The Dream Runner (9 page)

That stopped me. "Wait a minute. What debts?"

Jenny's eyes behind her half glasses gleamed with an emotion I couldn't read. "It's standard legal language in these cases."

"And I'm asking a standard legal question. She had debts?"

"Not debts, as such. Projects in need of completion, you might say."

"And if she wills her projects to me they are legally mine? As in, I'm obligated to take care of them?"

"True, I'm afraid."

I leaped to my feet, the chair skittering away from me on the hardwood floor. "That's total bullshit! What happens if I don't sign?"

"The signature is a formality, really. You inherit whether you want it or not. You can always sell or confer on somebody else."

"Fine. I confer this—project—to somebody else."

"Jesse, I recognize that all of this must be difficult for you—"

"Look—I need to go now. I'm not signing anything until I have time to think."

"Fine. But I am obligated to give you this. You can do whatever you wish with it."

 She reached into a different drawer and held out a small key. It was plain and ordinary, too small to be a house or a car key. The silver on the wards had worn a little with use.

"What is it?"

"Safe deposit box. Go to the Credit Union and ask for Bev. She's expecting you."

"What's in there, Jenny? Part of this 'project'?"

"I have no idea. She didn't confide in me. How old were you when she left town?"

"Ten."

"Right. Well—she showed up here last winter. Said she wouldn't be long and it wasn't worth it to evict the renters. She moved into an apartment—"

My head now felt like a giant hand had reached in through my skull and was squeezing my brain in a death grip. I was running out of time. "Listen—I really don't care. I don't care what happened to her, and don't need to hear about her last known movements. I came home because I care about the house and the land. That's it. So I'll go see what she has in her hidey-hole. And I'll be in touch, okay?" I blundered out of there, half blind, with the key in my pocket and a copy of the will in a manila envelope.

One long main street runs the length of town. Swallowing down nausea, I drove past the mall, such as it is, and the feed store, stopped briefly at a stoplight, and proceeded into town proper. I passed a Bank of America and the new Starbucks, which I resented. There had been a small coffee shop on that corner all my life, a little shabby but its own individual place, at least. The drugstore was a Walgreens and this too jolted me with a sense of disappointment. When I was a kid it was an independently owned and family run business, but progress had caught up even to Williamsville.

I turned right on 2
^nd
Ave, across from the Safeway, and pulled over into a tree-shaded parking space right in front of Western Co-op. Still feeling the ghost vibration from the bike, I sat in silence for a minute, rubbing my forehead and turning the little key over and over in my fingers.

My cell phone went off, and by now I wasn't finding the shark music amusing anymore. "Hey," I said, deliberately rude.

"Due to delay, your customer has changed location."

"Please listen—"

"You will find him at Alderson's Forestry Products. Now."

And then silence. I knew damned well that there was no escape for me this side of death, and that the pain would ease the instant I set out looking for Will. But I was sitting right outside the bank, with the little key squeezed in my fist.

In the years since my mother ran off I'd told myself all sorts of stories about her. She'd been abducted by aliens. She'd run off with a movie star. A serial killer had stolen her away and buried her body somewhere in the national forest. These were the early versions. As I got older and thought about things, it was easy to see that she'd just left. She didn't love me enough to stay, or even to say goodbye.

And now, all these years later, I sat holding a little silver key in my hand, wondering exactly what she might have left me.

Will's dream, and my relief from pain, could wait a few more minutes.

As I walked into the bank I tried to hold myself in check. High expectations only meant deeper disappointment. What did people use a safety deposit box for, anyway?
Jewelry
, I told myself.
Coins. Photos of her lover. Something she hadn't wanted my dad to see
. A flood of annoyance washed through me that she'd dragged me into this little game.

Biting back the pain, I breezed through the door like I had every right to be there. Small, for a bank. Two teller windows. A couple of chairs to sit in if you had to wait. Toys for kids. Only one office, where a woman sat behind a computer, simultaneously talking into a Bluetooth and typing.

There was no line so I proceeded directly to the first open teller. Nobody I recognized, although the girl was about my age. Her nametag declared her to be Stacie, and she disliked me at first glance.

"Can I help you?"

Her tone grated on nerves already raw and I had no patience, but I sucked it up. I had no time for a scene.

"I need to talk to Bev."

"She's busy."

"She's also expecting me."

Stacie initiated a stare down, and I smiled at her, not saying another word. I left my sunglasses on and just stood there, waiting. It only took a minute. 

"Oh, all right then."

She tapped across the lobby on heels that were ridiculous for a woman on her feet all day. I followed her to the single office. The woman on the phone looked up and smiled, giving me a little wave to indicate that she'd be available in a minute, and Stacie traipsed back to her post without another word.

"Jesse Davison. How long has it been?" Bev was clad in a sensible skirt and blouse, and wore just enough makeup to look professional. She was a square built woman with bulldog jowls, but her smile was genuine and a lovely thing to behold. Getting up from behind the desk she crossed the room and took my hand, earning my eternal gratitude by not wasting time on small talk.

"Do you have the key?"

I held it out to her and she nodded. "Very well then. Come with me."

I followed her across the lobby, every footstep tightening the fist that clamped my brain, and waited while she spun the wheel for the safe and then used her keys to open a security door that led into the vault.

"I'll leave you to it," she said, and did just that, pulling the door mostly closed behind her to allow privacy without locking me in.

All of my security box daydreams flew out of the room with her. My mother hadn't been the nurturing sort. Not that she'd been cruel or abusive, just absent. Even when she was still home, it was my dad who bandaged my scraped knees and tucked me into bed. I knew full well that when I turned that little silver key in the lock and opened the lid I wasn't going to find a loving message or a heart shaped locket.

What I did find had certainly never crossed my mind as a possibility.

Three glass tubes, each half full of a straw colored liquid, stood upright in a metal rack. Each was neatly labeled in black marker. I'd donated plasma a few times when I was desperate for money, and the fluid looked ridiculously like what ended up in the collection bag during that process.

Time ticked by while I stared, trying to process what I was seeing and failing utterly. I couldn't think of any reason my mother would have left me plasma, but every other idea that came to mind was so far fetched and implausible that my brain hit the reject button.

Truth serum.

Cure for cancer.

Biological Weaponry. Perhaps mother had been plotting to kill the human race and was using me as her weapon of mass destruction.

That idea was too bizarre, even for me.

Walk away Jesse. Throw away the key.

I couldn't do it. Holding the test tube labeled
#1
well away from my body in case of spilling, I worked loose the cork, braced for disaster. Nothing happened. I sniffed it, catching a whiff of the sawmill, first, and then the unmistakable smell of a long summer afternoon and something else that made my cheeks flush hot with embarrassment.

These were dreams, then, or something very like them.

Warding off a throng of questions, I wedged the cork back into place and carefully wrapped the test tubes in a t-shirt pulled from my backpack, stowing them as securely as possible where they wouldn't be jarred or crushed against another hard object.

By now the fist in my head was stabbing thumbtacks into my eyes from the inside out, and if I didn't go confront Will soon I was going to be incapacitated and unable to ride. I stumbled out of the room in search of Bev.

"Honey, are you all right?"

"Fine." I tried to smile, but my lips felt stiff and numb.

"This must all be so difficult for you." Bev patted my shoulder and walked me out, giving me a little hug at the door. The sunlight was a spike of agony so intense I was barely able to get a leg over Red and start the ignition, but the pain eased the minute I headed in the right direction.

As my thoughts cleared I began to wish I'd listened to myself and left my mother's gift right there in the safety deposit box. Whatever was in those little tubes, it didn't mean anything good—for me or anybody else.

 

 

 

 

"A smart, resilient heroine, a scarred hero, dragons that are all too real and much too close, and myriad doorways that lead from a modern ER into dreams and waking and everything in Between make for a sparkling debut novel. Most enjoyable."

 

— Carol Berg, National Bestselling Author of
The Demon Prism

 

"A rich wonder of a fantasy, full of life, death, dreams and nightmares becoming real, and dragons. I was swept away."

 

— Robin D. Owens, Award-Winning Author of
Heart Secret

 

 

Vivian Maylor can't sleep. Maybe it's because she just broke up with her boyfriend and moved to a new town, or it could be the stress of her new job at the hospital. But perhaps it's because her dreams have started to bleed through into her waking hours.

All of her life Vivian has rejected her mother's insane ramblings about Dreamworlds for concrete science and fact, until an emergency room patient ranting about dragons spontaneously combusts before her eyes—forcing Vivian to consider the idea that her visions of mythical beasts might be real.

And when a chance encounter leads her to a man she knows only from her dreams, Vivian finds herself falling into a world that seems strange and familiar all at once—a world where the line between dream and reality is hard to determine, and hard to control…

 

 

 

"Wakeworld is a fine adventure. Kerry Schafer gives us heroes we can root for and a world that twists and turns like an Escher print so that nothing is quite what it seems."

 

 — Anne Bishop

 

"Schafer brings a unique voice to urban fantasy, and her writing has a dreamlike, magical quality. A captivating read, a real page-turner!"

 

— Yasmine Galenorn

 

 

Vivian Maylor is trying to hold it together. But her attempts to build a life with the man she loves seem doomed by the dragon inside her yearning to break free. Vivian is a Dreamshifter, the last line of defense between reality and the Dreamworld, and the only one of her kind.

Weston Jennings also believes he is the only one of his kind. He fears his powers as a Dreamshifter, and resists learning to control them. After suffering a tragic loss, Weston heads deep into the woods of the Pacific Northwest to embrace a safe life of solitude. But when a terrible mistake leads to an innocent's death, his guilt drives him to his former home, where he encounters what he never thought he would find: another shifter.