Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel)

by Aileen Harkwood

  Someone slid into bed beside her. Right away she noticed how good he smelled, clean, that masculine scent that rose off a man’s skin when he’d recently stepped out of the shower. She instinctively snuggled into his warm, hard chest. She was too far-gone to care that she must look and smell disgusting herself. What did it matter? Her life was over.

  Heavily muscled arms wrapped around her and held her tentatively, trying to be gentle. His touch jostled her injured hand and she wanted to scream, but she bit down, holding it in so that only a tiny wince of sound emerged. She didn’t want to do anything to destroy and chase away this incredible, comforting fantasy her imagination gifted her. She tipped her head back and looked up into the face of the man leaning against her headboard, cradling her body protectively against his.

  “Jack,” she said.

  He smiled at her, but it didn’t mask his grim expression.

  “Am I dead?”

  He looked solid, not like last time, when he’d been transparent, resembling a ghost.

  “Not even close,” he said.

  Strong fingers trembled slightly when they brushed aside a tangled lock of her hair that had fallen over her eyes and was matted with dried blood. Unlike the previous two times she’d seen him, he was fully dressed from shirt to jeans to boots. He smiled at her again. She could see him putting greater effort into hiding something.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “Home,” he said. “That’s where you wanted to be, wasn’t it?”

  “More than anything. I just wanted them to let me go.”

  She put her good hand flat against his chest for leverage and pushed, trying to sit up, but she couldn’t manage it.

  “Oh my God. I’m here? Really here?” Lara asked, overwrought with relief. “They let me go. Oh my God, they let me go.”

  “Shh,” he said. “Let’s just lie here for a few minutes, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, and sank back against him. She was too weak to realistically do anything else.

  Feeling safe, with his fingers stroking her hair, she closed her eyes.

  She slept. It seemed like minutes, but it could have been hours. Eventually she felt Jack release his hold on her, shift her off of him, and slide out of bed.

  “Jack?” she asked.

  “Hush,” he said. “I’m not leaving. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She heard him go into her bathroom and rummage around in the cabinets. The medicine chest was opened, and then a minute later closed. Water ran in the sink.

  She fell asleep again.

  Jack roused her, calling softly to her. “Lara. Wake up.” He touched her face. It was partly a caress, partly, she knew, in order to gauge how bad her fever raged.

  She didn’t want to wake.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Yes, you can. I need you to sit up for a minute.”

  He lifted her and propped her against pillows he fluffed. Her eyelids continued to drift downward, but she caught the assemblage of items he’d carried from her bathroom and set on the nightstand, a towel and several damp washcloths, one that had been soaped, a comb, scissors, bandages, aspirin, glass of water, and a prescription bottle with leftover medication for an infection she’d had earlier in the year. Despite her doctor’s insistence that she take all the pills until they were gone, she’d forgotten once she’d felt better.

  Jack shook out two pills from the bottle, and three aspirin. Sliding an arm around her shoulders, he lifted her up far enough to enable her to take the pills and swallow them with the glass of water. Her mouth was so dry that even with the water, she struggled to swallow all five tablets. She coughed and choked, but Jack was patient and they worked to get the pills down her one at a time.

  He let her rest for a few minutes after this, and used the wetted washcloths to cool her skin, then bathe her face, shoulders and her good arm. He worked most of the blood out of her hair with another washcloth and a comb.

  “I’d help you change out of that,” he said of the T-shirt, “but I think it would cause more pain than it’s worth. Besides…”

  “Besides, what?”

  He didn’t answer her. Besides, what? Why would changing out of these horrible, blood-crusted clothes not help her? Was she really near death, then?

  Finished with the limited bath he gave her, he dried her and then spread the towel out on the bed at her side. He reached for her injured hand, which had swollen grotesquely within its tightly constricted wrappings.

  “No,” she said and pulled her arm to her chest defensively.

  “Lara, I have to look at it.”

  “No!” Tears welled in her eyes. “Leave me alone.”

  “Lara.” He was apologetic.

  “No. Please? Just please,” she said.

  Despite her protests, he reached again for her arm.

  “No, Jack. No-no-no,” she said, even as she surrendered her hand to him.

  “I’m sorry, Lara,” he said. “I know it hurts, but we need to take a look at what you did to your hand.”

  He used the scissors from her bathroom to cut away the bandages. Each snip equaled a tug on her wound, followed by a gradual release of the tourniquet tight bandages. As the flesh was allowed to expand, the pain amped up more and more, until fresh air wafted across her open wound.

  Lara cried out.

  “Oh, God, that hurts. It hurts so much.”

  Gazing down at her exposed injury, Jack sighed. The grimness she’d noted earlier in his face returned, but was just as quickly wiped away as he looked her in the eyes and smiled. “Not so bad,” he said.

  “My fingers?”

  “Still there,” he said. “All four and the thumb.”

  “Why can’t I move them?”

  “Let’s not worry about that right now.”

  “No, tell me. Jack. Tell me.”

  “Hush. Everything is going to be all right. Take a deep breath for me, okay? In and out,” he instructed her.

  She complied, breathing in deep and then letting it go.

  “In and out. That’s right. Slow. Slow. Quiet your mind. You’re not alone any more.”

  She took one more deep breath and let it out. He smiled again. She was so focused on doing as he asked, she didn’t notice the bowl of water and washcloth in his hand until wet fabric touched her hand.

  Lara cried out in shock and began sobbing at the pain his movements caused. Jack’s lips tightened, but he diligently dabbed at the edges of the wound, cleaning it as quickly as he could.

  “Okay,” he said, as much to himself as he did her. “Now we bandage it up again. Though not as tightly.”

  Lara, hating herself for being crying, swiped away tears.

  “Is this real?” she cleared her throat and asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “All of it. You’re not hallucinating. Everything that has happened to you so far is real.”

  “We’re in my bedroom?”

  “Yes, we’re in your bedroom. Neither of us is dead. You aren’t dreaming.”

  “Then why aren’t you calling 911? Why aren’t you taking me to a hospital?”

  Jack looked up from his work, but his face was unreadable. She struggled to hold onto consciousness. With each moment that passed, the effort grew more and more difficult. Had he answered her question and she just didn’t hear it? She couldn’t remember what he said from one minute to the next. He pressed the washcloth into the palm of her hand at a particularly vulnerable spot and her body went rigid, the agony shooting up her arm, up through her neck, exploding behind her eyes.

  When she could think again, she found herself in the middle of a conversation she didn’t know they’d begun.

  “Do you know who the people are who took you?” Jack asked.

  “No.”

  “Ever seen any of them before?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what they want?”

  “The bedroom. Your bedroom. They want to know where it is.”

  “Did they tell y
ou that?”

  “They showed me a picture.”

  “A photo?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know where the photo came from?”

  She shook her head.

  “Describe it for me.”

  “It’s just a photo. Dim. Bad quality. Little bits of random colors mixed in.”

  “Grainy?”

  “Glitches. Like a photo taken by a cheap camera.”

  Jack went still, more worried than she’d seen him so far.

  She didn’t understand his reaction, but continued with her story.

  “He hurt me. Then they gave me something. Drugs. More than one. Then he hurt me some more and kept waving the photo in my face. After a while I…I don’t know what happened. Suddenly, I was in your room.”

  “He? You said he hurt you.”

  Her eyes closed.

  “Lara? Lara? You said he hurt you.”

  “The Grey Man. That’s what I call him. He’s the one in charge of pain. He wears a grey suit and he’s just, somehow…grey.”

  Anger played over Jack’s face, barely contained. Why did he look like that? Had she done something wrong?

  “Did I do something horrible just now? Back there…I mean in the other place…”

  “No. What? No,” Jack said, quickly reassuring her. She watched him tamp down on his emotions, hide them away while he laid her arm across her stomach, bandaging finished. “Nothing at all.”

  He got back into bed with her, pulled her to him and held her close. She listened to the breath go in and out of his powerful chest, the sound of it and feel of it in her hair lulling her toward sleep again.

  “I promise you, I will find you,” he said, placing special emphasis on the word find.

  “What are you talking about?” Lara asked, alarm renewing itself in her. “I’m here. You found me. You said yourself this is real.”

  At the same time she spoke, a shudder ran up her spine and weakness greater than any she’d ever felt in her life washed through her, consumed and drained her. Her eyesight began to fail, the world around her fading not to the blackness she’d expect from fainting, but to nothingness, her brain forgetting what it was to see anything at all.

  Death. She was dying. This was what death had to be.

  “Jack?”

  He hugged her more fiercely in his arms.

  “Jack, what’s happening?”

  “You’re going back now,” he said.

  “No.”

  He kissed the top of her head.

  “Don’t lose hope, Lara,” he said. “I’m one of the best at what I do. I will find you.”

  “Don’t make me go there,” she begged.

  “I don’t have a choice in the matter. You couldn’t stay here forever.”

  “Jack!”

  “Don’t try to be brave,” he told her. “Tell them anything they want. Tell them my name if you want. Jack. You don’t know my last.”

  Her very being began to evaporate. She felt her body disintegrating. Nothing in her life could equal the panic of being extinguished atom by atom. At the end, she wasn’t even sure if she heard his voice or if his words were just something she made up to finish the conversation and close out her life.

  “Don’t resist their interrogation,” Jack said. “Let them think you’re broken.”

  “I am broken.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re strong. Stay alive, Lara. Survive for me!”

  Then she heard and felt no more.

  Chapter 16

  Jack had never witnessed someone unconscious on a run before. He hadn’t thought it possible. Runners were either aware and present or else, if something catastrophic happened, the runner was slammed back into his or her body an instant later.

  During his previous encounters with Lara, he’d connected emotionally with her, been able to feel what she felt. Staring at her in bed when he first arrived here, he got nothing. Her twin had lain unresponsive beneath her quilted comforter. She didn’t breathe, didn’t move, didn’t react to his voice or touch. It scared the crap out of him.

  Dead as a twin? How was that possible? And what did it mean to her true body back where it resided? Was she dead there, as well?

  No. Jack had refused to believe it. Refused to let her go. He would not accept this. He had spent several minutes calling to her. He shook her shoulder, rubbed her uninjured arm, stroked her hair. Three minutes passed, during which he struggled with his rage at her captors.

  She’d been battered before when she’d made the run to his safe house, but the newest signs of torture rivaled what he’d expect done to political prisoners, or someone being worked over by a Mexican drug cartel. Electrical burns covered her arms and abdomen. Blood painted the side of her neck and face, caked the T-shirt, matted her hair. Raised, red needle marks lined the insides of both elbows. The skin around her split lip and bruised eye had begun to yellow. Worst of all was the injury she’d incurred on her previous run. Hastily bandaged, the wrappings were a damp, solid red; the hand was grotesquely swollen. Infection must have swamped her immune system.

  Were the Greys really capable of abominations of this magnitude? They might be a rogue faction of the government, but if so they were still government, and Lara was a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.

  Jack’s relief had been monumental when she finally stirred, took a shallow breath, and murmured something unintelligible. Weak as she was, emotions leaked from her again, agitation the strongest of them, fear at her pain-clouded mental state. Her connection to reality was tentative at best.

  Jack slid into bed beside her, held her in his arms and basically willed her to live, sending her as much of his own energy as he could.

  “Am I dead?” she’d asked.

  He lied to her without hesitation.

  “Not even close.”

  He’d given her antibiotics, cleaned her of much of the blood. Done what he could for her fever with cool cloths and aspirin. A part of him kept up a steady drumbeat of futility.

  This is her twin. This isn’t Lara you’re trying to treat. It’s just her twin.

  In his desperate need to make her healthy again, though, he rationalized what he did. If physical injury to a twin could cause permanent injury to the original, why couldn’t the opposite happen? Why wouldn’t medical treatment given to a twin help a runner’s true body, too?

  When she went back to herself, she’d be covered in the same blood he’d just removed. Her hair would be as matted and tangled as when he found her, but perhaps the respite he gave her from that, however brief, would aid her spirits. Perhaps battling her fever here, the swelling and infection here, would have an effect there. However slight the difference in outcome, he’d decided he had to try.

  Cutting open the bandages and examining what had happened to her hand from her contact with the doorknob, plunged him into a dark state he doubted he’d successfully concealed from her. She would need major reconstructive surgery. Skin grafts. Nor did he like the coloring of her two smallest fingers, which evidently weren’t receiving the same blood supply as the others. She might lose them. She could still lose the entire hand. If what he’d seen in her twin represented what her real hand looked like, no one had bothered to treat the injury. It meant her captors weren’t concerned if she died. To them, she was disposable.

  He’d clasped her possessively to him for more than an hour. He had to find where they held her. He had no idea how much time she had left before gangrene set in, or worse, she succumbed to sepsis and died. He would not let her go. He wouldn’t allow her to lose the hand to amputation. She might not ever see full functionality restored, but he’d be damned if he’d let her suffer the alternative.

  Their conversational back and forth, his questions to her replies and the questions she had in turn, had been separated by minutes at a time while she slid in and out of consciousness, a fact of which she seemed unaware.

  So the Greys did have her, but where had they gotten the photo they showed her? How had th
ey known the image of that particular room, unremarkable in design, would be of use to them? Jack could almost put the pieces together, yet felt like one or two of them were upside down or didn’t fit with the rest of the puzzle.

  From the start, he’d known he couldn’t hold her there indefinitely. The feverish energy that had fueled her dreamrun home to the comforting environs of her bedroom would run down and out. As with her earlier death-like state, her departure was equally disturbing. Her twin didn’t free itself from his embrace, open the barrier to the fields and leap through. No barrier appeared. He detected no opening to the fields at all, no trail he might follow. She dissolved in his arms like a sandcastle worn away by the ocean, all while he soothed her, allayed her fears, made her think this was normal. It wasn’t normal. Nothing like it.

  Distinct edges to her became softer, losing definition. Entire parts of her crumbled, wore down and were sucked into nothingness, until she disappeared and the only thing he had left was the plea he spoke to thin air.

  “Stay alive, Lara. Survive for me!”

  Jack’s eyes blinked open. The view through the car window was not the same one he’d left behind. Instead of the bronze roof of the sedan that had been parked next to Gavin’s SUV and the brick wall of the abandoned dry cleaners, he saw the underside of a massive concrete overpass. Heavy traffic rumbled over the bridge, vibrations shaking everything below it, ground, car, atmosphere.

  “Finally,” Gavin peered over his shoulder at Jack and said. “You’re back. Do you have any idea how long you’ve been gone?”

  Jack couldn’t move. Not right away. His body lay contorted across the back seat. The usual after-run spasm, like a vicious fist reaching in and knotting his back, rendered him immobile. Not that he would confess his temporary helplessness to his boss.

  “How long?” he asked.

  Gavin checked the stopwatch app on his phone. “Just over six hours.”

  Not so long. I’ve gone longer. What’s the big deal? Isn’t that about average?

  “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”