Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) (24 page)

“Nothing. Go on. I want to hear.”

She silenced her own internal dialogue so that he could concentrate on the story and nothing else.

“Anyway, I’d been assigned a safe house. In Virginia. Roanoke. I moved in and started to search the fields for Lost Ones just the way I’d been taught. It was Taylor who trained me. The agent who’s missing. I went on several findings with him before they let me out on my own.

“I was a natural at it. I’d always known it, too. You could say I was pretty full of myself when it came to my abilities. Of course, at that age, you don’t have much in the way of perspective.”

Lara could tell how difficult this was for him. Already, he’d dived into the self-blame.

“In fact, I surprised myself when I ran across not one, but two dream signatures belonging to Lost Ones on my very first hunt in the fields. It took me almost a week and more than a dozen false trails, but I finally tracked them down. Their signatures were tightly intertwined, both feminine. Relatives, I guessed. One was a lot stronger than the other, and though she probably didn’t realize it, cries for help she kept locked up inside of herself leaked out into the fields.

“As a finder, you can never be sure where you’re going to end up on a run. You don’t have a photo or an address or even a time zone. You just have to open a barrier, step through, and hope for the best. I’m typically visualizing my twin at the same time I get a look around at a place. My first concern is to make sure I don’t materialize inside flooring, walls or furniture. If I’m outside, it’s the same. Avoid trees, sidewalks, lampposts, you know the drill. My second concern is that no one notices me there initially. That first trip is always supposed to be short, no more than a few seconds to look around, find a name, hopefully get to a window or door, look out and get an address or landmark. I’ll come back later once I have more information on the target and know what I’m getting into. Since it’s easier to track a Lost One when they’re dreaming, they aren’t typically awake to see me.”

“But this time someone saw you?” Lara asked.

“A little girl. In a princess costume with fairy wings. I’d opened the barrier into a bedroom in the middle of the night. It wasn’t her bedroom. It was her older sister’s. The little girl sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, facing the bedroom door. Her fairy wings were rumpled and one was torn. She didn’t seem to notice. I had the impression she’d chosen not to sleep, but instead to guard her sister for some reason.

“She stared right at me. She wasn’t the least bit afraid of me, though; she was solemn. Very solemn. I didn’t know her name, of course, so I called her by the first thing that came to mind.”

“Sweet Pea,” Lara guessed.

“Sweet Pea,” Jack agreed. “Her real name was Jamie. She was six. ‘Hi, Sweet Pea,’ I whispered.

“ ‘Are you a knight?’ she whispered back. I didn’t know how to answer that. Her eyes were wide in awe, no doubt at seeing someone materialize out of thin air right in front of her.”

“No doubt,” Lara said. “What did you tell her?”

“I told her my name was Jack.”

“You dodged the question,” Lara said.

“I dodged it. But if she wasn’t expecting someone, it felt like she was hoping for someone to show up. Though like I said, she wasn’t afraid. She introduced herself, and then gestured back over her shoulder at the bed. ‘That’s my sister, Starr,’ Jaime said. She stood up, faced me, and I’ll swear if she didn’t look every inch the princess. ‘Are you here to help us?’ she asked.

“I glanced at the girl in the bed, who looked more dead than asleep. I’d slipped into the room very quietly, not like the times you’ve seen me so far. I’d had more time to prepare and could open the barrier slowly, carefully. Even so, the conversation I was having with her little sister would have woken most people. Starr didn’t move. She barely breathed. I judged her to be about thirteen.

“ ‘I need to find my other sister,’ Jamie told me.

“ ‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

“ ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I never get to see her. But I know where she is. Will you go with me? She’s in trouble.’ ”

“In trouble?” Lara said. “You said you’d tracked two dream signatures, and that they were so close with each other you thought they were related. So, Starr and her sister were your Lost Ones?”

“At that point I wasn’t sure who I was there for or even who else might be in the house,” Jack said. “I knew Jamie couldn’t be one of my Lost Ones. She was too young to run. Starr was a possibility and the way she slept wasn’t normal. A girl just hitting puberty was in the right age range for the ability to manifest, but just barely. More commonly we come into it in our late teens through our early thirties. Some even later than that.”

Lara wondered what she would have done if she was in Jack’s position. Jumping blind into a strange house in the dead of night sounded like the worst possible scenario. Especially when you didn’t know who lived there. What if Jack encountered an adult who thought he was an intruder there to rob the family or, God forbid, there to steal a child? Someone in the house could call 911 and have the police arrive in minutes. If the parents had guns, they might shoot first and phone the police later.

“So did you go with Jamie to find her sister?” she asked.

“I shouldn’t have. It was a terrible risk.”

“But you did. Of course you did. That’s who you are.”

“I knew I should have left right then, and come back after I’d had a chance to better investigate, but Jamie—I don’t know how to say this—she wasn’t a child. Despite the fairy princess costume, no one had ever really let her be one. She was adamant about going to find her other sister. I suspect she would have done it with or without me that night. I wasn’t going to let her do it alone.

“We crept out of Starr’s bedroom, which was on the second floor, down a hall, some stairs to the foyer, then through the living area to the kitchen. The house was dark, but the whole time I kept wondering when one or more parents would wake up and what I would do when they found me with their little girl. I’d closed the barrier up in Starr’s bedroom. Could I get to a conventional exit? Should I even try? What was going on that Jaime needed my help? I took in as much information as I could on our way. The grandfather clock in the entry gave the time as 2:36, so I suspected the house was in my own time zone. It was obsessively neat, the décor more than a little sterile, and upscale, the type a professional like a lawyer or a doctor might own. Except the only signs of a profession I saw were stacks of bibles, and boxes of religious pamphlets and DVDs in a room also filled with shipping supplies. I thought maybe the father was a minister or some type of evangelical that made his living selling mail order.

“When we got to the kitchen, Jamie led me to a basement door. We could hear these soft, eerie cries from below without even opening it. ‘She’s down there,’ Jamie said. I told her to wait in the kitchen while I had a look.

“On the floor in the center of the basement was a wooden box. It was large and rectangular and had probably once been used to store long narrow tools. It was just a little smaller than a coffin. It was padlocked. Soft scratching noises came from inside the box, along with an exhausted whimpering, like from someone who had screamed in terror for hours until all humanity and emotion had been wrung out of them.

“I happened to glance to my right and along the wall, I saw a rollaway bed had been set up. One look at the sheets and I knew someone had had sex in it not long ago. My heart was pounding. I’d never come across anything like this when I was training with Taylor.

“Jamie hadn’t stayed in the kitchen. Suddenly she rushed down the stairs in her bare feet and went straight to the box. She put her lips to the crack where the lid met the body of the box, and whispered, ‘Hello?’

“The person in the box heard her and went still. ‘Jamie?’ a young girl’s voice said. ‘You shouldn’t be down here. Hurry. Go back to bed before he comes back.’

“ ‘Who are you?’ Jamie asked.

“I’m Starr,’ the girl in the box said.

“ ‘Starr? I have two sisters named Starr?’ ”

“It was her twin,” Lara said, breaking into Jack’s tale again.

“There was no second sister,” Jack confirmed. “But even Starr thought there were two of her. She’d been told that by her father. ‘I’m the devil’s Starr. No one’s supposed to talk to me. Hurry, Jamie, get out of here before it’s too late,’ she said.

“All this time, I’d been searching for something I could use to cut or break the padlock, but though the father had his workshop down here all the cabinets had their own locks. Finally, I noticed a length of pipe propped in a corner. It wasn’t that heavy, but it was all I could find. I grabbed it, turned around and I saw her on the stairs.”

“Who?” Lara asked.

“The mom. She’d stopped halfway down, and stood there frozen in place, dressed in this prim, old-fashioned nightgown. She held her arms across her chest so tightly it was like she was trying to keep something inside her from escaping. I expected her to start screaming, but instead she simply stared at me. Her face was so calm.

“I need to stop and explain something here,” Jack told Lara. “Some runners can tell the difference between another runner’s twin and true bodies as easily as they could a living human from a life-sized photo cutout of that person. I’m not one of those people. Unless the twin is still connected to the original, hovering just out of sync with it, or something has gone really wrong, like when you only half-materialized in my room at the cabin, I can’t tell one from the other.

“The mom knew exactly who I was. Or more precisely,
what
I was.”

“A runner,” Lara said.

“Right. She knew she was looking at a twin. It didn’t faze her. But then, she seemed really out of it anyway. Shell-shocked in general. It made sense. If the father was molesting and abusing his daughter, there was a good chance the abuse had started with the wife.

“ ‘Where is he?’ I asked her.

“ ‘Gone,” she said. “He won’t be back till morning.’

“I pointed at the wooden tool box. ‘Where’s the key to this lock?’ She was mute. ‘Does he have it?’ I asked. She nodded. I took a mental step back, furiously trying to think through what to do next. I was torn. I wanted that girl out of the box immediately, but I knew there would be consequences for them, the mom, Starr, even possibly Jamie, if I went ahead and bashed the crap out of the lock with the pipe I had in my hands. The father would come back, see the broken lock and start beating the wife or children to get the truth out of them. The truth was that I wasn’t in my real body. I was a twin at that point, with a definite time limit during which I could act. At most, I’d have a few hours to get them packed up and safely out of there, provided they’d even come with me, or the father hadn’t taken the only vehicle available. I thought about trying to coach Starr through how to get herself out of the box, by returning to her body, but she clearly didn’t understand how any of it worked. I doubted she’d ever consciously opened a barrier before. She’d probably just twinned herself and stepped out of her body at night, not knowing she could go other places beside the house. I knew eventually Starr’s twin would open a barrier and return to its body naturally, when her energy ran down and she fell asleep.

“In the end, the mom surprised me. She continued down the stars, headed for the father’s workbench, reached her hand around the side and got an extra key he had hidden there. She handed it to me and I got Starr out of the box. Her fingernails were ragged and bloody from having clawed at the wooden lid. Imprints of the father’s hands stood out on her arms, bruises already forming. Except for a pair of panties, she was naked. There was blood on the panties and more bruising on her thighs near her crotch.

“I wanted to murder the bastard. Instead, I instructed the mom to find something for the girl to wear, and tried to decide whether or not to call the police. The problem here was—and I learned that he’d been doing the same thing with the mom—he never abused their true bodies, only their twins. Minor injuries to a twin don’t usually show up physically when a runner returns to his or her body. It takes something catastrophic–”

“Like a bullet,” Lara said, gently touching the healing scar on Jack’s shoulder, where stitches had recently been removed.

“Or like your hand,” he said, took her cast, lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it tenderly. “The way Starr’s father had worked it, he could molest, beat and abuse with no consequences, because no evidence of his crimes would be left once the twin disappeared. Though Starr’s scratches on the inside of the box lid would still be there to show police, none of her DNA would. I had nothing. Plus, bringing in the authorities would be dangerous for the Society. You can’t expect Lost Ones to care about the consequences of exposing their gift or the Society to the world.”

“So, what did you do?” Lara said.

“I locked the box up again, had the mother send the kids to bed, and sat down and had a talk with her. She told me her husband believed she and her daughter were inhabited by Satan. The twins were really the devil taking on forms familiar to the father to use in corrupting him. He’d told her that the only way to purge the wife and Starr of their evil was to punish the twins. His repertoire included a variety of creative tortures that would have given your Grey Man a run for his money, all of them excruciating. Having them swallow caustic substances was one of his favorites. Not enough to kill the twin or damage the true body, but enough to make them violently ill. His goal was to extinguish the twins forever. Beat the ability out of them so that they could never run again.”

“This was your first solo mission as a finder?” Lara said, incredulous.

“I’ve had worse in the years since.”

“Really? I can’t imagine.”

Jack sat up a little straighter, pulling her up with him so that they were sitting against the headboard now, rather than lying in bed. He looked at Lara and shook his head. “You’re incredible, Lara. You know that? You blow me away with who you are. I’m telling you a horrific story from my past, while your equally, if not more horrific reality is right here in the present.”

“But that’s just me.”

“Just you?”

“Not some poor abused family.”

Jack let her protests slide, saying nothing more for the moment.

“What happened to them? You still haven’t told me,” Lara said.

“I went back in my true body to fetch them and take them to a women’s shelter,” he said. “Thankfully, they lived in a town only an hour away from my safe house, and the shelter I had in mind, run by a fellow Society member, was only half a day’s drive. This sort of family dynamic was way beyond anything I could handle, especially at that age. I knew taking them to the shelter was the best solution. Get them help, while at the same time mental health experts could examine and evaluate them to see if the mother and daughter would ever be suitable for membership.

“I arranged to pick them up while the father was away on a business trip. All three were ready and waiting just inside the front door when I drove up. We got everyone loaded into the car and then hit the road. About two hours in, the mom asked me if we could stop for a bathroom break. She was nervous and obviously afraid. This had been a big step for her. Like a child, she told me she’d forgotten to go before leaving home.

“We pulled in at a gas station and the mom got out. The kids were in the back seat. Starr was asleep, and Jamie very drowsy, so neither needed to use the restroom. It was just the mom. She was in there for a long time, several more minutes than I thought she needed. I was debating starting the car and moving it along side the station so that it would be right next to the restroom doors, when Jamie unbuckled herself and reached over the front seat.

“ ‘Hey, Sweet Pea,’ I said. ‘What do you need?’

“ ‘Here,’ she said.”

Jack released Lara, climbed out of bed, found his jeans tossed over a chair and dug in a pocket. The gold coin. He handed it to her. It was a child’s version of royal bullion, with the picture of a princess on one side, and another of a castle in a magical landscape on the other. Lara turned it over and over in her fingers, observing how worn it had become over the years from Jack’s handling.

“She gave me that,” he said. “ ‘What’s this?’ I asked her.

“ ‘Knights get rewards,’ Jaime said, very earnest. The regal princess was back. She kissed me. A feathery little peck on my cheek from tiny lips.

“The next thing I knew, the front passenger door opened and a man with a gun slid in to take the mom’s seat. The father. He hadn’t gone on a business trip after all. He’d been following us. Courtesy of the mom. She’d told him our plans and had agreed she would ask me to pull over somewhere along the way. I later found out he’d killed her in the gas station bathroom.

“ ‘Drive,’ the man said.

“I don’t remember exactly what I started to say to defuse the situation and get him to calm down, but he cut me off instantly.