Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel)

by Aileen Harkwood

  “Lara, no. Don’t do this to yourself!”

  DOOR.

  She gripped the knob–

  “Lara, no!”

  –and screamed.

  Chapter 12

  Gone. Lara vanished in an instant, with a blinding flash that would outshine a meteor strike. They’d sent her to that door uncaring of what might happen to her. Hearing her cry, the absolute animal pain in it when she’d grasped the doorknob made him physically ill. It also sent him into a fury.

  He hurled himself at the barrier through which she’d appeared before it could close, his intent to follow her back to where they kept her. Too late. Like a camera’s shutter, the human-sized opening closed down while he was still airborne. It may not have had mass, but the barrier was real nonetheless. His rage-driven human will met a universal resistance not even it could overcome. He was knocked back. The next thing he knew, he woke with a violent start in his true body on the bed.

  He didn’t allow it to deter him.

  No. I’m not leaving her to them.

  Too worked up to think clearly, he desperately went through the motions, tried to achieve the state necessary to open a barrier of his own and race after Lara through the fields, but the barrier wouldn’t form. He didn’t have it. He lacked the energy and power he needed. Gavin was right. It was too soon after his previous run, hence the worthless non-body he’d found himself in while trying to prevent Lara from touching the door. It might seem like runners ignored the laws of physics to do what they did, but in reality all they knew were a few more of those laws than everyone else. Certain rules always applied. You had to have energy to spend it, and he’d spent most of his last night during the failed run to rescue Lara. If only he hadn’t tried again so soon. If he’d had use of his true body when she’d appeared minutes ago, he could have shown her the door wouldn’t open for her.

  Stupid. Stupid.

  I’ve failed her again.

  Had his idiocy just cost Lara a hand?

  He wanted to destroy something. He called Gavin instead.

  “I want you out of there now,” Gavin told him once he heard Jack’s story. “We’re abandoning your safe house. Sooner or later, they’ll guide her back there.”

  “Exactly why I should stay,” Jack said, pacing restlessly back and forth while talking to Gavin on the phone. “To intercept her when she returns, and then follow her back to where they’re holding her.”

  He should have pressed her for her last name. Then they might have had some decent information to go on in tracing her through traditional investigative channels. They may not know where she was now, but Jack believed it would help to know where she’d been, where she lived, who employed her, and most importantly, how she’d landed on the Greys’ radar. Was it someone she’d talked to at work? Or a friend in whom she’d confided? Runner abilities didn’t just spring into existence with full functionality. The knowledge of who you were and what you could do came on gradually in bits and pieces. There would have been signs, events in her life that probably frightened and distressed her.

  A therapist? Could the Greys have connections to psychiatric practices and hospitals, just as the Society did? Why not? It was only logical.

  He doubted Lara knew she was a dreamrunner. Incorrectly believing she was losing her mind as her ability manifested, she might have gone into therapy.

  “You don’t know anything about her.” As usual, Gavin spoke as if he could guess Jack’s thoughts.

  “I know enough.”

  “She might be working for them and faking the torture.”

  “You don’t fake the hopelessness I felt in her.”

  That caught his superior off-balance. “You experienced her emotions? Again?”

  “Yes.”

  Gavin was quiet. If Jack were to speculate, his boss wasn’t just weighing his options for closing down the safe house, but ordering Jack off the mission altogether. That a finder could share a Lost One’s pain was not good news. Hurt the Lost One and you might incapacitate the finder. A finder not in full control of his abilities was a danger to himself and the Society. If the Greys caught Jack, they’d have another high-value captive, in addition to the missing Taylor March, they might use to bring down The House.

  “She’s an innocent,” Jack said.

  “They’re using her,” Gavin said. “She may not be a willing participant, but she’s still a tool under their control.”

  Jack heard his superior’s fingers flying over a keyboard. Was he at The House or his office in D.C.? His boss rarely stayed put. Guessing his location was never easy.

  “Get out of there, now,” Gavin said. “As of a minute ago, the cabin is no longer among the Society’s holdings. It’s slated for demolition by the county. Today.”

  A runner couldn’t run to a place that no longer existed.

  Jack’s agitation grew. “Dammit, Gavin, what happens to her?”

  Lara wouldn’t injure herself by attempting to return to the cabin after it was demolished. She wouldn’t suddenly find herself buried in the ground beneath it. She wouldn’t be able to find the property at all. Small consolation. By erasing her path to the Society, they erased the only chance Jack had so far of finding her.

  “I’m sorry,” Gavin said.

  “So, we just abandon her? Another Lost One left for dead?” Jack said. “I’m guessing we’ve decided the vow is meaningless then.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gavin repeated. “We can’t chance losing another finder. ”

  “No word on Taylor? No leads.”

  “None. No change. We’re in the dark,” Gavin said. “It could happen at any time.”

  Jack’s dread of the situation increased. There was something they were missing. Something they’d overlooked. For a change, he let Gavin stew in silence while he thought. Suddenly, he quit pacing. Stood rock still.

  “How’d she find us?” Jack asked.

  “Your target?”

  “Lara. My Lost One’s name is Lara.”

  “I assumed she was a finder, like you.”

  “No,” Jack said. “I don’t know what she is, but she’s definitely not a finder.”

  “They showed her a photo, then,” Gavin said.

  “Right. But where did the Greys come up with a photo of the inside of this place?”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense,” Gavin said.

  “Technically, a tourist who rented the cabin might–”

  “Might what? Snap a pic, magically know they’re standing in a Society safe house and just as magically know who might be interested in that information? Not even worth considering. Besides, if the Greys got the photo from a tourist they wouldn’t bother sending your Lara. Why would they have to when the tourist could easily give them the address? The place would have been under surveillance long before you arrived. You’d be wherever March is now. They’d have taken you, not him.”

  “I still say they had her working off a photo,” Jack said.

  “At this point I don’t care how they found the cabin,” Gavin said. “You’re out of there. Two hours from now, the place is going to be so much rubble.”

  Chapter 13

  Lara rose from her dark oblivion guided not by sight or sound, but by the unrelenting pain in her hand. She opened her eyes and found herself on the floor of the same cell as before, huddled into the corner farthest from the door. Chair, instrument cart, and her tormenters were all gone. The zip tie around her ankles had been removed. Burns from hours under Grey Man’s torture with the car battery dotted her abdomen. They’d left her in the same clothes she’d had since the abduction, T-shirt and panties, the shirt now spotted with dried blood around her shoulders. Another large patch of it, still wet and sticky, stained the hem.

  Immediately, her gaze locked onto her hand, clumsily wrapped in a layer of bandages at least one inch thick. She knew the wound was the source of the freshest, greatest amount of blood on her clothing.

  Jack.

  He was the last thing she
remembered before passing out, the ghostly man whose body she’d seen in the room in Grey Man’s mysterious photograph. She’d assumed Jack was dead, his ghost warning her not to touch anything. He’d pleaded with her not to try and open the door, that she might lose her hand. It had made no sense to her at the time. How could she lose a body part because she touched something in a dream? He wasn’t even real, was he? He was just someone her mind had made up.

  Figment or not, he’d been correct. Nothing, not even the torture she’d received over the past hours or days, could match the physical shock of finding her palm embedded in the metal doorknob.

  Embedded.

  Things like that weren’t possible.

  I’m losing my mind.

  Or she’d lost it already.

  She remembered that’s exactly what she’d been thinking while standing in the bedroom with the pine paneling, that she must have had a stroke. She knew the mind could craft intricate illusions to rationalize injury to the brain. Could all she’d experienced so far, Grey Man included, really be attributed to a clot in her brain or a burst blood vessel? How long did such fantasies last? Could they pack the imaginary passage of entire days into a few minutes of real time? Could she actually be in a hospital somewhere fighting for her life? Or worse, alone in her condo, suffering a major brain event with no one to notice and call 911?

  No. How could a hallucination go on that long? It didn’t seem feasible, and as bizarre as everything that had happened so far was, the experiences felt solid. The pain in her hand was very real. Her gut told her to stop pretending. Face the truth. Accept the reality. She wasn’t waking up, because she wasn’t asleep. She was really here, locked up in this cell for reasons no one had communicated. She was injured and wearing bloody clothes, shivering on a cold cement floor.

  She didn’t want to look that closely at her hand. She knew something was gone, and feared what that something was.

  Don’t look. Don’t. You’ve had too many shocks already.

  The more she told herself this, however, the more she needed to see.

  Her arm lay stretched out on the cement, her hand palm up. She tried, but couldn’t bring it any closer. She didn’t have the strength to lift her arm. With profound relief, however, she noted that all four fingers and her thumb were still there, tips emerging from the ball of wrappings.

  She tested them, attempting to close her hand in a semi-fist. None of her fingers or her thumb responded. Why couldn’t she move them? How much and what parts of her hand, hidden beneath the bandages, were missing?

  Don’t go there. Don’t think about it. Stay strong.

  Had she been here long enough to be missed back home? She’d been scheduled for work the morning after they took her. Would her boss or work friends care enough to wonder why she hadn’t shown? Or had she simply been reported as absent, a black mark checked beside her name, while someone else was called to cover her shift? She had people she knew, people she spoke to regularly at the places she frequented, the store, her favorite restaurant, and the laundry room at her condo complex. These weren’t friends, though; they were acquaintances.

  Sadly, she realized she’d distanced herself from people in the two years since the nightmares had started, ever since her ex had left her. She’d isolated herself, stopped calling people back, didn’t want to maintain old friendships or make new ones.

  No one would come knocking at her door, asking if she was all right. Her abductors had chosen wisely. She would not be missed.

  Instead of allowing herself to dissolve into tears, she wrested with the problem of what she was doing here. Focusing on the situation in which she found herself was the only thing she could do to distract her from the pain, and keep her from crumbling completely.

  Figure it out. You’ve already been over the options, criminals, mistaken identity, serial killers. Whittle them down. Which is it?

  Those who’d kidnapped her had access to medical supplies and sedatives, and had no trouble overriding her condo’s security system and breaking in to take her. She’d been brought to an obvious torture cell with no access to natural light or anything beyond its four bare walls, a drain in the floor and—she looked up—a tiny vent in the ceiling. Even if they hadn’t taken away the chair and she’d been able to stand on the seat to reach it, the vent was too small for her to use as an escape route, being eight inches across at best.

  How many people were involved? Gray Man and his accomplice might have been the same two who’d abducted her, but she couldn’t be sure. If not, it meant a possible total of four men working together. For what purpose?

  Not serial killers. Grey Man enjoyed the torture, but so far hadn’t expressed any desire to kill, only maim.

  Not drug dealers. Too professional in their dress, the suits too corporate for that, or no. Not corporate. Grey Man’s suit wasn’t tailored. It was off the rack.

  Government? Was she being held by the U.S. government?

  Mistaken identity. That had to be the answer. They’d taken her because they thought she knew something about…what?

  Terrorism.

  An evil man lives in that room, Grey Man had said when she’d been in the bedroom with Jack. A terrorist.

  They thought she knew about a terrorist plot.

  “Hello?” She raised her voice, hoping it would carry to anyone beyond the locked door. “Hello?”

  Like the last time she’d tried calling for someone, she was met with silence.

  “Hey!” she shouted. “Someone!”

  Seconds ticked by. The door didn’t open.

  “Please.” Her voice broke. “You have the wrong person. I don’t know anything about terrorists.”

  She listened for any sound beyond the door, but heard nothing.

  “I don’t know where that room is. I’ve never been there before. Listen to me! I don’t know what this is about.”

  Dead silence. For all she knew, no one was on the other side of the door. She remembered the long descent when they’d carried her to the room. They could have left her alone in this weird basement cellar complex knowing she couldn’t possibly get out. They might be done with her. She might never see them again. She might never leave this room.

  This time she couldn’t hold back the hysteria.

  It was like being buried alive, the only difference being the size of the coffin.

  Fear of death shot a speedball of anxiety into her heart. She sat up. Then onto her knees. Used her good hand to push herself to her feet. Her legs shook, too weak to support her well, but she wobbled forward, leaning on the wall as she circumnavigated the room to get to the door.

  When she reached it, she banged on the metal.

  “Help!” she cried as loudly as she could. “Help! Someone help me!”

  She did this until her good hand ached and her skin chaffed from the impact with the rusty, pitted steel. She kept going until her legs wouldn’t hold up any longer and she collapsed to her knees. Even then, she was so frantic she pounded on the door until she couldn’t raise her fist another time. She sagged back to a prone position huddled against the nearest wall, much as she had been when she’d woken.

  It was strange, but even faced with the prospect that she would never be free or see the sun again, she discovered her body could only continue in panic mode so long before it wore itself out and entered a numbing sort of calm.

  Forgotten during the last half hour, the excruciating pain in her hand throbbed in time with the beating of her heart. It made her sick to her stomach. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, but wouldn’t have been able to swallow food if offered. Had they ever given her water? Her mouth was dry, tongue like a dishtowel someone had wadded up and stuffed in her mouth.

  She pulled her hand close to her chest, cradling it protectively with her other arm while she lay on her side. Had the bandages always been as tight as they felt now?

  She looked down, alarmed by what she saw. Her hand had begun to swell, straining at the tens of layers of
cotton gauze. The wrappings acted like a tourniquet for her fingers and thumb, the flesh bloating up and seeking release. Slowly at first, a spot of blood appeared in the cotton covering her palm and then grew, blooming to the size of a rose within minutes. How long until the bandages would be sopping with it? She fumbled at the wrappings, but the fingers on her good hand shook too much. She couldn’t peel away the bandages.

  Soon chills wracked her body, while her cheeks were hot to the touch.

  Fever.

  Her injured hand was infected.

  Quietly, she began to sob. Her eyes remained dry. Perversely, her body was too dehydrated to produce tears. Eventually the sobs died out, as well. She lay still. Hours must have passed, but the fever attacked her ability to reason or think clearly so again, she couldn’t judge how long.

  Lara retreated to fantasy. Jack. She was so happy her imagination had supplied her with a name for him. She visualized her make-believe savior coming to her rescue and smiled to herself when she thought of him in jeans only. She imagined the two of them together on the cold floor with that magnificent bare chest of his pressed against her back, warming her body. His chest was smooth except for an arrow of hair pointing toward the button fly of his jeans. In her fantasy, one of his legs hooked over hers and they spooned into one another, sleeping like a couple, sharing comfort and strength.

  She put words in his mouth again, uttered in that startlingly deep voice of his. Listening to it was like relaxing with a rich glass of chocolate wine.

  I’m here, Lara. I’ll protect you. I’ll be here if they come back, and even if they don’t. I’ll be here until the last.

  A niggling question dawned on her in the middle of this lovely daydream. If only Jack was real so she could ask him what he thought about it.

  She couldn’t reconcile the sequence of events since her abduction. One minute she was here in the torture cell; the next Grey Man had, without her being aware of it, transported her to a bedroom she’d seen in a photograph. Now she was back here. How could Grey Man take her to that room without knowing its location himself? Why would he need her to look outside and tell him where it was? It didn’t make any sense.