“Here,” he said. The deep timbre of his voice warmed her more than any tea could. The gruffness in it charmingly showed her both his desire to please and the fact that he felt put out.
“What? Oh, thank you,” she said as he handed her a mug. “My twin can drink and eat?”
He shrugged. “Sure, why wouldn’t it be able to?”
“No reason, I suppose.”
She accepted the tea. He held out the plate of shortbread. She took one, then looked at the cookie.
“It’s funny. I’m not hungry,” she said. “I haven’t eaten since Monday. Why am I not starving?”
“Twins aren’t always. Cravings tend to be suppressed in this form.”
She noticed he’d thrown on a shirt, covering up, though his feet remained bare. She sighed.
Not all cravings.
“Still, it’s fuel,” he said, and tossed a whole cookie in his mouth.
Lara took a bite of hers, a sip of tea, then put both down on the windowsill.
“Jack,” she said. “Why did you lie on the phone?”
“What?”
Lara watched Jack retreat behind a mask of neutrality. Odd, was that really his energy she sensed pulling away from hers? Something connected the two of them. It wasn’t merely an unspoken attraction on his or her part. It went deeper than that, was harder to describe, impossible to see, and at this very moment, she felt his side of it withdraw. He so obviously didn’t want to have this conversation.
“I didn’t lie,” he said.
“You told the man you spoke to, you hadn’t let me near an open window.”
On cue, the sun crested the ridge opposite the cabin. Sunlight, bright and honest, streamed through the window. Delighted, she squinted into it taking its brilliance into her, whereas pre-abduction she would have shielded her eyes. Dust motes stirred in its beams. The light cast her shadow onto the old farm table and chased darkness into the farthest corners of the sparsely furnished room.
Jack joined her next to the window again.
“Look out there,” he said. “What do you see?”
Lara gave the restful yet invigorating landscape careful scrutiny.
“Trees,” she said. “A mountain ridge.”
“Do you see any other buildings?”
“No.”
“Any people? Any roads? Signs? Any memorable landmarks?”
“No.”
“Do you notice anything particularly remarkable about the shape of the mountains?”
“No.”
“Do you know where we are?”
“I know we’re on the east coast of the U.S.”
“Which encompasses how many millions of square miles?”
“All right. Somewhere in the Appalachians, then.”
“You’re sure about that? You sure we’re not in Canada?”
She pointed. “That’s an American beech over there.”
“One of the most common trees in North America. It ranges from Texas to Nova Scotia.”
“You know species maps by heart?” she asked.
“I like trees,” he said, evasive. “The point is if you left the cabin, you’d find yourself walking a long way before you came to anything that would give you a clue of where we are, so there was no harm in letting you see the sun.”
“I don’t understand. Why all the paranoia about someone being able to see out? You had it like this back at your other place. The bedroom with the pine paneling. Is that room down there in the basement, too?”
“Did you feel like you were underground there?”
Lara thought about it. “No. I don’t think so, but it was all shut up like this place. I couldn’t tell them anything about its location.”
“Couldn’t tell them,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Oh,” he repeated, seconding her moment of insight. “That’s the point. If you, or any other runner who found this place doesn’t know where you are, you can’t tell the Greys where you’ve been.”
“The Greys?”
“The people who have you.”
“Of course. Grey Man. My torturer.”
“We know almost nothing about them except they might be the government or…” He looked chagrined. “…they might not. But they’re obsessed with the color grey.”
“Why do they want you? Your people?”
“Your people, too. You keep forgetting you’re one of us.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“No one in your family has ever spoken about the Society?”
“My family is gone,” she said. “I didn’t have much of one to begin with. Just my parents. They died when a train derailed in the town where we lived when I was sixteen. It was carrying toxic chemicals. I was at school far enough away. Our house was too close to the tracks. No brothers or sisters, no aunts, uncles or cousins. I don’t know who my grandparents were.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You say that like you know what it’s like.”
He nodded, but didn’t elaborate.
“You’re what we call a Lost One,” he said. “Someone who should be a member of the Society, but who’s been left out in the cold for one reason or another.”
“And the Society?”
“The Dreamrunners Society. It’s not big, less than a thousand and counting, but we all have one thing in common. The same rare ability you have. For people like us, the world is an extremely dangerous place. More so in this era where political corruption is pervasive. You wed the privilege and power of people at the top of the food chain to the incredible technology we have available today to track or locate people, versus what was available during the 19th century when the Society was founded, and there’s very little we can do to hide our identities.”
Lara took a step back. Political corruption? Power elite?
No. Please don’t tell me you’re a conspiracy nut.
He sighed. Looked at her in disappointment. Turned away.
Think it through, Lara.
Lara jumped. Until now she’d believed hearing his thoughts was a one-way street. Either that or her imagination. She had to stop assuming that. This was real.
Stunned, she asked, “You heard me?”
“Yes. I can hear you. I’ve been able to from the start.”
“A dreamrunner thing?”
He shook his head. “I’ve heard stories about runners being able to communicate telepathically, but never known anyone who could. You’re the only one I can do it with so far,” he said. “I can also feel what you’re feeling.”
“You said to think it through. Think what through?”
Quietly, he returned to the window, gazing out at the morning breeze shifting through verdant foliage.
“If you were a government or a corporation or a powerful individual who valued secrets,” he said, “and you heard of a group of gifted individuals who could transport themselves any where in the world—confidential meetings, government facilities, maximum security prisons, bank vaults, terrorist training camps, nuclear power plants, anywhere—just by glancing at a photo of the target location, what’s the first thought that would go through your mind?”
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh,” he echoed her again. “Depending on your viewpoint, we’re a danger or a resource. People with secrets, or those who want to keep them, are either going to neutralize the danger we present, or want to find ways to exploit it. It’s why we do everything we can to keep to ourselves, to keep a low profile and watch each others’ backs. The Society founders came up with a fancier way of saying it, but that’s essentially what we’re about.”
“What’s your part?”
“I’m a finder,” he said. “A few of us don’t need to see a photo first to travel. We can track people and places by their signatures in the fields.”
The fields. She shuddered, remembering the trip here, feeling like she was suffocating and falling simultaneously.
“That’s the place,” he said, understandin
g the shudder.
“So you find them and then what?”
“It’s my job to help them, save them if they need it and they’ll let me. Lost Ones don’t usually have anyone who can explain to them who they are or show them how to deal with it. They have a tendency to think they’re insane. Drugs and alcohol are common release valves. Too many end up institutionalized.”
Lara thought about her own need to seek out therapy for her nightmares. Jack’s description wasn’t far off.
He continued. “We’ve been worried for some time now that the Greys would capture a Lost One and use torture or indoctrination, or some combination of the two, to turn him.”
“Or her,” she said.
That’s what he meant, wasn’t it? Her. Lara. He’d discussed it with the man he called Gavin on the phone, when he’d told him she wasn’t “compromised.” Even though he’d stood up for her, he hadn’t looked convinced himself.
As she expected, the interrogation began.
“Did they show you any other photos beside the one of the room with the paneling?” he asked.
Dully, she went along with the questioning.
“No,” she said.
“Maybe pictures on a cell phone?”
“No.”
“Did they ever mention someone named Taylor to you?”
“No.”
“What about them? Did they call each other by name?”
“No.”
“Talk about their plans?”
She gritted her teeth. “No.”
“Did you ever see any other captives? A man about 30, with sandy hair perhaps?”
“No.”
“Maybe you heard someone in an adjoining cell?”
“No. No. And NO to your next fifteen-hundred questions,” she finally shouted. “They locked me in a cell. Shot me full of drugs. They didn’t give me access to a bathroom, or food or water to drink until they wanted to force some pills down me. They beat me. Electrocuted me with a car battery. Used implements on me.”
She hoped her outburst would affect him and that he’d have the decency to show embarrassment. Embarrassment wasn’t the reaction she got. He drew inward, even as his breathing grew louder and his expression darkened. She watched him struggling internally with an emotion that slipped out of his grasp and threatened to spiral out of control. She tried to get at it, feel what went on inside him, but he threw up a wall as thick as those belonging to the house hidden beneath their feet.
In violation of his obsession with keeping places locked up, he walked to the window on the other side of the door. Like hers, wooden shutters covered it. His fingers hurriedly slid back the bolts securing them, and when they didn’t cooperate at first, he nearly ripped one of the shutters off the wall on the subsequent attempt. Finally, the bolts let go and he threw open the view, letting dense, rich sunlight into the other half of the cabin.
Freeing the sun calmed him, as it had her. He stood there and she sat in her window seat, each the sentry of his and her own timber framed panorama, letting the minutes stretch out behind them. He retrieved his mug again and drank tea. Lara finished hers. She saw him pull something out of his pocket. She could tell only that it was small, flat, and gold in appearance. After staring at it a short while, he slipped it back in his pocket.
She left her window and walked over to his.
“Have you ever been to the Middle East?” she asked him. If he was surprised by the question, he didn’t show it.
“Yes.”
“Southeast Asia? Africa?”
“Asia, yes. Africa, no.”
“Do you smoke?”
“Cigarettes? No. Why do you ask?”
“And the Society, it doesn’t blow people up? Not even in self-defense?”
His strong jaw tensed. “We’ve already been over this. No.”
“Like with car bombs,” she said.
His expression became rock hard, steeled eyes glaring at a small, innocent bird flitting from one branch to another outside. He gave the poor little creature a pass and instead turned that angry look on her. She didn’t need his mental walls to come down or the ability to read minds to know her questions hurt him. A lot. He faced forward again.
“In what possible situation would a car bomb constitute self-defense?” he asked.
“None.”
If possible, the real Jack, the one she’d connected with on a primal level removed himself even further from her ability to sense, trapped in a chain of thought she couldn’t penetrate. Whatever it was he thought about looped over and over, growing bigger and badder in his mind with each revolution.
“The photos on the floor of your cell. I’m supposedly responsible for all of that,” he said.
“Yes. Grey Man said you enjoy it.”
Self-consciously, he touched his cheek, the one made different from an old injury.
“Jack.” She laid her hand on his shoulder. “You aren’t the only one who has felt the connection between us. I’ve noticed it for a while. I just didn’t realize what it was. At first I thought it was because you were a figment of my imagination and why wouldn’t I feel a connection to someone protective and kind I made up to keep me sane while Grey Man was working me over.”
Jack’s expression softened at hearing this, but his taut stance didn’t relax.
“Then I found out Grey Man knew about my dreams,” she continued, “and he told me you were the one that did those horrible things and I thought, maybe that’s where the connection comes from. I might have seen you in those places–”
“Wait,” he said, jolting back to the here and now. “What dreams?”
“The ones about terrorists. Or they’re not always terrorists. Other types of violence, too. You don’t have them?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Tell me,” she said, “the embassy in the Middle East. How many did he kill?”
Jack frowned. Held up his hand. “Back up a minute. Which embassy?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You should know more about it than I do by now from the news. I had the dream…I’d say I had it last night, only I never know what time it is in the cell. But it should have happened already.”
“Hold up,” he said. “You’re losing me. You have dreams that come true?”
“It’s more like I’m there. It feels real. You know how dreams are half symbol, how, if you try to remember them when you wake up, they don’t make sense half the time?”
“Like your boss has the head of a poisonous lion fish or a giant shredder is eating your house? Something like that?”
“Wow, you have issues,” she said.
“I have issues?”
“Just saying. My normal dreams aren’t anything like that.”
“Whatever.” He shook off her criticism. “So all those photos I saw were of–”
“A lot of the deaths I’ve witnessed first hand. In the nightmares anyway. Some he showed me were just things everyone has seen in the news the last couple of years.”
“Do the nightmares happen in real time? Like you’re there at that exact moment people die? Or do your dreams take place before or after the real event?”
“Mostly real time, but every once in a while I get them a few hours before. Never more than a day ahead. Never after the fact.”
“And you had one, not that long ago about a bombing?”
“Yes.”
“All right.” He grasped her upper arms firmly. It wasn’t an aggressive move. Instead, it grounded her. “I need you to think about your dream, in every detail. I want you to describe it to me. Everything you can remember. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She went through the nightmare with him. The narrow, sandy street. The little boy on the bike. The building with the American flag. The blue Mercedes. The explosion.
He shook his head. “As far as I know, there hasn’t been an embassy bombing in the Middle East, Afghanistan or anywhere else since you’ve been taken. But I spent half of yesterday driving here, an
d then most of last night searching for you in the fields.”
He asked for clarification. “Did you see anything that would tell you where you were? Street signs? Names of businesses?”
“The market across the street had something, but it was in a language…I don’t, I didn’t recognize it. It’s not the Latin alphabet like English or German or French.”
“Arabic? Was it Persian script?”
“No idea. It just wasn’t a Western language.”
“All right. Now, the building. You’re sure it was an embassy?”
“I saw an American flag and some soldiers at a narrow metal gate. Are there any other places besides embassies that have that?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. “That’s not my thing. Tell me about the building. How tall? What color? What’s it made of?”
She worked to reconstruct the image in her mind. “Three stories. Tan. Made of stone, but the blocks in all different sizes, and they’d moved some massive cement barricades out of the way in front of it.”
“Anything else?”
“Not that I can think of…wait. The wall facing the street was solid, but it used to have windows. They’d filled them in with more stone.”
“Good. That’s good, Lara. Hold tight.”
He stood up, retrieved the satellite phone from where he’d set it just inside the pantry and hit redial. He walked further into the storage room as he talked, again to someone he called Gavin. Blocked by the door, and with his voice low, she tried, but couldn’t understand any more of Jack’s side of the conversation.
He stuck his head out of the pantry. “What year and model Mercedes?”
“Do I look like someone who would know that?”
Impatient, he muttered something unintelligible, no doubt a non-PC comment about women and car knowledge.
“Old or new?” he asked her.
“Older than me, and it made that odd puttering-clickety noise that some Mercedes make.”
He spoke into the phone. “Seventies era, would be my guess, possibly early 80s. A diesel. Probably the W123 body. Don’t know what the model number would be overseas.”
Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) Page 13
