Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) (22 page)
Read Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) Online
Authors: Aileen Harkwood
Lara nodded, put the shell box on the room’s small, cottage-style dresser.
“Thank you for this,” she said. “It means a lot.”
“I’m glad,” Poppy said. She paused and Lara could tell she’d stopped herself before adding something else.
“What is it? Lara said.
“You know you’ll never be able to go home again, right? Back to your old life?” Poppy gestured at the box and the clothes, jewelry and shoes. “That’s it. That’s all you’re going to get to take away with you.”
Lara nodded again, but mechanically. She heard, already understood why she couldn’t go back, but wasn’t ready to take it in.
“You grabbed what I would have grabbed if my place was on fire. And then some,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Poppy said. She headed for the door, but paused when she gripped the handle. “You’re the right one for him. Exactly the right one.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s been five days since you and I last talked.”
“Five days! But Jack and I–”
“Exactly. Jack was basically dead. You went in there and spent almost four days in the fields bringing him back to us. At one point we thought you’d both stopped breathing. In the end, however, you emerged whole and healthy. You healed him. Miraculously. Not me. Not the doctors. You. I love Jack, but I can’t say with absolute confidence that I would have gone that far.”
Lara’s stunned look remained seconds after Poppy left the room.
A nurse with a wheel chair was her next visitor, taking her down to Dr. Matthews for an appointment to check the progress of her last surgery. After that it was off for another round of tests, plus a stop to schedule appointments with a Society-mandated psychiatrist who would help her with what would likely be a whopping case of PTSD in the weeks, months, and years to come, plus the first of some sort of dreamrunner orientations. Lara would have loved to walk the corridors on her own, but was secretly grateful to be ferried around by others. How did Jack, a man who had only days before needed a ventilator to breathe, just get up out of bed, throw on his clothes and gallop back to work? Meanwhile being pushed through hospital corridors fatigued her so much she began to slump in her chair an hour into the day.
Exhaustion got the better of her emotions. Inexplicably, she became cross at the smallest delays or inconveniences. She’d been rescued from the Greys. She was alive. She wouldn’t lose her hand. She should be delirious with relief. Happy. Laughing.
Instead, she could barely muster enough energy for lunch. Her hand hurt like an SOB and no reasonable amount of meds would shut off the pain signals. She refused the stronger ones she was offered. She didn’t want to be out of it when she saw Jack again.
By three, however, when she returned to their room, Jack wasn’t there. She hadn’t seen or heard from him once. She mentally reached out, hoping to snatch even one of his stray thoughts, but nothing.
Face it. He’s staying away for a reason
.
She changed into a tank and silk short pajamas, climbed into bed and pulled the covers over her head. Her greatest desire was to shut out the world and forget about her hurts, both physical and emotional for the next few hours. Her conversation with Poppy this morning had given her a lot to think about, but she was sick of thinking. She wasn’t even sure if half of what Poppy had said truly applied to Jack. His rationale for staying away could be a lot less complicated than what Poppy implied. He might have woken from his ordeal, been happy to have sex, but after a chance to sleep on it, realized the massive error he’d committed, and decided to head for the exit.
Eventually, her thoughts and anxieties wore down. Warm and safe, she drifted off.
Lara picked her way over the hundreds of bodies that scattered the ground, smoke and a noxious chemical that burned her eyes still rising into the night air. Only a few of the bodies were complete, with arms, legs, a head. Most were pieces, many no longer recognizable as human
.
Her gaze settled on the scorched stuffed animal peeking out from under a little girl of no more than four- or five-years-old. A toy dog with blue fur, pink felt tongue stitched to its cheery-eyed face, and the little girl with no arms to cuddle it
.
No. Not again! Why this dream?
It was her third time for the nightmare. She felt no closer to grasping its importance, or less, if it predicted an actual future. She’d had dreams that didn’t come true. She always had. She might, as she understood now, be a dreamrunner with a specific skill, running toward violent tragedies, but she wasn’t infallible. Her “success” rate ranged from 70- to 80-percent
.
More than two weeks had passed since she’d first dreamed of these poor, dead souls, yet nothing had occurred anywhere in the world during that time that resembled or matched its senseless destruction. Did it mean the dream was just that, a nightmare concocted from a blend of unresolved fears buried deep within her subconscious?
As dizzy as she’d always been inside the dream, she reached for the same striped maple tree to steady herself and encountered the identical film of blood and tissue splattered on its trunk. The butt of her hand slid and faltered in the warm gore and it made her wonder. She glanced down at her other hand
.
No longer whole and perfect as it had been the first time she’d had this dream, her hand bore a cast to the wrist, except it wasn’t the same one she’d just worn to bed. It looked more permanent, like something meant to be worn for weeks, not days. Seeing it touched off dread so powerful, gooseflesh rose instantaneously on her arms, spread up her neck and raised the fine, nearly invisible hairs at the edges of her face
.
This is the future.
Her confidence in what she saw solidified until she could imagine no other outcome or explanation. Bombings. Explosions. Death. Wherever this was, the events here were coming, and would end hundreds of lives
.
Like an automaton given one program and one only, Lara repeated the same actions she’d performed in the previous two iterations of this dream. She knelt down to wipe her hand on the grass, but the blood and other stuff wouldn’t come off. She watched it sink into her skin and doubled over at the pain that followed, then suffered dry heaves. She hugged her knees to her and rocked, with one alarming difference in this version of the dream. Grief. Grief wailed from her chest. Hysterical sobs wracked her body. The loss felt inconsolable and very, very real. It could mean only one thing. She knew the dead
.
No. Stop. You have a gift. Put it to use. Don’t just sit there weeping.
Wrenching herself out of the dream’s inevitable storyline required strength she didn’t think she possessed, but she pushed herself to action
.
Hurry. Get up. Look. Memorize.
Weaving her way back to her feet, this time she paid attention to every last nuance of her surroundings as she turned in a circle. Gutted and consumed by flames, roofs and walls no more, little remained to identify the five buildings or what purposes they may have served. Her mind took in the materials they’d been made of—bricks with roughly dressed pale-colored stone—plus each building’s general size and layout within the collegiate setting. She committed the streets in front of and connecting the structures to memory. She imprinted the landscape plantings and the distant hills and the crescent moon in the sky on her thoughts
.
“Lara.”
Someone whispered her name, the sound coming from behind her
.
“Lara.”
She knew who called. It was the one voice she didn’t want to hear. Not now. Not here
.
“Lara.”
Hearing the voice meant something bad had happened, worse even than this unfathomable atrocity. The voice begged her to turn and look at him
.
“Don’t make me look!” Lara asked for mercy. “Please.”
Slowly, every second bringing the horror closer and closer to her heart, Lara turned to see
.
His eyes met hers, already clouding with death, though his voice continued in her mind
.
“Never forget,” he said
.
“Never forget,” Lara whispered and opened her eyes. Her heart pounded and she fought back the scream that wanted to let loose. She shivered in the aftermath of her nightmare’s revelation.
She’d slept well past early evening and into the middle of the night. A thin line of light shining in under the bottom of the hospital room’s door provided the only illumination, but it was enough for her to see Jack, asleep in one of the two comfortable arm chairs that formed a seating area for their room. Still dressed in the clothes he’d put on that morning, his jean clad legs and booted feet stretched out in front of him, while his chin dropped to one side so that his forehead pressed against the chair’s cushioned upholstery. Something glinted between the fingers of his right hand.
His gold coin. Good. He found it
.
She didn’t know what the bit of plastic sprayed with gold coating symbolized for him, but she knew its loss would have devastated him.
She smiled poignantly as she continued to observe him. So peaceful and, frankly, innocent in sleep, compared to his habitual expression of skeptical, suffer-no-idiots intensity.
He’d returned to their room to sleep, but hadn’t climbed into bed with her. Lara wasn’t sure what that said or didn’t say about their relationship. Had he not wanted to risk waking her? Or had he accidentally fallen asleep while waiting for her to wake so they could have “the talk,” the one where he told her he was glad she was safe, but it was over?
Either way, she didn’t want to wake him. She needed time to process this third visitation of her nightmare, parse its meaning and potential warning. In all honesty, she didn’t know what she’d do or say right now if he woke.
Moving carefully as possible, she climbed out of bed and walked to the room’s only window. Unlike her yellow room on the non-society member’s side of the hospital, this view was unrestricted. This afternoon, she’d glanced toward it and noticed soft blue sky marred by just a hint of overcast inviting her to look outside and finally learn her whereabouts. Strange, she’d been reluctant to do so. Why hadn’t she rushed to the glass to take in her new freedom?
Silently, she padded to it now. Crossing her arms tightly about her chest to ward off the shivering that hadn’t quite dissipated, she surrendered her worries to the outdoors and the night sky. Mindlessly, her gaze followed the slumbering contours of the land, hills, a river reflecting ghostly shards of a heaven swirling with so many stars she might as well have been in a Van Gogh painting. From the lack of light pollution dimming the Milky Way, Lara guessed them to be far from the nearest city and likely several thousand feet above sea level.
Her casual investigation came to an unexpected halt when she zeroed in on a particular object well into the distance. She stepped closer to the window, fixated by what she saw hundreds of yards away.
She stiffened, took an awkward step back, and then rushed on bare feet to the door. Without a sound, she slipped into the corridor and broke into a full sprint toward the nurses’ station at the end of the corridor.
Startled, the two women on duty glanced up at her frantic approach.
“I need Gavin,” she said.
“Ms. Freberg–”
“Now!”
Chapter 32
“You’re certain this is it?” Gavin asked.
Almost before he could bring the SUV to a stop, Lara pulled on the door handle and launched herself from the vehicle, racing to the striped maple tree from her dreams. Stopping in front of it, her eyes searched its trunk. Her good hand reached out and fitted itself around the curved surface, at the precise spot where it skid and slipped in gore in her dream.
Frantic, she turned in a circle, exactly as she would at some unspecified time ahead, gaze raking over the buildings, the stream and hills in the distance. Everything was identical down to the last walkway, trashcan, bench, the last shadowy mountain laurel. Except here, in the now, the buildings rose whole and unscathed within their setting. No explosions. No flames. The air smelled earthy and damp, but sweet with some native bloom she couldn’t identify. Carefully trimmed lawns covered the large, open spaces between buildings like rugs of dark, shorn fur. Unlike her nightmares, no bodies or body parts littered the grounds. Midnight’s black cape shrouded the land, lulling everyone into a false sense of safety and security.
“Lara?” Gavin spoke softly.
He stood off several feet away, waiting.
She squinted into the dark, found the hulking shape of the hospital they’d just driven from, perhaps two hundred yards away, and counted until she found her room’s unlit window on the third floor.
“The House, Gavin,” she said. “Which one is it?”
“They all are. The House isn’t just one building. It’s all of them. Over a dozen.”
“Like a campus.”
“You could call it that.”
She knew her eyes must look wild. He probably thought her deranged.
“You’re in danger,” she said. “All of you.”
“We know that.”
“No. You don’t. Or at least not what I’ve dreamed.”
“Tell me.”
“That building, that building,” she said, pivoted, and pointed at each of the five closest structures. “That, that, that. They’re all gone.”
“Gone?”
“Blown up. Fires in the ruins. Bodies everywhere. Bits of people on the ground.”
Even in the poor light, she thought she might have seen him pale in reaction.
He said nothing at first. Took a deep breath. She had the feeling that even unflappable Gavin needed a moment to deal with this.
Then the cool, calm man was back.
“When did you have the dream?” he said.
“I’ve had it three times, the latest just before I called for you. The first on the night the Greys took me.”
“Three? Is that usual for you?”
“No. I’ve never had the same nightmare more than once before now.”