Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel)

by Aileen Harkwood

  She sighed deeply. “Not long. I’m not sure he’ll last the drive to The House.”

  “Doesn’t have to,” Rafe said. “They’ve got a helicopter transporting the Lost One there right now. He just has to make it off this mountain and then another three miles down the road to an area open enough for the chopper to land. Once it’s dropped off the Lost One, it’ll circle back and fetch him.”

  Poppy quietly contemplated Jack’s immobile features.

  “Pray,” she said.

  “Not the religious type.”

  “Me neither,” she said.

  He nodded. “Will do.”

  Chapter 28

  Home, as Gavin put it, was apparently an ER, a very tiny one. When they rolled her in, she found herself in a room more appropriate in size to a private doctor’s surgical suite. It had just two emergency beds and no windows. She didn’t remember the helicopter landing, or the route they’d taken to push her stretcher here.

  “One, two, three,” a man’s voice said, and several sets of hands lifted her, transferring her to one of the beds.

  Scissors cut away her clothes, and snipped away the dirty, bloody bandages around her injured hand, while she moaned incoherently and thrashed half-heartedly. People asked her questions, but she wasn’t certain if she answered. Vial after vial of her blood was drawn, the vials capped with a variety of happily colored tops. Individual faces among the many working over her disappeared and came back, everything done in a flurry of activity. Contrasted with her dulled, slowed senses, she felt like she was an immobile object in a sped up time-lapse video.

  Through all of this, one thought stuck in her mind and wouldn’t come dislodged.

  Jack.

  She knew something was wrong with him. Catastrophically wrong. She didn’t know how she knew he was in grave trouble, yet the feeling persisted. Like another needle, this one to the chest, the knowledge knifed its way into her heart and stayed there, with no one to pull it out. Its icy panic festered and grew until, in her disoriented state, she began crying uncontrollably.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” a nurse said to her. “I know it hurts, but we’re going to make it better soon.”

  “No,” Lara said. “That’s not why I’m crying.”

  If someone asked her why she cried, she wasn’t aware of answering.

  Minutes later, she picked up and latched onto another snippet of conversation she knew was important.

  “You’re AB neg, aren’t you?” Someone, a doctor, Lara thought, asked a woman who stood by her bed with a clipboard.

  “Yes,” the woman said.

  “Forget the intake form,” the man told her. “We aren’t going to get anything sensible from her now. They need all the AB neg they can get on the other side. He crashed twice on the way here.”

  “Jack,” Lara said. “Jack’s in trouble. Someone help him.”

  “We know, Lara,” the doctor said. “We are. He’s got our best team with him on the hospital’s other side. Let’s concentrate on you. Okay?”

  Lara wouldn’t say, okay. A part of her, she could only describe it as sheer will, had hold of something critical and precious. She could feel it in her grasp, insubstantial yet glowing with brilliant golden light and stretched to the point of breaking. So thin and fragile was it, she knew the slightest wrong move could destroy it. She was the only one who saw it, the only one who could keep it from breaking. If she did as the doctor asked and relaxed, she’d have to let go.

  Letting go, would be letting go forever.

  “You’re going to feel sleepy now, Lara,” the doctor said. “Don’t fight it. We’re going to take good care of you.”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t do it. Please, don’t.”

  Lara woke. Her eyelids flickered and then closed….

  She woke again, annoyed by an extremely noisy bird outside somewhere. Her eyes closed again….

  She woke a third time, now able to focus her eyes and register her surroundings. She occupied a hospital bed with crisp, surprisingly soft and comfortable sheets, in a small, but private room. Unlike the typical hospital room, this one had personality. It wasn’t her personality. The furnishings weren’t ones she would have chosen, since she wasn’t overly fond of yellow, but it was at least a thousand percent better than the typical institutional setting. The bird that had interrupted her sleep, continued to chatter on the other side of a set of French doors. She watched it hop from branch to branch in a small potted tree that sat in the corner of the balcony beyond the doors.

  Lara squinted at the view, trying to figure out what was off about it, and then she understood. A masonry wall that rose a good ten feet high enclosed her balcony and completely blocked the view of whatever might lie beyond it. Light was allowed down into the well, since the sun was currently directly overhead, but even if she’d managed to use the nearby furniture to construct steps to the top of her balcony’s enclosure, thick wire mesh covered the hole the mesh so tight, she wouldn’t be able to fit a pinky through the gaps.

  She sighed.

  Another prison.

  This one was better, but she was still a captive.

  “I haven’t figured out how it got in.”

  The woman’s thoughtful voice startled Lara. She hadn’t realized anyone was here in the room with her. She glanced in the direction from which the voice had come and discovered a woman with short, fiery hair and bones even finer than her own Nordic ones, studying her intently. One leg was tucked up under her, while the other almost dangled, her toe, due to her petite frame, the only part of her foot making contact with the floor. Lara decided she sat that way because it was the only way for her to get comfortable in a normal-sized chair.

  Lara stared back at her, but said nothing. Since waking, she’d felt it coming on, the sadness. It welled up inside her until she feared it would burst from her eyes in a torrent of tears, or maybe do the opposite and strike her dumb, muting her emotions, and her voice for the rest of her life. She didn’t understand the sadness, or why it had sunk its teeth so fiercely into her, but its grip couldn’t be broken. The sadness had her prisoner, just as much as this room.

  “The bird,” the woman said, gesturing at the balcony with a tip of her head. “It’s trapped, but how did it get in there in the first place?”

  Muteness. That was how her heart wanted to handle the moment. She wouldn’t speak because she didn’t have anything to say.

  “I’m Poppy,” her visitor said. “I was Jack’s first Lost One. Or…” Sudden melancholy on her face mirrored Lara’s own. “…I should say I was the first he was able to save. The first two, well, he never talks about them, you know.”

  No, I didn’t, Lara wanted to respond and say, but her vocal cords wouldn’t cooperate. What was wrong with her?

  “You want to know about the balcony, don’t you? Why you can’t see out?”

  Lara’s body surprised her by allowing her to nod.

  “You’re on the non-society member’s side of the hospital,” Poppy said. “They don’t know you yet. At least not well enough to trust you. They have to protect everyone in The House. There are hundreds that live here, many of them children, as well as people with serious illnesses. Their safety depends on an outsider never knowing how to find this place.”

  “But…” Lara tried a question. The one word rasped from her throat and then her voice died.

  “But, you’re thinking, now that you know what this room looks like, all you’d have to do is visualize it while dreamrunning, and you could find your way here.”

  Lara nodded again.

  “That would be what the guards are for outside your door, and every corridor is buttoned up tighter than a hospital for the criminally insane,” Poppy explained. “Trust me. I know.”

  Lara wasn’t going to ask how Poppy knew what the inside of a psychiatric prison was like. Her expression didn’t invite the question. The two women fell silent. Finally, Lara couldn’t contain the sadness inside her any longer. It blurted out what she ne
eded to know.

  “Poppy, where’s Jack?”

  Poppy gave her a long, somber look. At first, Lara thought she wasn’t going to answer. It evidently took her some serious internal debate before she decided what to say.

  “He’s on the other side of the hospital, in intensive care.”

  “He’s–”

  “Holding on.”

  “And?”

  Poppy wouldn’t give her a direct answer. Rather, she said, “Your name was bouncing around inside him, you know. Just like the bullet. Just ricocheting around in there. I was the one who found him. Me and my partner, Rafe.”

  She paused, as the bird out on the balcony kicked up an even louder fuss.

  “It’s frantic to get out,” Poppy said. “The doors won’t open without a key. We’ll need to call someone to come and rescue it.”

  “Poppy, what about Jack?”

  Poppy returned her attention to Lara.

  “He was dead. Dead, but he wouldn’t let go of your name,” she said. “It’s what stopped the blood. He used it, like a bandage. He put it over the hole, and your name stopped the bleeding.”

  Maybe Poppy did know what the inside of a psychiatric hospital looked like. Her cryptic words made no sense to Lara.

  “Can I see him?” she asked.

  Again, Poppy evaded. “You haven’t even asked about your hand yet,” the petite woman said.

  Lara had forgotten about the injury to her hand. She looked at it now, holding up the heavily bandaged limb in front of her face. She couldn’t feel her fingers, but the length of the bandaged part suggested, she hoped, she hoped, that they and the rest of her hand hadn’t been amputated.

  When she lowered her arm back to the bed, Poppy was gone.

  Dr. Matthews, the physician in charge of her case, was her next visitor. She recognized his voice. Lara wanted to like him. He was kind, thoughtful, explained bluntly, yet compassionately that her hand, while it would look almost normal again after several surgeries, would never be the same. Still, she struggled with placing her trust in him. He’d asked for it before in the ER when he told her not to fight their help. He’d put her under, thus forcing her to let go.

  At the time, she’d been crying, rebelling at following his instructions. She hadn’t dared lose consciousness. It had been vital she hold on with all her strength.

  Why? She couldn’t remember. Hold on to what? Why was she now so upset with this man? Her anger mounted to where she no longer heard anything he said. He’d cost her something without which her life became pointless. What had he done? What had she lost? Why did she want to begin sobbing and never stop?

  “I want to see him,” she said, interrupting the doctor’s explanation of her next three scheduled surgeries.

  “I’m sorry, what–”

  “Jack. Take me to him. Now.”

  “Lara. You’ve just regained consciousness. You aren’t out of the woods yet. You could still loose the hand if you aren’t careful.”

  “Take me. I know he’s on the ‘other side’ of whatever this place is. I know you’re not supposed to let me out, but I swear, if I don’t get to see him in the next five minutes, I swear I’ll–”

  “Do what?” another voice joined the conversation.

  Gavin.

  He stood just inside the door to her room. Through the opening, Lara saw exactly what she expected to see, a corridor with two men standing guard.

  “Did anyone ever tell you that threats aren’t the best way to gain someone’s trust?” Gavin said.

  The doctor, sighing uncomfortably, took the unexpected intrusion as an opportunity to beat a hasty retreat.

  “Come on, Lara. Tell me. If you don’t get to see Jack, you’ll do what?”

  She turned away and stared at the confused bird, trapped inside her room’s faux balcony.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Can’t you tell a hollow threat from a real one? I’m as powerless here as that bird out there.”

  “But do you wish your threats weren’t hollow?”

  Lara turned back toward him, fixing him with a frustrated stare. “What do you think? Poppy just told me there are children here, somewhere. And sick people. I’m angry, but I’m not an idiot. My grief isn’t worth their lives.”

  “Grief?” he asked, puzzled by her choice of words.

  “Jack,” she said, as if that explained all. He knew more than she did about what had happened to him, so perhaps it did.

  Rather than respond, Gavin walked to the French doors, dug in his pocket and pulled out a key. He used it, opening one half only far enough to slip inside, and then closed the door behind him. Instead of trying to catch the bird with his hands, which would have been futile given the height of the enclosure, he started at one end of the three-walled space and carefully examined the barrier, brick by brick. About a third of the way, he stopped, poked an index finger into a small chink in the masonry. When he pulled it out again, powdered mortar came away. It fell and dusted the tops of his shoes.

  He’d found the hole where the bird had gotten in.

  Lara observed him reach into another pocket for a Swiss army knife, which he used to scrape away at the disintegrating mortar that held the brick in place. He removed the loosened brick and set it on a small table next to the potted tree. Then he stepped as far away from the opening as he could, to allow the bird a chance to investigate. It took mere seconds for the bird to find the exit and leave.

  Curious despite possible repercussions, Lara levered herself up on her elbows in an attempt to peer through the hole Gavin had made and see what lay beyond. She was soon disappointed. Another masonry wall faced hers, separated by only a few feet.

  Gavin returned to the room without putting the brick back in place.

  “Caged, but not powerless,” he said. “Give it a opening and it found its way out.”

  He crossed to the door leading onto the corridor, and waved to someone waiting outside. A male nurse entered her room with a wheel chair. When she expressed shock, he added, tone somber, “I was coming to get you anyway.”

  Gavin and the nurse escorted her along a maze of hallways, through several locked doors, to an elevator, also locked, and down two floors. When the elevator doors opened, it was onto a much larger facility, though still not as expansive as a city hospital. Another minute’s travel time lead them to an ICU with five beds, each in its own glass-walled treatment room.

  Every bed was filled and from her lower vantage point sitting in the chair, Lara couldn’t see any of the patients. It didn’t matter. She instantly, intuitively, knew which ICU bay belonged to Jack.

  Feeling a tug at her chest, she looked down and saw a ghostly ribbon of light enter her body over her heart. Tentatively, it curled around inside her and anchored itself there. She looked up again to find the golden thread weaving its way around equipment and other obstacles, straight for where she knew Jack lay.

  Eyes wide with astonishment, she asked Gavin and the nurse, “Do you see that?”

  “It connects you,” a now familiar female voice answered her. Poppy stepped out of Jack’s ICU. “It is you.”

  “You can see it?”

  “No,” she said. “But I can sense it. I can sense anything to do with a person’s body.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Gavin asked.

  Poppy gazed at him and shook her head, the message clear. Leave it.

  Ignoring protests from the nurse, Lara struggled up out of the wheel chair and made unsteady progress on foot toward Jack. The golden thread of light moved with her, never giving up its place in her heart. She knew what it represented, Jack’s energy. His presence and soul connecting to hers. This thread was the precious thing she’d been holding onto with everything she had in her, just before they’d put her under. How had she even known of its existence? Did it matter? One heart had spoken to the other and she’d been terrified that by releasing it, Jack would cease to exist in that moment, moving beyond this life to a place she couldn’t go.

>   So faint was the golden thread, Lara knew what she saw when she reached Jack’s side would be bad.

  Her heart jumped in her chest, alarm closing her throat.

  It was worse. He couldn’t be alive. Not like that.

  “Is it just the machines? Keeping him alive?” she asked. Her gaze took in the device that helped him breathe, another that tracked his vitals, tubes and wire leads everywhere.

  “Until he comes out of it.”

  “But he will come out of it?”

  Poppy gave an inelegant shrug. On the surface, it appeared callous, but Lara could see the tears just barely held back.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “The bullet didn’t hit anything major,” Gavin, who stood just behind her, said.

  “It was the blood loss. Massive blood loss,” Poppy said.

  “How long has he been like this?”

  “You’ve both been under for more than a week.”

  “A week!”

  No one spoke. What was there to add?

  Lara leaned over the rail guarding the side of Jack’s hospital bed and ran her fingers gently through the panther-black lock of hair that had fallen into his face. His cheeks, so sunken! Skin ashen, but puffy in odd places. Those indigo blue eyes hid away behind bruised lids, also sinking inward. The sight terrified her more than anything Grey Man had ever done while she was his captive.

  She lowered the rail and sat on the edge of the bed, fingers now moving over his bandaged shoulder where the bullet struck, attempting to soothe away the hurt.

  “Leave us,” she said.

  “Ms. Freberg,” the nurse said, the start of an objection.

  “I need to be with him.”

  “He’s not strong enough for lengthy vis–”

  “Leave. Me. With. Him,” she said. “Now.”

  “All right,” Gavin said, signaling to Poppy, the male nurse and a doctor that had just made it to the doorway to see what was going on. “Let’s give them some space.”