Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) (23 page)
Read Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) Online
Authors: Aileen Harkwood
“You’re sure this is the exact same place in the dream?”
“Positive.”
“Day or night?”
“Night?”
“Time of the year?”
“Like it is now.”
“The weather?”
“Clear.”
“Is there a moon?”
“A moon? Yes!”
“Full? Almost full? Crescent?”
“A sliver. Barely there.”
“Okay. Good. Where was it in the sky?”
Lara studied the horizon, and then pointed.
“Waxing or waning?”
“I don’t know which is which.”
“Show me which direction it was facing.”
She used her good hand to mimic the shape and position of the crescent moon in her dreams.
“Good. What else, Lara?”
She hesitated. “Nothing.”
Do I tell him?
Should she reveal what she’d seen in her most recent version of the dream? She didn’t want to think about it herself. She wanted to forget it and pretend it couldn’t happen. The idea that this was the future. Her future, since she would stand at this very spot and hear the voice calling her name.
“Do all the dreamrunners live here?” she asked.
“No. Only a fraction. I do. My agents don’t.”
“You do?”
No. I’m not telling anyone
.
If she didn’t tell, it wouldn’t happen, she rationalized to herself. Her dreams weren’t foolproof predictions. She didn’t always get it right.
“I believe the reason your nightmares don’t always come true is because sometimes something happens to change the future,” Gavin said, matter of fact.
Lara froze like a small defenseless animal in a predator’s sights.
“What did you say?”
Can he hear me? He hears my thoughts?
I do
, his voice answered in her mind.
I have since we met
.
Oh, God. Were all the dreamrunners telepathic? What embarrassing things had she been thinking since she’d arrived here?
Nothing too terrible
.
She hadn’t yet witnessed Gavin laughing, and half-suspected he wasn’t capable of it, but here was this gentle laughter riding his mental voice.
“But I thought…Jack told me he’d never…that we were the only ones he knew of who could talk that way,” she said.
“Other than myself, he was right,” Gavin said. “You two are the first I’ve encountered with the ability.”
She noticed he held a smart phone and thumbed the screen several times, tapped it, and then gave a dour smile.
“At least this is good news. If you’re correct about the position and phase of the moon, we have at least 22 days before this happens.”
“That can’t be. I’ve never had a dream that far in advance of an event.”
“Then let’s be grateful this time you have.”
“It could just be a dream.”
He nodded. “It could, but I don’t think so. You’re a runner. What you’re describing is a run. Other than when they pass through the fields, runners don’t run to imaginary places. If I were to hazard a guess, your gift allows you to run to the future. A very limited, specific one populated by extreme violence. When something as momentous as the events you’ve witnessed occurs, it’s my theory that some of the emotions they create leak back through time. Similar to Jack and other finders like him, you travel using a signature as your guide. You don’t need a photo any more than he does.”
The future suddenly crystallized before her, real and horrifying. She wasn’t imagining things. She never had. “So this is really going to happen? These five buildings destroyed. All the people I saw around me dead. Children. Even…”
“Even what, Lara?”
She wouldn’t answer him.
“Even what, Lara?” He pressed her harder.
“Hey!”
Jack’s angry shout came from across the lawn in the direction of the hospital. He ran full out toward them.
“What are you doing to her?” Jack demanded and inserted himself between Gavin and Lara, instinctively shielding her with his body. “You’re interrogating her? Now? Here? Why?”
He was a lot more spent from his ordeal in the ICU than he would let on to either of them. When his stiff neck had cramped up a little after midnight, rousing him, and he’d found Lara’s bed empty, his groggy mind had conjured the worst. He completely skipped over the fact that they were safe within the Society’s compound, flashed back to the cabin where Lara had been taken from him by her Grey Man, and hit the panic button, afraid she’d been abducted her again.
His relief, once he learned from the nurses on duty that nothing had happened to her, was profound, but short lived. She’d asked for Gavin, blurted out that it was an emergency, and then driven off with his boss as soon as he’d arrived.
Again, Lara hadn’t trusted him. If she had an emergency, why hadn’t she come to him for help? She couldn’t have missed him sprawled in their hospital room chair. Why hadn’t she woken him, confided in him?
Which had left him standing outside the hospital entrance, pacing back and forth, wondering where Gavin had taken her, when he spotted the familiar SUV pulling up to the curb in front of the Society’s orphanage several buildings away. Lara dashed out of the vehicle first and ran to the old striped maple that had been a fixture of his childhood here at The House.
Jack begun to run and saw Lara go from agitated to bat shit terrified. He could see, but not hear, Gavin firing questions at her, one right after the other. By the time he reached the pair, she stood paralyzed like a helpless animal, pinned by Gavin’s intense stare and the question, “Even what, Lara?”
He pushed Lara safely behind him.
“What the hell is going on here?”
“Jack–” Gavin said.
“I want to know what’s going on. She shouldn’t be out here in the middle of the night,” he said. “Being questioned.”
“It’s not what you think,” Gavin said, his tone quiet and grave.
“She belongs back in the hospital. I don’t see any doctors signing off on her release.”
Lara touched his shoulder, urging him to turn and face her.
“Jack. I’m all right. Really.”
“She’s had another dream. Three to be accurate,” Gavin said. “The first was more than two weeks ago, right before the Greys took her.”
What? Why didn’t you tell me?
he asked Lara silently, his brow furrowed in worry. Why didn’t you wake me?
She ran her fingers along his tensed jaw, coaxing the muscles to ease up.
You needed your rest
, she told him.
Remember you were mostly dead until day before yesterday
.
Aloud she said, so their silence wouldn’t seem strange, “The third dream was just a few minutes ago. They’re the same thing over and over. Always identical. Or almost.”
“So why are you out here?”
“Because this is the–”
“No,” he said, understanding hitting him like a Taser to the chest. Her dream was about The House? He glanced from Lara to Gavin. He didn’t want it to be true, but their expressions gave his conclusions nowhere else to run. “No. That’s not possible. Not here.”
“Here,” she said.
“How? I mean, what happens?”
“Bombs, I think. Or explosions of some kind. I’m never here when it happens, only during the aftermath.”
“How long do we have?”
“We don’t know exactly,” Lara said. “At least I can’t tell from the dream, but Gavin has a pretty good idea.”
“A little over three weeks,” Gavin said.
Sliding his cell phone back into a pocket, he backed up, then swung around and started for his vehicle. He waved for them to join him in the SUV.
Jack continued to have a hard time putting his resentment toward Gavin aside. Lara may not have thought it necessary to wake him for this, but Gavin sure as hell should have.
“How long have you known? About these dreams?” he asked his boss.
“I’m only just hearing about them,” Gavin said.
“Jack. Let it go. Please,” Lara said.
In the short time it had taken them to drive from the tree back to the hospital, Lara’s tense, erratic energy had faded. She sounded tired. Utterly worn.
This was too much for her. Damn. How could I have fallen asleep when she needs me?
“I’m fine,” she said.
He scooped her up out of the backseat while Gavin’s SUV idled at the hospital entrance.
“She’s just like any other runner, Jack,” Gavin looked over his shoulder from the driver’s seat and said. “It takes it out of her, the same as it does any one of us.”
“More for her, I think,” Jack said.
“What do I do?” Lara half-mumbled. “How do I stop it from happening?”
“You don’t,” Gavin said. “
We
stop it. All of us. But you? You rest. You’ve done your part.”
“I should have told you both earlier,” Lara whispered. “So many deaths. I’m so sorry.” The last words were muffled. Clinging to Jack as much as he did her, she passed out.
“She takes too much on herself,” Jack said.
“Sound familiar? Like someone we know?” Gavin asked.
“Not in the least.”
“Too bad,” Gavin said. He paused, and then added. “She does trust you, Jack. She knows with absolute conviction you’re the one to keep her safe. But she needs you to trust her with your story. Tell her about your first mission.”
“Lara doesn’t need to hear some old sob story of mine.”
“Is that how you think of Jamie and Starr? Old sob stories?”
“Dammit,” Jack said. “You know I don’t.”
“Then why so cavalier? Never mind, I get it. But so does she. Tell her.”
“Night, Gavin,” he said. He nodded to his boss. It was parting greeting, apology for his earlier overreaction, and unwilling acknowledgement of Gavin’s advice all wrapped up into one.
Chapter 33
Thunder woke Lara with a start.
Disoriented, she felt her heart immediately start racing. What was it? Bombs? Gunshots? The door to her cell slamming shut?
“Shh, Lara. I’ve got you.”
Powerful arms reached for her in bed, encircled her shoulders and pulled her close.
“You’re safe, little love. No one’s going to hurt you. I won’t let them.”
“Jack?”
“Right here.”
She looked around, panicked, and still too groggy to be sure of where she was.
“Where’s Grey Man?”
“Dead. I promise.”
Though her eyes took in the same tranquil hospital room where she’d woken each of the last two days, her brain wouldn’t register what she saw. Her body’s internal clock told her it should be midday, but it was dark enough for dusk. Oddly-tinted, the meager light that filled the room made her think of solar eclipses, or what she imagined noon would look like to someone drowning at the bottom of a murky lake.
Fire ripped the sky outside their window. Lara flinched at the concussive blast that shook the massive stone building.
“That was a close one,” Jack said, and, when Lara wouldn’t relax her death grip on his forearm, added, “It’s okay. You’re okay. It’s just a thunderstorm.” He stroked her hair gently, trying to soothe her. “We get them like this all the time. We’re so high up in the mountains the lightning seems worse, the thunder louder.”
Tipping her head back, Lara gazed up into his face. The quiet confidence in his eyes slowed her frantically beating heart.
“Jack?” she said, more clear-headed this time.
“Still here.”
She couldn’t stand it a moment longer She could no longer hold it back. She buried her face against his chest and cried. Lara wracked with sobs so loud she knew she should be mortified with embarrassment, but she couldn’t help it. She wasn’t even sure why she cried, only that it represented some deep sickness that had to come up out of her, like the infection and fever that had almost taken her hand.
Jack held her tighter. He was silent, yet displayed none of the usual male discomfort with a woman’s tears. He simply let her cry herself out.
Finally, her body was done, tears dying away to soft hiccups, and then she could speak again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She swiped at the last wetness at the corners of her eyes with the back of her good hand. “I hate being a crybaby.”
“You aren’t,” he said. “If you didn’t cry or wake up screaming in the middle of the night for the next several months, I’d be worried.”
“Please tell me I am not going to do that again.”
“With what you’ve been through, it’s a wonder you haven’t gone stark raving mad.”
Suddenly he leaned back away from her in bed. With mock concern, he made a show of getting a larger, more encompassing look at her.
“No. Wait,” he said. “You do look a little wild around the eyes. Maybe I was being too hasty.”
“Rat,” she called him.
Neither spoke again for several minutes. They lay comfortably in each other’s arms, listening to the wind howl, the rain lash the window. Watching for lightning strikes, they counted the seconds till the thunder came and, as the delay between flashes and booms grew longer, the storm moved off.
Jack broke the silence. “I want to hear more about this dream you’ve been having.”
Lara tensed. Fear started up anew. She didn’t want to think about what she’d seen.
Tell him
, Gavin’s mental voice had urged her just before she’d passed out in Jack’s arms.
He can handle it
.
Jack might be able to handle it, but could she?
He sensed her reticence.
“How about I tell you about Jamie and Starr first?”
“Jack. You don’t have to–”
“No. It’s time. I need to.”
“Okay.”
She settled back into his embrace to let him tell his story. She recognized it as a reprieve, but also wanted to give him the emotional support he needed to unburden himself of guilt he’d carried too long. Whatever he had to say was at the heart of what made Jack, Jack.
“I was twenty-four when I went on my first solo finding,” he said. “It wasn’t the first time I’d been away from The House. I was raised here, by the way. I grew up hanging out under your maple tree.”
“The one from my dream?” she asked.
“Mmm-hmn. The very same one. That’s the orphanage it’s standing in front of.”
The girl with the blue stuffed dog
.
It made sense to her now, why there were so many children in the dream. Why he–