Dream Breakers

Dream Breakers (Chapter 21)

It had been a while since the last time I dreamt of Dad.  It was a strange thing. I knew I wasn’t the average kid, but so many people who’d lost their parents didn’t get to converse with them after the fact.  But I did.  I got to hug him.  Talk to him.  Laugh with him.  Break with him.  Even if the dreams weren’t real, even though they were just set up by my psyche as a sort of postmortem trauma, I couldn’t regret them.  Two years they’d been gone.  Two grief-laden, angry years.

 At this point I was ready to forgive and forget that whole argument we’d fallen into.

“Karsten,” Dad exhaled on a sigh of what seemed like relief.

“Dad. Oh, shit.  I fell asleep, didn’t I?”

He leveled me with the parental eyebrow arch to end all parent eyebrow arches.  “What have I told you about language, Karsten Nyx?”

“ ‘Pretty girls don’t have dirty mouths,’ ” I grumbled.  It was one of those parental catch phrases that I could have lived my life without.  Upon further inspection I realized I actually really missed them.

“No, they don’t,” Dad agreed.  “What were you doing before dozing?”

I chewed my lip, thinking.  “I was lying in bed thinking about my…homework,” I lied.  Smooth, K. Nyx, real smooth.

“Well, it’s no wonder you fell asleep, bud.  Math, wasn’t it? You’ve never liked math.” I nodded, feeling guilty.  Dad seemed to pick up on my guilt.  “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

“What do you mean?” I said.  I could have given him any number of answers, ranging from a falsified “Nothing!” to a “I’m a freak and it’s getting hard to hide it now” type of thing.

“I’ve been trying to reach your dreams for some time now.”  Dad was quiet a moment.  Pensive.  “I’ve never been denied entry to any Break before now.  Ever.  How long have you been practicing blocking?”

I scrunched my face up.  That one was new to me.  “I wasn’t trying to.  And I haven’t been practicing ‘blocking’ anything.”

Dad looked mildly shocked, which I knew was not a familiar expression for him.  As a toddler I’d gotten hold of a pair of shears and chopped a good chunk out of his sideburns while he slept.  When he discovered it in the morning all he could do was laugh hysterically.  So shock didn’t come easy to Dad.

Well, there was that time when Mom and I had managed to set fire to the kitchen while making homemade ice cream.  Ever since then we’d referred to the incident as “That One Time with the Fire and the Ice Cream Maker.”

"Fascinating," he said.  "Blocking is a part of your abilities.  In addition to Breaking, you specifically, can also keep people out of your dreams.  Blocking.”

I nodded in semi-understanding.  “Me specifically?  How come you were able to get in this time and the times you’ve been trying before?”

He thought about it momentarily.  “Have you been over exerting yourself? Maybe doing a lot of excessive Breaking lately?  If you’re using too much of your ability at once it may be taking a toll on you more than you realize.”

“Yeah.  I guess I have kind of been training a lot.  I met this guy from school.  He’s a Breaker too.  Holy cow, Dad, he’s amazing!  See, originally he’s from Imperion and so he knows all this stuff about new abilities.  Blocking’s probably part of that too.”  Dad nodded in agreement.  “But so far only I can do them.  Well, me and a few others in the past.  But I’ll bet if I went back into Imperion and found some Breakers who—”