Delirium (10 page)

Eleanor, who’d advanced on the TV when she saw her house featured in a news segment, dropped the hand she’d held across her mouth. The other held her tumbler of champagne. She looked back at Sera. “You said you warned Jake and Jessica?”

She wanted confirmation. Again.

“I did.” Sera racked her mind for details. “Jess told me she’d take the kids and go to her in-laws. Jake took his wife up to a cabin somewhere.”

“Lake Henshaw?”

“I don’t know where, exactly.” Sera glanced at Gary to see how he was taking it. Losing the family home, all the memories, all the family pictures—it must be devastating.

“The plumbing was bad,” Gary said valiantly. “Was going to cost a mint to fix.”

The car he’d been rebuilding for the past few years was in the blackened garage. All the family Christmas decorations, too.

Harlen was hardening under Sera’s arm. Angry. “I’m so sorry,” he said to his parents. “I never meant for this to touch you.”

Sera wanted to cry—she was raw enough—but another strange emotion had swept her. It wasn’t hard, like the fury grasping Harlen. It was a loose kind of heat—mean and sharp. Someone had touched the people she loved.

Eleanor shook her head. “It didn’t touch us, Harlen. They
couldn’t
touch us. Everyone I care about is safe.” She raised her glass. “Sera, you have no idea how relieved I am that you’re joining our family. Today we grew stronger. I
do
like you. Always have. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Sera answered, tearing and up and desperately wishing the moment wasn’t covered in darkness or lit by flame. She wanted to fight, but also to take Harlen away from this and love him. Neither was possible at the moment. “Always have.”

Rook and Jordan were speaking quietly to each other, but they paused and lifted their tumblers. “To family,” Jordan said.

The newscast switched to the protest of Chimera’s new extended powers. Someone’s amateur sleuthing had identified the house as the new Darkside Division director’s childhood home. In the background, the chant, “Kill Chimera,” punctuated the on-site news personality’s story. In the wake of Bright’s death that morning, the public was now hearing the chant as a literal call to arms against the dream police.

Eleanor reached over and turned the flatscreen off. Then she lifted her glass, and so did Gary. “To family.”

She and Harlen raised their glasses. “Family.”

After everyone had taken a deep sip, Jordan said, “We’re set with Maisie, by the way. She should be Darkside by now.”

That was a relief. Sera glanced up at Harlen, saying by way of explanation, “Maze City.”

He nodded, understanding immediately. “That’s good. Thank you.”

Jordan looked over at Harlen’s parents. “There’s only one place Darkside that we know is safe. It’s a place called Maze City. It’s not a Rêve, not in the Agora. It’s my sister’s natural dreamscape, so it’s not there when she’s not asleep. Like all dreamscapes, its boundaries can be breached, but once inside, her city is safe. It’s a maze, and only people who know how to navigate it can move around easily. And with this new tandem dreaming technology, you can go there every night when you sleep until the nightmares are taken care of and the Oneiros back off.”

“It’s where we all meet Darkside,” Sera added, “so you’ll have a good idea what’s going on—won’t have to wait for news.” Which she knew Eleanor would appreciate. “Jordan will be there to show you around.”

“Can’t actually,” Jordan said. “I’ll send them down, and Maisie has promised to wait around to orient them before heading back out to look for Steve, but I have something else to investigate while you guys do the proxy thing in the black market with Rook.”

Rook’s scowl meant that he’d already had words with Jordan about it and she’d won. She obviously wasn’t going to tell anyone else where she was going.

“What about Jake and Jessica, the kids?” Eleanor asked. “Can they go to Maze City, too?”

Sera shook her head. “We can’t get to them tonight, but we will tomorrow. In the meantime, we should make a list of everyone the Oneiros might target.”

Sera thought of her parents in Florida. It might be days before she’d be able to get them set up with Vince Blackman’s Tandem Tech. Would they be targeted? Would the Oneiros really go after Harlen’s girlfriend’s parents? She had no idea.

Rook had been saying over and over that the Oneiros were making a move. Sera set her worry aside, promising herself
tomorrow
. Not a couple of days. If Eleanor could wait for Jess and Jake, then Sera could wait for her parents. She had no doubt that Harlen would make hers just as much a priority as she’d made his.

“I’m sorry, but there’s no time,” Rook said. “If we’re going to be there before something happens, we’ve got to go Darkside now.”

Sera felt Harlen’s heavy, angry gaze settle on her. “You ready?”

She set her tumbler of celebratory champagne down. “I brought the dreamjack. Charged it, just in case.”

“Rook, you follow Sera to her dreamscape,” Harlen said. “And I’ll try the proxy. If it doesn’t work—” he shrugged “—then we’ll think of something else.”

Sera kept any traces of worry off her face. It had to work. If it didn’t, she knew he’d just go on to the black market anyway, and then someone would recognize him and he’d have to fight off angry revelers
and
nightmares.

The beach house had two bedrooms, one with a queen bed and one with two twins. She and Harlen got the room geared to kids—it even had a bucket and shovels on the dresser for building sand castles and a selection of spine-broken books on a shelf.

“You’re going to feel like someone is watching you,” Harlen said once the door was closed. He’d already started fiddling with the dreamjack.

He was talking about the proxy, business as usual, as if nothing had happened. As if his
home
hadn’t just burned down.

Sera put her arms around him, her ear to his heart. “Are you okay?” She knew the answer. He wasn’t. How could he be?

He was silent a moment, and then she felt a tremor run through him. He took a controlled breath. “Too much is happening too quickly. I don’t see how we can win.”

His tone was flat as he delivered what Sera knew to be the honest truth: A god out on the Scrape. An army of nightmares. And legions of revelers conspiring to darken the waking world.

She pulled back to look into his eyes. “But we can’t run and hide, either.” Never in a million years would he consider it, anyway.

His handsome face was lined with grim certainty. “There
is
nowhere to hide.”

“So we do what we can to figure this out. To fight if we have to.”

His certainty turned feral, eyes narrowing, jaw tightening. “I can’t lose you,” he said. “Do you get that?”

“We’ll be together the whole time,” she reminded him, picking up the dreamjack. “So tell me what to do.”

He frowned, disgusted. “Just bear it as long as you can. At first you’ll feel uneasy, but that will grow to paranoia. It’ll feel like I’m a parasite, and you will instinctively reject me. Eventually, you’ll cast me off and we’ll split. Don’t feel bad when you do. It’s just how a proxy goes.”

She’d seen him after a proxy and knew it was a lot worse for him. He’d been ill, shaking, and disoriented.

“Sounds like fun,” she said lightly. She took the twin bed with the blue covers—the boy bed—on principle. Big, strong Harlen could sleep on the pink, flowery comforter. She thought she saw the faintest glimmer of amusement in his eyes.

Kicking off her shoes, she lay down, put the jack in her ear, and turned it on. The high-pitched whine speared through her brain—
calling all dogs
—and soon the bed, room, and house fell out of existence. Cool fluid swamped her, a perilous kind of sinking that made her thrash, though losing was inevitable. The waters gushed around her, and with a splash she found herself back in the Fawkeses’ kitchen, except this time it was burned out. Scorch bites ate away at the cupboards. Pools of water mixed with soot.

She didn’t want Harlen to see this, so she pushed it out of her mind. She wasn’t as good as Maisie at building, but she had often used her dreamscape to envision her restaurants. Imagining every detail—wood and linen and the gleam of plates. Her second restaurant—as it would be in three months if the contractor didn’t find any more structural problems—came into existence around her.

“Hey. You punched me here once,” Rook said, looking around. “I crashed into that table.”

“Damn right you did,” she answered. Rook had the rare talent to go Darkside without a dreamjack.

“Did Fawkes tell you how this was supposed to work?” Rook asked.

“Sort of.” She didn’t love having Rook in her dream—too intimate, like a doctor doing a breast exam. She wanted to punch him again, just in case. Maisie was a saint for letting them come and go from Maze City.

Proxying meant that Harlen wasn’t going to appear in her dream, not like Rook just had. Harlen was going to piggyback on her consciousness and use
her
to see and experience Darkside…until her psyche cast him off. Harlen had essentially been a spy during the Rêve War.

While they waited, Sera asked, “What’s Jordan up to?”

Rook’s expression darkened. “Can’t say right now.”

She was about to ask,
Why not?
when she had the feeling that someone was behind her and turned. Nobody. Then it dawned on her, and she smiled. “Harlen’s here. How weird is that?”

Rook’s gaze got sharper, appraising. “Are you okay?”

Sera thought a second. “Yeah. So far it’s fine. I might not even have noticed if I weren’t waiting for him.”

But now that she had noticed, she couldn’t un-notice it. A faint presence, like a mild aftertaste.

“You want to wait around and see if Harlen starts to annoy you?”

She laughed. Did a couple of jumping jacks to see if she could dislodge him. “I think waiting around would annoy me more. We’re good here.”

Rook cocked his head. “Harlen would want me to give you more time.”

“I could punch you again, even while being proxied,” she offered. “Would that satisfy you?”

“And into the Scrape we go,” he said.

The beautiful dining room of her restaurant was suddenly dusty with gold sand.
Hourglass sand
, she thought. The Scrape was full of endless tracts of time, rippling on forever. And yet, it seemed theirs was running out.

As she left her dreamscape, the wind first brushed at her skin and then whipped her hair. The farther she got from her restaurant, the more the force of the gale increased until it chaffed, scrubbing at her as if to erode her with its power. She trudged after Rook into the dust storm—keeping him close in her sights, a hulking, hunched shadow. She’d never been to the black market before, a place full of criminals and illegal dreams. Revelers went there at their own peril.

A gust turned cold, a nightmare near, but the air was too dense with sand to see very far. She instinctively reached her hand out behind her to Harlen. When he didn’t take it, she remembered she was carrying him. Because, yes, more than anything she could sense a presence. His. But it wasn’t annoying, and certainly nothing to get paranoid about. It felt as if he had her back, and in the midst the incomprehensible vastness around her, she
liked
the sensation.

“You okay?” Rook shouted. She deciphered the words more by the shapes his mouth made than the sound whipped from his lips.

Raising a thumbs-up, they continued into the wind. She didn’t know how to find the black market, what to pin her mind on to make it appear, but each step brought colder and colder blasts. She was chilled though her skin and into her bones. Her teeth clattered so she clenched them. The sand grew sharper, cutting, so frigid it burned.

Nightmares. Somewhere. Here. The gusts around her blew gold and black.

Her head was down, so she walked right into Rook’s back.

Turning, he put his mouth to her ear. “The black market must be swarmed.”

Squinting ahead, she found a twinkling of lights barely illuminating a jumble of structures jammed next to and on top of one another. It was a dream ghetto, the rank opposite of the monolith of the Agora. The walls were patched and roofs sloped, with other dark rooms built atop the flimsy foundations. The higher she lifted her gaze, the higher the market rose, though it also tumbled off into other directions in a crazy, haphazard jumble, like children’s blocks knocked over and forgotten.

Sera guessed she should be scared, but she didn’t feel it. Not with Harlen so close, so warm, surrounding her. She squinted into the storm again but could make out little more than the twinkling lights and the strange, circus construction of the market. The icy wind was her only bit of certainty that nightmares ranged nearby. And lots of them.

They trudged the last hard steps in cold so bitter she thought she might never thaw, and they finally came upon what looked like a metal door in one of the many outer walls of the black market. It had no handle or knob. Rook banged on it with his fist.

A small circular window appeared, framing an eyeball—a Judas hole. The eye spotted Rook, and the little peephole closed again, but only for the door itself to open wide enough to allow entry.