Butterfly Queen

The Butterfly Queen/ A Wolf Among Men/ In Your Dreams/ My Worst Nightmare

It all started with a dream.  Then again, doesn't it always?

Marguerite has been dreaming the same dream for 20 years. There have been variations, of course, but it's always the same dream.  All she ever remembered was a castle. The first time she dreamt it, she saw it as a sign to leave Haiti.  Then she saw it as a sign to get married, then to retire, and finally to move to Florida.  What she sees every night is this: she is running through an empty castle, looking back, holding up the skirts of her gown.  The gown is white, her nails a pale pink, and while her feet are bare, the click of her heels echoing off the stone floor is the only sound. She didn't know whether she was running to or away from something; she didn't know where she was headed, away from the past or into the future. Sometimes she was barefoot, and the pain was unbearable.  She would wake shivering in her bed, the walls sweating in the summer heat, hot tears washing her burning cheeks.  The clicking of the fan that woke her sounded like gunfire,  bringing up fears of the regime change and its aftermath. Between the urgency of the dreams and the political maelstrom that year, she had the constant urge to leave Haiti behind.  It took almost two years, and burying her father to convince her mother to leave with her. They moved, but the dreams persisted.  The only time her dreams changed was during her pregnancies, when she dreamed the dreams of her children.  Even then, though, her dreams would sometimes poke through.
***
Chapter 1
Few really important events can be trace to a single moment, a point of impact, but the day they met was the day everything changed, for everyone.
There is a wind that demands compliance, creates isolation. It brings both latent fear and a native consolation to surface, reminding all in its path of their utter smallness, their insignificance in life’s grand scheme.  Cherie was standing in such a wind, at home for the first time since moving from California that summer.  For six months, she’d been bored by the flat gulf waters, the flat landscape, the boring flat roads.  Florida was just so flat.  She missed everything about Cali, but mostly her dad, and her old life.  She was too young to think of the good old days, but she hated that her family was wrenched apart.  Ironically, she blamed her mother, although she’d done nothing wrong.
She was on her five oclock run, a regimine she started when her parents started having quiet conversations behind closed doors.  That’s how she knew it was bad: her family didn’t do anything quietly, and they said everything as it came to mind, no filter.  Even her meme was hush hush—meme who filled her days with funny stories and funnier criticisms about LA.  At thirteen, she developed the need to run away from home, daily, for 45 minutes.  Today was no different.  After getting Kai off the bus, done with homework and safe in front of the Xbox, she headed downstairs for a quick swim and  a run.  Everything was normal, she climbed out of the pool, slipped into a rash guard and sneakers, grabbed her ipod and jogged down the deck stairs toward the beach.
Clicking her way to Incubus, she breathed in deep the gulf air. That’s a plus, she thought.  Florida does smell clean.  However, she did miss the ever present greasy smell of taco stands that lined the west coast. Not that it matters, home isn’t home anymore.  About a mile in, Cherie became mesmerized by the sky.  It was a weird purple, and the waves were swirling up to reach the sky.  Not in theNeptune’s coming for you way of California’s surf, but in this almost calm, mournful way.  She stopped to watch it.  She didn’t know how long she stared,but when she became aware of what she was doing, she started up again, slowly, tiptoeing around mollusks in search of their shells.  One eye was trained on the weird sky.  Even the birds seemed uncertain by this dance of sky and sea.  She sat down to watch the show they provided too.  She became hypnotized by the sound of the beach; she even turned off the music.  It seemed the beach itself was breathing.  She leaned back to be part of the huge slow breath.  She even made a few sand angels.  Just as she was immersed in the greatest sense of relief and peace since her nightmares started, convinced she’d left the boogey man behind, that’s when she caught the wolf’s attention.
***
Cherie gazed into the new sky, amber, with three bright suns lined up one on top of the other, like a streetlight, each progressively warmer in hue than the last.  She eventually realized that the bottom sun was a bird—a giant golden eagle headed straight for her.  Within seconds, the enormous creature was perched on the high branches of a neighboring grove and staring right at Cherie.  Cherie stared back.  As she did, she glimpsed a peach glinting in the sunlight.  She plucked the golden peach and examined it closely. It looked more like an apple up close, but still smelled like a peach, and it tasted like an orange.  All three flavors mixed together like a trifecta for the senses.  She ate ravenously, shocked by her sudden hunger.  She stole another glance at the giant Roc and, as sleep took over, dropped the core to the forest floor.
Within minutes hounds and wolves descended on the scene of the crime.  General Nox hovered over the core, thinking. She smell of the forbidden fruit still lingered in the air, but the culprit had vanished.He ordered troops up and wolves out with a nod of his head. At the command, 300 men scaled the sacred trees, knowing one wrong move would be their death.  If any of the plumchard fell before harvest, Olrec would have the head of clumsy man by supper.
As the men surveyed the scene treetop, 300 wolves scattered to search the forest floor.  Nox paced his horse back and forth at the scene of the crime.  How could he explain the elusive thief without losing his job? Or his life?