Delirium (7 page)

Rook and Jordan staggered into the dream, bloodied and gasping. Jordan pointed behind her, mouthing something urgently—Harlen had muted the sound—and into the Rêve crept a nightmare—grayish brown, big black eyes, knobby fingers.

Harlen stopped the playback and pointed to the creature. “This is what has come to be called a
nightmare
. Most of you will have heard rumors about their existence by now. A few of you may have seen them. They roam the Scrape freely and attack revelers they find lost in the dust storm.”

Marshal Jane Taylor leaned forward. At twenty-two, she was a little inexperienced to be selected for the DD but too damn talented to leave off the team. She’d acquire the experience faster than was kind.

Harlen nodded to her.

“
You
reported this breach in the Agora,” she said.

“I did,” Harlen told the room. “I submitted to a memory capture as the Rêve’s record has mysteriously vanished. This is not a hallucination or reveler exhaustion. I wish to God it were.”

A hand lifted. Marshal Frank King. Of everyone gathered, he was nobody’s fool. “Some revelers claim to have seen them in the waking world.”

“Yes, they have,” Harlen said. “Though most attribute the reports to a growing hysteria. Do you, uh, have something to share with the class?”

First-person accounts would help the doubters in the group believe.

King shrugged. “I saw one attack some poor schmuck in the middle of the street. Broad daylight. Was the most fucked up thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“And when was this?”

“Two days ago.” A pause. “I didn’t report it.”

“You have now.” Harlen looked at the rest of his marshals. “Nightmares have been reported in the Scrape, in the Agora”—he gestured to the one frozen before them—“in individual dreamscapes, the black market, and, yes, even the waking world. All of it is alarming, but what’s downright terrifying is that the first report by Marshal Rook occurred only two weeks ago. They are advancing fast, and we are only now organizing to fight them.”

The room had gone restless, feet shuffling, murmurs rising.

“The Darkside Division is
not
a dream police. We actually don’t have the luxury or manpower to spy on anyone’s private dreamscapes. Our primary focus is to understand the nightmares’ movements and find out how to stop them. Our interference Darkside is limited to those ends.” Harlen killed the memory capture. “Has anyone else here seen or fought a nightmare?”

Marshal Spence Neumann lifted his head. “Seen one. Swear to God it looked like my ex-wife for a second.”

A chuckle rumbled within the group. Someone mumbled, “She
was
a nightmare.”

Skepticism dulled some of their eyes, a little anger curling mouths down. Harlen spoke to them. “Some of you are thinking that the nightmares aren’t real. That’s okay, for now, as long as you are prepared do your job when you encounter one.”

“And that job is?” Marshal Osbourne’s tone went beyond skeptical to derisive. Never a joiner and never fake, he was the one Chimera who Harlen was sure wasn’t an Oneiros.

“Our first mission,” Harlen said, “is to capture a nightmare so that we can figure out what the hell they are and how to stop them efficiently.”

Osbourne sat back in his seat, mumbling, “Might as well be chasing fucking unicorns.”

To which Taylor—too new to know not to mess with him—leaned over and said, “Fucking unicorns wouldn’t be hard to chase, as they’d probably stay in roughly the same spot while they, you know, fuck.”

“Heh. Horn action,” King added, nodding and smiling broadly.

Harlen lifted his gaze to the ceiling to pray.
Please God.

His prayers were not answered. Marshal Osbourne got up, expression foul, and left the room.

“Anyone else want to leave?” Harlen asked. “We’ve got no time for bullshit.”

“Uni-shit, you mean,” said Neumann.

“You can buy it online,” someone else put in.

“Any kind of shit,” Harlen told them. To get them focused, he tapped the control screen again and an animation of the Agora nightmare holding cell technology materialized. “We’re going on a field trip to the Scrape. By the time we’re done, every single one of you will be a believer.”

***

“You’ve got to admit, Marshal Fawkes sure gets around,” came James Dugan’s voice from behind her.

Allison Bright had been stealing a quiet minute to scroll through her e-mail on her mobile, but she straightened and turned to face him. The meeting room was empty, though the foot traffic just outside the open door was brisk and echoed through the space.

She didn’t like her back to Dugan. When Harlen had proxied Lambert, he’d discovered that Dugan had been party to torturing her to get her to reveal classified information.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
What a little asshole.

His brows came together. “Marshal Fawkes,” he said again. “Though you probably call him
Harlen
.”

She said nothing to contradict his innuendo. Dugan had to be desperate following the loss of Lambert. No one to tell him what to do. Yet, that is.
Yet.
Eventually someone else would assume the leadership of the Oneiros, and then Dugan would be busy again. She knew that he was just trying to keep his head above water in the meantime.

“After all,” he continued, “there has to be a
reason
that Fawkes has your support, as well as that of Senator Fleight. It’s how he got his own division. Both of you are women, and boy, does he have a track record with the fairer sex. Seems my old chum is finally trading in on his talents.” He smiled. “Nothing wrong with a little ambition.”

“Mr. Dugan,” she said, “you’re not funny, and I am very tired. Please step out of my way.”

Dugan stepped closer. “Why did he leave in such a hurry?”

“He was needed at Chimera headquarters.”

“Probably yet
another
woman,” Dugan answered himself. “He’s screwing me up. Plans were moving along so well, and then
him
.”

Enough.
Allison made to move around Dugan.

He put out an arm, and something hard dug into her waist. She looked down to find a gun in his grip. A cold sweat broke on her suddenly hot skin. She could guess how he’d managed to get a weapon past security:
Oneiros.
They were everywhere. Looking up to the passersby outside the door, she swallowed and drew a tight breath as if to call out. It was so loud out there that no one would hear her. She decided to punch Dugan in the neck first.

“I was supposed to kill Harlen,” Dugan said, making her hesitate. “But I have to settle for you. I’ll be sent to prison, and Chimera will try to keep me from dreaming too deeply, but
He
will come for me.”
He
had to be the Sandman.

Her arm was winding up, knuckles primed, when a shot drilled her in the belly. She hit his windpipe, hard, at the same moment she registered the white poker of pain.

Her vision jerked as she fell back and hit the table, jamming her shoulder. Her pulse beat in her ears, but when she settled into her blood-draining slump, her breath short, she could see Dugan on his knees, hands at his throat, struggling to inhale.

The Sandman couldn’t come for him if he died.
So there.

It seemed the Oneiros had already bounced back from losing Lambert, and they’d found a new mission for Dugan, too, although today they’d had to settle for second best.

Today they’d had to settle, which was something else entirely. They hadn’t won—not even as darkness clouded her mind. Strangely, the darkness didn’t have the fluid quality of the world Darkside. She wasn’t going to sleep; she was dying. An emptiness was swallowing her, and whatever dreamwater she had was spilling, warm, down her belly and onto the floor.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Forward! Move!” Harlen yelled against the gale, and then spat out the Scrape sand that had coated in his mouth and teeth.

The grains cut at Harlen’s eyes, but he gripped the writhing and bucking nightmare’s ankle with both hands as he charged into the wind. Marshal Neumann gripped its right ankle, while two others held its arms. The skin of the creature had broken where Harlen held it, and his hands were slick with frigid black oil—what had to be the same stuff that had stained Vince. Nightmare blood.

The twist and slide of its skin over bone was disgusting, but the contortions the creature attempted, bending in wrong ways, breaking into unnatural joints that tricked Harlen’s grip, had him sweating and cursing.

The skinny fucker
was
a nightmare. It’s face…
God!
And eyes. Seeing it for a few seconds in that gaming Rêve was nothing in comparison to touching it.

His Darkside Division marshals made a traveling ring around the moving center sprawl of the captured nightmare. The glimmer of the Agora was close, but so too were the flashes of icy wind that presaged the dart and strike of other nightmares hiding in the gusts.

When they finally breached the Agora, three of his marshals were missing. Harlen and those who’d made it through the storm wrestled the creature into the endless plane of Corinthian columns that made up the Agora’s fundamental structure, upon which the artificial dreams were built.

Harlen initiated the Rêve holding cell, which comprised three layers of increasing dreamwater density—a dream within a dream within a dream—so that once inside, the nightmare was held in suspended animation.

Turning to King, Harlen said, “We’re going back out.” After his lost men.

But then two of his missing marshals crossed into the Agora and collapsed onto their knees, heaving for breath. Behind them came the marshal who’d walked out on the meeting—Osbourne. He was cursing and dragging the last missing man, who was weeping and mumbling unintelligibly.

Harlen held out his hand to Osbourne, glad the marshal had decided to come back. “They’re not unicorns.”

Osbourne glanced at the suspended nightmare. “No, sir, they are not. Found that out the hard way.”

The marshals of the Darkside Division gathered around the holding cell to get their first good look at the creature. Black puffs of its blood hovered in the waters like blooming flowers near its gray-putty skin. Its fingers were too long, joints were wrong. The limbs were bony, lacking muscle, only gristle. It was sexless and wrinkled at its crotch and had no belly button or nipples. With its head thrown slightly back, the eyes weren’t as prominent, but the slice of its mouth was a black moon of a maw.

Harlen touched a nearby column to send a message to Bright that they’d accomplished the feat. She’d want to see the thing herself as soon as possible.

Nightmare contained.

But the message pinged right back at him.

He glanced at his list of new messages and gasped at the sight of one from Director Bright and its subject:
In the event of my untimely death…

Harlen leaned into the column for support, dizzy.

The Oneiros again, vying for control of Chimera. They’d lost Didier Lambert, and so they’d taken Bright.

“What is it?” King asked.

Harlen turned to find his marshals staring at him. His shock had to have been even more alarming than the trapped nightmare.

“Our job just got harder,” he said. “More dangerous.”

If the Oneiros had gone after Bright, their next target would be him.

A sick punch hit his gut. If they couldn’t get him directly, they’d draw him out.

God,
Sera.
He’d have to call her right away. His family, too.

And yet…these Chimera marshals standing before him, both alarm and belief on their faces, had to understand the full scope of the fight before him. They had to understand now, in case something
did
happen to him. Time was too short for any delay, even to wake long enough to call Sera. He couldn’t call her. He had a job to do. It didn’t matter that his heart was squeezing so tight he thought it might burst.

“Everyone believe me now?” His gaze flicked from face to face. They all looked uneasy and slightly nauseated, but at least now they were uneasy for the right reason. “Well, I’ve got more to tell you”—the Oneiros and Sandman—“and it just gets worse.”

***

Sera hadn’t driven a stick since she was fifteen and had just gotten her learner’s permit. The clutch made a high-pitched grinding yelp when she shifted into third gear, telling her she wasn’t doing it well. The gray drizzle and speedy traffic weren’t helping, either. Not to mention she’d basically just kidnapped Harlen’s parents.

Her burner phone
finally
rang.
Harlen.
She reached to pick it up, swerving slightly into another lane—
sorry!
—before correcting back to her own.

“Hey, hon,” she said lightly, really hoping she hadn’t overreacted.

She had, after all, blindfolded one highly volatile person and another much more accommodating one and forced them into this crappy vehicle with her.