The Gatekeeper's Secret: Gatekeeper's Saga, Book Five (The Gatekeeper's Saga) by Eva Pohler Page B

immediately sensed her, turned back to her, and winked. She covered her giggle, even though the dreaming boy couldn’t hear her.
    “Give me the dice, Dungeon Master,” the boy said to Hip. “I need to see if I can open that door.”
    A huge wooden door loomed before them.
    Hip said, “Dude, you don’t need to roll. Just open it.”
    “The magi warned me that…” the boy stopped in his tracks.
    “What?” Hip asked. He turned back to Jen, shrugged his shoulders, and turned his finger in a circle by his head to indicate the boy was crazy.
    The door burst open. Both Hip and the boy jumped back and yelped in surprise.
    A huge red dragon with shining scales and a horrible woman’s face glared at them with bloodshot eyes. Hip had once explained to her that figments—which were eel-like nymphs—took the shape of beings from the dreamer’s subconscious.
    “It’s my mother!” the boy screamed.
    The boy turned and ran in the opposite direction of the dragon as a sharp forked tongue shot out from the dragon’s mouth and whipped the boy.
    “Do you get that symbolism?” Hip stopped to ask Jen. “This is about how his mother speaks to him.”
    The sharp tongue lashed out at the boy. Hip jumped up and snatched the dreamer, saying to Jen, “But you should see his room. It’s a pig’s sty. No wonder she yells at him.” Then to the boy, Hip said, “Don’t run. Offer her a gift!”
    The boy stopped. His arms and legs trembled in fright. “Give me the dice, Dungeon Master!” he cried.
    “They are under your bed in your messy room,” Hip replied. “Now give the dragon what you came here to give her!”
    “No, Dungeon Master!”
    Goblins appeared from the cracks in the walls and surrounded them on all sides. “Oh, hell,” Hip whispered. “This kid is stubborn.”
    Jen giggled again.
    Hip leapt from the dungeon and gave her a serious look. “Something’s going on in your brother’s dream.”
    “Bobby’s?”
    “No. Pete’s. Come on.”
    The colors and lights shifted in the globe, and soon she could see Hip standing beside Pete and her father’s ghost in their barn.
    She shuddered at the site of her father’s ghost, which she could see with clarity in the dream globe. Although it was transparent, it looked exactly as her father had appeared just before his death. A shiver rushed down her neck and spine, and a tight knot formed in her belly.
    Pete was shaking all over, his head bobbing faster than ever, like he was being electrocuted from the inside.
    “Help me!” Pete cried.
    Jen stood from her bed, holding the globe with both hands. “What’s happening to him?” she asked. “Can we wake him up?”
    “I’m dangling from an iron chain I don’t know where!” Pete shrieked in a voice that sounded nothing like his. “Go to Melinoe, Hypnos! Make her show you where I am!”
    “It’s Cybele!” Hip said. “She’s trying to contact me through your brother.”
    “Help him!” Jen screamed into the globe as Pete faltered to the ground in the fits of an epileptic seizure. She tried to remember that this was only a dream, but it seemed too real.
    She dropped the globe on her bed and ran down the hall to her brother’s room where he was seizing on his bed in the same way he was in his dream. She shook him fiercely, calling his name.
    “Pete! Pete, wake up!”
    ***
     
    In Alexandria, Egypt, where the Nile River emptied into the Mediterranean Sea, Therese stood beside Artemis full of the excitement she used to have before a meet. She bunched her hair beneath her swimmer’s cap and pulled down the arms of her wet suit, noting the scoff of superiority from her competitor. Unlike Artemis, who wore her usual leather skirt and boots, Therese wore the gear, not for protection from the elements (which she didn’t need), but for diminishing the friction of her body against the water. In this race against the northern-flowing Nile all the way to its southernmost banks in Rwanda, she would need every advantage