Read Online The Last Dream Keeper by Amber Benson - Free Book Online Page A

didn’t help things.
    Still groggy, she pushed the thick brown duvet away from her body and climbed out of the king-sized teak bed. She slid her feet into a pair of soft slippers then pulled on her powder-blue chenille bathrobe, letting the plush fabric enfold her in its warmth. She walked over to the vanity and sat down to stare at her face.
    She looked awful. Hungover even. Her usually handsome features were drawn, the ebony skin too taut over the razor-sharp cheekbones she’d inherited from her mother—who was now only a faded memory, having died when Arrabelle was four. Leaving the curious little girl behind so she had been raised by a loving, yet eccentric, physician father and a revolving door of nannies.
    â€œWho are you?” Arrabelle asked the image in the mirror, but if she expected a reply, she was disappointed. The tired-looking woman in the glass did not answer.
    She left the vanity and dragged herself to the bathroom, where she brushed her teeth and washed her face, slathering on moisturizer. This was the same ritual she’d performed for years, eschewing makeup and the other accoutrements of femininity because she was just too damn busy doing other things. Worrying about what she looked like did not rate high on her priority list.
    The late-morning light filtered through the living room windows as Arrabelle made her way to the kitchen for her morning coffee. Unlike makeup, espresso rated high on that priority list, and she was no good to anyone before she’d had her first shot of the day.
    After decades of living among the detritus of her father’s folk art collection, Arrabelle had become almost immune to the West African and South Asian ceremonial masks and ornamental sculptures that decorated her living room—but not quite. Somehow these same collectibles seemed apropos to their environment when they resided in her father’s dilapidatedold row house in San Francisco, but here in the Southern California sunshine there was something macabre about them.
    Their brightly colored faces followed her, eyes ogling her back. Her slippers made no sound on the hard surface of the living room floor, no echoing footfalls to carom off the cathedral post-and-beam ceiling. She’d bought the house for its good bone structure, but she’d ended up redoing the whole space, shaping it into a modernist version of a wooden cabin—large plate-glass windows juxtaposed against the original, more traditional, wooden structure. It was an impressive bit of architecture, something she was proud of creating.
    Still, her father’s collection felt strange in the space, like a flea-ridden squatter hiding out in the palatial expanses of Versailles. All those faces watching and whispering from their spots on the wall, their gazes malevolent and hostile. Even the benign ones—the smiling masks with wide eyes and grinning mouths, or the animal avatars with their paintwork stripes and spots and fur.
    And then there were the vertical-eyed monsters with serrated teeth and pointed tongues, the plain wooden masks that seemed like blank slates ready to take on the emotional state of whatever shaman wore them. For some reason, their expressionless faces terrified Arrabelle the most.
    She didn’t think of herself as easily upset, but more and more she found she averted her eyes when she had to go through the room.
    . . . Bella boo . . .
    The words flowed around her as though someone were whispering them inside her head, the imagined fluttering of lips and teeth making Arrabelle shiver.
    . . . Bella baby child . . .
    Her body went rigid, feet stopping her in place. She felt like a bug trapped in amber in the middle of the living room. All the hair on her body stood on end; the voice—and the words it spoke—was not something she’d heard for a very, very long time.
    . . . Bella baby . . .
    It was her dead mother’s voice, calling