“Meaning?”
“Don’t get suspicious. I can already see your mind churning, thinking you haven’t always been Gabriel, but just a new replica sent in Gabriel’s place. The creators aren’t that cruel.”
“How can you know that?” Debbie asked.
“Obadiah has always believed we’ve been sent by God or some other deity to do their sacred work.”
“And I still do. I think you are still Gabriel, but perhaps you’ve merged with this persona. Or because of the changes, this new human mind cannot hold the vast enormity of what a dream thief is, but you are still an agent of God. And to answer your question, my dear, it is my belief that our creators gave us many, many gifts to carry out our sacred duty. Giving us all the gift of beauty is but another arsenal to aid us. I have a very faint memory of white, lustrous wings.”
Malcolm knew not to argue. Debbie, on the other hand, stared at him as if he was bloody Jesus, which could put a huge ass damper on his newfound sex life. Nothing more than being thought of as holy to turn a girl off. He had no doubt some women would be into that kind of kink, but not Debbie. “It’s all bollocks!”
Obadiah shook his head, removing the cup from his lips.
Malcolm had to cut him off. “Now that you have me here, brother, we need to get down to business.”
Obadiah swallowed, conceding to a momentary defeat. “You’re right.” He sat the cup on the side table that held an espresso machine better than Malcolm’s, a Keurig, and an old-fashion coffee press. He wiped his hands on his pants and stepped to the main computer at the front.
Debbie finished her tea, sitting beside Malcolm while placing her hand in his lap. He reached out, placing her hand into his so he could rub her thumb. The tension eased out of her shoulders as Obadiah let his fingers fly over the keys. A large screen behind Obadiah rolled down with an electric hum, and a projector Malcolm hadn’t noticed blinked on, showing Obadiah’s computer screen for them to view.
The main database screen shown on the projector screen. He swiveled on the computer desk to where he could face them. “First of all, as Librarian…” the title rang through, his voice sending a chill down Malcolm’s spine. Debbie had no reaction whatsoever. He filed that away for later review. “…I have decreed that for our protection, save for a few, all the dream thieves will have to be paired off. As far as the others are concerned, Aelia is still here.”
Debbie said under her breath, “Who’s Aelia?”
“Aelia is Stephanie’s true name.” Obadiah smiled, pointing to his ears. “Super hearing. You are free to ask questions. I won’t be offended.”
Debbie’s cheeks flushed again, and Malcolm felt the moment of insecurity was good for her. Most of the time, nothing could rattle that woman’s self-confidence.
“As I was saying, everyone thinks Aelia is with me. You know Heris and Tiaret are looking for Caelieus. Makir is with Lother.”
Malcolm held up a finger. “Wait, what? You assigned those two together? I’m betting Lother loses his head first.”
Obadiah rolled his eyes heavenward in imitation of prayer. “She’s the best one to keep him in line.”
“Save for the Librarian.”
“Yes, well, I can’t stay on the phone with him 24/7.”
Debbie lifted her hand in the air. “Sorry. Why do you say Librarian as if it’s a title or something?”
“It is. The job rotates between the dream thieves. One day, instead of a call to a target, we get called here and the power transfers to that person.”
“Power?” Debbie raised one eyebrow.
“The Librarian is tied, physically, to the Cave of Scrolls. They cannot go but a certain distance, but with that vulnerability, they can command the other dream thieves.”
Obadiah’s look stopped Malcolm. “Command is too strong of a word. Of all the dream thieves, only Gab… I mean Malcolm here was never assigned to this position. I’d call it more of a persuasion than a command.”
Malcolm scoffed. “You’d call it that, but whenever Lother was Librarian, he certainly used it that way.”
Debbie touched Malcolm’s arm, concern and what he’d call pity were laced in her eyes. “Why weren’t you ever Librarian?”
Malcolm shrugged. “Just another of a million unanswerable questions.”
Obadiah smiled. “Perhaps never holding this position is what allowed you to make the transformation.” He held up a hand, stopping Malcolm before he could begin another tirade about the creators. “We won’t start down that road again. Back to what I’d been saying. Makir is with Lother. Lysander and Nimue are together. They will be cohabitating in New Orleans. Zari is joining Halek in California.”
Malcolm tallied everyone. “That leaves Caelieus missing and me. Where am I supposed to be?”
“You are settling the affairs from the mishaps in Chicago and will join Aelia and I here. At least that is what the others will think. You will go underground as we discussed, investigating these murders.”
Debbie shivered beside him. Not that Malcolm could blame her. “Why are you making us stick together?” Malcolm asked.
“Because my internal alarm still functions just fine and that buzzing urgency from when you missed half of Dharma Knight’s dream is still present.”
Shit! Had he failed anyway?
6
Obadiah pursed his lips together and let the full weight of his words press down on Malcolm. “Until that alarm desists, the dream thieves need to stick together. A change is coming. Bigger than anything we’ve ever seen, and we have to be more vigilant than ever. On that note, shall we get started?”
He settled into the chair at the front. With several quick strokes, he pulled up a list of the latest Cos files. Malcolm swallowed, hating the realization of how deep the two of them were dragging Debbie, but Obadiah didn’t pause.
He clicked on a name that made a spider walk down Malcolm’s spine. “The second you should recognize. Tobias Miller. A prominent bioengineer for the World Health Organization.” With another click, he opened Caelieus’s files. “Says here the dream was collected approximately eight weeks ago.” The description left a lot to the imagination, but sometimes dreams were like that. “Guess all he saw were several plant images, mathematical and scientific formulas. Ahh, now we’re getting something.”
Debbie read out loud, “Target would join in research conducted at Avient Pharmaceuticals. Together, a plant would be developed that would win the Nobel Prize. That plant would cause the female embryos exposed in utero to be unable to finish mitosis, therefore, being unable to ovulate. This would lead to a steady decline of the world’s population.”
“This level of detail wasn’t in the files when we were investigating Caelieus’s mysterious ailment. I’m assuming Wu Sun will be the same.” Malcolm scooted back, running a hand through his hair, feeling the sting of betrayal course through his veins.
“Yes, those were doubly encrypted.” If Malcolm hadn’t known Obadiah for centuries, he’d have missed the slight lift of his voice. “Only the Librarian could get in.”
“He was one of the names Aelia emailed you?”
“Yes.”
Debbie ran a sweaty hand across the bottom part of her blouse, bracelets jangling with the movement. “Wait, you’re saying you didn’t know anything about these murders until Aelia emailed you?”
“We knew of Wu Sun and Tobias Miller,” Malcolm said.
“I don’t understand. If Aelia is killing these people, why would she email you telling you the list of names?”
“Bragging? Who knows?” Malcolm clenched and unclenched his fist as the anger rose with each second. How dare she do this? How dare she pull him back into this life as soon as he’d managed to escape?
“I’m not so sure.” Debbie rested her elbows on the table, tucking her chin into her palms. They waited for her to say more, but she stared straight ahead, forehead constricted.
“Shall I go on?” Obadiah leaned his head around the monitor. Malcolm waved for him to continue.
“After the dream had been stolen, Miller’s research would have swayed into cancer research that didn’t amount to much progress, but at least the world didn’t end. He was killed about five weeks ago.”
The timeline corresponded to Aelia’s threats during the harrowing ordeal with Dharma Knight. “How did he die?”
“Car crash. Seems his brakes had worn out.”
“Cliché much?” Debbie shook her head, rising to fix herself a second cup of strong tea. Malcolm couldn’t disagree, but it wasn’t as if the dream thieves had a habit of killing people. At least, he didn’t think so.
“Who’s next?” Malcolm took a sip of the piping hot tea Debbie had brought him with a dash of honey and no cream since Obadiah didn’t keep any on hand. Cream or milk did make the flavor that much richer.
“Wu Sun. Stockbroker from Japan. His Cos file is from ten weeks ago. In his dream, he’d get rich from investing in a research project and would never have to starve again like he did as a child. With the dream stolen, he backed out at the last minute. Caelieus noted this dream had a tinge of memory to it.”
“What does that mean?” Debbie blew on her tea.
“Some dreams are just random firings from the subconscious and make no sense, but others are pulled from real memories.”
“Like suppressed memories?”
Malcolm patted her hand. “Exactly.”
Obadiah took a few gulps of his own coffee Debbie brought him, not the least bit phased by the steam rising from the cup. “Which means Wu Sun most likely experienced starvation as a child. I found an old file from where he’d been taken out of his great aunt’s home for neglect.” The photocopied yellowed page replaced the previous file. “Sun had been left alone, locked up without a single thing to eat for days before he was found. He was six years old. That would explain why these memories resurfacing would lead him to fund Tobias Miller and Avient Pharmaceuticals in making plants to help end world hunger.”
Debbie shivered, despite the warm tea.
Malcolm rubbed her arm. “Always hated dreams like these. The ones where the people have such great intentions.”
“Isn’t that a saying? The road to hell is paved with good intentions?” Obadiah shrugged, scratching at the back of his neck. “With the dream, and suppressed memory gone, Sun instead would invest in a different pharmaceutical company that does go on to develop a sublingual form of epinephrine to help treat anaphylaxis, but unfortunately, he died in his apartment due to carbon monoxide just days before Tobias Miller.”
The three sat in stunned silence, mourning this dead stranger. They had four more of these cases to go over. Malcolm wasn’t sure he had the stomach to do this, but what choice did he have?
“Those were the easy ones. After those, the rest get pretty nasty.”
Debbie shivered and squeezed his hand. “Ain’t no time like the present. Let’s just dive right in.”
This time a photo appeared on the screen behind Obadiah. A white man with curly brown hair and light blue eyes smiled around a full beard. “Tabor Petrov, a retail salesman from Khabarovsk, Russia. Cos file is dated six months ago. This one is Zari’s. He dreamed he was walking hand-in-hand with his pregnant ex. Only, in the dream, they were back together, and she carried his child. The next day he would’ve acted upon the dream, driving out of his way after work to pick up flowers and take it to her place. Another car would cut him off, causing him to crash into an orphanage, killing himself and six of the children. Instead, seven months later, which would’ve been two months from now, he’d run into his ex at the store. The two would reconnect, marry, and have two children. Three weeks ago,” the computer clicks replaced the smiling, happy face with the man covered in blood. Those light blue eyes stared into oblivion. “His body was found behind a dumpster with twenty-three gunshot wounds.”
Debbie covered her mouth, squeezing her eyes shut.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to be here,” Malcolm said.
Debbie shook her head. “No, I’m okay. Keep going.”
“Do you need a moment?” Obadiah’s soft voice coaxed the truth from Debbie as his voice usually did.
“They were going to have kids, and now they’ll never be born. He wasn’t going to kill those kids on purpose, and after the dream was stolen, he wasn’t a threat. Why would anyone do that? The others, I don’t agree with, don’t get me wrong, but Dharma Knight’s future had multiple people all working together to cause the end of humanity. No one in particular stopped the threat totally, but this guy…Unless Aelia has totally lost her mind, this doesn’t make sense at all.”
His brother swept from the seat to close the distance between them. He squeezed Debbie’s shoulder and the last of her tension eased away. “That’s what we’re here for. To see if there is a pattern.”
Malcolm left the two of them, went to the front, and clicked the button, letting Tabor Petrov’s mutilated body disappear from the room. If only the memory could vanish just as completely.
Debbie, sweet, snarky Debbie, with her hippie skirts and eclectic taste in music, shouldn’t be looking at murder photos. He shouldn’t have asked her to come.
“Oh no you don’t, boss man!” Debbie cut his thoughts off with her sharp tongue. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m here, and I’m in it. I can handle it. Obadiah, please show us the next target.”
He bowed. “As you wish.”
The two males changed places, and yet another face appeared on the screen. This one was of a middle-aged woman with straight, salt-and-pepper hair and round glasses. “Florence Gagnon, a nurse from St. Andrews, Canada. Halek logged her Cos ten days ago. She dreamed of running along a boat deck, laughing. It was tinged with childhood memories of sailing trips with her father. A storm blows in, capsizes the boat, and she wakes just before she drowns. After this dream, she would cancel her sailing trip around the world that she’d scheduled for next year, in memory of her father, who died two years ago. The next shows Alex Pomroy winning a seat in Parliament.”
“What does that have to do with her sailing trip?” Debbie asked.
“There is a very interesting connection,” Obadiah said. “With the dream stolen, she goes on the trip. During one of her stops, she witnesses a rising politician at a fancy bar snorting cocaine with prostitutes on his lap. Ms. Gagnon snaps several photos and sends them to a friend who works for the National Post. The pictures go viral, and the politician drops out of the election.”
“Let me guess, Alex Pomroy?” Malcolm scribbled the name in a notebook to research later.
“One would assume.” Obadiah glances toward Debbie before clicking another button. Yet another mutilated body appeared behind Obadiah. “Ms. Gagnon will never take that trip now. A little over a week ago, she was abducted from her home, raped, and beaten to death. Police are calling it a robbery gone wrong.”
“Jesus!” Debbie bowed her head.
Malcolm sat back, disbelief and shock battling within him. “Come on. Rape? The others were clean deaths. The last guy was a bit of overkill, but I don’t see Aelia ordering someone to be raped.”
Obadiah shook his head, clicking the keyboard and cutting to the Cos logo. “I thought the same, but she can’t be killing people herself. At least not all of them. If she’s hiring someone, who knows what they’d do.”
“What the hell are we going to do about Aelia? What if we find her?” The chair slammed back against the table behind him. He couldn’t sit still, not any longer. The urge to hit someone or something overrode any sense of sanity in him.
“Lock her up?” Debbie suggested, standing as well, but keeping her distance.
“We could, but if she gets a target, then she’ll be gone like that.” Obadiah snapped his fingers, watching Malcolm pace back and forth, as if waiting for him to start throwing things.
“Lock her out of the system. Prevent her from getting access to any more of the files, save for her own.” Malcolm paused in front of the door leading to the database. “Could Halek do that
?”
“I’m sure with some time, but Aelia built this database. Who knows how many backdoors she’s built into it? I’m not tech-savvy enough myself. I’ll have to chat with Halek to see.”
“I thought,” Debbie gestured then stopped, glancing between the two of them. “I thought Stephanie sent Lother. Unless he’s changed, like Malcolm, he can’t have raped anyone.”
Obadiah straightened. “We don’t know who eliminated the targets. Why do you think it was Lother?”
Malcolm flopped back into a seat, answering for Debbie. “I guessed Lother killed Tobias Miller and Wu Sun. Jesus Christ, this is a mess.”
“Yes.” Obadiah tapped the keys again. Each stroke slowly stripped a little more of Malcolm’s peace of mind. “We have two more cases, but at least this one wasn’t a decent fellow.”
The screen showed a heavy set, middle-aged man, missing several teeth with a large cowboy hat fraying over top of dirty blond hair. “Joseph Merang, aka Big Joe, a local drug dealer from Houston, Texas. Cos from Lother eleven days ago on April 26th. Big Joe here dreamed about eating a turkey sandwich that morphed into a yellow pig that knocks him in a vat of string cheese in his grandmama’s basement.”
“Seriously?” Debbie closed her eyes.
Malcolm’s shoulders moved up and down in a silent laugh. “You know how dreams are. Sometimes they don’t make a lick of sense, and we can’t figure out why certain dreams trigger certain ideas. Nature of the job.”
Obadiah cocked his head in concession. “Next day, Big Joe changes his usual lunch order at the deli from turkey to a Ruben. This makes him late for a deal with a new buyer who gets spooked and leaves. But instead, with the scary pig dream out of the picture, Old Joe gets his usual, meets the buyer, and is picked up by the DEA. He would have cut a deal, helped them catch some bigger fish, and gotten placed in the witness protection program. But two days after his bust, on April 29th, someone captured him while he was out on bail. Three days later, his body was dumped in front of the DEA office. His throat was slit after being tortured.”
The Dream Awakened Page 4
