She paced back and forth as if unable to stand still. “He transported here, like that,” she gestured toward her bedroom door, “and he hasn't said a word. He won't stop bleeding and is growing weaker and thinner by the minute.” A look Malcolm didn’t recognize crossed her face, but in an instant, it vanished.
“So why bring us all here?” Lysander asked in his deep voice that reminded Malcolm of boulders rolling down a mountain. “Why not end it? He’ll regenerate, and then he’ll check in.” He wore navy-blue pants and a starched white shirt that contrasted his dark skin. He’d moved from France in the last twenty years or so to New Orleans where he’d fallen in love with their culture.
“Don't you think I've thought of that?” Aelia whirled, running a hand through her short blond hair. “If he’s missed a target, he might not have any memory of it. Or if he had a fourth target too close to the others, his mind might be overloaded. If we force the regeneration, we could lose all record of that target.”
“What did you think we could do?” Malcolm asked his old friend.
“Something big is coming. Don’t you feel it?” She stared at him as if he would be the one to agree.
In actuality he didn’t, but he paused, closing his eyes to consider her words. Down deep inside him, the singularity, his internal dream thief alarm, wasn't blaring but was giving off a slight buzz. His eyes opened to stare at Aelia in disbelief. Her shoulders visibly relaxed when she realized he’d felt it too. He wanted to kick himself for not paying attention, but he’d been too preoccupied with life, his last target, and Debbie to notice it. Being the Librarian, she would be the first to notice, but he shouldn’t have missed it. He was getting sloppy.
Malcolm nodded, his mouth in a thin line. Now that he sensed the small alarm giving off as a constant hum in his brain, it became impossible to ignore. If there was such a thing as Defcon 2 for dream thieves, this was it. He spun the computer chair to look at his fellow agents. “Pay attention. It’s there. Like an alarm, but muted or set to vibrate.”
At first, they all stared between Aelia and him as if they’d gone crazy, but one by one they closed their eyes. After a few minutes, a look of pure fear etched their faces, and he knew his expression had matched theirs only a few moments ago. He watched the calculations and the unfathomableness that they, like him, had missed it.
Aelia paced again. “We’ve all gotten too lax in this modern age. It’s full of distractions.” Her voice caught on the word. “The serenity of quiet has been lost to the electronic age. There is never a silent moment unless you seek it out. As soon as we awake, we’re like the humans, TVs on, browsing our phones, checking email. Hell, I bet some of you have succumbed to social media.” At this, a few gave an uncomfortable laugh. “You laugh, but have you let yourself be photographed?” At this, the laughter fell away. “Now, more than ever, our identity and what we are has to stay hidden. Unless something devastating happens, their electronic age is only going to grow stronger. I don't have to tell you that we are what stands between their continued success and those devastating things.”
“Aren’t you all getting sick of this life? Or whatever the fuck it is?” Lother narrowed his eyes farther. “Here we are able to transport, but only when there is a target. What the fuck use is that? Not being able to enjoy our immortality because we get called to these damn targets, filling our head in less than five minutes with lifetimes of memories that will never happen. We have super speed and strength, but we can’t show it. Unless we’re like Makir over there, and all our strengths are written off due to adrenaline.”
Aelia interrupted his tirade with a look. “We are the dream thieves. I know all of us would love to give it up, to live, to be free, to die.” Aelia shoulders slumped, shadows playing across her face. Something itched in Malcolm’s mind, but he couldn’t say what it was.
Aelia straightened, shadows gone. “You remember the Dark Ages? The rise of the Goths only happened because we decided to turn our backs on humanity and our sacred duty. You can only enjoy what life you built with your immortality because we prevent those targets from acting on those ideas. If we didn't do our jobs, you wouldn't have an immortality to enjoy!” With each passing word, her voice grew louder.
Makir gave Lother a rude gesture. “I choose to use my abilities at other times than during a target. We protect humanity, and if that means I can protect them from themselves while they are awake, then that is what I choose to do. I don’t need recognition, and I don’t want it. If we were found out, they’d never leave us alone. We would be blamed for every bad thing that ever happened to anyone. Someone’s child dies in a car accident, and it’s our fault because we didn’t take the idea from them not to drive to the gas station for a bag of chips and soda. Fuck that. We’re better off staying in the shadows.”
Her words hung in the air, and no one could think of anything else to say in those long moments. Only Caelieus’s moans broke the silence.
Aelia cleared her throat, righting herself from leaning against the desk. All eyes watched her as she made her way to the back of the room to the half-kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee, adding copious amounts of sugar. She took a long sip and rubbed her temples with her free hand. She waved a hand, and a few others joined her, getting their own cups. Malcolm waited while the others fixed their own drinks, noting the trashcan overflowing with empty liquor bottles. He shot Aelia a sideways glance. She usually preferred wine to liquor.
The silence stretched. In a room full of immortals, the lack of sound didn’t bother them. In their own thoughts, they processed Makir’s words.
With her second cup of coffee, Aelia returned to the front and sat in the main chair. “I brought you here to help me go through his latest targets, see if we could find a pattern. Or to see if anyone had an idea of how to help him. I couldn’t explain it over the phone. Words wouldn’t do it justice. Him justice.”
The arguments melted away. “Let’s take a look,” Malcolm said, moving the mouse in front of him.
“Always the suck up, Gabriel.”
“Screw you, Lother! These days I go by Malcolm. Got it?”
“Blow it out your ass. No one gives a shit what alias you’re using these days. In here, we use our ancient names.”
“My brothers, calm yourselves please. We must put aside our ancient grievances. We need to help Caelieus. It is our duty.” Obadiah had picked up the accent of London since living there. Obadiah reached forward, touching Lother’s shoulder. Obadiah’s light brown hair lay over his head like a cherub, and as always, he radiated peace and tranquility.
Malcolm let it go and turned his back on Lother. He pressed ctrl, alt, delete, and the log-in screen opened. He entered his password and pulled up the Cos site. He entered another series of passwords until he got in. Luckily, Aelia had spent most of the last quarter century putting all their files into the database. The monumental task was nowhere near done, by the evidence of the enormous caverns in the back. They were still full with millions of scrolls and ancient leather-bound books detailing the stolen dreams of humanity. How many untold stories of ways the world could have ended time and time again existed back there?
Malcolm read through Caelieus’s files several times. None of the three cases shared any connections except for the close proximity in time, and Caelieus had gotten each of the calls. Typically, the targets rotated among them, but in a random order. He knew he’d had a case two days ago. That gave him an idea. Still wanting to prove Lother wrong, he forced himself to use Aelia’s new alias, with difficulty. As much as he hated it, when they were together or talking on the phone, their ancient names rolled off the tongue without thought, but sometimes when they weren’t together they’d refer to each other by their true names. “Stephanie. Who all has had a target lately?”
She answered for the group. “There have been a higher number of targets, but nothing that we haven’t seen in the past, like right before the Crusades.”
“Let’s read through all the latest cases,
say in the last few months.”
A few grumbles answered him. Lother’s was the loudest, but the haughty tap tap of the keyboard told him they pulled up the additional files anyway. Nothing unusual came up in any of those cases, either. Malcolm leaned forward and whispered to Heris. Her red hair moved over her shoulder, and she stared at him with emerald eyes. “Find anything?”
She shook her head. “You?”
“Nothing interesting.” Malcolm let his gaze roam around the room to his fellow dream thieves. “It’s sad how little we see and talk to each other. Especially with all the technology. I don’t know where you’re living these days.”
Heris smiled. “I’m living in this remote jungle of Africa. I’m painting the wild animals. I live off the grid except for a satellite phone for emergencies. What about you?”
“Chicago.”
Heris rolled her eyes. “Again. What is it about that city?”
“I love my bookstore and the history there.”
“Didn’t you live in North America during the Trail of Tears?”
Malcolm nodded. “No choice. I got a target there and got stuck.”
“I lived among the Navajo. It was one of the best times of my life,” Tiaret said in her sultry voice.
Heris got a far off look in her eye. “I love the Killiney Strand in Dublin.”
“It is beautiful there. Beijing is quite lovely, too. I’ve been there a while now, but I’ve been wanting to go somewhere smaller,” Tiaret said.
Halek turned in his chair, flashing them a teasing grin. “You could always come visit me in California. I could teach you how to surf. It’s totally wicked.”
Aelia cleared her throat. Malcolm gave her a sheepish grin and got back to work. He decided to cross-reference the types of targets, futures halted, and general locations. He found nothing. After umpteen cups of coffee, later switching to tea, nothing added up. Twelve hours later, they called it a day.
Back at his hotel, he booked a tandem massage at the spa, happy for the late hour accommodations. While the women chatted away in Italian, talking about the day’s weather, all the best tourist locations, and places to eat, Malcolm’s thoughts muddled through the case files again.
Caelieus’s first case was a man who’d wanted to write his selfish son out of his will. The man thought his son would squander what he had worked his whole life to build. If the man had written his son out of the will, the young man who now would undergo a transformation after losing his father wouldn’t be able to use his vast wealth to start a group home for boys, saving so many from turning to a life of crime.
The next case had been a woman who would have backed out of breeding her chocolate lab because she dreamt they’d all been stillborn. Now she would move forward with the breeding, and one of the puppies would become a guide dog that would belong to a young girl with seizures. Without the guide dog, this young girl would have walked across a street and fallen in front of the train tracks, leading to the train derailing and hundreds of people dead. Now her dog would stop her across the street from the train.
The third had been a case where a man was considering donating money into research, but dreamed he’d get filthy rich. With the dream gone he’d gotten cold feet and he backed out at the last minute. Malcolm couldn’t recall now reading what would’ve happened if he’d invested the money.
Malcolm thought about them all again and again, but still nothing clicked. Nothing would explain Caelieus’s condition, except having three targets in quick succession. Something wasn’t adding up. Perhaps Caelieus’s brain couldn’t take it all in, so it had overwhelmed his healing powers and left him unable to recuperate. But why wouldn’t he die and regenerate?
Despite the two massage therapists’ obvious talent, the subtle alarm inside him wouldn’t let him settle down and relax. His voice had taken on the clipped tone he’d heard in Stephanie’s since she first called.
Three hours later, he still couldn’t fall asleep despite the obscene number of shots of bourbon he had taken to knock himself out. Giving up, he left his room and took his suitcase with him because he’d had a feeling he wouldn’t be returning to his stunning hotel room. He wasn’t so stupid that he checked out officially, just in case that intuition turned out wrong. After another cab ride, he entered the underground cavern with a quick stop by a new security guard. This one was close to eighty if he was a day, and he could barely hear despite the large hearing aids angling around each ear.
Aelia greeted him this time in black leggings and oversized sweatshirt. She handed him a double shot of fine whiskey. “I’ve needed a lot of these the last few years.”
He scrunched his forehead, trying to remember if she’d always been a heavy drinker. He took the glass and threw the brown liquid down his throat. It scorched like fire and hit his stomach and burned. The buzz, if he got one, never lasted long unless he drank enough to keep ahead of it. His metabolism burned through it too fast. Now more than ever he wished that wasn’t true. “How is he?”
“Getting worse. Come see.”
He followed her to the bedroom. Caelieus’s chest rose a fraction with each slow breath. Every rib and point of his hip bones stretched thin over his bluish white skin. The blood from his nose never stopped and now trickled from his ears. Nothing had ever affected a dream thief like this. If he hadn’t seen this with his own eyes, Malcolm would have said nothing could kill them. Sure, sometimes they’d received injuries too devastating to heal, but they’d disappear, regenerating whole once again, always in the same place. Each one of them had a different regeneration spot. Malcolm’s was in Cairo, Makir in Rio, Aelia in Rome, and during one of these regenerations, they could decide if they wanted to change their appearance to male or female, as well as their hair and eye color. But they could never truly die.
Now, watching Caelieus, Malcolm wasn't so sure.
Aelia leaned her shoulder against the doorway, darkness around her eyes. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to have to kill him.”
6
He thought she’d be shocked, that she’d yell at him and say they couldn’t, but she only nodded. “We’ll tell the others in the morning. I want you to go to Easter Island. It’s where Caelieus always regenerates. Let me know when you get there. That way when he, or she, emerges, you can report in.”
“What made you change your mind?”
Her eyes filled as if ready to cry. She hugged herself, leaning up against the door frame, nodding toward Caelieus. “He isn’t getting any better. We haven’t been able to find anything to help him, and I’m afraid that if we don’t do something to help him and soon, then he’ll die, for real. We were never actually promised immortality.”
Something about this nagged at him, like a bad taste in his mouth. He thought on her words. The prospect of ending this eternal existence resonated some deep longing he wasn’t aware he’d had. “Perhaps we should let him die. Maybe he doesn’t want to regenerate.”
She closed her eyes, and a tear slipped out of the side of her left eye, trailing a slow path down her cheek. She didn’t bother brushing it away. With her eyes still closed she said, “Don’t think I didn’t think of that already. If I could escape…I would. I’d want this to end. I wish we could just ignore our duty and let the world implode.”
Malcolm shook his head. “You don’t think that. We’re all tired, but life is too precious to let the world end.”
Her eyes opened, and she faced him. “You’re right, but what if we could end? If we weren’t needed, wouldn’t you want to die? None of us have ever really talked about it. Even the two of us when we lived together. About if we would want to be saved or allowed to be let go.”
“It was never a possibility. A discussion in futility. Before now, that is.”
Her head bobbed as she forced down a heavy breath, not wanting to break down and sob. “I’m so ashamed. I’m angry at Caelieus. I thought he was relieving me. I’ve been Librarian now so many times. This stint keeps on go
ing and going. I’m stuck here.” Tears did spring to her eyes now. “It was bad before, but being stuck here all the time, not being able to travel at all now that travel is so much easier than before…I can’t stand it. There’s no reason I couldn’t go an hour away. Just an hour. It’s not fair. Whoever the fuck controls us. It’s not fair.” She pushed the tears on her cheeks away, despair giving way to her anger.
Malcolm wished he could offer to take over for her. He could use the break and an excuse to keep away from Debbie, but that wasn’t how this worked. He hadn’t been assigned. Right now, he was still an active agent, though who gave them their assignments, none of them knew. None of them could give her a break, because like she said, the Librarian remained tied to Rome. He wasn’t sure how far they could stray, but a physical pain would halt them if they tried to leave. He tried to imagine it. As bad as being a dream thief could be, at least he’d always been free to go where he wanted. To be tethered to the scrolls. What torture would that be?
She shuddered. “For the record, if the choice is for me to regenerate or die, let me die. Even nothingness would be better than going on and on like that damn Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill.”
He wrapped his arms around her, and she returned the embrace, though her arms were firm and cool—distant. He thought about arguing with her, to remind her that in this modern day, she could be in touch with any and all of them whenever she wished and that this shift as Librarian couldn’t last forever. When she got out and could see how much the world had grown and changed, then she would find it worth living again. But he would never utter a single word. He knew how this life got to him, had gotten to all of them. If she wanted to be let go when and if the time came, then he would let her go, and more than that, he trusted her to let him know if she ever changed her mind.
The Dream Thief Page 5
