Delirium (13 page)

Visibility was shit, but Viv was around here somewhere. She had to be. He
felt
her. But the silhouettes in the dust were so consumed by sand that he couldn’t tell if they were nightmares or lost souls.

Viv was smart, a survivor by nature. She wouldn’t be wandering, making herself a convenient target for an attack. Even he was crouching low so as not to be as noticeable.

Rook looked down into the shifting mounds of sand, bodies littered everywhere. He picked his way over them, looking for signs of life, and he found her. Under a blanket of gold, Viv was on her side in the fetal position, arms over her head.

When he touched her shoulder, her fist came up, hit his jaw, and nearly turned his lights out.

He was still reeling back, when he heard her say, “Malcolm?” and before he could answer, she’d thrown her arms around his neck.

“Hey, Boss.” They had to move, so he blinked his wits back as he helped her get to her feet, still low to the ground. “Nice hook.”

***

Sera held an arm over her watering eyes as she forged across the Scrape, leading the way to Maze City. Some reveler, a man, would
not
let go of her waist and was using her as a shield against the wind. Probably against nightmares, too, if it came to that. Another reveler, a young woman, held on to her free hand. And behind them, a scraggly line of dreamers flowed, though they had no idea where Sera was taking them. She had no idea how many revelers they’d managed to save. No looking back. Back was death.

She slid her gaze to the side to try to spot Harlen—he’d dodged off to her right minutes ago to fight off a nightmare—but the sheer wind burned her eyes, too painful to hold. She had to duck her head behind her upraised forearm again.

He’d be back. He was defending the line. He’d be back.

Please, God, let him come back now.

Her heartbeat had dropped from a frantic thud to a rapid rabbit tremble, running and tripping so fast despite her slow progress.

Forward. Only one way to go. One thing to do.

Get to Maze City.

Maisie was going to be so mad.

Crossing the Scrape was always an endurance test, a project of single-minded willpower. There was no beacon or star to follow on the waves of this sea. It was ever forward until she proved steady enough to win the fight.

The grip on her hand slipped, nails digging into her palm for purchase.

Oh shit.
Sera looked back to find the reveler woman who had been holding on to her hand was being pulling her away from the line by the hair and neck by a nightmare. Sera tried to grip her back but got only a fleeting sense of fingertips.

It didn’t help that the man grasping Sera’s waist, cringing far to the side, face pressed into her ribs, was nearly strangling the breath out of her as he hid from the nightmare.

“Please!” screamed the reveler woman as she disappeared into the cruel upwind sand.

But Sera reached back for the next link in the chain of dreamers. She couldn’t risk losing the line. If Harlen could help the reveler woman, he would. Otherwise…

I’m so sorry.

Forward. It was the only thing to do.

***

Harlen herded his group of five wanderers out on the Scrape to the wind-blasted line of Darkside refugees, and he transferred them from clutching his shoulder to joining the huddled and weeping revelers slowly marching through the storm to Sera’s lead.

The magnitude of what had happened—

Without Sera—

He couldn’t think about any of it. It made his throat close. Made him choke on fear. Already he shook from the effects of the proxy. Later, when they reached Maze City, he’d contemplate the ramifications of nightmares overtaking and crashing the black market. Later, when he slept, he would put aside the scores of dead and try to make a plan.

The cold still crackled through the air. He used the straggling passage of revelers like a lifeline, grappling along shoulders and bent arms to climb toward Sera. See if she was okay.

The line seemed endless. Crouched figures, one after another, battled forward.

His lungs were full of glass as he pressed on, each breath cutting. The tang in his mouth meant he was bleeding. His vision was a wreck of shapes and shadow, all color scrubbed away. He couldn’t see the blood on his hands, but the cold of it had seeped through his skin so that even though he reached and grabbed, his fingers were utterly numb. His heart was a still, heavy thing to carry. He’d have dropped it a ways back, if he could’ve.

Each step was hell. A knee buckled and he went down. Feet shuffled by him, and all he could think about was rest and quiet, but the damn wind just howled and howled.

He’d seen so many others fall along the line, too weak, too hopeless to continue. Was it a dozen or a hundred lost that way? Seemed now it was his turn.

Sera.

For her, he fell no more but kept to his hands and knees, like a dog. For her, he shifted his weight, dragged a leg under to push up and stand.

A clawing scrape across his back meant fear had found him, too. Another nightmare, this time coming to drag
him
away.

He jerked his arm to shake it off, but the thing clung like terror.

Then a sudden weight crushed Harlen back to the ground. He had no idea what was happening until warm hands were helping him up. Sand-blinded as he was, he made out human shadows kicking the shit out of the nightmare. A band of fighters, also guarding the line.

A collective murmur among the revelers rose above the wail of the wind. Harlen turned to find a pinprick of light gleaming in the distance, made blurry by the reflection of gold particles in the air. Salvation.

For the first time since he’d seen that boy up for auction in the Underground, he thought they just might live through this dream, after all.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Gary stopped typing his comment into the online forum and stood up from the table, frowning deeply and listening as hard as he could. His hearing wasn’t as good as it used to be, and he damned himself for not at least picking up the pamphlet on hearing aids that Eleanor had been conspicuously leaving all around the house. In his defense, leaving it on top of his bathroom magazine stack had been just mean.

The house was silent. A car passed outside with a gentle whirr. But he didn’t sit down again. His skin had gone clammy.

The Oneiros had burned down his house. His mind couldn’t even wrap around the idea that the place for which he’d paid the mortgage for thirty years was a charred shell, but he’d thank God for Sera every day for the rest of his life. She and Harlen were
meant
to be together; not even Jess, who still wasn’t a fan of Sera’s from all that old breakup drama, could deny that now. But then, he was old enough to know that falling in love was easy; learning to hold on to love over time was learned. Took practice. Harlen and Sera would make it. One day at a time.

He did understand, however, that his son was in real danger. The sense of trouble had been growing for some time now. And even though Harlen was now stronger than Gary was, his old pop would still stand between him and anything that wanted to harm him. It was a parent’s right.

Burn down my house? Fine. Touch my child? I’ll kill you.

The silence of the night boomed in his ears, but it pounded with anger, not fear.

His
family
slept here, including the people not related to him by blood. But they were all family. They were protecting his son, too.

He backed into the kitchen and pulled a knife from the wood block on the counter. Stepping into the hall, he listened carefully again—the kids were in the back two rooms, Harlen and Sera in the room to the left and Rook and Jordan to the right. He glanced back at his wife in the front room. Eleanor slept on her back on the pull-out sofa, her fingers loosely laced together under her breasts. He didn’t want to leave her, but he felt her telling him to go look in on the others, the way she had when their kids were little to see if they were okay, or when they were teenagers to see if they had snuck out. Harlen had been missing once or twice in the middle of the night and had come home to a fully lit house at three a.m.

With soft steps back along the tile floor, he pushed open the door where Harlen and Sera slept. A still form lay on each of the twin beds—Harlen was in his socks, his ankles and feet dangling off the small bed. Sera was a sleeping beauty, soft light splashed across her cheek.

In the room across the hall, Jordan was curled into Rook’s side on the queen bed. Rook was on his back, but the light from the hall reflected off a bead of sweat sliding down his neck. Bad dreams, then.

Gary turned back to face the front room to get a look at Eleanor. When she was sleeping, her hair fell back off her face, not unlike the style she’d worn when they first married, and he could glimpse that girl in her now.

He brought his gaze up only when a shadow passed in the front window, darting out of sight. Gary gripped and raised his knife.

A second ago, someone else had been watching Eleanor, too.

***

“Why would you bring them here?” Maisie yelled.

Sera was having none of it. Behind the brat, Maisie, stood Eleanor, who was looking at Harlen with worry in her eyes. She started to go to him, but Sera held up a hand to stop her. Harlen had just done a proxy, and then had fought his way across the Scrape. He didn’t need anyone hovering. Just space to breathe. In the meantime, she would deal with Maisie.

“Well, where else could we take them?” Sera gestured to the battered refugees. The Scrape had subdued them so that, as a group, they were silent, with only the occasional murmur or sob as they took in the vast grandeur of Maze City. They were all crammed—stopped by Maisie—on a street flanked by older-looking, monochromatic, soft-gray brick buildings shadowed by a neo-Gothic pall. Not all that soothing for the traumatized revelers standing behind Sera. It felt as if a modern vampire or werewolf could be hiding down an alley.

“Um…lemme think…” Maisie raised a finger to her chin and tapped it. Her eyes were blazing. “How about the Agora! Not my city. It’s
my
city, Sera, and you keep bringing people here.” Maisie leaned to survey the crowd. “Looks like hundreds this time!”

So much emotion rolled up into Sera’s throat that her words came out as a croak. “There were thousands of people, Maisie. As in
ten
thousand at least, and
this
was all we could save. Who knows if the Agora is safe.”

They all knew the Agora, infiltrated by the Oneiros, was not safe. Even Maisie.

Tears and shudders overwhelmed Sera for a moment, but a glance at Harlen, so covered in nightmare tar and his own blood, gave her the will to swallow her horror and dismay and look Maisie in the eyes again. Yes, this was an invasion into her dreamscape, her most intimate space. Like taking hundreds of people inside her head. But—

“You built a city for a reason,” Sera said. “Why a city, if not to fill it?”

How could Maisie not back down while facing the bloodied and shivering crowd? They had barely escaped with their lives.

“I was going to make my own people,” Maisie grumbled, but Sera could tell she was backing down.

“You’re not God.”

Maisie made a face. “Well, did you have to bring me criminals?”

Sera made a face back. “
You’re
a criminal.”

Maisie slid her gaze to the crowd. “Oh right. I am.” Then she sighed. “So I guess I just put them up until we can find a way to get them back to their own dreamscapes or something?
Obviously
, they can’t stay here forever.”

“Obviously. We’ll figure that out as soon as we can.”

“I’m happy to help,” Eleanor said, though she was still looking at Harlen. “And Gary will, too, when we trade places.”

“Help would be good,” Sera told her.

Maisie’s eyebrows lifted, so Sera turned back to the crowd to find that Rook had emerged from it. Like Harlen, he was splattered with black goo, mixed with his own red blood. His gaze was hooded, haunted,
hounded
.

“We should go out to look for stragglers,” he said, roughly. “So many revelers ran out into the wind to get away from the nightmares.”

Sera was exhausted to her bones, but she said, “Yeah, okay.” She glanced over at Harlen, who was straightening, too.

“You can’t possibly—” Eleanor began.

“—leave people to die?” Harlen finished for his mom. “No, I can’t.”

“I can go, too,” Maisie said. “You guys look like someone ran over you with a truck a couple times. And then a couple more times. I’m fresh, at least.”

So she did have a heart.

“No,” Rook told her. “You have to stay and defend Maze City. We can’t lose this place, especially now. Get the people situated but watch out for assholes. Most of the people were in the black market looking for a good time and aren’t seriously dangerous, but there will be a handful who are talented Darkside and might try something.”