by Dima Zales
“Leal,” Kain corrects.
“Right. Did Leal have a grievance with the last lady—”
“Gemma,” Kain provides.
“Yes, Gemma. Did Leal—”
“Leal only had one friend—Ryan, the elf,” Hekima says, his grandfatherly features wreathed in pity. “Nobody on the Council liked him much, except maybe Kain and the other vampires.”
“Oh?”
“I’d go as far as to say I considered Leal a friend,” Kain says. “Or at least an ally.”
“But why does everyone else not like the guy?” I resist the temptation to open the folder and look at the man in question.
“His powers,” Kain says. With a sharp-edged smile, he adds, “He was a dreamwalker.”
Another dreamwalker? I glare at Kain. “Why are you only telling me about that now?”
The vampire shrugs. “When was I supposed to tell you? Rumor has it, he had blackmail material on all the other members of the Council. They thought he’d gathered it in their dreams.”
The ache in my temples intensifies. “So you’re telling me he might’ve been killed for snooping around people’s dreams?”
“It’s feasible,” Hekima says gently.
I take a deep breath and try not to look at Pom, who’s rapidly turning black on my wrist. “But that’s exactly what you’re asking me to do. What’s to stop them from wanting to kill me?”
Kain waves dismissively. “You should worry about the murderer. That’s who’ll really want to kill you—if you’re any good.”
“Thanks. That makes me feel so much better.”
Kain smirks. “If I were you, I’d do my best not to find any compromising information inside the Councilors’ heads.”
I cup my hands over my eyes, the enormity of the task hitting me like a punch to the face.
“Why don’t you do your thing with those Council members who have more reason to be under suspicion?” Hekima suggests. “Anyone strong.”
I lower my hands. “Sure, I’ll start with the ones who can rip me in half. I feel safer already.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” Kain says. “Still, I want you to set up a dream link to everyone on the Council. Even me.”
I take another breath, trying to think like the detective I’m not. “This Leal, did he leave any notes? As you said, he knew secrets about the Council. Maybe he wrote them down somewhere.”
And maybe, just maybe, he also wrote something about the art of dreamwalking itself. I’ve never met any dreamwalkers besides Mom—we’re pretty scarce on Gomorrah—and between her diligently avoiding the topic of our abilities and the fact that I never received any formal training in how to use my powers, there’s a lot I don’t know about my own kind.
“I’ll take you to his lab,” Kain says, his expression unreadable.
Hekima withdraws his illusion, and the dreary cell room comes back—as does the stench.
“Let me know if I can help any further,” Hekima tells Kain. “And Bailey, if you need to know anything about the history of the Council or anything else, I’m here for you.”
Felix chuckles. “Good old Hekima. He’ll look for any excuse to run an Orientation.”
I smile at the elderly illusionist. “Thank you. I’ll find you if I need that.”
Hekima’s dark eyes twinkle. “I guess I’ll see you tonight in my dreams.”
“Not if I’m just setting up a connection,” I say.
Hekima leaves, and Kain picks up the folder and strides out.
I sprint to keep up with him.
A few winding corridors later, we arrive at the lab I saw in Hekima’s recreation of the grisly bird attack. Though someone has cleaned up, I can picture the bloody corpse all too easily. What’s worse is that the doves are here now, roosting in the same cages they broke out of to murder their caretaker. And the smell emanating from those cages…
“Creepy,” Felix remarks just as Kain says, “I’m going to leave you to it. Be back in an hour.”
Hundreds of saffron-colored eyes stare at me hungrily from the cages. Before I can beg Kain not to leave me alone with the stinky killer birds, he disappears, closing the door behind him.
As if that’s what they had been waiting for all along, the dule of murderous feathered beasts begins to coo menacingly.
Chapter Fourteen
The cooing swells to fill the room, mimicking the growing knot in my throat. But the birds don’t attack me. They don’t even try to escape from their cages. They just coo and eat grain from their feeders, and on occasion, I hear a wet splatter as one of them poops.
Serious eww.
Despite the stench choking my nostrils, the death-by-birds-inspired adrenaline begins to leave my system. And as it does, my eyes get gritty, my lids grow heavy, and a yawn escapes my mouth. Oh yeah, I’m starting to feel like someone who hasn’t slept for four months.
I’d give a lot of money to take a nap right now. Then again, needing money is how I ended up so sleep deprived in the first place.
There’s no time to sleep, though, no matter how I feel, and it’s too soon to take another dose of my “medicine.” So I do the next best thing, an exercise called bellows breath. I inhale deeply and rapidly for a short while, as if hyperventilating. Bellows breath can give a little burst of energy in a pinch, and I’m certainly in a pinch.
It helps a little. Instead of a ten out of ten on the horribleness scale, I only feel like a good, solid nine.
“You okay?” Felix asks softly.
I take out my phone and furtively text, Never been better. Time to get back to my investigation.
“You can just talk out loud,” he says. “I doubt Leal’s lab has any listening devices.”
You sure? I text.
“Positive.”
“All right,” I say out loud. Even if someone is listening, they’ll probably just think I’m crazy.
I look around, taking in the surreal paintings on the walls around me.
Stinky birds aside, this lab clearly belonged to a dreamwalker.
“Very cool,” Felix says as I walk over to stand before a famous painting by Salvador Dalí—Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Awakening. “Makes me wonder what it would’ve been like to walk in the artist’s dreams.”
“Maybe Leal did just that,” I say as I turn to see a painting depicting a staircase that loops in a circle instead of going up or down. Such structures can’t exist in the real world, but they can exist in art and dreams. In fact, I have stairs similar to these in my own dream palace.
“That’s M.C. Escher,” Felix says needlessly. “That piece is called Ascending and Descending.”
I force myself to ignore the cool art and search for anything relevant to the case. But there are no notes on the desk, no diary on the bookshelf, nothing else I can use. If the doves were parrots, I could ask them to repeat something, but as is, this is leading nowhere.
I study the way the art is laid out, using my dreamwalker’s eye for detail.
Aha. Every painting is hung flush with the wall, except one. Ascending and Descending is not. I pull the heavy frame away from the wall and peer at the back. Score. There’s a pocket here, and something inside it.
Fishing out the small device, I examine it carefully.
“Gomorran comms,” Felix says, confirming my guess.
“Must be generations old.” I turn the clunky little thing in my hands. “My unit was ancient, and it was way sleeker.”
“Even an old comms device probably has a petabyte of data and more processing power than any supercomputer on this world,” Felix says reverently. “Be careful with that.”
“Otherland tech is totally forbidden,” I say in my best imitation of Kain. In my normal voice, I add, “Unless you’re on the Council, that is.”
“They’re hypocrites,” Felix says. “At least the dreamwalker hid the device. Some of the other Councilors break their own rules a lot more openly.”
Feeling a yawn
coming on, I shake my head. “Back to the investigation. Let’s get into this thing.” I bring the comms device closer to the camera. “This is your chance to show off your powers, in case that’s not obvious.”
He sighs. “I can’t.”
“What?” I tap the earpiece as if that’s going to change his answer.
“I mean, I could, but it would have to be in person. The device is not connected to the internet and—”
“You can’t be here in person.” I twirl around to remind him where I am. “Maybe I can ask them to take me to you? But no, then they’d know about you.”
“Yeah, I’d rather not be pulled into this. But there is a way I can get into the castle in person without much fuss. Ariel’s cousin’s best friend’s daughter is having her Mandate ceremony there in a couple of days.”
“Oh? What does that have to do with you?”
“Mandate ceremonies are a big deal. Everyone attends to show support, so it won’t be suspicious if I tag along with Ariel.”
“I hope I’m alive by then,” I say dubiously.
“Well… maybe I can get some of the data from the cache right now. But we risk damaging the device.”
“Do it then—but carefully.” I don’t think I have a couple of days to dick around.
“I’ll do my best. Put the comms on top of your phone.”
I set my Earth phone on the desk and place the comms device on top.
“Now be quiet,” he says.
I watch the device for any sign of something. Just as I’m about to ask Felix what gives, a strange magenta energy snakes from the phone into the comms unit.
“Got something,” he crows. “A few excerpts from some kind of diary. Emailing them to you now.”
I pocket the device and open the first email from Felix on my phone.
Roger came back with the newest batch of the medicine today. The bird I tested it on fell asleep instantly, and stayed asleep for six hours, three hours longer than with the prior formulation. But just like before, it died instead of waking up. Still, at only $10 per dove, this provides unlimited access to the dream world. Next time, I’ll have him—
The passage ends there.
“That’s it?” I ask Felix. “Any chance to see what came before or after this excerpt?”
“No, but there’s another piece when you’re ready.”
“In a second,” I say and start searching the room again.
But no matter how hard I try, I find no sign of the strange drug described in the email.
“Why would he kill birds by making them dream?” Felix asks as I finish looking through a nearby desk.
“To enter the dream world without falling asleep.” I look behind yet another painting—to no avail. “I use Pom for that. I guess this Leal guy found his own method.”
“By killing the poor doves,” Felix says disapprovingly.
“Right.” I cast an uneasy glance at the cooing creatures. “They got their revenge in the end, didn’t they?”
“I guess. Sending you the other bit of text I found in the cache.”
I check behind the last painting. Nothing. Oh, well.
I open my email.
Another werewolf, another failure. The inner wolf and the man attacked me together yet again, and I found them too hard to fight off. Lost my powers for the day as a result. Werewolves are proving to be the most difficult of all Cognizant to dreamwalk in. Eduardo isn’t making it easy, either. He forbade his pack from allowing me to continue this research. The son of a bitch likes me powerless against him. I’ll have to master the multibody technique if I’m to succeed. That way, one of my consciousnesses can attack the wolf while the other deals with the man. Alas, I fail at this too. Maybe if—
Crap, cut short again. I tap the earpiece. “Hey, I want to read the rest of that.”
“Sorry, there’s only one more tidbit left, and it’s from a different part of the diary.”
“Send it to me.”
“One sec. I want to understand what he meant by what you just read.”
“Isn’t it obvious? Werewolves are a problem when it comes to dreamwalking. I’ve heard of this sort of thing with some other types of Cognizant. They say you can never sneak into the dreams of gnomes, for instance, not unless they let you in.”
“Right, that part was more or less clear,” Felix says. “But I don’t get the part about losing his powers and the multibody thing.”
I reread the message. “I think he meant that he had to use his dreamwalking power so much inside the werewolf’s dream that he ran out of juice. There’s a limit to how much dreamwalking one can do in a day. He must’ve reached that limit.”
“And the multibody bit?”
I read the text once more. “Sounds like he’s talking about having two bodies in the dream world that can simultaneously think and feel. If so, that’s very intriguing and not something I’ve ever tried to do. I can sort of leave my body and reenter it, but that’s not the same. I’m going to have to give this a shot one day.”
“How trippy,” Felix says. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in two places at once, even in a dream.”
“Logic takes a vacation in the dream world, that’s for sure. Now stop stalling and send me the next piece of this diary or whatever.”
He types something so loudly I can hear it. “Done.”
I pull up the email.
Any dream can be hidden behind the black window—my own, a dream of another subject, or the dream of the subject herself. The remarkable thing is that when a dream is a memory of the subject, the memory itself becomes deeply suppressed. She has no recollection of the events at all. More fascinating still is that the subject doesn’t recover her memory when I reenter the black window. The breaking of the black window is the only way the subject gets to experience the events locked behind it. If it’s her memory, she recovers them, but if it’s an implanted dream, she dismisses it as a figment of her—
It cuts off.
Disappointed, I reread what is there. “You sure there was nothing more about this?”
“No, why?” Felix asks. “Does it make sense to you?”
“Vaguely.” I greedily scan every sentence for clues. “Whatever this black window is, it seems to let you erase people’s painful memories. I’ve never heard of that.”
“That’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind kind of shit.” Felix’s voice is full of awe. “Makes sense, though—you do deal with the subconscious. Still, scary.”
“Yeah.” I pocket my phone. “And the bit about hiding his own or other people’s dreams inside someone else’s dreamscape—that’s just as crazy. It would give dreamwalkers a way to hide information so that only another dreamwalker could find it.”
“Not the best method,” Felix says. “What if the person who has information hidden inside their dreams dies?”
We both fall silent. It’s obvious he’s thinking what I’m thinking: Could Leal have hidden something inside the dreams of the other victims, something that someone killed them to hide? But if so, who?
I head for the door. “I think I’d better get more information to work with.” Another yawn threatens as I walk, and I instinctively pat the vial of vampire blood in my pocket.
Wait a second. It’s too soon for another hit, so why am I even thinking about this? Is this a craving? The start of an addiction?
I’d better keep a close eye on this.
Performing the bellows breath technique to wake myself a little, I reach for the door knob.
What the hell? It’s locked.
Did Kain do that?
That’s just great. Now I need to do the opposite of bellows breath to fight my panic.
“He said he’d be back in an hour,” Felix chimes in, as if reading my mind. “You don’t have to wait long.”
“Still.” I eye the cooing doves. “These cannibals have a taste for dreamwalker flesh. We’re probably delicious.”
“Cannibal doves would eat other doves, not p
eople.”
“Thanks, Felix, that really puts my mind at ease.” Before he can reply, I say, “In any case, the good thing about having Pom on my wrist is that I’m always ready to go into the dream world. Since I’m stuck here, I’m going to test out some of the things the dead dreamwalker was talking about.”
Raising my hand so that Felix can see, I touch Pom’s fur and slip into a trance.
Chapter Fifteen
The yummy scent of manna fills my nostrils as I appear in the lobby of my dream palace.
Pom pops up next to me. “I’ve missed you.”
I grin at him. “We’re attached, you know. But yes, I’ve missed you too.”
Pom turns purple, and his ears flap in a sort of happy dance.
I tell him an edited version of the events that have transpired so far, which boils down to getting “hired” to solve a case for the New York Council.
When I get to the part about Valerian, he says, “I can tell if he really looks the way you think. I can see through any illusion.”
I look my furry friend up and down, which doesn’t take long, given his small stature. “How?”
He floats up to my eye level. “I see through your eyes when I’m awake. Pretty sure the illusionist would have to target me with his powers to make us both see the same thing.”
“See through my eyes, right. Perfectly normal behavior for a symbiont. Not something a parasite would do at all.”
“Indeed,” he says, oblivious to my sarcasm. “And it can be useful.”
I snort. “Not really. You said you have to be awake. You’re almost never awake.”
His ears turn the color of carrots. “But you can wake me up.”
“I can? How?”
“By mentally shouting for me.” A lightbulb appears above his head. “Why don’t you wake up and try it right now?”
Intrigued, I exit the dream world and open my eyes back at the lab.
Pom, I mentally shout. Pom, wake up!
Then I look at my wrist.
The way to tell if he’s awake is that his fur will start to express his emotions instead of mine. Oh, and on a rare occasion, he’ll deign to speak as a voice in my head.
