Authors: Elle Hill
Reed slammed the received into the cradle, waited for a few seconds, and then called the number again. After three rings, he hung up, collected his money from the coin tray, and dialed one more time.
This time, she picked up on the first ring. “This had better not be a heavy breather, or I’m tracking your ass down and smashing your face into paste.”
Reed hesitated. Finally, “Elijah Wood?”
Jade made a disgusted sound as she realized who it was. “What? Have you seen his eyes?”
“Anyway, I’m calling to give you more information on Katana . . .”
“You’re calling me in the middle of the night to give me tidbits on sword lady?” she demanded, and yawned hugely for emphasis.
“The Broschi have her trapped in a continuous dream,” he snapped. “She’s spent weeks at least living through nightmare after nightmare.”
Jade was silent. Finally, she said, “Poor kid.”
“She’s holding up, but it’s really hard on her. We need to get her out of there.”
Jade groaned. “My brain is sluggish. Such is the problem with the
middle of the night
. But if you know she’s sleeping, can’t you go wake her up?”
“I don’t know where she is,” he rasped.
His voice must have conveyed more than he intended. The following silence felt dense.
“Why are they doing that to her?” she asked seriously.
She must really be sleepy not to figure it out right away. “She’s living through a constant stream of nightmares, never waking up, always scared or in pain.”
“Oh, man,” Jade hissed. “They’re feeding off her. It’s kind of simple genius when you think about it. I’m surprised they didn’t do this before now.”
“Maybe they have. Maybe there are others. I don’t know. She’s the only one I know about.” Reed pressed the receiver against his ear, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“How do you know about her?” Jade asked.
He remained silent.
After an exaggerated sigh, Jade bit out, “I’m not asking for a diary entry, Reed. I’m asking a question in order to help you locate her.”
He shifted his weight again, kicked a small pebble with his big toe. “I find my way into her dreams when I’m asleep.”
“Wow.” Ten seconds passed. Twenty. “That doesn’t sound very Leech-like. Maybe you got some Psychic in there, too. The Council should hear about this . . .”
Reed actually snarled at her, like some wild animal. Like a monster. “I don’t care about making good with the goddamn council. We need to find her.”
“That’s what I meant! Jeez, Reed, calm down a minute. You’ve always— Ah, hell. Never mind. Tell me everything you know about sword woman. Wait. Let me get a pad and pen.”
He told her every tidbit he’d gleaned about her identity, from Tansy and Ken Kibbe to mentioning her suspicion that she was or had been a university student. Jade listened to him, only occasionally asking him to slow down or spell something.
After he’d finished, she murmured, “Uh-huh” a couple more times, still writing. Then, “Have you thought of using your . . . hunger, sense of fulfillment, whatever it is . . . like some kind of sonar?”
He sighed, annoyed with Jade and his own flaws. “Doesn’t work.” He’d tried it. Like Cor, he simply felt less hungry, warmer, all-around more energetic at the Daleth’s house.
“Well, hell. I’m assuming I speak for the council when I say if you can find her, don’t worry about the Sleeper assignment. Her safety takes precedence.”
Like he cared what the council said. The second he found Katana he planned to drag her to safety, Clan and world be damned.
“I’m just hoping we can figure out who she is and find her,” he said quietly. “Meanwhile, I’ll keep trying to locate her in the house.”
Silence spread between them. “Uh, how’s it going there?” Jade finally asked.
Reed smiled suddenly. “They hate me,” he told her.
Jade laughed. “Hard to imagine,” she said dryly. “Are you being a dick?”
“What do you think?”
She snorted.
Silence again. Reed stared at the pale, fluttering shapes of moths as they basked in the glow of a streetlight. “I’ll let you know when I have more info,” he said.
“I’ll get our best researchers on this.”
“Good. Sweet dreams of Elijah Wood.”
She snickered. “Oh, they always are.”
“Night.”
“Bye.”
He hung up the receiver and climbed back into his truck. As he drove back to the Daleth’s home, the clouds in the night sky glowed a waxy gray-yellow, mirrors illuminating the nearly-five-hundred square miles of Los Angeles.
Twenty minutes later, Reed quietly clicked the door into place behind him. Mari stood in the entryway before him, her red rose lips puckered into a tiny smile. He waited, staring at the tiny woman.
“Where were you?” she asked in a low voice, even though the bedrooms lay at the opposite end of the house.
Reed reached a hand into his pocket and withdrew an empty, greasy fast food bag. “Taco craving,” he said. “Goodnight.”
He brushed past her on the way to his bedroom.
When she opened her eyes, Katana found herself sitting in a large armchair, feet propped up on an ottoman. Dim light suffused the room, bright enough for her to make out a comfortably lower-middle-class living room. Several feet away and perpendicular to her chair, a well-used sectional sofa lounged before an entertainment center. The walls rose shiny and off-white and the beige Berber carpet, dirtied to tan in some areas, spread below. The occasional toy lay abandoned on the carpet or couch. Overall, a pretty average living room.
Points for comfort, though.
Although her memory seemed to be improving and she felt more alert throughout her dreams, Katana still had no idea how long she’d been trapped inside her mind, held prisoner in eight pounds of gray matter. Weeks? Months? She could remember little beyond the walls of her imagination, including her own identity and the life she’d led prior to her imprisonment.
She was recalling more and, thanks in part to the stimulating effects Reed had on her awareness, could remember more and more of each dream. Before she’d had a reason to focus, she’d drifted from nightmare to nightmare, unable to make sense of her context, incapable of remembering the details that colored in her sense of self.
Now, as pieces of her life drifted like snow into the landscape of her memory, she felt both relief and trepidation at her newfound lucidity. Regaining her identity felt like a gift, a journey home after a lengthy vacation. However, sitting here in this oversized, brocade chair with her slippered feet propped up on a fluffy ottoman, she’d never felt so drained, so utterly exhausted. Her previous ignorance, while horrifying and dehumanizing, had also spared her the awareness of her horrendous circumstances.
Superhuman beings had locked her up inside her head, trapped her in an endless parade of nightmares, while they snacked on her feelings at their leisure.
Knowing this, knowing that the only things she gained from these endless horrors were those memories she had once possessed, aware that she mourned for the loss of a life she could scarcely recall, she burned with anger, disgust, impotence.
But most of all, she simply felt tired and heartsick.
As much as she looked forward to seeing Reed, as much as she used the compass of his visits to make sense of her mental map, she also hated their brevity and the endless, lonely dreams that followed. Given a choice between the fuzzy ignorance before Reed and the pain of awareness that his visits brought, she wasn’t sure which she’d choose. Everything hurt.
So, when her dream presented her with a comfortable chair and ottoman set inside a homey, middle class living room, she did what any tired person would do: she sat there.
Come hellhounds, zombies, or split-pea-soup-spewing adolescents, she was damned if she would budge a centimeter.
I wonder what’s on TV
, she thought sourly, but refused to search for the little black remote. She didn’t even care what lay outside the window on her left. Feet propped, head back, she’d wait in comfort for whatever the dream had to offer.
There was something vaguely familiar about the house. Slightly messy, well worn, sinfully comfortable: it felt real. Shouldn’t a nightmare house feature moldering hardwood floors, creaking doors, and creeping shadows? Or, in true nightmare form, a carousel of corpses and a didgeridoo staffed by mutant giraffes? Nightmare houses featuring crocheted dolls and Little Golden books failed to inspire much terror and awe.
She knew this place.
“Don’t look,” she whispered to herself, but her gaze drifted to the stretch of wall opposite her. Directly in front of her, a dozen or so feet away, an eleven-by-fourteen family photo hung slightly askew. A golden frame curled ornately around the picture, which featured four people, all wearing stiff red shirts and stiff red smiles.
The picture could have decorated any wall in any middle class home in the U.S. At the center of the photo sat a plump White woman in her early-thirties, curly brown hair wisping about her face and shoulders. She held a blond baby, older than one but probably not yet two, in her arms. The baby wore a red dress, shiny black Mary Janes, and a vacant smile. Behind the woman and baby, his hand resting on the woman’s shoulder, a brown-haired, bearded man stood. He was prematurely balding and needed to trim his mustache and beard, but he looked pleased to participate in this most mundane of family rituals. Next to him, to the right in terms of the picture, stood a plump, grinning little girl, perhaps five or six years old. Her curly brown hair sprang from her head in two low ponytails, just brushing the material of her red velvet shirt.
Christmas photo
, she thought. She knew the family in the photo didn’t celebrate Chanukah or Yule.
Sighing, she looked out the window. It was night, and sooty darkness smeared itself across the glass, but she could just see enough to recognize an average, desert front yard.
I wonder if they’re here
, she thought. She did not rise to investigate. In fact, her chin dropped on a sigh to her chest.
“Kat?”
The little girl’s voice came from far away, somewhere else in the house. From someplace upstairs.
“No,” she whispered, whether to the girl or as a warning to herself she didn’t know.
“Kat?” the little girl’s voice rose in pitch, as if in fear.
“
No
,” she hissed and realized her hands had clenched against her thighs. Air whistled through her nostrils.
“Mommy? Daddy? Where are you?” the girl wailed, sounding terrified. “Kat, are you okay?”
Katana rocked to the edge of her chair but told herself she wouldn’t do anything. It was just a dream, a bunch of neurons firing in her sleeping brain.
“Please c’mere, Kat,” the little girl cried, her voice twisted in terror. “I don’t want to play this game.” She started crying, then, huge, watery sobs that carried all the way down the stairs and into the living room.
Neither do I
. Katana tucked her head down and rocked in her chair, waiting for the dream to end.
Suddenly, the girl stopped. Katana’s head snapped up from her chest.
She heard a man’s quiet, indistinct voice coming from somewhere upstairs. After a second, the little girl answered.
That’s not Dad’s voice
, she thought, and surged to her feet. She was pounding up the stairs before she even realized she’d moved.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” she chanted, and cold tears leaked from her eyes. Her vision narrowed to a panicked pinpoint as her legs pumped endlessly. How many stairs
were
there, anyway?
She had almost reached the top when M— when the girl started screaming.
Sobbing, heart pounding in her chest, temples, and throat, Katana finally reached the top of the stairs, stumbled briefly, and then sprinted toward the room at the end of the hallway.
When she got there, she.
When she got there.
She saw.
Ink, as red as velvet dresses, spilled over the wooden floor in a pool.
She saw ink. Red ink. A pool of red ink, waiting for a stylus to dip into it and scribble a poem on the room’s night-dark walls.
Too much ink, spilled from a broken pen.
Red ink.
She saw the ink and collapsed on the floor.
Reed left his lessons with Paul the following day nursing, of all things, a throbbing wrist. He didn’t think he’d broken it, but it hurt bad enough to warrant several painkillers. Unfortunately, painkillers never worked on him. Resigned, he tinkered about in the Daleth’s backyard.
He felt relieved when Cor poked her head outside and yelled to him to quit slopping about in the mud and tend to the more important affairs of the rich. Her visits had become one of the few pleasures of his existence among Leeches. In fact, he didn’t think planning a reception and dinner for thirty-odd people required daily meetings, but neither of them suggested trimming back their appointments.
“If you have college, girl, how can you show up here every day at the same time?” he asked her as they stretched out on the couches in the living room.
“I’m a night owl, my man,” she said while drawing her notebook, paper rather than electronic, from her ugly orange backpack. Today, she wore a cheap gray hoodie and baggy jeans. “I take all the late night classes. You’re lucky I get here before three p.m.”
“What does your father say about you attending LAU instead of some Ivy League college?” he asked, settling back.
“Stop dissin’ on my college! It may not be Oxford, but it’s a good school. And lest you forget, I wasn’t known for my studious ways when I was a teen.” (
So long ago
, Reed thought.) “My high school GPA wasn’t stellar, so Al decided to keep me here for a while.” She heaved a sigh, but he didn’t think she’d done it theatrically.