Authors: Erin Kellison
Tests had never been her thing, but bouncing back after failing? That she could do.
The driver took them off the Strip with its enormous hotels. Many of the attractions were dingy and kind of fake in the bright light of day. In silence they drove about twenty minutes to Summerlin, an area with widely separated, huge mansions with gated entries, like in the movies. Except in the movies nothing good ever happened at these kinds of places—they were either blown up or shot up or their occupants held hostage. Really nice furniture got smashed. People died.
Why anyone would want to live in one was beyond her.
The driver typed in a code at the gate, which opened to guards armed with AK-47s flanking the entrance driveway. See? Places like this were so dangerous, they needed their own little army. The winding quarter mile to the house itself was occupied by one burning question: Umm…how was Steve supposed to get in to retrieve her?
Maisie guessed she had more immediate problems as the SUV pulled to a stop and her door was opened.
First, the guards at the house wouldn’t let her take her new boots with her. And second, they frisked her. The only man she wanted frisking her was Steve.
For all the house’s security, she decided not to worry. The man didn’t make false promises. He didn’t exaggerate his abilities. If anything, he kept an arsenal in reserve, like his six-pack hidden under a plain gray suit and a dull tie. He was Mr. Unflappable because he didn’t have a reason to get worked up.
And when he did get worked up, he was nothing less than spectacular.
She’d do her part; he’d do his.
The house was white and huge, two symmetrical wings breaking back into the landscaping. Deep green bushes surrounded the place with thick, lush leaves at odds with the none-too-distant desert all around. Mist sprayed at the foliage, wafting a desert-wet smell into the air not unlike the dreamwaters. She was strongest in the dreamwaters, so there.
Tall, white columns stood at even intervals across the face of the house, which reminded her of the Agora and Chimera. Columns meant safety.
The irony made her smile—
suckers
—and hold her head high as she walked inside.
***
Steve, in his own vehicle, kept back from the property into which the white SUV had turned. He couldn’t afford to be seen by security cameras, which didn’t dream, weren’t fooled by illusions, and recorded exactly what they saw in the waking world. Inside The Wake Hotel’s sprawling complex, he’d appeared to be one more visitor, but here, he had to be wary of the mechanical eyes watching him.
Maisie had gone inside. He could feel her presence like a star in his mind. She was his true north. The rest of the world oriented to her.
The property contained other Revelers, too. Each was a distinct hum in his awareness beyond the security gate, most clustered inside the house. And—how convenient—two of them were Darkside right now. It was illegal to maintain an unlicensed Rêve service, and Steve was pretty sure that whoever owned the house was unlicensed.
At the moment, however, the Revelers would be useful.
Dreams were always brushing at his mind, trying to get in. It took effort to keep them out.
But he could also seek them out, follow…usurp, if he so desired.
He focused on the fattest moth flickering in the periphery of his vision and followed its buzzing wings out of sunlight and into a misty gray above an unsettled primordial sea. When he broke the surface of sleep, he kept half his awareness aloft, in two places at once.
Part of him was alert in the waking world, his body succumbed to the weakness that occurs during dreaming. Only his eyes would twitch, which to an outsider might look like the rapid half-blinking of REM. Strange how in one place, a person could become vulnerable, and in another, godlike.
Invisible, Steve stalked the Reveler into a nightmare of a battlefield after war. The air was dark and red with smoke, the earth gray like ash. Human bodies were slumped and heaped on the ground. The essence of the dreamwaters creating the scene was so brackish with death, fear, and pain that he knew this must be the dream that had terrified Maisie. The waters here had turned acidic, poisoned by fantasies so dark and rapturous with violence that any who encountered the stuff risked being overcome.
Maisie had fled. Her instincts, as usual, had been right.
Maisie had refused to bring anyone else here. Again, she’d been right. Almost everyone, even Chimera, would founder in these waters. Almost everyone would be dragged under and might never surface gain.
Almost everyone. Not him.
He was already filled with darkness. This water might reek, but it couldn’t kill him. When he was a child, he’d encountered foul dreams. He’d been introduced to the fancies of psychopaths, the twisted visions of a waking world overrun with chaos and blood.
This place was pitch, yes, but it would not overpower him.
The Reveler Steve had followed was hard at labor, his heart tightened with bitterness, his skin sweaty with funk. He was dragging the limp human body of a middle-aged woman by her armpits across the field, her dead weight creating pale streaks of disturbed dirt at her heels.
The limp body, however, was not a fictional part of the dream. It was a dreamer, like William Kerry, but this one was beyond her strength. She’d splurged on a Rêve to become anything she wanted to be—young, powerful, beautiful, adventurous. But somehow she’d lost the will to live.
Steve was bound by his oath to Chimera to help her. He was a marshal, his duty to protect and defend. But he saw no way to do so without alerting the Reveler to his presence. Graeme had Maisie, and Steve wouldn’t risk her. There was no saving this other woman today. He’d have to come back for her tomorrow.
Similarly, this dream belonged to neither the Reveler nor the woman: the dreamer who’d created this place was a collapsed body, a near-corpse, waiting on the battlefield to gasp his last. He’d lost this war, but against whom?
Steve followed the Reveler to find out. As he walked along the wavering tracks of the woman’s heels, the darkwaters revealed to him similar trails left behind. They multiplied in his vision into an ominous wave. The mass of tension and turmoil was gathering, and it made Steve’s dream heart beat furiously as he moved toward the answers.
The battlefield had a sense of vastness, but not nearly the scope of a dream like Maisie’s city. The Reveler and his victim, and Steve invisibly following, came to the boundary of the dream where the scrub of the battlefield was clogged with Scrape sand.
The wind gusted, but the howls that reached his ears were from the throats of monsters.
The Reveler cringed back while trying to shove the body of the woman outside the boundary with his foot.
One of her hands flopped outside the dream and onto the Scrape.
Shadows beyond darted forward, and the rest of the woman was dragged into the storm.
Steve lunged after her, breaking out onto the Scrape himself.
Through veils of sand-carried wind, Steve saw the shadows leap upon the woman. They formed a dark huddle around her body, and one of her feet sticking out twitched as they…fed.
This is what would’ve happened to William Kerry.
Flashes of cold burned all around Steve, which meant other such creatures were coming. There wasn’t enough of the woman for them all to get their fill.
He turned to find one inches away from him, leaning in as if to sniff. Sand burned Steve’s eyes, but he could see that the creature was near human, but gray, feral.
They surrounded him now.
Steve gritted his teeth to summon courage for the impending fight—he had Maisie to think of—but the creature’s interest shifted. They moved on, parting around him like a stream divided, for whatever scraps might be left of the carnage of the woman.
They left Steve—
devil, soulless, freak
—alone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The entrance hallway was so big and echoey with marble and crystal that sounds bounced around the space like bullets. If Maisie had serious money, this wasn’t how she would spend it. Her ideal abode had soft sounds, like the ocean at a beachfront condo, which, come to think of it, would probably cost as much as this house.
Graeme loitered, pacing outside a set of big, white double doors. Nervous.
Yeah, well, she was, too.
Steve was probably waking up now. He’d be bossing everyone around, coordinating shit, rolling out maps on the hoods of cars like the fucking FBI. Making people literally jump at his commands.
Yep. That’s what he was probably doing.
The doors suddenly opened inward, and some lady with a bun and dressed in chin-to-shin black—kinda like a nurse on opposite day—beckoned them to follow.
Maisie looked around as she was led into a huge living space with elegant, silk-covered sofas that had rolled arms with silver-blue trim. Huge gold rugs covered the floor, probably a hundred years old and from some foreign place where they’d been hand knotted by children. The nurse lady kept walking, though, leading into another living roomish space, and beyond that loomed another set of double doors. Maisie was willing to bet there’d be a third living room within. Because what else would they do with all this space but buy sofas to fill it?
The nurse knocked, but didn’t wait for an answer—whoever was in there must’ve known they were coming.
Graeme went inside first. “Sir.”
And Maisie trailed after him into an office dominated by a really big, ornately carved wood desk. Behind the desk sat a man in his late fifties, and she recognized him…but from where?
Though his hair was going gray at his temples, the man was fit and had the fresh, glowing skin of an actor only ten years out of his action-movie days.
The man stood up and held out his hand. “Hello, Maze.” French accent. “I’m Didier Lambert. I’ve been very anxious to meet you.”
Whoa. Everyone knew
his
name. Everyone.
Didier Lambert had invented Rêve. He was a national hero in France, but he’d become a recluse after the Rêve-olution of shared dreaming had swept the world. Some people cursed him for opening Pandora’s box. Others praised him for ushering in a new age wherein humankind could be gods. Generation Rêve, Maisie’s generation, knew he was important, but didn’t remember the time before. Who remembered what life was like before electricity? Cooking food over a fire? The time before Rêve might as well have been the Stone Age.
Every once in a while Lambert would pop up somewhere interesting, like the U.N., but mostly he stayed incognito.
She shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, too.”
What was
he
doing involved with all this? Had she been delivering
his
packages?
As he pulled away, he gestured. “If you’ll have a seat?”
A chair was pulled up behind her. Maisie looked around to find Graeme standing back by the door frowning, his expression sickly pale. Afraid.
Maisie turned back to face Lambert, a chill raising the hairs at the nape of her neck.
This was bad. Really bad. Lambert might be rich and famous, but he was also attached in some way to the evil dream. He wasn’t going to let her go and tell the world that their modern visionary was doing evil stuff Darkside.
“Maze—” Lambert interrupted himself. “May I call you Maze?”
“Sure. What do I call you?”
Diddy
came to mind.
He smiled slightly. “You may call me Mr. Lambert. I’ve been following your work for Graeme, and I’ve heard you are aware that you’ve been shadowed Darkside by one of our own as well?”
“Your driver guy?” Maisie asked. “Yeah, he’s followed me a couple of times.”
“You cross dreams effortlessly?”
Maisie shrugged. He knew she could.
“And you’ve sneaked into the Agora once or twice.”
She blinked at him. “Sometimes it’s unavoidable.”
“And do you have any problem with
la tempête de poussière
?”
“The what?”
“The great dust storm,” he said.
“You mean the Scrape.”
Lambert lifted an eyebrow.
“Scrape,” Maisie repeated, louder. Maybe he was hard of hearing. “Wind blows. So what? If you want me to deliver your packages, my rates have gone up.” Way up. Not even the über wealthy Didier Lambert could afford her.
“Oh, you’re worth too much to risk on deliveries.”
She blinked at him again, taken aback. “Somebody’s got to take things from point A to point B.”
That was the point of her coming back to Graeme, wasn’t it? Because she’d stopped delivering their all-important packages?
“I have other people for that. I was hunting for talent before I published my first findings on shared dreaming.”
That had been over fifteen years ago. “Okay?” If they had so much talent, why hadn’t Graeme just let her go? Why pursue her? Why the trouble?
The more she looked at this guy, so suave and cultured, the more uneasy she felt.
“I am, however, in the market for a little real estate,” he said.