Darksider: Reveler Series 3 (7 page)

The dreamscape prodigy with the eye-blinding hair. And then her sister, Jordan—

—who was in the process of sizing Sera up at the same time.

Steely gaze locked with steely gaze.

Sera wasn’t about to play Who Blinks First, so she went direct with her evaluation. “What do you contribute to all this?”

Jordan smiled sharply. “I’m the muscle. I throw people I don’t like far into the Scrape.”

Oh, a threat?

For Harlen’s sake, Sera had a little fun with it. “You could try.”

“Oh, I’ve done it.”

Pfft.
“On a baby, maybe. Do you regularly throw babies into the Scrape?”

“You want a demonstration?”

“You’d only embarrass yourself.”

Crazy Maisie bounced over to Steve and sat on his lap. “I
like
her.”

Steve put his arms around Maisie. “You should’ve seen the way she punched Rook. Laid him out flat on his back.”

Jordan stood. “What?”

“Took him a while to stand up, too.” Sera grinned and looked over at Harlen to check on him. “Didn’t it, honey?”

***

How Sera could joke around was beyond Harlen. All this shit, and she was playing Badass Bitches with Jordan Lane, and, most significantly, she’d just called him
honey
.

Chef Serafina Rochan didn’t use foods or…condiments as terms of endearment lightly.

Somehow, in the midst of all this—and he couldn’t put his finger on when—he’d done something right. Must’ve been momentous, too.

“Rook’s fine, Jordan,” Coll said, grinning. “He sneaked up on Sera and got what he deserved.”

“It’s not funny,” Jordan returned. “There are
bad things
out there! You said you’d have his back.”

Of anyone, Rook could handle “bad things.” Harlen had heard the stories: When Rook had been a runaway teen, he had gone on some very bad trips Darkside, the kind to melt the brain, and lived to tell. The man could handle himself. And then some.

“Circumstances changed,” Coll said. “He had to track Sera’s stalker.”

Jordan looked back over at Sera. “Someone’s after you?”

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Harlen told Sera.

She ignored him and made a face at Jordan. “I think mine’s a more generic stalker than the non-human creature things you guys are talking about. But I’m very appreciative that Rook is looking into it for me.”

Jordan seemed to settle down, if against her will. “Well, humans can be pretty bad, too. Are you Chimera?”

Harlen almost snorted.

“Ah, no. I’m a chef. Marina de Sel.”

Jordan sat on her sofa again, still uneasy, but seemed like she was trying to put a good face on it. “Marina de Sel? I love that place. The ceviche tacos are deadly delicious.”

Sera shrugged. “I actually created that dish when I was still with Harlen.”

“Well, no wonder you’re being stalked,” Jordan said. “I’d stalk you, too.”

“You’re welcome to come in any time.” Sera smiled. “I’d be pleased to cook you a deadly dinner.”

Harlen heard the double meaning there, and all his tension transmuted into a desperate attempt to keep a straight face. They were trying to make friends. Well, sort of.

Jordan lapsed into silence, but every once in a while her gaze darted to the door.

Harlen didn’t like what he’d heard during this little confab today, but he would’ve believed Coll if he hadn’t done that thing to his eyes. And Coll wouldn’t drop it, either, which was stupid. The eye trick cost him his credibility when he was already compromised by the pending charges.

Best thing to do? Turn them in, let the process sort things out. It would be best for everyone involved.

“There he is,” said Maisie. “I just felt him cross.”

Jordan visibly relaxed. “I know he’s been doing this for years. I’m just not used to this yet.”

“None of us are used to this,” Coll said as the door opened and Rook stepped inside.

“Well?” Harlen asked. “Did you find him?”

He wanted to get Sera out of here, and then he’d deal with the Lambert stuff later.

“I think you have a bigger problem,” Rook said. “Sera’s stalker could be a runner, like Maisie here used to be. Crossing boundaries at will. But the trail led to the Agora, and odds are…”

Predators Darkside steered clear of the Agora, or went in under the cover of an ordinary reveler with a ticket to a Rêve. The Agora tracked and noted each time a barrier was crossed. Some smuggling occurred, and a Chimera was almost always involved. Harlen had done it many times—with women. As long as he didn’t tweak the log—that was the trick,
not
attempting to cover it up—and confessed if confronted, the lead on duty usually let it pass. After all, Chimera had to have lives, too.

“You’ll need to check the breach log next time you go in,” Rook said. “Match it against the nights that she had her nightmares. See if you can find a pattern.”

“I know how to do my job, thanks.”

“You can’t identify a particular person?” Sera asked.

“No,” Rook said. “I’d have to be inside, and I can’t risk entering the Agora now.”

“I’ll take it from here,” Harlen said. If the person responsible was Chimera, then no regular investigation was going to uncover him. Harlen doubted very much that there would be a name next to the time stamp logging the breach, but he’d check. Then, yeah, look for a pattern and use that to define a group of suspects.

“Clearly, Chimera is corrupt,” Coll said. “All the way through. We
have
to do something about it.”

Harlen couldn’t take it anymore. “Can you fucking
please
put your eyes back?”

“You should see them in the waking world,” Rook said. “I nearly pissed myself, except we were on the job and Maisie was stuck with Lambert.”

Bullshit. “In the waking world?”

Rook raised his hands. “I swear to God, man. On my dead brother’s grave, Coll’s eyes are like that in the waking world.”

His dead brother’s grave? Was he out of his mind? Had to be.

“I’m not going to believe it until I see it for myself,” Harlen said.

“Fine.” Coll’s eyes morphed back to normal. “I don’t blame you. But what about Chimera?”

God damn. For Sera, and for the sake of his sanity, he had to know what was going on. How could he continue to work there without knowing if it was corrupt or not, and if he quit and got a job with some corporate Rêve designer, then how could he ever feel like those dreams were safe, either?

He knew what he had to do, though he’d sworn he never would again.

Harlen put a hand to his skull to try to hold it together, but his hand was shaking again, so he gripped the arm of the sofa instead. “Rook, have you marked any of the people Lambert works with?”

“A couple, yeah.”

“Why?” Coll asked.

“There’s something I could try.” Even thinking about it was bad.

“No,” Sera said. “Stay out of it, Harlen. Don’t get involved in this. They are cra-zy. Capital
C-R-A
. Capital
Z
.”

“I don’t want to get involved,” he shot back at her. “What if there is a system-wide problem?”

“Report it. Go to the police.”

That was his point. “I
am
the police.”

The last time he’d tried it, he’d ended up disoriented and sick, with night sweats and a sense of paranoia that wouldn’t quit. This was going to be hell. “It’s called Indirect Surveillance.”

But it was about as direct as surveillance could get.

He gestured to Rook. “A tracker marks the subject and then—” he couldn’t believe he was talking about it “—drops a proxy into the subject’s dreamspace. It’s not crossing, not like we’ve all done today to get into Maisie’s city. The proxy merges with the subject, so that what the subject sees and knows, the proxy does, too. It’s analogous to a memory replication, except without consent.” Not that all memory replications occurred with consent. “It’s a first-person experience. The proxy
becomes
the subject until the subject overpowers him. And then the proxy runs like hell.”

The side effects sucked big-time; the intelligence gathered became an uncomfortable weight in the mind. It didn’t belong there, couldn’t be owned, couldn’t be shaken.

“And you did this for how long?” Sera asked.

He knew he was confirming all her worst fears about the world Darkside. What he’d done, what he could do. He’d broken all the Rêve laws and regulations everywhere. Didn’t matter that he’d been ordered to do so. War made monsters of everyone.

“Couple years.” Four years. Three months. Two days.

“And you’ll do it again?” That was Coll, pushing.

Harlen sighed. “Rook needs to find the subject, and I need to have several hours within which to work—so tomorrow night at the earliest. But I’m following up on Sera’s stalker first.”

“Besides, morning has to be coming soon,” Sera said. “And I’ve promised Harlen crepes for breakfast.”

“Breakfast? Crepes?” Coll seemed dumbfounded. “
Didier Lambert
is feeding revelers to monsters.”

Harlen wasn’t ready to go all-in with Rook and Coll yet. He had to play this cool and smart or they would all be caught and incarcerated, and Lambert would do whatever he pleased regardless.

Besides, he wasn’t passing up Sera’s food. Ever. “Yeah, but these are the best crepes in the world.”

CHAPTER FIVE

When Sera opened her eyes, she screamed.

Which startled the dark, menacing figure crouching next to her bed. He leaped to his feet, facing the door, a looming shadow, braced and ready to fight.

For Pete’s sake. It was Harlen.
 

“Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” Her heart boomed in her chest. She sat up and found she was only a little sore from going through the window. Her forehead ached a bit with the shift to sitting, and her stitches itched.

Harlen turned back to her. Seemed to put two and two together. “Oh. Sorry.”

The man baffled her. She took a deep breath. Got her bearings. “You slept on the floor?”

He shrugged. “It was as close as I could get without breaking my promise.”

See, right there.
It was impossible not to want to…take a bite out of him. Literally. Put her mouth on him and bite. It would solve all her problems.

He’d come over last night to help her. She’d known he would, no matter what had happened between them; he’d always been a good guy. Someone she could trust. With his dominant presence and playful personality, he made a lot of friends and had always had a lot of female admirers, even when he and Sera had been an established couple. But this new sense of reserve, of quiet waiting, of control—it unnerved her. She had a feeling he’d been forced to learn it in terrible ways and at great cost to himself.

“Sit,” she commanded, pointing to the end of the bed.

He did as he was told—also strange—slowly shaking his head with remorse. “About last night. I had no idea what they were into. I’ve worked with Rook and Coll for years and—”

A swift move and she straddled his lap.

The shock on his face made her day. Well, she’d been shocked last night, too. The way he’d tried to cover his shakes. It was intolerable that he had them in the first place, and more so that they were so ingrained in his experience that they had transferred to his person Darkside. The mere thought of him in pain and suffering was unacceptable to her. Years had passed, and he still bore the effects. It made her angry and scared and angry all over again.

She didn’t care about a broken heart anymore. So her heart was going to get busted up again. So what? He was here
now
.

This was
Harlen
, the only man she’d ever loved. Hell if she was going to let him go.

She tugged up his shirt, and when he resisted, she almost fell backward from her perch on his thighs. He caught her—of course he did—and let her wrestle the shirt off him so she wouldn’t fall again. With the
whoosh
of pulling it over his head, his scent rushed over her. She took a deep breath of him—dark, a tad sharp, and warm.

“Sera, what are you doing?”

At the moment, she was gazing at the finest broad chest she’d ever seen. The man was big and beautiful. Ripped. His arms were ridiculously gorgeous, thick with muscle and hot to the touch. She scooted her hips a little so that she and Harlen were joined at the best spot. She was buzzing all over, impatient to ease the jitters inside her from the dream last night. She grabbed him by the sides of his head and kissed him for all she was worth. When she tried to taste him—only to get a little lick of his mouth—he pulled back.

“Um, Sera? No. I said I wouldn’t, and I’m not going to.”

His lips were moving, chin dodging her, so she went for his neck, nibbled, then sucked. His hands found her waist and clamped down to keep her from rubbing up against him. He was hard, very hard, and it felt awesome between her legs.