Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (4 page)

Cas Doran released Rose to lay both his hands on Sandy’s shoulders. He shook him. “Who was Laura Hame with?” Doran demanded.

Sandy was puzzled—hadn’t Doran heard what Rose had said, or did he not believe her? “She was with Miss Tiebold,” Sandy said, then added, insolent, “That’s why I’m asking Miss Tiebold where she is.”

“Laura was in bed with me,” Rose said. “We didn’t sleep. We were talking. When the screaming started, Laura got scared and bolted down the stairs to the dreamer’s door.” Rose looked from Doran to Sandy, her expression earnest and, beneath that, very alert.

Sandy wanted to find Laura. He gazed around at the people in blankets. He saw one he recognized, bundled up and
shivering, Maze Plasir’s apprentice, Gavin Pinkney. Sandy noticed the odd, imploring way that Gavin stared at Secretary Doran, then dismissed it as irrelevant. He had to find Laura.

Rose was plucking at Secretary Doran’s arm. She said she wanted to go home. Her cousin would have run there. Doran shook his head. Rose was his daughter Mamie’s best friend, she must come home with him, he said. “I’ll send some people to your house to find your cousin.” Then the Secretary turned to Sandy. “As for you, Mr. Mason. The police and Regulatory Body officials are gathering exposed dream-hunters …”

Sandy was so startled that the Secretary of the Interior knew who he was that he missed the next few things the man said. Something about public safety, and a quarantine for those affected.

Doran called over one of the Dream Regulatory Body officials. Sandy thought to himself that whenever they showed up en masse like this, the officials did rather have the appearance of a private army. Doran’s private army.

“I have a dreamhunter here,” the Secretary said, and laid his heavy hand on Sandy’s shoulder once more. “And Maze Plasir’s apprentice is standing just over there. Also, Miss Tiebold tells me that her cousin, the dreamhunter Laura Hame, will have run home.”

The official gave a curt nod.

“She didn’t sleep,” Rose said, urgent. “We were talking.” Then she gave a choked laugh.

The official took hold of Sandy and walked him away. They collected Gavin Pinkney as they went. The official said, “We’ll find you some clean clothes. Then we’ll take you straight In and see if you can’t overwrite the nightmare before you have to have it again.”

Sandy realized the “clean clothes” remark was directed at
Gavin, who stank of urine. The poor boy had wet himself.

Sandy craned back over his shoulder at Rose Tiebold, hoping for some communication, some sign. But she was speaking to Doran, standing with her head erect and a haughty expression on her face, as though she was somehow above even her own worries.

Sandy turned away, trudged on, and fumed. For a moment he reverted to his earlier resentful thoughts about the rich and famous Tiebolds and Hames. Then he remembered how Rose had insisted
“We didn’t sleep.”

It was clear that
she
hadn’t, because her cheeks and mouth weren’t marked by her own fingernails. But Laura was another matter. What if the truth was the opposite of Rose’s story? What if the girls were not together, were not talking, were not both awake?

Sandy stumbled. The official made an impatient noise and jerked him upright. “Leave me alone!” Sandy said, and drove his shoulder into the man’s side. The man wheezed, then, “You’re not about to give me trouble, Mason, are you?”

Sandy glowered but let himself be led on. His head was spinning—in fact, the whole of him seemed to be spinning, speeding up, draining away down some great, dark whirlpool. For he knew Laura
had
been chewing Wakeful. She’d taken the drug and walked some distance out of the Place carrying a nightmare. She’d kept her nightmare fresh and had delivered it, overpowering her aunt, and Sandy’s uncle, and Sandy, and every other sleeping soul in the Opera that night.

When the Mason boy had left them, Doran asked Rose, “Is that your cousin’s beau?”

The girl replied, “I’m sure
I
wouldn’t know,” every inch a
Founderston Girls’ Academy senior asserting her sense of what was proper.

Cas Doran realized with a small shock that he knew very well what Rose’s life was like. She had the kind of agile spirit to be found in those who straddled very different worlds. She attended a fashionable school, had all the manners of a nice young lady—in other words, she prickled with barbed boundaries—but she was also from a dreamhunting family and party to the daily phantasmagoria of life with dreamhunters, to their frequent exhaustion and feverish wildness.

These dreamhunters—they were
his.
His responsibility, his study, his stock-in-trade. But Cas Doran was not a dream-hunter, nor was anyone in his family. He lived a regular domestic life in a household run by a refined woman—herself a graduate of the Girls’ Academy. And that was how he knew what Rose Tiebold’s life was like, how contradictory it must be. Because, even given the differences in their ages and occupations, this girl was in some ways
like
him.

Secretary Doran’s car came through the crowd. The chauffeur stood up and called to his employer.

“Come,” said Doran to Rose, his tone gentle but managing.

Rose went with him. He spoke soothingly. He said that everything would be all right. He helped her into the car. Its interior smelled pleasantly of new leather. Rose realized that there had been some terrible smells, as well as terrible sights, in the plaza.

The car began to move again, easing its way through the thronging people. There were seething shadows on the plaza,
interrupting the lights from streets and houses. Rose stared at Doran’s profile. In the light ghosting over his face, Doran looked grim and intent, like someone getting ready for a fight. Then he turned and smiled at her.

Rose knew she’d do everything she could to keep people from guessing that it was her cousin’s nightmare. Before too long she’d speak to Laura, then she’d know why her cousin had done it. There would be a reason, some kind of sense. Rose suspected it had something to do with the letter Laura had torn up, a last letter from her missing father.

The letter had, for some reason unfathomable at the time, been partly buried in a large amount of sand in Laura’s bedroom at Summerfort. Laura had been into the Place illicitly, looking for clues to why her father had disappeared. She was back in Summerfort when Rose and Rose’s father, Chorley, had found her. Laura had kept them out of her bedroom; then, when she had finally opened the door, they’d found her standing up to her ankles in a pile of sand. The envelope that held the letter was sticking out of it.

Sand!

When, that very night—St. Lazarus’s Eve—the howls of terror had wound down, Rose had seen her cousin emerge from the Hame Suite and stand for a moment unwinding bandages from her hands. Laura had looked up at Rose, then seemed to dismiss her. She began to call. What she shouted sounded like nonsense, but it was a name. At her call a monster had come running. A great statue in the shape of a man—a beautifully muscled, nobly serene man. A man apparently made of sand. The monster had swept Laura up in his arms and run to the stairs down to the dreamer’s door. Rose had tried to break away from her mother to follow them. But Rose’s mother had kept a firm hold on her. Then Rose, straining after Laura,
had seen something. She saw the name Laura had called scored in the sand on the back of the monster’s neck. Four letters: N O W N.

Rose was trembling. Secretary Doran touched her arm and said, “How are you, Rose?” Then, “We’re nearly home.”

There was no one in the world Rose was closer to than Laura, but Rose had known nothing of any of this—the nightmare or the monster. She felt herself shrinking. She didn’t
know
anything. All her schoolmates thought she was a bit of a hero, but she wasn’t. She was baffled, and in the dark.

2

AURA’S SANDMAN CARRIED HER ALL NIGHT. HE WALKED FOR TWENTY MILES, FOLLOWING THE RAIL LINE SOUTH
west from Founderston, traveling along the railbed with long, rocking strides. Laura was careful to keep her eyes open. She was afraid of waking up in her dream again, of opening her eyes on blackness and the chilly embrace of a satin shroud.

They left the tracks at the small train stop near Marta Hame’s house. They didn’t follow the road, for it was getting light, a dull twilight rinsed by drizzle.

As Nown clambered up a hillside, Laura heard sheep pattering away from them. She saw the flock pour down a slope together and flow into the groove of a gully, like raindrops on a large leaf spilling to pool at the stem.

Nown pressed down the top wire of a fence, and the whole thing strained, twanging along its length. He stepped over it.

At the edge of Aunt Marta’s yard, Laura told Nown to stop. She slid from his arms, and he steadied her till she found her footing. She said, “You hide yourself. But stay near.” Then she recalled that she had set him free.

Nown had helped her do what her father had asked in the letter he left for her. Laura had hated having to catch Buried Alive and overdream her unsuspecting Aunt Grace. As she had gone about it, she had come to understand that her sand-man
had doubts about what she was doing. When he’d tried to speak to her, she had silenced him.

She had
made him;
he was her servant, bound to obey her by rules she knew she didn’t fully understand. But she did understand the most simple rules of the spell that had made him. She knew that if she erased the W in his name, made it NON instead of NOWN, he would fall apart, as her father’s sandman had. And she knew that if, instead, she erased the first N in his name, he’d be his own—free. With Nown’s help, Laura had completed the task her father had set her. Then she found that what she wanted next wasn’t obedience but guidance and wisdom—and to be cherished.

So it was that, a few hours before, in the dark of night, when frost was forming on the timber ties of the rail line they walked along, Laura had leaned over her sandman’s shoulder and scratched out one letter on the back of his neck, the first N in his name. She’d freed him. And he didn’t leave her (as her father had). Instead he gathered her close and kept on walking.