Authors: Erin Kellison
Maisie squinted at him. What had this to do with delivering William Kerry to that horribly bloody and evil dream? She hated when people made her feel stupid, as if she couldn’t follow a conversation.
“I don’t know anything about real estate,” she said. “I’m a courier Darkside. An expensive one.”
“You undervalue yourself.”
She had just said
expensive,
right?
“I want your city.”
Oh. Maisie leaned back in her chair. “You’re the great Didier Lambert. Build your own.”
“Hélas,”
he said. “I cannot. I was born without my own dreamspace, cast adrift on the waters from my infancy.”
He had no dreamspace? Impossible.
Except, sitting before him, all her senses were jangling with warning. She’d known there was something wrong about him, though she never would’ve been able to guess
that.
“I need a place of my own from which to control my business Darkside,” he said.
Hell if it was going to be her city.
“I’ll pay you handsomely for it.”
“You can’t
buy
my dreamscape. It can’t be
sold.
It’s part of me.”
He made her skin crawl just talking to her about it. Her instincts were again screaming to run away. It was the same feeling she’d fought since first visiting the bad dream. Only Steve’s company, his absolute confidence, had managed to quell it.
But the urgency was now alive and well.
Run. Fucking fly if you have to.
He opened his palms to her. “I’ll give you anything you want in the waking world.”
She didn’t like the waking world very much. It was Darkside where she was alive, really alive.
She had to get away from him and this house, but she had voluntarily trapped herself inside. Freedom was back two living rooms blocked by that nurse lady, then down a long driveway with armed guards. And a gate. There was no way out.
“And where would I go to dream?” she demanded. “It’s not like I can move out.”
“True. You’d still descend into the city during sleep, but it would belong to me. I’d be the mayor, if you will. You’d put your talents at my disposal.”
She’d heard enough. “No. Why would you think
anyone
would agree to this?”
“Well, I had planned on motivating you with your sister, Jordan. But she got away and sent the son of one of my business associates deep into the…Scrape.”
Vince Blackman. Right. He’d tried to romance Jordan into going off with him. Somewhere, probably in this very house, his father Raymond was held captive. Well, Steve could rescue him, too.
Any time now would be good.
“I’m going to have your city,” Lambert said, “whether you concede it or not. If you cooperate, you will be comfortable. If you don’t, you won’t.”
Comfort was subjective. She was far from comfortable right now, and they were still playing nice. If she couldn’t run, she’d have to fight. She’d have to hold out until Steve came for her. The twenty-four hours now seemed like a century.
Every nerve was burning with the certainty that if she didn’t do something, Lambert was going to keep her prisoner for the rest of her life. She scanned his desk for a weapon—smack him with his palm-sized onyx globe? Stab him with a pen?
She brought her gaze back up to his smug face…and she stopped breathing, surprised.
How
weird….
She was looking at a dream version of Lambert. In fact, she must’ve been looking at a dream version of him for the duration of their conversation.
Revelers did it all the time Darkside—pumped themselves up, shed weight, grew taller, developed fuller, perkier boobs—remade their appearance into fantasy versions of themselves. Maisie had never altered herself because it was too much of a pain in the ass to concentrate on looking different while illegally crossing boundaries. She was more of a come-as-you-are kind of girl.
But she’d never heard of anyone being able to alter his or her appearance in the waking world. She was awake, but looking at a dream.
Could she see past it?
Yes. Dear God.
“The last dreamscape I took over,” Lambert was saying, “my host put up a valiant fight. The dream itself became a battlefield.”
Maisie remembered the battlefield. Remembered the overpowering feeling of evil and death.
More disturbing, if possible, was the man standing before her, his dream-tooled illusion no longer fooling her sight. Apparently, not having his own dreamscape wasn’t the only abnormality with which he’d been born.
He had freaky eyes. The irises were gray, but a little too large in diameter to be normal, and there was no differentiation where the irises met his pupils.
“Why did you need the old man in the package you had me deliver?”
Lambert looked over at Graeme and said, laughing, “I knew she would open it!”
Then he smiled down at her. “I was going to introduce myself to you. And then I was going to show you how to keep
les cauchemars
, the nightmares, away from my city. You feed them dreamers.”
His city? “Did you feed them Raymond Blackman?”
“He was useful in that way, yes.”
She was going to be sick. “Well, I don’t have any nightmares in my city.”
“They exist. They will find it.” He gave another of his slight smiles. “They will find
us.
”
He had to be referring to the kind of creature Jordan and Rook had fought.
And there was no
us.
“It’s not my fault you don’t have a dreamscape of your own.”
“It’s not my fault, either,” he said. “I will fight you, Maze. And I am stronger than you are. I will overcome.”
“Not in this life,” she vowed.
“No,” he answered. “In the Darkside one.”
Maisie had never been drowned into sleep, though she’d pushed others once or twice to get out of a tight spot.
The sensation was what she’d expect of drowning in waking world waters. Being held under, breathless, out of control, panicked. Last night Steve had merely assisted with a fall into sleep, but this descent was like being bound and gagged and thrown into the deep.
***
Maisie’s distress ripped though Steve. The intensity of her emotion was such that she had to be in the dreamwater for it to be conducted so easily from person to person.
For a terrible moment he thought the creatures had found her, too, but no—she was falling into sleep from the waking world. Graeme didn’t have the ability to force her to do anything, so she had to have moved up the chain within the organization.
Steve never should’ve allowed her to go back.
She’d played her part well at The Wake Hotel, so well that anyone but he would’ve believed her greedy and naïve enough to think she could flipflop sides, that youth and boredom ruled her. She’d presented herself as a difficult asset, but an asset just the same. Graeme had reason to keep her alive. The fact that he’d bought her the boots indicated that he’d intended to keep her happy as well, like buying a child a toy to coerce her cooperation.
That was before, when Steve thought greed ruled Graeme’s organization, too. Greedy people protected their income. They’d protect Maisie.
But greed didn’t rule them. Madness did.
Get offa me!
Maisie shrieked.
Ignoring the creatures at their feast—Steve had nothing to fear from them—he dived into the dust storm to find her. At first, she was only a distinct awareness in his mind, a warm fuzzy light. But it was enough to lead him across the Scrape. And to her city, wherein she gleamed all the brighter. Again, he was awed by the jumbled incline of the roofs, each a little higher, building to a crown of skyscrapers at the city’s center. Anyone who visited her city would know her talent. Her intelligence. He should’ve thought of that.
They would’ve known she wasn’t petty.
He crossed into her dream by the warehouses again, except that where before they suggested industry, now they were dark and ominous. The dreamwaters were less sweet than it had been before, as if something poisonous was tainting her fantasy.
Black-market memories sometimes did that. They were one more form of commerce Chimera was fighting; he’d concluded that Graeme was in the illegal transport of memory business. The imports promised one kind of experience—sex, adventure, sports—but the memory actually relived something entirely different.
Maybe she was reliving a bad memory.
Regardless, if she was smart, and she was, she’d go somewhere he knew. It was her best chance for help. The only place they’d stopped during their last visit here was at the small city park, where she’d buried the old man.
Steve retraced his steps there, past the row houses and taller brick buildings, the stairs that led to nowhere, and out of the massive iron sculpture that hid the passageway.
He came to the black iron gate that surrounded the park, and there Maisie knelt at a man’s feet, as if forced down by her neck. The taint in the dreamwaters was coming from him, seeping into her city.
Not a memory. This man was the source of the foulness in the battlefield dream, and it seemed that Maisie was his next victim.
Rage rose inside Steve the likes of which he’d never felt before. It was a living thing, worthy of the all terrible epithets he’d ever been called.
He had to remind himself that Maisie only appeared to have surrendered. She was so strong and bright that, if anything, she was buying time. Or plotting escape.
He went along with her charade, saying, “Let her go.”
She turned her bowed head slightly toward him and rolled her eyes.
Yes, she was fine, apart from the fact that Steve was never going to leave her side again, monster though he was. She was officially stuck with him. No choice.
Steve approached, and the mystery man turned. The shock on his face mirrored Steve’s own.
“There are
two
of my kind?” the man exclaimed.
“No, just one.” Because Steve was going to kill him.
***
Rook pulled up behind Coll’s rental car on the service road.
“See?” he said to Jordan. “Everything is going according to plan.”
“I still don’t think she should’ve gone in alone,” Jordan shot back.
The ploy had worked. Rook had been unconscious for less than two hours, just long enough to get to the hospital and be hooked up to an IV. Good thing his tolerance hadn’t diminished since his days as a street punk. Took a lot to put him under for long.
Jordan had cursed him out for the premature aging Chimera was inflicting on her.
He was still surprised that the waking dream thing had worked in the first place. Fucking awesome skill. What the hell was Coll doing in
recruitment?
He should be on the front lines, not holding out. Going from one hotel to the next. Easy life, but there was work to be done. They’d have to have a talk about that later.
They were parked out of sight of the house where Maisie was supposedly charming Murray Graeme into taking her back, but close enough that Rook was able to sense her inside—a good sign—as well as Alec Murs, a killer he’d once marked and tracked Darkside for Chimera. Bad sign.
When had he gotten out of prison?
Coll was going to be pissed when he heard Graeme was keeping such company. He’d want to pull Maisie immediately. She’d done her best. No one would doubt her anymore.
“Wait here.” Rook got out of the car, though he could sense Coll was Darkside. Rook would have to wake him. The presence of Murs inside the house changed things. For Chimera threats existed on two fronts: waking world and Darkside. Coll was handling Darkside—but Maisie was just as much at risk in the waking world.
Through the driver’s side window, he could see that Coll was in REM. No Chimera liked to be awakened without warning during a job, but it couldn’t be helped.
Rook knocked on the window. Knocked harder. Opened the door.
When Coll finally turned his head, his eyelids still flickering in sleep, Rook staggered back.
What the fu…?
Coll.
Goddamn.
His eyes.
Which, yeah, might account for him keeping the waking dream thing secret.
Was he even human?
Coll didn’t look like himself, but the urgency in his voice was all him. “Get her out. Get her out now.”
CHAPTER NINE
Lambert staggered back with the force of Steve’s blow. Maisie, released, fell on her butt.
Steve was here, just like she knew he would be.
There are two of my kind?
still echoed in her mind. What had Lambert meant?
Steve turned to her. “You okay?”
But she just stared.
Her vision had to be screwy—or maybe Lambert was messing with her head—because Steve didn’t look like himself. Well, it was
him,
but his green eyes were now too-big gray, like evil-wannabe-mastermind Lambert’s.