Nightmare City: Book 1 Of The Nightmare City Series (Urban Fantasy)

by P. S. Newman

  Sergeant Taylor? The anti-shade crusader from the records room? Oh joy.

  “Dobrev has probably gone home to his family already,” Ganner continued, ”so you’ll have to talk to Taylor.”

  She picked up the phone on her desk and dialed a number. “It’s Ganner,” she barked into the receiver. “Are you still here? I have a private hunter who has questions about one of your and Josh’s cases. I’m sending her to the front desk. Please answer her questions.”

  She hung up and nodded at me. “Taylor will wait for you at the front desk.”

  “Then I’d better get going.” I pushed my chair back and stood, forcing myself to relax. I didn’t want to give the impression of fleeing her office. "Thank you for your time.”

  “Come back soon,” Ganner said, “I do enjoy our conversations. Good luck with the doppelgänger.”

  “Thanks.” Somehow, I managed to close the door quietly behind me and not run down the hall like a bat out of hell, though I did walk at a brisk pace.

  As promised, Taylor was waiting for me at the front desk, showered and cotton-candy free. I took a deep breath to steel myself for the upcoming confrontation and stepped up to him. “Sergeant Taylor? I’m Eden Maybrey. Thank you for meeting with me."

  The scowl on his face deepened when he recognized me. "You again."

  "You chased a doppelgänger three nights ago," I said. "I've been hired to eliminate it and could use your intel.”

  Ice blue eyes flashed in understanding. "You're a freelancer?"

  "Yes.”

  "Read the report," he said and turned to leave. So much for his cooperation.

  "I did," I said, following. "It wasn't exactly informative."

  "Haven’t you heard? Vague is the new detail."

  So he did have a sense of humor. Good for him.

  "Care to make it less vague?" I asked.

  He spun back to me. "On one condition. You don't fight it alone. If you get close to it, you call me for backup, no matter what time of day it is." He pulled a business card out of his wallet and shoved it into my hand.

  I stared at him. That was unexpected. And even more unwelcome.

  My surprise must have shown because he smirked. "Don't get your panties in a twist. That wasn't meant as an insult to your abilities, nor as a permanent arrangement. It's just a fact: nobody can eliminate this doppelgänger alone. But it needs to be stopped, so I'll be your backup."

  "I hunt alone," I told him.

  "I don’t recommend it," he said. "I had a partner and the doppelgänger still got away from us. No shade gets away from us. From me."

  "Ah.” He wasn't just a crusader against all things shade; he also couldn't stand the thought of letting one slip through his fingers. "This is about pride for you."

  He snorted and his lips spread in a smile that had nothing to do with humor. "I don't give a rat's ass about pride. Those things need to be stopped and this one is worse, because it's evil. A psychopathic shade. You won't stop it alone."

  Things. A lot of people objectified shades, but I heard more than that in Taylor's voice. Pure, unadulterated hatred bled out of that one word.

  "Fine. When I find the doppelgänger you can be my backup," I lied. People would stop dreaming before I let him back me up on anything. "If you answer my questions."

  He started walking down the hall again. "Walk as you talk," he said. "You have until I reach my car."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I drove home after my talk with Taylor, hopped in the shower and headed over to Cecelia and Bella’s house for breakfast. I was so tired I almost skipped it, but I’d sleep better if I ate something first. And I loved our family breakfasts.

  David buzzed me in. Cecelia was standing by the stove, scrambling eggs.

  "Was that Sean's car I saw driving away after you headed back home earlier?" she asked. Her bedroom window overlooked the front yard. Sean's red Ferrari was hard to miss, especially for one of LAPD's finest.

  "Yes," I admitted, propping Aunt Vy up in her honorary chair by the dining table. "He has a case for me."

  Both Cecelia and David eyed me.

  "A case?" David asked, returning to his task of frying bacon.

  "A shade," I explained, watching him nudge the sizzling strips of meat around the pan. "It's confidential."

  David nodded and turned his attention back to the bacon. Cecelia wasn't so easily deterred, despite aiming frequent glances at his handiwork. "You’re sure you want to work for Sean?"

  "They'll be fine," David said before I could reply. "Sean can be a hard-head, but he understands a no."

  "We're not the press, David," Cecelia said. "You don't always have to defend him. You know how he gets when he can't have something he wants. So I'm concerned for my friend right now, not your brother's delicate sensibilities. Or yours."

  “She’s extra feisty today,” Aunt Vy said, delighted.

  David, unable to hear my sword, held up his spatula in surrender. "Eden can handle herself. She's no wilting flower."

  "Guys!" I interrupted. "I'm fine. Sean and I are adults and, incidentally, still friends. He wants this shade taken care of. That's all."

  David shut his mouth. Case closed for him. Not so for his girlfriend. "You're sure, Edita?” There was an unusual edge to her voice.

  "Positive, Lia. I'm fine. But David's burning the bacon."

  David snapped his attention back to the smoking pan with a startled yelp, dropping his spatula in the process. It fell to the ground, hitting his toes.

  "Fuck," he said, hopping back.

  Cecelia glared at him, fists on hips.

  "What?" he asked, picking up the spatula. "Bella's not here, she didn't hear that."

  Cecelia reached over and slid the smoking pan off the stove. "One of these days she will be and then I'm going Uma Thurman on your asterisk."

  “She could just make him eat his own cooking,” Aunt Vy suggested.

  I smirked. “My bloodthirsty sword suggests that making him eat his own cooking is a better punishment.”

  David shook his head with a grimace, plucked a strip of bacon out of the pan and held it up for inspection. It was charred black and crumbled between his fingers. "I'll take the Kill Bill approach, thanks."

  He tossed the ruined strip into the garbage and switched off the stove. “I’ll lay the table.” He grabbed a handful of plates out of a cupboard and disappeared in the dining room.

  "You should make him stop," I said to Cecelia, "before he poisons us one of these days. That could be far more damaging to Bella than the occasional cuss word. Where is she, by the way?"

  “In her room, sulking,” Cecelia said, banging the ladle on the edge of the pan with a clang. There might be more to her extra feisty mood than Sean hiring me.

  “What is she sulking about?” I wanted to know. “Me phasing her Lassie-shade?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “After this morning’s shade debacle, I decided something has to change. The nightmares aren’t getting any better and neither is her anxiety or insomnia. She’s not handling you moving next door as well as we’d hoped and progress on her trauma therapy is slow. She’s still not over Mom. I told her she had to get a new dream keeper to help her sleep."

  I refrained from pointing out that Cecelia wasn’t over their mother’s violent death at the hands of a monster shade, either. She just had a better handle on it than her little sister.

  “Isn’t she still on the dream keeper blacklist?” Just before Bella manifested me, she’d driven off the last in a long line of dream keepers. She trusted only Cecelia to watch over her sleep and played tricks on anyone else who tried. When I moved in with them under the cover of being a cousin, the search for a new dream keeper was dropped. After I moved out, Cecelia inquired about hiring someone again. She was told that Bella had been blacklisted by the dream keeper society for her horrid behavior, which meant the hourly payment for treating her had shot to astronomical heights. As far as I knew, she was still on that list.

  “
I’m sure she is, but that’s not the issue at hand,” Cecelia said. “It’s about her taking responsibility for a change, making herself safe and not relying on other people to do so all the time.”

  “I bet that went over well.”

  “She said I can’t force her because she’s seventeen. I told her to start acting like it. Things went downhill from there.”

  I squeezed her arm in sympathy. “I think a new dream keeper would be good for her. If it’s the right one. I just wish I could back you up on it more.”

  She patted my hand. “Maybe it’s best if you stay out of this argument or she’ll have you sabotaging my efforts at finding someone.”

  I glanced at my sword.

  “Don’t look at me,” Aunt Vy said. “My opinion of those hacks hasn’t changed.”

  “Not all of them are hacks.”

  “Would you want some stranger waving incense over you and chanting Indian proverbs while watching you sleep?”

  “Not all of them operate that way.”

  “Doesn’t matter how they operate, they’re all hacks. Their ‘therapy’ could only work if they could read people’s dreams in realtime.”

  “Research suggests that a good dream keeper can help reduce shade manifestation in prime dreamers,” I countered.

  Aunt Vy snorted. “Unless that ‘good dream keeper’ is a shade, I don’t buy it.”

  Cecelia caught the glare I threw my sword. “I take it Aunt Vy won’t talk to Bella, either?”

  I shook my head, hating being so useless. “Nope. She’s out.”

  “Hey,” Cecelia said, noticing my low spirits. She nudged my shoulder. “We’ll make an adult out of Bella yet.”

  I smiled back. "I'll go check on her, let her know breakfast is ready."

  I went upstairs, pointedly leaving Aunt Vy on her perch on the chair. Bella's door stood half-open, but she was nowhere to be seen. The bathroom was empty, too. I headed to the closet. I may no longer live here, but I still knew Bella's secret hide-out. I knocked, opened the door and was met by the light of a purple lava-lamp emanating from the back corner.

  I heard a scuffle from behind the movable rack of clothing that blocked my immediate view of Bella. Her design, of course. By the time I'd taken the two steps past the rack, she sat still in the corner, her stiff leg elevated on a pillow, a book in her lap. She smiled up at me. Her teeth glowed purple in the lamplight.

  "Breakfast is ready," I said. "David's making bacon."

  She threw me a look of disdain. "Like that's an incentive."

  "There are also scrambled eggs á la Lia,” I enticed.

  "Cool." She was keeping a tight grip on her book.

  "What are you reading?"

  "Huckleberry Finn." She held up the book. "See?"

  She loved her classics. I knelt in front of her. "Yes, I see. What were you really reading, Bells?"

  She pressed her lips together but reached behind the cushions she'd arranged for more comfort and pulled out a graphic novel. A dragon-like monster wreathed in lightning was depicted on the cover. The title read Dreamscape - Volume 12: Lightmares.

  "Oh, Bella." I took it from her. She'd hidden the rated-R label in the lower right corner of the cover behind a Shades Are People, Too sticker. "Where did you find this? I thought Lia hid them from you." The three of us were all avid graphic novel readers and both Cecelia and I knew the entire Dreamscape series by heart. Bella was too young to officially read them, but she’d found Cecelia’s stash some time after their mother’s death. It had taken Cecelia almost six months to realize that her sister was sneaking the comics to her room and back. By then, Bella had gone through the entire series three times. Cecelia had confiscated them all and locked her stash in the safe in the garage, but it was too late. Bella was hooked and over the years had come up with several inventive ways to get her hands on more of the books - including manifesting two characters right out of them.

  She shrugged. "I bought this one at a library sale with my pocket money. It's my favorite..." she clamped her mouth shut. My heart cracked a little bit. It was my favorite, too. I took the book from her. One corner was squished and the folds in the back showed it had been flipped through often.

  "You've had this for a while," I said, grabbing at anything to distract myself. To keep myself from opening it.

  "Since you moved out. It helps when the panic threatens. It gives me hope instead of nightmares."

  Oh heck.

  I opened the volume. The first page was a series of stills of a chase scene. A woman with flowing blond hair and exaggerated curves covered by ridiculously small pieces of armor was being chased through a barren wilderness by a pack of giant, flaming hounds. One of the stills was a close-up of her face, looking over her shoulder, eyes wide and intensely green, lips red and full in a heart-shaped face with ‘killer cheekbones’ as Bella liked to say. It was like looking into a comic book mirror at myself. Which made sense because she was me. Or rather, I was her.

  A little over two years ago, Bella had dreamed of the characters in this graphic novel and manifested two of them - Aunt Vy and me.

  I flipped the page. My graphic novel alter ego couldn't flee forever, so she drew her long, curved, soul-possessed sword with the blood-red hilt to make a stand. With Aunt Vy by her side, my alter ego was a superb fighter and able to handle almost any shade monster the writers of the graphic novel series threw against her. But in this particular volume, the two of them found themselves outnumbered by the pack of hellhounds chasing them. They were losing ground, unable to fend off the masses of snapping teeth and rending claws. Then they heard a shout, depicted in a speech bubble: 'Elysia.'

  My real name: Elysia. The name I was manifested with and forced to change because if anybody saw the similarities between me and this graphic novel heroine, they’d realize I was a shade.

  And there he was, in the next picture, racing to Elysia's rescue. The very definition of modern Viking warrior. Greyson.

  I closed the book with a snap. I knew the next part of the story so well. How he came to Elysia’s rescue and they fought their way out together. How they kissed in the aftermath, standing in the blood and gore of the slain hellhounds, starting an intense and turbulent romance that spanned the entire graphic novel series, one of the most popular in the country.

  At the time of my manifestation, the Dreamscape series had consisted of almost eighty volumes, during which Elysia eventually married Greyson. He’d even been present in Bella’s dream out of which Aunt Vy and I manifested. She’d dreamed that Greyson and I were arguing about hiding our relationship from the public because he was my teacher. And even though it had all happened in her dream, it felt like it had happened to me.

  I remembered that argument as if it had taken place yesterday, in the real world. To me, it was real. The anger I’d felt at him insisting we keep our relationship secret was real. The resentment at the fact that he could be so rational about our love was real. And the love I felt for him… that, above all else, was real. Then and now.

  But he hadn’t manifested alongside Aunt Vy and me. He’d walked out of Bella’s dream before she woke up. And so I’d come into this world in love with a man who’d never existed outside of the pages of a graphic novel and a fifteen-year-old girl’s infatuated imagination. Greyson would forever remain on those pages. Unless Bella dreamed him into being, too. But that didn’t guarantee that he would manifest with the same feelings for me as I had for him.

  I’d come into this world loving him. Two years later, I hadn’t once fallen in love with another man. Maybe I wasn’t capable.

  "Please don't take it away," Bella whispered, her gaze fixed on the graphic novel while her fingers opened and closed as if she wanted to grab it from my hands.

  I handed it back to her. "You're seventeen now, right?" More importantly, it calmed her down and cheered her up, made her feel safe. That, in turn, helped keep the nightmares at bay. In theory.

  Bella took the book, laid it on the carpeted ground and
leaned in for a hug. "Thank you."

  "No problem, kiddo." I made a mental note to give Cecelia a heads-up so she didn't blow a gasket if she stumbled across the illicit graphic novel by accident. Speaking of blown gaskets…

  "Let's go downstairs and see if David managed to set the kitchen on fire," I suggested, getting to my tired feet.

  Bella sniffed the air. "I don't smell smoke and the house is still standing. Cecelia probably made him go stand in a corner."

  "Or eat his own burned bacon."

  "Not if she wants him to live."

  We headed downstairs, giggling all the way.

  Bella’s Dream-Study Journal

  Case Report # 11

  General Thoughts:

  I’ve hit a break-through! Not only did I manage to create a specific shade during a lucid dream, but I was able to influence it after it manifested!

  Experiment Setup:

  I got C. to watch Lassie (the movie) with me last night. After I managed to manifest Lassie (the dog) last week from only my childhood memories, I thought it might work even better if they were more immediate.

  This time, when I went to bed and began the breathing exercises, I pictured the loyal Lassie and thought about how my mind-link with A.V. feels. I figured something similar could work for other shades, too.

  Experiment Results:

  Reaching a state of lucid dreaming gets easier with every attempt. Conjuring Lassie into my dream took barely a conscious effort. Like flipping a switch.

  Maybe it was too easy or I was too tired, because I faded into true sleep, unable to keep up the state of lucidity. I was no longer conscious of the fact that I was dreaming. The next thing I remember is not only Lassie but a giant iguana. The big one from the zoo. Of course, my subconscious wouldn’t miss serving me that one up on a silver platter…

  I woke up and it popped into existence. It attacked me immediately - but Lassie had manifested, too, and she intercepted it. As she chased the iguana through the house, I realized that Lassie reacted to my unvoiced suggestions. Every time C. aimed for the collie, I thought ‘watch out’. And Lassie would run behind some furniture. She also herded the iguana outside when I asked her to, though I didn’t have to tell her to kill it when it came after me. She charged it all on her own.