Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) (14 page)

Jack’s indigo eyes regarded her piteously.

“Sorry. You don’t get a choice.”

“What?”

“It’s who you are,” he said. “Look.”

He gestured at her injured hand. Only it wasn’t injured. The bandages were gone, her palm whole, just like she’d seen in the nightmare with the little boy and the car bomb.

“How? I don’t understand,” she said, paused. A moment later, she sighed and closed her eyes in disappointment, face lowered. “Oh. Just another dream.”

“Lara.”

She paid no attention to him.

“Lara.”

Why should she? Jack was a figment, after all.

“Look at me.”

His fingers touched her chin and urged her head up again.

“
Look
at me.”

She opened her eyes.

“You’re not dreaming. You’re dream
running
.”

“Whatever. You’d expect someone to babble nonsense at you in a dream.”

He pinched her arm, hard.

“Oww!”

“Have you ever felt pain in a dream?”

She thought about it. Had she? Yes, but only in her nightmares. And this was different than those, if only because it was blissfully free of the violence that inhabited the others.

She let his question slide, and examined the room in which they both sat. Bamboo flooring under her, warm against her skin. She reached out and fingered a wall. Like cement, but not, the surface was buffed, polished, the same soft brown as the traditional clay containers for bonsai trees, only much, much harder.

But no windows and only one door, just like where they were keeping–

My body?

She flashed back to what she’d seen on the floor of her cell. The dead woman.

Me
.

“I’m finally dead then,” she said.

“No. Why do you keep saying that?” he asked her, obviously disturbed by the question. “Don’t you trust your senses at all?” He rapped the floor with his knuckles. “What does that sound like?”

“Wood,” she answered, but brushed that aside. “How else do you explain the body I saw on the floor of my cell? The one that looks exactly like me?”

“It wasn’t a body. It’s you. Alive and, well, not so kicking at the moment, but alive.”

“That’s me? Back in the cell. I’m there.”

“Yes.”

“But I’m also here.”

“Yes.”

“Wow, the drugs these guys have are truly–”

In one fluid, powerful motion he vaulted to his feet, and pulled her up beside him. His hands gripped hers and she expected to cry out in pain because of her injury, but here she was whole, of course. Her injury didn’t exist. He forced her to meet his direct scrutiny. Lara looked into Jack’s eyes and experienced a frisson of alarm. This was a dangerous man, someone who could and would kill if necessary. Could he really be the terrorist Grey Man claimed he was?

“What kind of game are you playing with me?” he demanded.

“Game?”

“You know how to dreamrun. Don’t pretend you don’t. You appeared at my safe house after they showed you the photo, and now look at you.” He held up her miraculously perfect hand. “You shouldn’t know how to make your twin whole. Not yet. Not if you’re as inexperienced as you’d like me to think you are. And yet you’ve projected yourself here completely whole and unharmed. Even your bruises and other injuries are gone. Only an experienced runner can do that.”

What was he talking about? It sounded like utter gibberish.

“And you kill people,” she said.

“Oh, would you get off that!” he said. “I’m not a terrorist and you know it.”

“How am I supposed to know it? Or whether or not to believe anything you say? Or even understand what you’re talking about?”

“I don’t kill people,” he said, then amended that. “Unless they’re trying to kill me first.”

“Well, someone killed the woman back in my cell,” she persisted. “And when I woke up, you were the one I saw standing over her. Did you do it?”

He glared at her in disbelief.

“I’m going to bang my head against a wall,” he said. “You…arguing with you is the most frustrating thing that…”

He was out the door. What astonished her more, considering the last few days, was that the door didn’t shut. She stared at an open door, one that invited her to get up, walk to it and exit.

She started toward it, meaning to follow Jack, then halted when she spotted the mirror mounted on the back of the door, and herself reflected in it.

He was right! She looked whole, normal, not a mark on her.

None of this makes sense
.

She studied the rest of the mirror’s reflection, the room in which she stood. Windowless, yes, but comfortably furnished. A king-sized bed with a plush mattress so high it looked like it needed its own ramp to climb up into it. Rich bed linens in chocolate and burnished gold. Tasteful antiques. Warm pools of light cast by several lamps to ward off the dark.

He stood still in the hallway outside, his back to her. Unlike the place where they kept her, this corridor resembled one you’d find in a normal home, and led to a comfortable living area. In fact everything about the place, except for the lack of windows, was built like any other residence.

“Your cell is better than mine, Jack,” she came up behind him and said.

“This isn’t a cell. It’s a safe house.”

“They’re keeping us in a safe house?”

“No,” he said, but didn’t elaborate.

Lara heard his next thought, loud and clear.

She’s playing me
.

“But we’re still underground.”

Dammit. And I fell right into it
, he continued to berate himself.
Can anyone be more pathetic?

“How many days?” she asked.

“What?” he said, his internal monologue cut off by her question.

“How long since they took me?”

Jack glanced at a small clock on a table. It read 6:17.

“Four,” he said. “They took you the night of the 16th. It’s now the morning of the 20th.”

Lara stepped around and faced him. She put her hand on his upper chest near one shoulder. She naturally gravitated toward him. Some inexplicable quirk of her soul craved constant physical contact with him.

“Jack, may I see the sun?”

He tensed. Immediately she knew she’d asked the wrong thing, or at least a big thing.

“Would you show it to me?” she asked.

She watched the play of emotions over his face. He wanted to give her what she asked for, but something in him held back. She’d have to call it duty. He had the look of a man who followed his sense of right and wrong, which warred with Grey Man’s description of him. She simply couldn’t view him as the depraved killer Grey Man described, casually standing by with a cigarette while an old woman was strung up by her ankles and tortured. Instead, at that moment, her eyes were drawn to the left side of his face, and the cheekbone she’d guessed had once been shattered. Even more than his eyes, she read that feature as the most vulnerable part of his body, not because it hadn’t properly healed—it had—but because of something it represented from his past.

“Come on,” he said.

He led her down the hall, into the living area, tastefully, and comfortingly furnished as the rest, and stopped in front of a door. It looked like wood, but when he opened it, it swung inward with the weight of solid steel and was twice as thick as a typical door.

They climbed the set of stairs in front of them to a small, nearly pitch-black space. Only the light glowing from the stairs below them showed her they stood in a pantry, its shelves lined with canned foods and other supplies. A few steps later, they emerged inside another lightless room, this one smelling of age and seasoned wood. Jack flicked on a light switch.

She glanced around at the interior, courtesy of a low wattage fluorescent in the ceiling. It was an old cabin, the logs that made up the walls hand-hewn without the aid of power tools. Scoured by at least one, perhaps two, centuries of shoes and boots crossing it, the floor sagged and sloped at a slight angle. Jack went to one of two shuttered windows, threw back the bolts holding the wood in place and folded the hinged panels out of the way.

Pre-dawn light, fresh and cool blue and totally, undeniably real streamed into the cabin.

Crying out in relief, Lara hurried over and stood beside Jack, looking out at the sun’s glow concealed behind gently worn mountains. Everywhere she looked were trees and sky. For the first time in days, she smiled. She took a deep breath and let it out, allowing happiness and peace to sink into her bones.

“I’m really here,” she said.

“Of course, you are.”

“I mean you can’t fake that.”

He frowned at the lack of trust her words expressed. Quickly, she amended them.

“I mean that my mind can’t fake this. It isn’t that talented. It can’t make up what I’m seeing. Nature is too perfect to be perfectly imitated.”

He returned her happy smile with a serious one that barely lifted the corners of his mouth.

“You really don’t know, do you? How could you not know what you are?” he asked.

“Who am I, Jack?”

“I already told you.”

Mine
.

That one word from him, thought but unspoken, sent a delectable shiver whispering along the nape of her neck. His gaze was wolfish, possessive. Lara swore she felt a spike of his energy reach out to her. She gasped. Heat flared within her. Though he didn’t move a muscle, his touch skipped along her skin, trembling in awe, ready to take, but only if she offered. So hungry to give and have someone give back. His face mirrored all of this. Was it possible a look alone could bring someone to climax? If so, this was the look.

In contrast, his words were all business.

“You’re a dreamrunner,” he said. “Like me. That wasn’t a dead woman in your cell. That was you. You’re able to split from yourself and travel while in a type of sleep state. It isn’t true sleep. It’s
running
state. You are physically in two places right now.”

Wow, crazy talk
.

But didn’t it make a weird kind of sense? He was correct. Her senses did tell her she was standing in a historic cabin, looking out at a mountain landscape in the hour before dawn. She saw the trees. Heard birds waking and nattering in the trees. Smelled the dust on the floor disturbed by their footsteps. She reached out and her index finger trailed along a large splinter of wood coming loose from one log.

Okay. Let’s go with this for now. What other choice do you have, really?

What about her hand, though? What was the explanation for how she’d injured it?

“Before, when Grey Man sent me to your bedroom, you yelled at me not to touch anything. Then when I did…” She held up her left hand and turned it over to stare at the palm. Perfect, uninjured. No bandages or blood, just smooth, regular skin.

“That’s because you weren’t fully formed,” he said. “You ran, but when you came through the barrier, you didn’t complete visualizing yourself. Your twin, that’s what we call a runner’s second body, wasn’t stable. You were still in the process of forming a body. Technically, when you grabbed the doorknob, part of your hand materialized inside the knob.

“Oh, God,” she felt sick all over again. “And now? Here?”

“You’re good. You did it right this time.”

“So I can–”

“Touch anything you like. Fully interact with your environment. Excuse me,” he said, and backed away from the window, leaving Lara to think this through. She immediately felt the loss of his nearness.

Jack opened a cupboard in the pantry, took out a satellite phone, and unplugged it from a trickle charger. He tapped in a number and held the phone to his ear, waiting for the call to be picked up.

“Gavin?” he said. “It’s Jack.

Terse shouting came through the handset; loud enough that Lara could hear it from across the room. Jack winced. Lara couldn’t make out what was being said.

“You can thank me later,” Jack said, cutting off the other’s tirade.

He looked up. Breaking his previously somber mood, he smiled at her conspiratorially, dark blue eyes crinkling at the corners.

“You can thank me, because I’ve got her. Lara’s here with me…No, her twin. She’s still back where they’re holding her…Yes, I have an idea. You ever hear of the ADEA? Yes, that Cold War agency. They built a military prison in the 1960s…subterranean. Right, total overreaction to the Bay of Pigs. I don’t know what happened to it, but it was located in…okay, you know, then. Maryland.”

Jack listened. A question was asked.

“No. No windows. She doesn’t know where I–”

The brief glimpse of Jack in a lighter mood vanished, replaced by the dead serious tone in his voice as he regarded her, and then answered.

“No. She’s not compromised.”

A long silence from both parties. Finally, the person on the other end repeated the question.

“No. I’m sure,” he said.

But Jack didn’t look convinced. He appeared worried. He turned away and lowered his voice. She heard him anyway.

“Taylor? No. I was about to ask her…Yes, we’ll be there…Hurry. Her twin seems fine. The other, it’s touch-and-go…Thanks.”

He hung up.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“The cavalry,” he said.

“Coming to rescue me? Back there? The cell?”

He nodded.

“So what do we do now?”

“We wait.”