The Sandman (3 page)

Maisie looked over at Vivienne again.
She
was Rook’s boss?

The woman extended her hand again. “Do
you
own this Rêve then?”

Maisie took her fingers. “It’s not a Rêve. It’s my dreamscape.” Then, to Sera, “They made a plan. Can you go now? Or do I have to beg?”

“If you see Jordan,” Rook said to Sera, “tell her to stay out of the waters.”

“God, yes!” Maisie said. “Jordan can go with you to help Steve.” The perfect solution—the two people she cared about most, together.

“If she’s awake,” Sera said, “I’ll take her with me.”

Eleanor wasted even more time giving Sera a hug. “Please let Gary know what’s happened and that I need to be Darkside longer than we’d planned while I help out. I’ll wake as soon as I can, and then he can come down. He needs to see all this, too.”

“In the meantime,” Harlen added, “have him check for any warning bulletins on the Agora website. See if they’ve closed it down, and if not, scan the news to see if word is out about the black market’s fall.”

Enough.
Maisie fisted her hands in fury, and the pavement cracked with the force of lightning, huge jagged streaks splitting the streets in all directions. Shrill screams rose from among the crowd of survivors, but the group immediately surrounding her merely wavered for balance, accusing glares suddenly pinned her way.

She’d tried to be calm, really she had.

Sera’s eyebrows had winged way up. “I guess I’d better go.”

CHAPTER TWO

Gary Fawkes gripped the kitchen knife in his right hand, blade high and ready. Another flicker of movement in the bushes outside the wide front window—a shadow sliding into another shadow—and he knew the little beach house rental was surrounded. He strained to hear a scrap of noise, but the silence was too overwhelming, dampening the room with dread.

In spite of everything, the Oneiros had found them. And yet, he was not afraid—not for himself, anyway. An old man like him didn’t matter. But a tightness building in his chest made him want to rage for Harlen and Sera, newly engaged, and Jordan and Rook, who were helping them, and for his wife, Eleanor, a fighter to the bone. Yet all were helpless in their sleep while they were Darkside.

He was supposed to look after them, but no matter how tightly he held the makeshift weapon, he became more and more aware of how weak he was compared to the cultish group that had just burned down his house.

He wished for his mobile phone—left behind so he couldn’t be tracked—and instead grabbed for the kitchen portable. Unwilling to set the knife down, he held the receiver in his left hand while he dialed 911. The address of the beach house was conveniently printed above a list of local delivery restaurants on a Helpful Numbers sheet taped to the wall. With the Oneiros outside the house, the need for secrecy was over.

How fast could the police get there?

A little voice in his head sang,
Not fast enough!

The phone was silent, which made him think someone on the other end had already picked up. “Hello?”

No answer.

“Hello?”
Dammit.
He hit “End” on the receiver then punched “Talk” again and listened. No dial tone. His mind raced, and he remembered the kids had what they’d called burner phones. Harlen had put his in his pocket.
Maybe…

A small tap outside the front door, and Gary dropped the phone to the floor.

No time. It was just him.

His heart racketed out of control, and he backed to take position in the hallway between the rooms where the kids were unconscious to the waking world. To his left were Harlen and Sera in separate twin beds. In the master bedroom on the right, Jordan was curled up against Malcolm Rook, even though their dreams took them different places—one to the black market, the other to the Agora.

The impulse to shout and wake them was almost overpowering, though they’d already told him that since none of them were in their own dreamscapes, they’d be too far away from the waking world to hear.

A low thump on the front door sent tension crackling along his nerves.

Gary glanced back at the front room where Eleanor slept on the pullout sofa. With her hair falling away from her face, she looked twenty years younger, as if dipping into the dreamwaters had erased decades from her skin. She would want him to defend the kids. Their work was so important. He couldn’t be prouder of Harlen and the tremendous job he’d undertaken.
But how to protect them?

With a sudden, harsh splintering of wood, the front door crashed open. Two men in black body armor were suddenly pointing rifles at him. Bright lights glared from the tops of their weapons. “Drop the knife!”

Like hell.

“Drop the knife,
now
!” The insignia on the soldier’s sleeve was Chimera. The agency’s logo of the three-headed mythical creature was on a patch right beneath it.

“Harlen Fawkes is here. He’s Chimera! He’s one of you!” Gary shouted to them, though Harlen had warned him that the Oneiros had infiltrated Chimera.
“He’s one of you!”

Were these the good guys or the bad guys?

“We’ve got an elderly man with a knife blocking the hallway to the back of the house,” one of the soldiers said into a throat mic. “Elderly woman is unconscious in the front room, a Rêve crown on her head. Some kind of hookup in place, as well.”

Oh, dear Lord…
Gary hadn’t thought… The hookup led directly to Maze City, the only place that was safe Darkside.

Another mistake.

The soldier seemed to listen for a moment before saying, “Roger that.”

He was a blur of black movement as he approached, fast. Gary stumbled backward, and suddenly darkness was hulking before him. A sharp ache shot through his wrist, and the knife clattered to the floor. There was a small explosion of pain above his ear, and then the darkness became complete.

***

Pain boomed on the side of Gary’s head. His wrists were bound behind his back, something cutting into them, and his legs were restrained at his ankles so that he could only bicycle his knees as he was dragged from the hallway to a chair by the kitchen table.

His heart thumped hard as realization struck him like thunder. He must have been out for only a minute or two.

“We have five revelers in the residence,” a male voice was saying. “Including Director Harlen Fawkes.”

So they did know that Harlen was here. Chimera
had
been infiltrated, then.

“No Vincent Blackman or Mirren Lambert?” a female voice asked.

Gary had heard those last two names before, but he couldn’t immediately place them. He scanned the small beach house: Eleanor was still asleep on the pullout, but now, two armed men stood on each side of the large front window. The curtains were closed.

“No, ma’am,” the male voice said. “According to their identification, we have Serafina Rochan in the same room as Director Fawkes. We also have Marshal Malcolm Rook, and a woman he’d been recruiting for Chimera, Jordan Lane.”

Another armed man stood by the front door, the frame splintered on one side. And Gary knew that still more were in the back rooms where the kids were sleeping.

“And him?” said the woman to what appeared to be the Chimera in charge, who stood next to her.

Gary finally focused on her. Fancy lady in a blue skirt suit, a pin on her lapel. He tried to memorize her face, which was made square by the slight sag of skin. Her blond hair waved to her chin, each strand perfectly in place. She had small blue eyes with very little makeup.
Tasteful
is what people would call her.

“The old man and woman have no identification on them,” the marshal said to her.

Gary hadn’t exactly had time to grab his wallet when Sera had burst into his and Eleanor’s house and demanded that they come with her immediately to this place. Shortly after, the Oneiros had burned their house down.

The woman sighed and made a connecting gesture with her hands. “Well, we know for certain that Maisie Lane, Jordan’s sister, is currently in hiding with Blackman and Lambert.”

The marshal shook his head. “The tie is too tenuous to link the older sister to the Oneiros, and then Harlen to them through her. We have to wait until they wake to question them, or force them from the dreamwaters and hope they don’t lose their minds.”

Harlen,
an Oneiros?

Gary had to correct the soldier. “Harlen Fawkes isn’t Oneiros. I swear on my life.” But someone here was. Why else orchestrate this…sting?

The woman’s lips twitched. “And who are you?”

Gary straightened as much as he could. “Gary Joseph Fawkes.”

And now that he looked at her closer, he recognized her. Not that he typically knew politicians or anything but this one had been in the news. “I know who you are. Senator Fleight. Your daughter was murdered.”

“Murdered. Exactly. By the Oneiros. And it’s time justice was served.”

She had it all wrong. “But Harlen is on your side! The Oneiros just burned down my house. They killed Harlen’s boss. We’re hiding here so that they don’t come after him.”

“Director Fawkes had an opportunity to thwart the Oneiros, and he did not do so. And here I find him in the company of a renegade Chimera marshal and the sister of a known associate of the people who murdered my daughter. Maybe
you’re
Oneiros,” she said. “Maybe you burned down your own house.”

The Chimera soldier at her right leaned over to speak into her ear, but Gary couldn’t hear what he said.

The senator nodded. “Give transport the all clear.”

From the back of the house there was a
thump
, followed by an angry feminine squeal, then Sera’s voice. “Get your hands off me!”

Two of the soldiers hauled her into the kitchen, grasping tightly under her upper arms, her elbows bent back. Her face was flushed with anger, but seeing Gary, she pulled herself together in one big breath. “Gary, are you all right?”

He was already shaking his head at Senator Fleight. “She’s innocent. She’s a big-time chef.”

“Damn right,” Sera said through clenched teeth. “Senator Fleight, I presume?”

“Time enough for talk later,” the senator said.

“No! You’ve got to listen to me.” Sera struggled against her captors. “The black market has fallen. Nightmares ha—”

A single shot punctuated the air, followed by a frozen millisecond of silent shock on Sera’s face before her head lolled to the side and her body went slack between the two soldiers.

“Sera!” Gary tried to rise, to go to her, but his bonds prevented him.

In a swift, controlled drop, the soldiers lowered Sera to the floor as another shot rang out. The senator’s Chimera advisor went down in a heap, thumping against the front door, a red hole in his forehead.

Gary glanced from Sera’s body to the fallen Chimera’s and back again, frantic and confused. His heart and mind felt blasted with horror.

The senator’s advisor had
shot
Sera—the gun was still in his hand—and one of the soldiers had shot the advisor back.

Blood seeped into an enormous gory corsage on Sera’s chest, just above her heart. One of the Chimera soldiers was already applying pressure. Another checked her pulse and then grabbed a dish towel so that the first soldier could use it to absorb the blood under his hands.

“Sera!” Gary shouted again, desperate for a sign of life. This could not be happening. Harlen would be destroyed. The whole family would be.

“He was going to shoot you next, ma’am,” said the soldier behind Gary to the senator.

Senator Fleight had gone pale, her mouth pinched. “Oneiros.”

“Call an ambulance!” Gary begged. Restrained as he was, he could do nothing to help Sera.

A nod from the senator—she’d put a shaky hand to her own chest—and the soldier behind him spoke into his throat mic. “We have two down. Need immediate medical evac.”

“
You
brought the Oneiros with you,” he told the senator. “Do you believe me now?”

The senator ignored him but asked the room, “What was she saying before he shot her?”

Before she was silenced
, Gary thought.

“The black market has fallen,” repeated one of the soldiers. “Then something about nightmares.”

***

Jordan had to hand it to the Rêve’s organizers: the Revelations concert was living up to the hype, and the marketing for it was genius. No wonder the cost of the tickets was outrageous. She was
inside
the music video for the first song off their
Dark Waters
album, “Prophet with a Bell.” She stood in the same stark forest of bare trees featured in the online graphics of their website and the GIFs pasted into the signature lines of many of the people on their message boards. The air was clear and bright, and it vibrated with the prelude to the song, an exultant rising cry of an electric guitar. A bell rang in the distance, and damn if she didn’t want to discover where it led.

Rook had shown her how to piggyback on someone else’s Rêve hookup. The person who had dropped $620 to buy this particular ticket looked like a teenage girl in a homemade version of the dress the model wore in the video, a blue, silky wrap that for all its lack of embellishment, billowed behind her like a flag.

Jordan used the trees to follow at a discreet distance.
Don’t mind me.

Light gleamed through the trees
that way
. Not only were there no nightmares but there was also a sense of safety in the air that she hadn’t felt since before her mom had died. It was a relief to be inside the Agora, where a Chimera marshal was easily accessible through one of the Agora columns. All she had to do was try to see one, and yep, a tall, almost monolithic Corinthian column appeared nearby. It was a symbol of strength and solidity, suggesting that
these
foundations weren’t made of Scrape sand. Of course, everything Darkside was. Nevertheless, at first glance, all was well inside the Agora.

The bass beat of the song ramped up the rhythm while the bell rang, its tone shifting higher into the clamor of church bells. The drums began to roll, and ahead in the clearing, a swell of concert screams rose. The air crackled with the synergy of all the revelers’ excitement. Noah Aldric, the lead singer, must have appeared.