The Sandman (9 page)

“She was transported via ambulance to St. Vincent’s,” Osbourne continued. “That’s all I know for now.”

Rook looked over at Harlen. The man had already been unsteady, shaking, and pale from the proxy and the fight in the Scrape. That he was upright was a feat of willpower. But the blotchy-red and then gray casts upon his skin had Rook grabbing Harlen’s arm to keep him from falling. “Let’s just see how she’s doing. If she’s at the hospital, they’re probably patching her up. I’ve been shot before. Twice. And I’m still here.”

Rook tried to sound convincing, but his mind spun with the implications. If Sera had been shot, then no one had gone for Steve. Which meant that he might be up shit creek, too.

Harlen shook Rook off with more strength than anyone in his state should possess. “I want to see Senator Fleight.
Now
.”

She had to be responsible, and Rook was pretty sure the senator wouldn’t survive the meeting.

“No one can get in to see her,” Osbourne said, shaking his head. “This whole situation is FUBAR. Seems Chimera is full of assholes who are all part of some insane Darkside cult.”

“Oneiros,” Rook supplied.

“You knew?”
Osbourne was incredulous.

“It’s why I’ve been…on leave,” Rook said, still watching Harlen. He seemed to be thinking hard, his jaw twitching. A desperate man would do desperate things.

It just as easily could’ve been Jordan.

“Well, it was one of these
Oneiros
who shot the woman,” Osbourne continued. “Chimera is in chaos. And now, there are reports on the news of hundreds of people not waking up. Three reveler care centers have been closed to new patients, and there are demands from everyone from the RRA to fucking NBC for an explanation.” Osbourne tilted his head toward Harlen. “Since Bright is dead, they’re calling for Director Fawkes, but it’s not like Chimera is going to let you speak to the masses until all this is figured out.”

“The black market fell to nightmares,” Harlen said way too evenly and controlled for Rook’s liking. “Did you get anything on my parents?”

His parents. Rook’s stomach rolled in anticipation.

“They brought in an older woman on a dedicated hookup. Tech no one had seen before, so they haven’t tried to wake her yet.”

That would be Vince’s Tandem Tech.

“Was there an older man, too?” Harlen asked.

“Not that I heard of,” he said. “Not in the report. I could ask around if you want.”

Harlen was going a little white around his mouth.

“When are we being charged?” Rook asked. All they needed was an opening, and they could run. Drown everyone in the way. Get Jordan out. Find Harlen’s parents. Get shot trying.

“You’re not,” Osbourne said. “You’re being transferred.”

Transferred? Rook didn’t get it. “Why? Where?”

“Chimera’s not secure enough anymore. Not with them all doubting one another.”

The outer door opened, and another Chimera entered. Rook had seen him around but didn’t know his name.

“Ethan,” said Harlen in that same scary-low tone. “What have you got there?”

Which made Rook notice the black cloth hanging from Ethan’s right hand.

“As I was saying,” Osbourne continued, “you’re being transferred, pending the results of Jordan’s memory retrieval.”

Rook washed cold. Wavered. Felt Harlen’s hand heavy on
his
shoulder.

“No.” Rook shook his head, disbelieving. Jordan would fight it. She’d fight it with everything she was. He stepped up to the poly. “No. You’ve got to stop it. You have no idea what’s at risk.” Not least of which was his girl’s mind.

“I can guess,” Osbourne said with a smile. He reached for a stun stick. “It’s not actually your primary concern right now, though.”

Oh shit.
Rook stepped back. “You’re one of them.”

“It’s a new world, man. There’s no going back to the time before.”

Ethan held up the black cloth. Two hoods. “Now, are you going to come easy or are we going to do this the hard way?”

***

Steve gripped the IV pole next to Didier Lambert’s bedside. The metal was cold and Steve’s palm was slick with sweat, so he gripped it all the harder to keep himself upright. Cloud-filtered sunlight fell across Lambert’s face, highlighting his cheekbones and making craters of his eyes.

Lambert’s lids were up, gray irises big in his whites. No pupils.

Steve’s heartbeat stumbled. The room tilted sideways, a strange vertigo making him clench his teeth for focus.

The eyes themselves didn’t scare him. Steve saw the same eyes every time he looked into the mirror. Just as clear in his memory, however, was the way Lambert had been eroded, erased,
undone
by the Sandman’s touch in the Scrape. Lambert’s Darkside self had been rendered down into Scrape sand until nothing had been left of him, and that nothingness was more unsettling than even the gore of nightmares feeding on helpless revelers. Because gore was at least
something
.

Lambert had been
dissolved
. Without his dream-self anchor, his body in the waking world was an empty vessel floating on the dreamwaters, lost, never to reach a mooring.

It’s what every reveler feared: never waking.

Next to the IV pole, on the stand by the bed, the tissue sticking out of the tissue box wavered softly, as if the air-conditioning had just turned on. The string pull of the window’s vertical blinds twitched, its plastic tie clicking lightly against the wall.

Didier Lambert was awake?

No. Much, much worse. Steve felt it in every nightmarish cell in his body.

The Sandman is rising. Has risen.

The Sandman had done more than just dissolve Lambert. He’d found Lambert’s tether to the waking world and followed it here, taking over Lambert’s body.

The current of air in the room stirred Steve’s hair, and a butterfly-soft caress touched his cheek. He lifted his hand and came away with a few hairs from his head. Losing more of himself. The ache inside was so intense it felt like he was losing Maisie, even though she’d probably make some crack about bald dudes being hot. She’d ask if she could buff his head. Or call him butthead. Anything to show how much she
didn’t
care about hair. The point being—and the secret to Maisie Louise Lane—was that by making sure she couldn’t be taken seriously, he couldn’t take himself too seriously, either. And they could just be dorks—her word—together. He preferred the word
happy
.

“Don’t do this,” he begged. “You don’t belong here.”

The monster on the bed inhaled, his chest filling with waking world air.

What happened when a god of one world trespassed into another?

Sweat pricked Steve’s skin, and it burned. Was there any reasoning with him? Could the Sandman reason?

Better to kill Him while he could.

For Maisie, Steve stepped around the IV pole. The Sandman’s gaze shifted from the ceiling to Steve’s face. For such an illustrious man, Lambert had no flowers, no vases. The room was near monkish in its pristine, white cleanliness. Steve used the only weapon at his disposal: his hands.

The sight of the patch of gauze on Lambert’s neck, covering where Maisie had stabbed him, gave Steve energy.
For Maisie, then.
He’d finish the job she’d started.

A breeze, now like a house fan, made Steve’s hospital gown balloon as he set his grip and forced all his remaining strength into strangling the shell of Lambert’s body, refusing the Sandman any more than that small glimpse of the waking world.

Steve squeezed so hard that his muscles burned. Sweat dampened his hot face, but it didn’t cool him. His ears roared with the blood pounding in his veins, so he didn’t hear the door to Lambert’s room open, only saw the nurse running forward to help the patient.

She didn’t get far.

Steve had just turned to yell for her to get back, when she screamed at the sight of his face.

Yes, he was a nightmare. He thought they all knew that by now.

She kept screaming. Screamed as the tip of her nose, the edge of her jaw, her blowing hair, shiny forehead, extended hand—all of it—blackened into ash and whipped up into the currents of air gusting around the room.

Scrape wind. In the waking world.

Steve’s grip loosened as he took in the room around him. While he’d been caught in his fury, the window’s blinds had fallen, the glass had mottled and pocked, and the walls had been eaten away. Disarray scattered debris on the floor. A piece of cloth. Bits of wall and ceiling. On the far side, where the door was open, a nightmare stood, looking back at him.

No.
Steve turned back to his victim. The Sandman couldn’t have this world.

He leaned forward to finish the job, to close those eyes once and for all. But it was his own hands that that made him waver in disbelief. They were charred things, ash falling like soot from what had been his skin. The burns traveled up his arms, and he found himself naked now, the hospital gown somehow gone, shredded by the nearness of the god and blown from Steve’s body. His chest and abdomen were patchy with darkened skin, and even as he watched, the rising wind in the room lifted bits of him away like gray snow to circle in the air.

“No!” Steve roared, but only a garbled sound rattled in his throat.

He dived again toward the Sandman, who seemed to now observe him with keen interest. Even wonder.

Steve’s hands—what was left of them—closed again around Lambert’s throat, but Steve’s strength had eroded with his skin and fingers.

He couldn’t stop the Sandman from sitting up. The force of it sent Steve staggering back against the wall. The wind howled about the room as the Sandman shifted on the bed, came to his feet, and stood.

“This place—” Steve tried to say,
Is not for you.

His god heard his prayer, and He answered silently with his gaze.

Steve wanted to cower from what he knew he’d find, but his god held him rapt.

The fearsome loneliness that he would be condemned to was a forever’s worth of wandering the Scrape, searching for refuge but never finding it. The loneliness was enough to kill a mere human, but Steve wasn’t only that, he was a nightmare, too, and so he suffered the pain as the Scrape wind ate him in small, mincing bites.

The wall behind him cracked and fell.

He knew he was going to die but resolved to stand as long as he could. Why he could still see baffled him. Blindness would’ve been better as the gale grew to monsoon force. And yet he could still hear over the Scrape’s howl, the screams of people—nurses, doctors, patients—nearby. All dying.

The Sandman was lonely, and He’d find no companionship in the waking world. The howl was
His
howl, his despair, his longing.

Maisie—indeed,
everyone
—was doomed. The waking world would be made desolate. Wind and wandering were the only things the Sandman knew. This ash was
not
like Scrape sand. It couldn’t build cities. It was not magic, couldn’t become whatever a person dreamed. It was death, the opposite of the god’s native gold sand, but Steve didn’t think the Sandman knew the difference. Or maybe He just didn’t care.

Steve shuddered against the gusts of wind as the rest of the walls came down. Most of the people he could now see were already half-consumed and turned to ash by the time he could make out their figures, arms held protectively over their heads like the victims of Pompeii.

Still others tried to run, and in so doing, were lifted off their feet as if into a tornado and shredded into nothing. The Sandman took it all. And would keep taking, and taking, and taking until there was nothing left of the waking world. Even now, the sun was dimming, concealed by ash.

There was movement in the fierce drifts. Through the relentless gray, there were figures upright that seemed unperturbed by the assault of the Sandman’s scraping. Shadows in the dark.

The horror of it brought another cry up Steve’s ash-clogged and charred throat. Nightmares. Nightmares remained behind.
They
were the only things that could survive the Sandman’s gale. And there were so many of them scattered among the ruination of the care center.

Steve looked at his hands again, no longer large and strong, but worn down to the bone, the color of putty, so that they only barely
resembled
a human man’s hands. They were more like those of an alien from another world.

And that’s when he knew how he’d survived the tearing wind as long as he had. The Sandman had killed the human man in him and had left only the nightmare.

Steve was dead. It was the freak, the demon, who was left behind. It was Caul.

His legs gave way with the last throes of his flesh’s agony. He fell to his hands and knees, finally brought low before his god.

CHAPTER SIX

“We’ve got another one waiting.” Viv stood in the coffeehouse doorway, arms folded, looking regal.

Maisie groaned and, gripping the sides of the small round table at which she was sitting, banged her head against the surface a couple of times. They were
so close
, and yet, just like a bad dream—and this one sucked—so freaking far away. Most of the black market revelers had trekked back to their dreamscapes with Mirren, whose mood now seemed about as foul as Maisie’s.

“Fine,” Maisie said, rolling her eyes. Maturity was very overrated. “So what’s the story on this guy?”

The remaining black market revelers were waiting for a final “bosses’ meeting” and instruction from Vince on Tandem Tech. That bitch Corey and teleporting Ivan, who Maisie actually liked now, were among them.

“I don’t know him,” Viv said. “He says your sister sent him.”

Maisie frowned. “Sent him? Is she here?”
’Cause
that
would be a relief.

“
Sent.
I don’t think I’ve seen her. I take it Eleanor or one of the others would recognize her?”

Yeah, they would.
It was just…

“Jordan would never
send
anyone here,” Maisie said. “Not without her. And if she did send him, how would he find Maze City without her help?”