doing. If she wasn’t going
04
to talk about her dream, she shouldn’t be prying into his. It was a rule
05
of secret-keeping, in which she was well-versed: Ask not, lest ye be
06
asked.
07
“Monsters,” he said with a shrug, and just like that, Eliza lost
08
interest—not at the mention of monsters, but at his of course tone.
09
Anyone who could say monsters in that offhand manner had defi‑
10
nitely never met hers.
11
“You know, being chased is one of the commonest dreams,”
12
Gabriel said, and went on to tell her about it, and Eliza kept sipping
13
tea and taking the occasional bite of nightmare ice cream, and she
14
nodded in the right places, but she wasn’t really listening. She’d thor‑
15
oughly researched dream analysis a long time ago. It hadn’t helped
16
before, and it didn’t now, and when Gabriel summed up with “they’re
17
a manifestation of our waking fears,” and “everyone has them,” his
18
tone was both placating and pedantic, as though he’d just solved her
19
problem for her.
20
Eliza really wanted to say, And I suppose everyone gets pacemakers
21
when they’re seven years old because ‘manifestations of their waking fears’
22
keep sending them into cardiac arrhythmia? But she didn’t, because it
23
was the exact kind of memorable factoid that gets regurgitated at
24
cocktail parties.
25 26
Did you know that Eliza Jones got a pacemaker when she was seven because her nightmares gave her cardiac arrhythmia?
27
Seriously? That’s insane.
28S
“So what happened to you?” she asked him. “What happened to
29N
your monsters?”
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“Oh, they carried off my brother and left me alone. I have to sac‑
01
rifice a goat to them every Michaelmas, but it’s a small price to pay
02
for a good night’s sleep.”
03
Eliza laughed. “Where do you get your goats?” she asked, playing
04 05
along. “Great little farm in Maryland. Certified sacrificial goats. Lambs,
06 07
too, if you prefer.” “Who doesn’t? And what the hell’s Michaelmas?”
08
“I don’t know. I pulled that out of the air.”
09
And Eliza experienced a moment of gratitude, because Gabriel
10
hadn’t pried, and the ice cream and tea and even her irritation with
11
his scholarly jabber had helped to ease the aftermath. She was actu‑
12
ally laughing, and that was something.
13
And then her phone vibrated on the tabletop.
14
Who was calling her at four am? She reached for it . . .
15
. . . and when she saw the number on the screen, she dropped
16
it—or possibly flung it. With a crack it hit a cabinet and bounced to
17
the floor. For a second she had hope that she’d killed it. It lay there,
18
silent. Dead. And t hen—bzzzzzzzzzzzz—not dead.
19
When had she ever been sorry not to have broken her phone?
20
It was the number. Just digits. No name. No name came up
21
because Eliza had not programmed that number into her phone.
22
She didn’t even realize that she remembered it until she saw it, and
23
it was like it had been there all along, every moment of her life
24
since . . . since she’d escaped. It was all there, it was all right there.
25
The gut- punch was immediate and visceral and undiminished by
26
the years.
27
“All right?” Gabriel asked her, leaning down to pick up the phone.
S28
She almost said Don’t touch it! but knew this was irrational, and
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01
stopped herself in time. Instead she just didn’t reach for it when he
02
held it out to her, so he had to set it down on the table, still buzzing.
03
She stared at it. How had they found her? How? She’d changed
04
her name. She’d disappeared. Had they known where she was all
05
along, been watching her all this time? The idea horrified her. That
06
the years of freedom could have been an illusion . . .
07
The buzzing stopped. The call went to voice mail, and Eliza’s
08
heartbeat was cannon fire again: burst after burst shuddering
09
through her. Who was it? Her sister? One of her “uncles”?
10
Her mother?
11
Whoever it was, Eliza had only a moment to wonder if they’d
12
leave a message—and if she’d dare to listen to it if they did—before
13
the phone emitted another buzz. Not a voice mail. A text.
14
It read: Turn on the TV.
15
Turn on the . . . ?
16
Eliza looked up from the phone, deeply unsettled. Why? What did
17
they want her to see on the TV? She didn’t even have a TV. Gabriel
18
was watching her intently, and their eyes locked in the instant they
19
heard the first scream. Eliza almost jumped out of her skin, rising
20
from her chair. From somewhere outside came a long, unintelligible
21
cry. Or was it inside? It was loud. It was in the building. Wait. That
22
was someone else. What the hell was going on? People were crying
23
out in . . . shock? Joy? Horror? And then Gabriel’s phone started to
24
buzz, too, and Eliza’s unspooled a sudden string of messages—bzzz
25
bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz. From friends this time, including Taj in London,
26
and Catherine, who was doing fieldwork in South Africa. Wording
27
varied, but all were a version of the same disturbing command: Turn
28S
on the TV.
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Are you watching this?
01
Wake up. TV. Now.
02
Until the last one. The one that made Eliza want to curl up in
03
fetal position and cease to exist.
04
Come home, it said. We forgive you.
05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 S28 N29
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a 2d
05 06 07
The Arrival
08 09 10 11 12 13 14
They appeared on a Friday in broad daylight, in the sky above
15
Uzbekistan, and were first sighted from the old Silk Road city of
16
Samarkand, where a news crew scrambled to broadcast footage of . . .
17
the Visitors.
18
The angels.
19
In flawless ranks of phalanxes, they were easily counted. Twenty
20
blocks of fifty: a thousand. A thousand angels. They swept westward,
21
near enough to earth that people standing on rooftops and roads
22
could make out the rippling white silk of their standards and hear
23
the trill and tremolo of harps.
24
Harps.
25
The footage went wide. Around the world, radio and television
26
programs were preempted; news anchors rushed to their desks, out of
27
breath and without scripts. Thrill, terror. Eyes round as coins, voices
28S
high and strange. Everywhere, phones began to ring and then cut
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off in a great global silence as cell towers overloaded and crashed.
01
The sleeping slice of the planet was awakened. Internet connections
02
faltered. People sought people. Streets filled. Voices joined and vied,
03
climbed and crested. There were brawls. Song. Riots.
04
Deaths.
05
There were births, too. Babies born during the Arrival were
06
dubbed “cherubs” by a radio pundit, who was also responsible for the
07
rumor that all had feather-shaped birthmarks somewhere on their
08
tiny bodies. It wasn’t true, but the infants would be closely watched
09
for any hint of beatitude or magical powers.
10
On this day in history—the ninth of August—time cleaved
11
abruptly into “before” and “after,” and no one would ever forget
12
where they were when “it” began.
13 14 15
. . .
16 Kazimir Andrasko, actor, ghost, vampire, and jerk, actually slept
17
through the whole thing, but would afterward claim to have blacked
18
out while reading Nietzsche—at what he later determined was the
19
precise moment of the Arrival—and suffered a vision of the end of
20
the world. It was the beginning of a grandiose but half-assed ploy
21
soon to fritter to a disappointing ending when he learned how much
22
work was involved in starting a cult.
23 24 25
. . .
26 Zuzana Nováková and Mikolas Vavra were at Aït Benhaddou, the
27
most famous kasbah in Morocco. Mik had just concluded bargaining
S28 N29
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01
for an antique silver ring—maybe antique, maybe silver, definitely a
02
ring—when the sudden hubbub swept them up; he shoved it deep in
03
his pocket, where it would remain, in secret, for some time.
04
In a village kitchen, they crowded in behind locals and watched
05
news coverage in Arabic. Though they could understand neither the
06
commentary nor the breathless exclamations all around them, they
07
alone had context for what they were seeing. They knew what the
08
angels were, or rather, what they weren’t. That didn’t make it any
09
less of a shock to see the sky full of them.
10
So many!
11
It was Zuzana’s idea to “liberate” the van idling in front of a tour‑
12
ist restaurant. The everyday weave of reality had by this time become
13
so stretched that casual vehicular theft seemed par for the course. It
14
was simple: She knew that Karou had no access to news of the world;
15
she had to warn her. She’d have stolen a helicopter if she had to.
16 17
. . .
18 19
Esther Van de Vloet, retired diamond dealer, longtime associate
20
of Brimstone and occasional stand‑in grandmother to his human
21
ward, was walking her mastiffs near her home in Antwerp when
22
the bells of Our Lady began to toll out of time. It was not the hour,
23
and even if it had been, the tuneless clangor was overwrought, prac‑
24
tically hysterical. Esther, who didn’t have an overwrought, hysterical
25
bone in her body, had been waiting for something to happen ever
26
since a black handprint had ignited on a doorway in Brussels and
27
scorched it out of existence. Concluding that this was that some‑
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thing, she walked briskly home, her dogs huge as lionesses, stalking
29N
at her sides.
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01
. . .
02 Eliza Jones watched the first few minutes on a live feed on her room‑
03
mate’s laptop, but when their server crashed, they hurriedly dressed,
04
jumped in Gabriel’s car, and drove to the museum. Early though it
05
was, they weren’t the first to arrive, and more colleagues kept stream‑
06
ing in behind them to cluster around a television screen in a base‑
07
ment laboratory.
08
They were stunned and stupid with incredulity, and with no small
09
amount of rational affront that such an event should dare to unfold
10
itself across the sky of the natural world. It was a hoax, of course. If
11
angels were real—which was ridiculous—wouldn’t they hew a little
12
less closely to the pictures in Sunday school workbooks?
13
It was too perfect. It had to be staged.
14
“Give me a break with the harps,” said a paleobiologist. “Overkill.”
15
This outward certainty was undercut by a real tension, though,
16
because none of them were stupid, and there were glaring holes
17
in the hoax theory that just grew more glaring as news choppers
18
dared to draw closer to the airborne host, and the broadcast footage
19
became sharper and less equivocal.
20
No one wanted to admit it, but it looked . . . real.
21
Their wings, for one thing. They were easily twelve feet in span,
22
and every feather was its own lick of fire. The smooth rise and fall
23
of them, the inexpressible grace and power of their fl ight—it was
24
beyond any fathomable technology.
25
“It could be the broadcast that’s faked,” suggested Gabriel. “It
27
could all be CG. War of the Worlds for the twenty-first century.” There were some murmurs, though no one seemed to actually
S28 N29
buy it.
13
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01
Eliza stayed silent, watching. Her own dread was of a different
02
breed than theirs, and was . . . far more advanced. It should be. It had
03
been growing all her life.
04
Angels.
05
Angels. After the incident on the Charles Bridge in Prague some
06
months earlier, she’d been able to maintain a crutch of skepticism
07
at least, just enough to keep her from falling. It might have been
08
faked, then: three angels, there and gone, no proof left behind. It
09
felt, now, as though the world had been waiting with held breath for
10
a display beyond all possibility of doubt. And so had she. And now
11
they had it.
12
She thought of her phone, left intentionally behind at the apart‑
13
ment, and wondered what new messages its screen held in store for
14
her. And she thought of the extraordinary dark power from which
15
she’d fled in the night, in the dream. Her gut clenched like a fist as
16
she felt, beneath her feet, the shifting of the planks she’d laid across
17
the quicksand of that other life. She’d thought she could escape it?
18
It was there, it had always been there, and this life she’d built on top
19
of it felt about as sturdy as a shantytown on the flank of a volcano.
20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28S 29N
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