Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel)

by Aileen Harkwood

  “She did, Gavin. She saw me. Don’t ask me how, but I know.”

  “And the men?”

  “Abducted her.”

  “You couldn’t see into the room very well, but you think she was abducted.”

  “I don’t think,” Jack said as certainty clicked into place, “I know.”

  “She could have asked for the injection herself. Heroin.”

  “Heroin in her system wouldn’t have kept me out. Asleep, awake, high or not, I would still be able to connect with her and run there. Unless she was put into a coma or near to it with a powerful anesthetic.”

  “An overdose can lead to coma.”

  “She was terrified, Gavin,” Jack said. “I could feel her fear.”

  Which in itself was unlikely. Jack wasn’t an empath. Detecting another’s emotions as if they were just another sensory cue such as taste, scent, or sound, wasn’t possible for him. Or anyone else he knew, for that matter. A moment from now, Gavin would begin accusing him of mental delusions.

  Amazingly, his boss assimilated Jack’s statement, for now, and moved on.

  “What about the men? Did they see you?” he asked Jack.

  “No. Of course not. How could they?”

  Another of Gavin’s irritatingly habitual phone silences followed.

  “You’ve been pushing yourself lately,” he said, perhaps half a minute later. “More than you should handle.”

  Jack’s anger with himself rose to the bait. “Don’t give me that,” he said. “I can handle myself. On this and a lot more.”

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t,” Gavin responded mildly. “I said, shouldn’t.”

  “I didn’t hallucinate this. I didn’t fall asleep and dream it,” Jack said. “Some bizarre quirk I don’t understand allowed her to see me. Due to causes I don’t understand, I, in turn, experienced her panic as if it was my own. Two men I didn’t see well enough to identify gave her a drug. It’s one I’ve never before encountered in a runner’s system when I’ve been on a finding. It cut the connection to her so I couldn’t leave the fields, breach the barrier and help. They took her and I was hurled back here. Hard. So hard it took me almost ten minutes to come out of it.”

  Jack waited, hearing nothing on the other end of the line. Sometimes he wondered about Gavin’s silences. You’d think the man was struck by intermittent seizures, which Jack knew, for a fact, he wasn’t.

  “Okay,” Gavin said.

  The okay was agreement. Perhaps not full blown acceptance of Jack’s version of the facts, but about as much as he’d get from the man.

  “This isn’t good,” Gavin said unnecessarily.

  No shit.

  It was bad. Worse than.

  How many people would have need of a black bag team to whisk away a woman sleeping peacefully in her bed, using a drug that rendered her untraceable by Jack, and the others like him under Gavin’s command?

  “The Grey Suits,” Gavin said.

  “They have her,” Jack said in agreement.

  Chapter 4

  No one spoke to Lara. Blinded by a hood over her head, her hands and feet bound, she regained consciousness just as the two carrying her started down a long staircase. Grogginess skewed her concept of time and dulled her senses. She drifted in and out, jogged awake each time by rough handling. The descent felt endless. Around her, the air grew more and more chilled the farther down they went. She wore the long T-shirt and panties she’d had on when she went to bed and nothing else. They hadn’t redressed her while she was unconscious, an idea that elicited a shudder, yet hadn’t wrapped her in anything either. Cold soaked in, the hands and arms gripping her furnishing the only source of warmth available. Reflexively, her body attempted to snuggle into her captors’ body heat, a fact that shamed her.

  Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she was hauled another long distance and finally dumped in a chair. The feel of it against the backs of her knees told her it was plastic, the sound of its legs scraping cement, that the chair was lightweight. Trussed up with her wrists in a zip tie behind her, she couldn’t sit back and almost fell off the chair onto the floor. One of them used a knife to cut the tie, carelessly slicing into skin as well. Shoved back into the chair, her hood was pulled off.

  Pain exploded in Lara’s head at the sudden light. Her eyes, made oversensitive by the drug they’d given her, teared up immediately. Though the watery haze, she saw two blurry figures walk away, disappearing into the dark.

  “Hello?” she said.

  A door slammed with a heavy clang that shook the floor under her feet. She was alone.

  So dizzy was she, she couldn’t be sure if she swayed to one side in the chair and then overcorrected, unable to sit up straight, or if the room tilted in her vision only. Just as she’d suspected, they’d seated her in a white, plastic chair, the type that could be purchased cheaply from a superstore’s garden center. She blinked several times, the room finally coming into focus. No windows, just a heavy metal door. Harsh light from the single exposed light bulb in the ceiling turned everything a sickly yellow.

  “Hello?” She tried again.

  Could they hear her from outside the room?

  “Is anyone there?”

  Silence.

  Her mind, under the drug’s lingering influence, stalled. She sat there for an hour, perhaps two, ankles snared by the other zip tie, too weak to make efforts to remove it. Gradually, however, the fog began to lift.

  Where was she? Who were these people?

  Not the police. Police didn’t do kidnappings. They might take someone into custody on a flimsy charge, but they told you who they were when they did it. They didn’t drug you or put a bag over your head.

  What did they want with her? Was it something specific about her, or would any hostage have served as well?

  Kidnappings were usually for ransom. Why would someone take her? She didn’t have anything anyone would want. She wasn’t rich. She had no living relatives, no grandparents, aunts, uncles, or siblings. Her parents had died in a train derailment eight years ago. She knew no one famous and never had. What few friends she had weren’t close or the least influential, just people at work with whom she exchanged a few pleasantries each day. She did not hold a position of power in any facet of her life. Her employment as a tour guide for a large biopark was hardly crucial, unless you counted her duties to the adorable elementary school children she ushered around on field trips.

  Was that it? Could it be something to do with the biopark? Could someone have planned mass killings and need her out of the way? Lara’s throat squeezed tight in anxiety at the possibility. Who would replace her when she didn’t show up at work today?

  Mentally scrolling through the list of her fellow tour guides, she couldn’t imagine a single one of them capable of such a heinous act. They loved their jobs, just as she did, introducing young minds to the natural world around them, leading classes through the various habitats. Pay was minimal, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave it for something more lucrative because the park had become a safe haven for her. More than anything, Lara needed a sedate, positive environment by day to counter the horrific dreams of terrorist bombings and other violence she suffered almost nightly.

  As many as forty kids and several chaperones on a tour might crowd into a glassed-in viewing blind overlooking the marshlands. She tried to picture how such an activity could place children at risk and came up blank. The blinds were designed to protect the wildlife on the other side of the glass, but none were remote from populated areas of the park. Shrieks of excitement typically swept through a group whenever kids spotted a “ducky,” their word for any water bird regardless of species. Amplified back into the park by the unique shape of the blinds, cries of terror or fear wouldn’t remain unnoticed for long. Besides, people who committed mass shootings usually just charged into a public place and started blasting away. They wouldn’t need to remove a tour guide in order to perpetrate such depravity.

  Maybe her abduction was re
lated to a crime. Two men had taken her, and though she couldn’t be positive, she believed they were the same two men who had left her here, locked in this room. Wracking her brain, she tried coming up with a connection. She’d never committed a crime, unless you counted jaywalking or illegal U-turns. She didn’t use, buy, or sell drugs. Had never stolen anything. Hadn’t bought anything recently she thought someone might want. She had no investments besides those in her job-sponsored retirement accounts. She couldn’t remember getting into an important argument with anyone lately. Couldn’t recall having pissed off anyone. She’d been sequestered once for a jury, but the defendant had pled out before the trial even started.

  Was it possible she’d witnessed something she shouldn’t have, and now needed to be silenced? If so, she had no clue what that might have been, and she doubted the perpetrator would kidnap her. He or she would simply kill her to get rid of her. No, nothing even remotely exciting had happened around her lately.

  Her nights might be filled with dreams of terror, but her life held no surprises. Years before the nightmares began, she’d had interests, a love of road trips, a passion for photography, but once her nights filled up with scenes of violence, her desire to explore anything beyond the road to work and back, atrophied and died. No matter how carefully composed the photograph, no image could distract her mind from the horrors she saw in her dreams. These days she had no life, spending every waking moment clinging to sanity by the most precarious of handholds. She purposefully lived her days in the dullest manner she could. Her life presented nothing that would excite the attention of others. She was the human version of junk mail.

  They couldn’t have meant to take her. It had to be mistaken identity. They must have meant to grab some other woman and gone to the wrong condo.

  Unless—her thoughts traveled back to her original fears when she’d found the men in her room—unless she was exactly who they wanted. One of the men had called her “Lara.”

  Serial killers.

  Her heart seized, and then a moment later her pulse exploded in her ears. Hysterical thoughts put an end to her logical quest for answers. Lara looked wildly about, confirming the room contained nothing but her chair. Unlike a prison cell, it had no sink, toilet, or bunk. It did, however, have a drain in the middle of the cement floor.

  The implications of this were obvious.

  Oh, God. It became a litany in her head. Oh, God. Oh. God.

  A box. That’s what this place was. A box to hold her and terrify her at the same time.

  Chapter 5

  Jack paced back and forth in the living room of the modest house on the lower Chesapeake Bay. A beach cabin amongst the grassy saltwater marshes, it was the only remaining of five identical structures that once formed a small campground built by a retired couple in the late 1940s; the other four cabins lost to a hurricane. It continued to serve its original purpose as short term housing, with Jack the latest of numerous tenants renting by the week. Little of the Virginia shore’s warm light filtered into the cabin during the day. At night, Jack could switch on every light, yet with its worn furnishings and gloomy wood paneling, this relic of vacations gone by could depress even the brightest spirit.

  Seconds after he and Gavin reached the joint assumption that Jack’s target could be in the hands of their worst enemy, Gavin had ended the call mid-sentence. Jack had heard a shout in the background, Gavin stopped talking, and the line went dead. Not even a word about calling back. Something was up back at The House. Whatever it was, had to be serious enough to trump the possible abduction of a Lost One.

  Jack belonged to a secret community known as The Dreamrunners Society. They numbered less than a thousand, but while blood didn’t always unite them, they were a family, brought together by a single genetic trait and the dangers that went with it. Every member of the society was a dreamrunner. When the gift was active, the recipient had the ability to bilocate, to physically be in two places at once. Jack might appear to be asleep in bed on the Virginia shore, while a second version of him traveled elsewhere, to any location on the globe his will directed. Though limited in specific ways, his second self was almost as corporeal as his original body. When on a run he interacted with his environment. He talked to people and, if all went right, they didn’t see anything odd or different about him. He picked up objects, had to use doors. His doppelganger, or twin, as runners normally referred to their second selves, was subject to nearly the same laws of physics as everything and everyone else.

  The ability tended to run in families, but every once in a while it manifested spontaneously in an individual who had no other relatives with the gift. Jack was known as a finder among his people, someone tasked with locating these Lost Ones, dreamrunners unaware of their own abilities, and bringing them safely into the fold.

  Safe was the operative word here. Runners who didn’t understand who they were and what they could do lived under continual threat. Many died at their own hands. The suicide rate among Lost Ones was staggering. Others, not even realizing they were running, accidentally killed themselves during their first attempt. Having an ability like theirs without understanding what it was or how it worked, resulted in many literally becoming lost to insanity; wrongful institutionalization for mental illness that didn’t exist; or worse, splitting from their bodies, breaking the connection to it, and never finding their way home.

  As if these weren’t tribulations enough for anyone without someone to protect and help, runners had enemies, none more mysterious and feared than the Grey Suits.

  Jack’s head pounded from the cost of the aborted trip to locate his latest charge. He tried, unsuccessfully, to massage away the headache burrowing in behind his eyes. As his pacing continued, he told himself to pull it together, but couldn’t stop thinking about the unknown dreamrunner snatched right out from under him.

  He knew this one.

  He knew her.

  He couldn’t pinpoint how he knew, but the recognition went deep.

  Come on, Gavin. We’re wasting time.

  Who was she?

  He’d never come across any of the Lost with a dream signature as strong or unique as hers. If he knew her from somewhere, had met her before, how could he have forgotten her signature? He never forgot one. He had an eidetic memory for them. It was one of the things that made him so good at what he did. Without that special skill, Jack would have become lost in the fields himself more times than he’d care to think.

  Jack’s formation of his twin had been far from complete when the woman lost consciousness, which explained why he couldn’t reach her in time. Without a body at the target location, he was no more effectual than a ghost, his presence there comprised of thought, emotion, shadow and little else. What could a shadow do?

  Nothing.

  He’d been utterly helpless, useless.

  He glanced at his phone for the fifth time, in case the call back from Gavin had come in and his phone, for some bizarre reason, hadn’t rung, or vibrated in his hand, or–

  God! What the hell is going on back there at The House?

  He shouted in frustration, looking for something to punch, realized doing so wouldn’t help, and strode to the bathroom. Yanking open the medicine cabinet, he shook twice the recommended dose of over the counter pain meds into his hand, and swallowed them dry.

  The need to do something, anything, while he waited, drove him to replay his aborted run over and over in his mind, searching for a detail he might have missed during the hazy sequence of events, some clue to the woman’s identity or the location of the bedroom where he’d found her.

  Clearest in his mind was her face, and that he would have remembered if he’d seen it before. Heart-shaped and pale, hers made him think of a victim of some unspecified abuse who might be beautiful to begin with, but was made exquisitely arresting by her determination to survive that abuse with her soul intact. Whatever was wrong in her life—and he had no doubt something was wrong—allowed her inner will to shine through. Though asle
ep when he’d first come upon her, he could see it was disturbed slumber, not the least restful. Her expression changed moment by moment as she slept, mirroring what must have been a terrifying dream.

  Jack held the image he had of her motionless in his head, mapping each quiet plane of her face, strengthening the memory so he could describe her to a sketch artist should it come to that. She couldn’t be more than 24- or 25-years-old. Dark blonde hair long enough to hit the middle of her back and Nordic fine.

  Eyes? What color?

  He replayed the scene forward in his head to the point where one of her abductors had climbed on top of her and pinned her down.

  Eyelids flying open, her panic had burst to life, the jittery infection of it striking him a blow now, again, almost as hard as the one he’d experienced in real time. Her terror, beating inside his heart, threatened any coherent thought. He’d never felt fear like this. It weakened, debilitated. He sensed her inner resolve to push beyond it.

  Fight, he willed her. Don’t let them hurt you. Fight!

  No, stop, he reminded himself. He wasn’t there any longer. This was over.

  It’s already happened.

  With effort, he extricated himself from the intense memory, backed it up.

  Watch it again. This time don’t feel. Look!

  Eyelids flying open…

  He saw.

  Light colored eyes, more blue than grey.

  Her height? He couldn’t guess. She never stood up, and once her abductors hit her with what was in the syringe, his connection to her started unraveling. His view into the room shattered. He knew she was slender, though. She didn’t eat. Not enough. That same, unnamed trouble that ruined her sleep also killed her appetite. She was walking wounded.