Darklands (9 page)

Kane shook his head. “Simone is still part of the Landry pack, her family of origin. The oldest daughter. She hasn’t gone solitary, and she hasn’t mated. I guess she’s content where she is.”

I wanted to ask what happened when a werewolf chose a mate, but I couldn’t think of a way to phrase the question without sounding like either (a) I was paranoid about Simone, or (b) I was dropping hints about our own relationship. So I let Kane talk.

Finally he checked his watch. “I’ve got to get over to the Back Bay for Simone’s talk. Where’s your job tonight?”

“Cambridge, near Porter Square. I’m getting rid of a little old lady’s nightmares for her.”

“It’s a pity we didn’t have time to celebrate properly tonight. What about tomorrow? How about we get together at Creature Comforts and pop open a bottle of Axel’s finest champagne?” He grinned.

“Champagne?” I made a face.

“Okay, then, we’ll unscrew the cap of your favorite lite beer.
Whatever you want. Simone has another fund-raiser, but she can manage without me. It’ll be our night.”

Our night, with no Simone to be seen? “Sounds perfect.”

We arranged to meet at ten the next night. At the door, Kane swept me up in an embrace that turned heads throughout the room. He was whistling—actually whistling—as he walked along the sidewalk toward the parking garage.

I watched him recede into the night. Half of me felt like I’d scored a major triumph. The other half felt like I was standing on the high dive, eyes closed, toes curled around the edge, taking a last breath before I plunged into the deep end.

I NEEDED TO STOP BY THE APARTMENT TO PICK UP MY equipment for tonight’s job. When I walked in, the television was on, but the volume was below its normal ear-shattering level. Juliet was just hanging up the phone.
Oh no, don’t tell me my one remaining client has canceled.

“That wasn’t for me, was it?”

“Feeling a little self-centered tonight, are we? Why would it be for you?”

“Clients have been canceling right and left, and I’m about to leave for a job.”

“Oh. Well, in that case, don’t worry. Your little old lady—what was her name?” She hunted through scraps of paper strewn across the coffee table.

“Phyllis.”

“That’s right, Phyllis. You’ll be happy to know that Phyllis is still tormented by nightmares. She called to confirm that you’re coming tonight.”

“You told her yes?”

“Do I look like a secretary? I told her you’d call her back.”

I put out my hand, and Juliet tossed me the phone. I wasn’t exactly
happy
that the poor old thing was having nightmares, I
thought as I dialed; I was just relieved to have a job. Phyllis sounded thrilled to hear from me, and I reassured her I’d be on my way within half an hour.

“Ooh, give me the phone—quick!” Juliet, her eyes fixed on the TV, was almost shouting as I hung up.

“Why, what’s so urgent?”

“If I call
right now
, I’ll get a free apple corer in addition to the food chopper and extra bonus knives!” On the screen, a smiling woman mercilessly sliced the heart out of a juicy-looking apple. A toll-free phone number scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

“Um, Juliet, when was the last time in your six-hundred-fifty years of existence that you needed to core an apple?”

She sent me a withering look. “If I
had
needed to core one, I’d have been completely unprepared—‘as one that unaware / Hath dropp’d a precious jewel in the flood.’”

Shakespeare again. She regarded me as though she expected me to respond in kind.
No, uh-uh.
No Shakespeare game for me tonight. Juliet always won, anyway. I knew maybe half a dozen lines of the guy’s work, the same ones everybody knew, like “To be or not to be” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” I hadn’t had several centuries to memorize every word he ever wrote. And if I’d been around as long as Juliet had, I like to think I’d have found other things to do. I ignored the quotation and offered her the phone. She took it but set it on the coffee table without dialing.

“So that’s what you were doing when I came in—adding more stuff to your ‘as seen on TV’ collection? What did you buy tonight?”

“Not much. Well, I did get one of those little gizmos that scramble an egg inside the shell. Don’t look at me like that, it’s clever. I want to see how it works. And I ordered a dozen microfiber dust cloths in assorted colors and sizes.”

“Dust cloths? You don’t dust.”

“I don’t cook meatloaf, either. But if I want to get two self-draining meatloaf pans, complete with recipes
and
a guide knife for cutting perfectly uniform slices, for only nineteen-ninety-nine plus shipping and handling, that’s my business. I can afford it. I— Oh, wait. I forgot to tell you the best thing I bought. A pair of slippers, fuzzy blue ones, with working flashlights built into the front. So you can see where you’re going without turning on
the lights! Isn’t that brilliant? I’d have bought a pair for you, too, but I wasn’t sure of your size.”

“That’s okay.” I grinned as a relevant line from Shakespeare popped into my head. “Romeo would love it: ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?’”

“‘It is the east, and Juliet’s fuzzy blue slippers are the sun!’” She collapsed in a fit of laughter. When she sat up, wiping tears from her eyes, she said, “Don’t you think if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing infomercials?”

“I think I need to get our cable company to block any and all shopping channels. And I also think you need to get out more.”

“That won’t be a problem tonight, thank Hades. I’m working. My Goons will be here shortly to escort me to Colwyn’s prison cell.”

“Let me know if anything related to Pryce comes up.”

She nodded. “I will. Anyway, after we’re done questioning that old fossil, I plan to eat out. I just have to convince Brad and his partner to stop at Creature Comforts on the way home.” She smiled, showing her fangs. “So don’t wait up.”

PHYLLIS’S SMALL, TWO-STORY HOUSE STOOD IN A NEIGHBORHOOD of triple-deckers on a side street north of Porter Square. The house looked modest, with gray shingles and white trim behind a chain-link fence, but given the explosion in Cambridge real-estate prices, it was probably worth more money than I’d see in the next nine or ten years.

Carrying the duffel bag that held my demon-fighting gear, I let myself in through the gate, went up the short walk, and rang the doorbell. The door was opened by a tiny woman wearing a pink terry cloth bathrobe. Her white hair was rolled in curlers, and she held the biggest cat I’d ever seen. With long gray fur and a lazy expression, he was nearly half the size of the small woman who held him. The animal was so large I could almost imagine Phyllis saddling him up and going for a ride—not that any cat that ever lived would suffer such an indignity.

“Come in, dear, come in,” Phyllis said. “Close the storm door quickly. I don’t want Pookie to get out.”

Pookie. Okay. Currently Pookie was lounging in Phyllis’s skinny arms with half-closed eyes, looking like a nap was way higher up on his feline to-do list than an adventure in the streets
of Cambridge. But I stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind me.

Phyllis poured Pookie from her arms. He lay at her feet where he’d landed, adjusting his position a little, then started snoring. She watched the cat with the fond expression of a mother watching her sleeping child. Then she looked up at me, her eyes large behind her glasses.

“Well, dear,” she said, “let’s go slaughter some demons.”

UPSTAIRS, PHYLLIS SAT IN HER BED, PROPPED UP AGAINST SEVERAL pillows and tucked under a frilly pink coverlet. Her bathrobe hung on the door, and her fuzzy pink slippers (no flashlights in the toes) waited beside the bed. She watched me through her glasses as I plugged in the dream portal generator and flipped it on. “Oh, my,” she murmured when a beam of multicolored, sparkling light lit up the room.

“This is how I’ll enter your dreamscape,” I explained. “It opens a doorway between this plane of existence and the one where dreams occur. It’s password protected, which means I have to say the password to step through the portal. That way, no demons can sneak out of your dreams to bother you while you’re awake, okay?”

She nodded, her eyes wide.

“The colors you see are like coordinates; they automatically key themselves to this location. Put your palm here, on this plate.” She did, and I fiddled with the dials until the machine beeped. “Right now, I’m calibrating the machine to your vibration. Every human has a unique vibrational signature, like a fingerprint. The calibration makes sure I go straight into your dreamscape and no one else’s. The colors make sure I come back here. Okay, I’ve got it.”

Phyllis pulled back her hand and looked at it like she’d never seen it before. “So you have to be with the sleeping person for it to work?”

“No, but it’s easier that way.” I turned off the machine. The colors hung in the air for a moment, then blinked out. “Mostly I work out of clients’ homes so we can get the paperwork out of the way.” I nodded to a stack of standard forms that Phyllis had signed. “And, more important, so I can get a sense of the dreams that have been troubling you.” Fear crossed Phyllis’s face, and I
patted her hand. “Don’t worry—the nightmares will be gone after tonight. But tell me about them so I’ll know what I’m looking for.”

“Oh, dear.” She clutched my hand. “The dreams make me so
tired
. That’s the worst part. Every morning I wake up exhausted, as if I hadn’t slept at all.”

“That’s a common trick of Drudes, the nightmare demons. It keeps the victim’s resistance low. Is there one dominant dream, or are the nightmares always different? Tell me what you can recall.”

“Oh, it’s one dream. Night after night after night—it’s always the same.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m standing in a long hallway that stretches endlessly before me. And I do mean endlessly, dear, it goes on and on forever. The hallway is empty, but all down the length of it, on both sides, are doors. The doors are evenly spaced, every three or four feet. And they’re all closed.”

“How do you feel when you look down that hallway?”

“Frightened.” She opened her eyes, and I could see the fear there. “I know there’s one door I
must
open, that something important is behind it.”

“Do you know what?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t a clue, I’m afraid. But I
do
know that if I pick the wrong door, something terrible will happen.” Her frail shoulders shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know what that is, either. Just that I must avoid it—whatever it is—at all costs.”

“So what do you do?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I stand there like a statue, sick with indecision and fear. There’s so much riding on me, and I can’t act. The impulse to pick a door gets stronger and stronger. The pressure becomes horrible, unbearable. I wake up screaming.” She covered her face with both hands. “It’s so distressing,” she said softly through her fingers. “Poor Pookie refuses to sleep with me anymore.”

Gently, I pried her hands from her face. “Well, tonight you won’t have to do a thing. It’s not up to you to pick a door. That’s my job.”

Relief flashed across her face, followed immediately by worry. “But what if you open the wrong one?”

“I won’t. The worst thing behind any of those doors is a demon. And I’m going in equipped to kill demons.” I showed her my pistol. “Bronze bullets,” I said, loading the magazine. “Kills ’em dead.” I shoved a spare magazine into the front pocket of my jeans.

She stared at the gun, then nodded once. “Good.”

“Here’s how this job will go. I’ll enter your dreamscape through the portal I showed you. Since you’ve been having a recurring dream, I’ll land in the hallway you described. This”—I showed her my InDetect—“is like a Geiger counter for demons. It helps me flush out the Drudes hiding in your dreamscape. I’ll move down the hallway, pointing the InDetect at each door. If it doesn’t click, there’s no demon there and I move on to the next door.”

“And if it does?”

“If the InDetect clicks, it means there’s a demon behind the door, hoping you’ll turn the knob so it can jump out and yell, ‘Boo!’” Phyllis flinched. “No worries. When I open the door, the demon will be the one who’s in for a surprise.” I brandished the pistol again.

Phyllis’s expression turned puzzled. “But if you only open the doors that have demons behind them, how will you find the right one?”

“What do you mean?”

“The right door. The door I’m supposed to open. The one with something important behind it.”

“Phyllis, that’s nothing but manipulation by the Drudes causing your nightmare. There isn’t anything important behind a door—only demons. They feed off your fear and indecision. They want you to open a door, any door. If there’s a Drude behind it, they get a rush out of scaring you. If there’s nothing behind it, they feed on your fear that you’ve chosen the wrong door. You can’t win.” I smiled reassuringly. “But I can win for you. I can kill the demons.”

“I certainly hope so, dear.” Phyllis looked doubtful. I couldn’t blame her, since she’d never actually seen any demons in her dreams. But she swallowed her doubts, along with the magically enhanced sleeping pill I gave her, and lay on her back. A few minutes later, soft snores filled the room. She sounded exactly like Pookie.

I double-checked my gun. Then I powered up the portal generator and stepped into Phyllis’s dream.

I STOOD IN A LONG, BRIGHTLY LIT HALLWAY. JUST AS PHYLLIS had described, it stretched ahead of me as far as I could see. I turned around. There was nothing behind me but dense, gray fog. Ahead, the white floor and walls glared relentlessly under harsh fluorescent lighting. Doors lined up along both sides. They were the rusty brown color of dried blood.

Open a door.
The thought tickled the back of my mind.
But, for heaven’s sake, don’t open the wrong one!

I pushed the nightmare whispers aside and switched on the InDetect. With my left hand, I pointed it toward the first door. My right hand held the pistol ready.

Not a click. The InDetect remained silent. I moved on to the next door.