Dreamspell (2 page)

Knowing her own sleep would have to wait—not necessarily that she would have slept since she was also intimate with insomnia—she said, “How many hours, Mac?”

He pushed a hand through his silvered red hair. “Eighty. . .nine.”

“Not
one hundred
eighty nine?”

“Why would I lie?”

“You tell me.”

“I would if you’d listen.”

Realizing she was picking an argument when she should be collecting data, she rolled a stool beneath her. “Okay, talk.”

He dragged a tattooed hand down his face. “The dreams aren’t dreams. Not anymore. When I went comatose, I truly crossed over, and that’s when I realized it was more than a dream. And I could have stayed.” He slammed his fists on the arms of his wheelchair. “If not for the doctors and their machines, I
would
have stayed!”

Pain stirred at the back of Kennedy’s head. “You would have died.”

“In this time. There I would have lived.”

Then he truly believed he had been transported to the Middle Ages of his serial dream. Interesting. “I see.”

“Do you?”

Was this more than sleep deprivation? Had Mac snapped? “I know it seems real—”

“Cut with the psychobabble! Sleep deprivation is the key to the past. It’s a bridge. A way back. A way out.”

She took a deep breath. “Out of what?”

“This.” He looked to the stumps of his legs, wheeled forward, and tapped her forehead. “And this.”

Stunned by his trespass, Kennedy caught her breath.

He sank back in his wheelchair. “In my dreams, I have legs again. Have I told you that?”

She gave herself a mental shake. “Many times.”

“I walk. I run. I feel my legs down to my toes. It’s as if the war never happened.”

She laid a hand on his shoulder. “It did happen.”

“Not six hundred years ago.”

She lowered her hand. “What makes you believe this isn’t just an incredibly real dream?”

“I don’t know the places in this dream, and I’ve never seen any of the people.”

That
was his proof? Though dreams were often forged of acquaintances and familiar landscapes, it wasn’t unusual to encounter seemingly unfamiliar ones.

He reached behind his wheelchair, pulled a book from his knapsack, and pushed it into her hands. “I found this in an antique book shop a while back.”

It was old, its black cover worn white along the edges, all that remained of its title a barely legible stamped impression. She put her glasses on. “The Sins of the Earl of. . .?”

“Sinwell,” Mac supplied.

Kennedy forced a laugh. “Catchy title.” She ran her fingers across the numbers beneath. “1373 to 1399. History. . .never my best subject.”

“He’s the one.”

“Who?”

“Fulke Wynland, the man who murdered his nephews so he could claim Sinwell for himself.”

Mac’s dream adversary. Though he had told her the dream arose from a historical account, he hadn’t named the infamous earl or the British earldom for which Wynland had committed murder.

“I’m in there.” Mac nodded at the book.

Kennedy raised an eyebrow.

“Look at the pages I marked.”

A half dozen slips protruded from the book. She opened to the first and skimmed the text. There it was: Sir Arthur Crosley. Okay, so someone in the past had first claim to a semblance of MacArthur Crosley’s name. What proof was that? She read on. With the King of England’s blessing, the errant knight pledged himself to the safekeeping of orphaned brothers John and Harold Wynland. She read the remaining passages, the last a single sentence that told of Sir Arthur’s disappearance prior to the boys’ fiery deaths.

Kennedy set the book on the bedside table. “You’re telling me you’re Sir Arthur?”

“I am.”

“Mac, just because your name—”

“When I first read it, there was no mention of Crosley. His name—my name—appeared only after the dreams began. And when the book says I disappeared, guess where I went.”

Pound,
went her headache.

“That’s when I came out of the coma, Ken.”

Worse and worse. “But you’ve reported having these dreams since then. If what you say is true, where are
those
experiences documented?”

“They’re not. Though I’ve returned four times since the coma, the present keeps pulling me back before I can save the boys from that murderer.” Fury brightened his eyes a moment before his gaze emptied.

“Mac?”

“Fifty waking hours isn’t enough, not even a hundred. It takes more.”

This explained the man before her whose years came nowhere near the age grooving his face. “Two hundred?”

“It’s a start.”

She held up a hand. “The truth. How many hours?”

“Two hundred seventeen.”

She came off the stool as if slung from it. “You know how dangerous—”

“Better than anyone.”

He didn’t look like a madman, but he had to be. “You’re forcing it, aren’t you? You could have slept days ago, but you won’t let yourself.”

“Dead on.”

Kennedy reached to rake fingers through her hair, but stopped mid-air. There was too little left beneath the cap, stragglers that served as painful reminders of her former self. She laid a hand to Mac’s arm. “You’re going to kill yourself.”

His smile was almost genuine. “That’s the idea.”

Over-the-edge crazy. Deciding her efforts were better spent admitting him to the university hospital, she straightened.

“I’m not going,” Mac said.

For all his delusions, he could still read her like a book. “Please, Mac, you have to.”

“It’s my way out.”

Pound. Pound.
“You think I’m just going to stand by and let you die?”

“You don’t have a say in it.”

“But you’re my patient. I can’t—”

“You think I like living in this thing?” He gripped the arms of his wheelchair. “When I lost my legs, I lost everything—my wife, my boys, my career. All I do is take up space, and I’m tired of it. You have no idea what it’s like.”

Didn’t she? Her world was crumbling, and though she had no choice as to whether tomorrow came, he did.

His gaze swept to her cap, and he muttered a curse. “I’m sorry, Ken.”

She crossed the observation room and stared through the window at the monitoring equipment.

“How’s the chemo going?”

She tossed her head and achingly acknowledged how much she missed the weight of her hair. “It’s going well.” A lie. There had been progress early on, but the tumor was gaining ground.

“The truth, Ken,” he turned her own words against her.

She swung around. “This isn’t about me.”

“You’re wrong.” He wheeled toward her. “My dream is a way out of the hell I’m living. And it could be yours.”

Nuts. Positively nuts.

He rolled to a halt. “Not my dream, of course. Something of your own choosing.”

Pound. Pound. Pound.
She stepped around him. “I need to take something for this headache.”

“You think I’m crazy.”

She looked over her shoulder. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, and we’ll discuss this some more.”

After a long moment, he said, “Sure. Can I borrow your pen?”

She tossed it to him and steered a course to the washroom where she gulped down the pills prescribed for just such reminders of her tumor.

Though she rarely did more than glance in the mirror, she searched her features: sunken eyes, ashen skin, pinched mouth, the hollows beneath her cheeks evidence of her twenty-pound weight loss. As for the hair sweeping her brow, it and the knit cap to which the strands were attached was a gift from her well-meaning mother. She looked almost as bad as Mac, far from the green-eyed “looker” she had been called before. . .

Almost wishing she was as crazy as Mac, she hurried to her office. After being reassured two orderlies were on their way, she returned to the sleep room. It was empty. “No.” She groaned. “Don’t do this, Mac.”

She ran down the corridor, through the reception area, and out the glass doors into the balm of a Los Angeles summer night, but there was no sign of Mac or the cab that had delivered him to the clinic. Where had he gone? It would be a place where no one knew him, where he wouldn’t be bothered if he didn’t show his face for days. Unfortunately, the possibilities could run into the thousands.

What about the cab? If she could find the company he had used, perhaps she could discover where they had taken him.

She went back inside and, in the sleep room, saw the pen Mac had borrowed on the bedside table, beneath it his book. He had forgotten it. Or had he?

She opened
The Sins of the Earl of Sinwell
. If not that she recognized Mac’s handwriting, she would have flipped past the inscription on the inside cover. She slid her glasses on.
Ken
, it read,
think of this as a postcard. Your friend, Mac

“Oh, Mac.” Try though she might, she knew that if she found him it would be too late. But knowing it and accepting it were two different things. Keeping an eye closed against the pain hammering at her head, she tucked the book under an arm and hurried to her office.

CHAPTER TWO

A
way out.

Mac’s words of a month ago whispered to Kennedy as she stared at the reflection of a woman she recognized less each day. Radiation and chemotherapy had taken the last of her hair. And for what? The hope she could beat unbeatable odds. Four weeks, eight at the outside, Kennedy Plain, twenty-eight years young, would go out with a whimper.

“A way out,” she muttered. “Crazy Mac.”

She tightened the belt of her robe and crossed her living room to the glass doors of her condo. A quarter mile out, waves battered the rocky beach, swept sand in and dragged it out again. Stepping onto the balcony, she sighed as cool morning air caressed her bare scalp. It was just what she needed to get through another waking hour. How many was she up to? She glanced at her watch. Seventy-two, meaning it was Monday.

Since forced to take medical leave two weeks ago, she had found it increasingly difficult to track her days—until this past Friday when she began marking time by the hour.

She turned back inside. The journal lay on her desk on a pile of paperwork that represented eighteen months of research. Research that would molder in some forgotten closet if the clinic director had his way. But she wouldn’t let that happen. If it killed her—ha!—she would conclude her study with data culled from her own dream experiences.

She dropped into the desk chair and reached for the journal. It would be her fourth entry, likely the last before her self-imposed sleep deprivation compelled her to sleep. With a quaking hand, she wrote:

8:25 a.m. Seventy-two waking hours. Not sure I can make it to ninety-six. Hands trembling, eyes burning, headache worsening, nauseated. No hallucinations, some memory lapses. Can’t stop thinking about Mac.

She lifted the pen and recalled the night he had borrowed it. For four days she had clung to the hope he lived, but on the fifth day, his lifeless body was found in an abandoned warehouse.

Kennedy swallowed hard. “Wherever you are, I pray you’ve finally found peace.” She rested her forehead in her hand and squeezed her eyes closed. Like a thief, sleep reached for her.

She jumped up and steadied herself with a hand on the chair. “Twenty-four hours,” she murmured. Could she do it? Her chronic insomnia having never exceeded sixty, she was ahead by twelve, but another twenty-four?

What she needed was a good book. Unfortunately, as her library consisted mostly of textbooks and periodicals, the best she could do was
The Sins of the Earl of Sinwell.
She eyed it where it lay on the sofa table. It had to be less dry than her other choices.

Sliding on her glasses, she retrieved the book and fingered the ridges and recesses of the worn title, then opened past Mac’s inscription to the first chapter. “1373,” she read aloud as she began to walk the room.

An hour later, she gave up. Not because the reading was dry, but her comprehension was nearly nil. One thing was clear from the little she had learned about Fulke Wynland, the Earl of Sinwell: he had no conscience. Not only was he suspected of having a hand in the accident that killed his brother, the Earl of Sinwell, but as a military advisor during the “Hundred Years War,” he had been party to the atrocious massacre of men, women, and children following a siege on the city of Limoges. So what chance had two little boys, aged four and six?

She trudged into the kitchen, opened the freezer, and stuck her face into it. Frigid air returning her to wakefulness, she congratulated herself on that bit of genius and closed the door. “And caffeine will do it one better,” she murmured.

After the coffee maker sputtered its last, putting an exclamation mark on the smell of freshly brewed coffee, Kennedy carried the pot to her cup with a hand that shook so violently that nearly as much made it on the counter as in the cup. When the caffeine kicked in on her third serving, she reached for Mac’s book.