Bring Me A Dream: Reveler Series 5 (4 page)

***

Vince woke in his friend Paula’s apartment, where he’d set up his business’s Shut Eye shared dreaming equipment for his and Jordan’s use. Her goal had been to retrieve Rook from Mirren; his had been to kill Didier Lambert. And he’d failed. He pulled the dreamjack out of his ear and dropped it on the coffee table.

No matter what world he was in, the sense of helplessness and rage followed him. He couldn’t move on, couldn’t fucking breathe right, until Lambert was dead.

The apartment was quiet. Jordan had left to find Rook in the waking world. The place was cluttered and half disassembled with moving boxes—she was in Spain recovering from a bitter breakup. Somewhere in her stacks of books and piles of clothes and crafty stuff, she’d given up and run away. Her life was in shambles, and so was her apartment.

Vince would not look to his right, where something dark was lurking. Reveler exhaustion had to be nagging him again. His imagination was mixing with fatigue—yes,
fatigue
was what that thing was. A relic of his illness. A hiccup in his synapses. A sane man would ignore it.

He lifted stiff legs off the stacked moving boxes where he’d propped them and sat up. On the cluttered coffee table to his left, on top of a tower of books that had yet to find a box, was a note. Since it wasn’t there when he’d gone Darkside, he figured Jordan must’ve left it for him.

Are you sure you’re not still lost in the Scrape?

The note sent a tremor through him.
Brilliant observation, Jordan.
Of course he was still goddamned lost in the Scrape…metaphorically anyway. Yes, he was still out there. And his father was, too. They were both lost in a storm of sand so sharp it might as well have been glass. He had blood on his hands, but no satisfaction.

Jordan, Ms. I-Have-a-Plan, should’ve kept her helpful insights to herself. Who did she think she was? The plan hadn’t worked for him. He’d been so close. Kill the old man. And then have blinding sex with in Mirren. That
had been
his
plan.

Now they wanted him to help find the
Sandman
? For chrissakes.

Vince was removed from everything and everyone he knew, a refugee of normalcy, living in someone else’s broken home. He rubbed a hand over his face, grabbed the note, and crumpled it up. Threw it into Paula’s mess.

The
thing
was still there, waiting at the edge of his peripheral vision, but if Vince acknowledged its presence, he’d have to acknowledge his own mounting madness.

Keep it together. Focus.

Lambert
was his target. The way out of the metaphorical Scrape was by killing him. But that wasn’t an option now.

He fought for breath and stretched his neck to get his heart rate back under control. Then, he stood to make the call. The back of his head fuzzed a little, but it cleared almost immediately. The incredible weariness that had crippled him these past few days transmuted into potential energy, the kind learned about in physics class, as if he were a rubber band stretched tight, ready to fly faster and farther than ever before. That was, if he didn’t snap first.

He cast his gaze around at his gear amid the mess—cutting-edge glasslight tech mixed with Paula’s quilting stuff—but he couldn’t spot Paula’s phone.

The
thing
to his right wavered, moving toward him. Vince could ignore it no longer.

Picking up a life-sized ceramic hen, the kind women like Paula used to decorate their kitchens, he turned to face it.

A nightmare watched him from the other side of the sofa. Its skin was gray, its body humanoid, but made out of putty. When Vince blinked, in the fraction of a second during the blurry crack of his lids, he could see his dead father before him. But when he opened his eyes fully, it was the nightmare who stared back at him.

Nightmares couldn’t come into the waking world. This had to be a hallucination. Stress.

It leaned forward, as if to crawl over the sofa.

“Leave me alone!” he roared at the creature, and he hurled the hen at it. The nightmare disappeared right before the hen exploded into a million pieces against the wall.

***

They were both late.

Steve Coll leaned against a wall in the huge, echoing crossroads that was Grand Central’s main thoroughfare. The foot traffic was constant, fast, and purposeful. Most people wore jackets, and at this hour, their scarves were knotted tightly around their necks. While he was sure security monitored the area with cameras and plain-clothes police officers, if he kept his head down, he’d merely be another person waiting for someone to arrive.

Across from him, a child stopped his mother in front of a billboard in the shape of an old-fashioned wardrobe door. The ad required no text because the door was iconic: it led to a Rêve of a popular classic fantasy book series that had been made real Darkside. Coll hadn’t had the pleasure, but he knew the company who’d licensed the rights had spared no expense creating the experience. Accordingly, the Rêve was constantly sold out.

Where were they?

Coll liked only one person who was habitually late, and that was Maisie Lane, his sweetheart, who more than compensated for it in other ways. He would not wait for Mirren Lambert, who’d abducted Rook and whose father had tried to overcome Maisie’s dreamscape, Maze City. Nor would he stand around for Vincent Blackman, who’d tried to recruit Maisie’s sister Jordan into Didier Lambert’s organization. It was dangerous to be out in the open too long, and he didn’t trust either of them. They’d do what suited them, what furthered their own interests, no matter who got hurt.

If it weren’t for the rumors of the Sandman, Coll would never have come in the first place.

He was crossing his arms to contain his impatience when instinct made him step forward.

Someone was here, probably Mirren Lambert. A strange nagging at the back of his mind told him so. Mirren was like him, half nightmare.

Coll scanned the area quickly—no immediate sign of her—then he went back and more slowly and methodically examined each group of people. Commuters. Students. Family. A few of them had the telltale blurry aura of a reveler, someone who not only was lucid Darkside, but who’d spent time sharing dreams. None resembled the young blonde Jordan had described to him. But then, if Mirren
was
like him, she would be a master at waking dreams. He’d yet to find anyone who could fool him, however.

This was ridiculous. He wasn’t playing games with Lambert’s daughter. And they didn’t need Blackman’s help. Coll was leaving.

He cast his gaze around one last time, anger rising. His interest landed on a young man who looked ill. The smear of diluted color coming off him said he was a reveler, but his pallor and visible misery signified a clear case of reveler exhaustion. He should be in a bed, a hospital one.

And then Coll’s adrenaline surged. A gray creature—exactly like a nightmare of the Scrape—was prowling on the floor of the terminal. Its attention was focused on the young man, who’d now put his arms around his head as if to block out all sight and sound. No one else nearby seemed to notice the nightmare, even though they were sitting within feet of the distressed reveler. Coll had almost missed it himself.

A week ago, Rook and Jordan had both claimed that a nightmare had followed Rook into the waking world. The nightmare had taken the form of Rook’s younger brother, whose death had tormented him. Coll wondered what form
this
nightmare was taking for the young man. It was terrible, whatever it was. The man had to have come to the train station hoping for safety in numbers.

Coll had been Chimera too long to stand by and let something from Darkside harm anyone. It’s how he proved to himself that his human side was stronger than his nightmare one. He’d chosen the waking world.

He made his way across the busy floor as quickly as he could—people were in the way—his gaze locked on the thing that did not belong in this world. The man still had his head down, arms clasped at his neck, and had begun rocking when Coll reached him.

Coll took hold of one of his arms and pulled him up and away from the thing.

The man stood, looking at Coll with alarm. “Get off me, man!” His voice was pitched to hysteria.

Coll placed himself sideways in between the man and the nightmare, so he could see them both. Nightmares didn’t bother with others of their kind. “You need to go to Chimera and report what’s happening to you.”

The man’s angry expression faltered, then his eyes focused. “
You see it?
”

An elderly couple openly stared at them, so Coll stepped in close and spoke low, inclining his head so only the man could hear. “I do. You’ve attracted a nightmare, and it’s not going to leave you alone. You
have
to get help.” Coll had no idea how to get rid of it. The thing wasn’t moving anymore; it watched them avidly, almost as if it were surprised and unsure itself. Even drew back a bit, as if wary.

Attack it here, in front of all these people?

“It follows me,” the man said.

Coll didn’t take his eyes off it. It reminded him of an alien, the kind people referred to as Greys. And, interesting, weren’t Greys supposed to occasionally abduct people? “You need to go to Chimera.”

“I can’t go to Chimera. Can
you
help me? Please. I’ll pay you whatever you want.”

“I can’t guard you every second,” Coll said. If the man didn’t want to go to Chimera, he had to have a reason. “It doesn’t matter if you went Darkside illegally. What matters is that your life is in danger.”

“I don’t want to go to Darkside prison,” he wailed.

“You don’t want that thing to drag you out into the Scrape either.” The implications of this were frightening. If both Rook
and
this man had had the same experience, other revelers must have, as well. “Run. Get out of here.”

Coll sensed the man’s departure, but he kept his gaze locked on the nightmare, wondering how to fight the thing in the waking world.

Which was why he didn’t notice who threw the big shoe that made it disappear. The dress shoe remained behind—a black lace-up that had been nice recently enough to have shiny patches, but was otherwise scuffed and ruined.

“Try throwing things at it,” Vince Blackman said through clenched teeth.

Coll looked him over, found him just as wild-eyed and twitchy as Jordan had described. The man should’ve been admitted to a mental hospital, not set loose to investigate the Sandman. “You know this from experience?”

“Yeah, I do.” Vince raised those crazed eyes to meet his. “What the fuck is happening?”

A woman in a skin-tight outfit approached from the other side. “I’ll tell you what’s happening: people went into nightmare territory, and now nightmares are checking out the waking world.”

Mirren Lambert. She’d been instructed to be discreet, but her body in that small T-shirt and form-fitting leggings screamed for attention. And flip-flops? In this weather?

“What?” she said dangerously, hand going to her hip to strike a defensive pose that accentuated her curves and bared her midriff.

Coll had no idea what to say. The woman was clearly ready to draw blood over her fashion choices. Maisie had on occasion chosen some interesting clothing, as well. He’d learned that the only safe evaluation was admiration, yet he couldn’t bring himself to even nod his head at Mirren’s getup.

“
I
like it,” Blackman said. The raw lust in his tone banished any and all of Coll’s hope of success for the task set for them.

Mirren Lambert and Vincent Blackman. Together? The world was doomed.

CHAPTER THREE

Mirren squared off against the stranger who was looking at her like gum on the sole of Vincent’s shoe. She’d hoped for Rook so she could get details about how David was doing. And she had instructions. They needed to childproof wherever they were staying or watch him carefully every second. And Darkside, well, everything in the waters caught his attention. She wanted Rook. But
this
man?

“Who are you?” she demanded.

His expression smoothed, went blank. Controlled. He held out his hand. “Steve Coll.”

She didn’t take it. “Where’s Malcolm Rook?”

“Babysitting. Do you really want to know where?”

Again that tone, as if she weren’t thinking right. She was. About David.

Vincent came forward, though he didn’t seem like the same man she’d known Darkside. She’d never met him in the waking world.

“Are you
our
babysitter?” he asked Steve, which brought her attention back over.

“Apparently.” The men shook hands, both strangers to her.

“That nightmare didn’t advance on you,” Vincent said. “It backed away even. Why?”

Good question,
Mirren thought. She looked at Steve Coll more closely.
Oh.
“Are you
that
friend of Rook’s?”

Rook had told her that he had a friend who was half nightmare, too. This judgmental man was like her. He was
like
her, which meant he could impose daydreams on people to trick them into thinking he looked normal. That he
was
normal.