The drugs kept me from being findable. Even if they were able to lo-jack my brain from time to time, the hallucinations from the ecstasy would be the perfect camouflage to hide my real location.
I just needed to stay alive long enough to kill the Wizard, the man behind the curtain that told us all our fanciful lies. The last we’d heard he was here in Vegas.
Where it had all began...
If I could just sleep, I would be able to gather enough strength for one more hit. At least this would be a kill that I would enjoy.
One small act to be a true “helping hand” to the world.
* * *
Val? Val wake up!
“Michael?” I grumbled. “Not time yet. Shhhh.” I tried to drift off into sleep again when something jolted like lightning through my heart. Panic.
I scrambled awake, ignoring the cramp in my side. Desperately blinking the sleep from my eyes, I grabbed for the pills. If I could hear Michael, then that meant the effects of the pills were wearing off.
Dammit.
We knew this would happen, Michael said in my mind. Our bodies, immune system, metabolism…
“Yeah, yeah, we’re so fucking special that we can’t even get high like a normal person.” I popped the pill. Less than twelve hours had passed since my last dose. The effects used to last for a few days.
I eyeballed the tin that was tucked behind the pierced feet of Jesus. It was a stronger cocktail of drugs — nearly lethal doses of cocaine and heroin. I had only intended to use it if I was close enough to the Wizard’s trail that it wouldn’t matter if my insides were permanently damaged.
Not yet. I didn’t need it yet.
But, by the looks of things, I had about a couple weeks’ left of pills. A month tops. At least we were relatively sure that the Wizard was here in Vegas. He was doing the university gig where he would recruit fresh meat for the experiments.
This was where he had found me a year ago. Young and hopeful, ready to get out of the classroom and change the world.
I had been so stupid.
Michael shimmered into view between the bright lights that floated around the baptismal again. He squatted on the mattress beside me, even though logically there shouldn’t be enough room for the both of us here.
He cupped my face in his hands, and touched his forehead to mine. “My love, you cannot keep going like this. You will burn yourself out. You have done enough.”
The fires from the lab still haunted my dreams. The skin that healed into angry, puckering gashes on my left hand were constant reminders of my failures.
Michael rested his hand on mine, his dark skin a stark contrast against the backdrop of pink and silver scars. “Have you thought about what we had talked about? Before?”
I shook my head violently. “No. I cannot — I will not — bring any more innocents into our world. I refuse.”
Michael stroked my hand, my hair, even as I trembled against him. The drugs would eventually make their way to my nervous system, but for now I clenched my teeth against the body-racking shivering. I knew that Michael wasn’t really here, that he was visiting me from some distant place, but the depths of our connection made this mental visitation as real as any touch.
He always knew how to calm me. “My love, they are already part of our world. The only difference is they know nothing and are easy prey for that monster.”
I stayed my tongue. He hadn’t been used in the field as I had been. He wouldn’t let me know how he had been used, what all they’d done to him, yet I’d given him his measure of privacy. I didn’t want to argue when I so rarely saw him now, and when I did, it was wrapped with danger.
So I rested deeper in his embrace and counted every rise and fall of his breath until I felt him slip away from me.
That was when the nightmares began.
I was in the laboratory again. My hand and face was smooth. There hadn’t been a fire, no botched explosion. It was me and Michael, and I stared up at him, so happy that I finally found where I belonged.
With him.
But then the image of Michael wavered, and disappeared.
Too late — I realized that I was in trouble. Instead of Michael’s warmth and love, I was in the presence of a mad man, his voice slippery and oily as he spoke.
“You know, Val, you keep this up, and you might end up being beyond recovery.”
I froze. Even though my mind had already accepted the idea that the Wizard had caught up with me yet again, my body hadn’t quite caught up to that fact. More through reflex than anything else, I fought against the restraints.
That voice. It wasn’t real. It was just a dream. Wasn’t it?
“Oh I really wish it was a dream, my dear.” The figure of a tall, lanky man with tufts of gray hair emerged from the unnatural shadows of the lab and loomed above me where the vision of Michael had been.
My heart slammed against my ribcage, threatening to break free. “You’re not real. This is a dream.” I screwed my eyes shut against his face willing my mind to escape this place and go back to where I knew I should be.
I’m not here. I’m not here. Go back, go back, go back.
“And where exactly will you be going, my dear?” I felt his presence drawing near. My eyelids were still squeezed shut; the heat of his presence and the scent of an unfamiliar cologne made my stomach churn. My pulse quickened, because I knew what that meant. He was wearing a new cologne. Something that I hadn’t smelled before.
And if that was the case, then this wasn’t a dream conjured up from my memories but a visitation.
He found a way to track me even in my dreams.
But how?
“It’s really amusing how you think you can still outthink me, Val. Haven’t you realized yet? Every thought in your head, every word, every feeling is available to me in technicolor display.” He pressed ever closer, close enough to hover just over my ear without technically touching me.
I kept my hands clamped over my eyes, willing myself not to see him.
One image was all it would take- my thoughts would hone in on him, and that’s all he needed- the perfect window that led straight to the soul. My essence.
He could get in and reveal everything- where I was, my memories, all of it. It was different than the drugs and the surgeries that he fixed in our brains. It was his specialty. His special skill.
He was able to invade your mind for real. Until then, I didn’t care how this made me look. He could call me a coward, but the fact remained: I would rather live like a coward than a dead hero.
Heroes thought they could save the world and go against the big, bad wolf. I was no hero. They broke that idealism out of me. I knew what they were capable, the deaths.
Heroes were selfish people who didn’t care about getting other people killed. The process always led to an innocent individual’s life being snatched away, and it was a selfish act I could not perform.
I would never do that, not again.
“Oh Val, you’re only prolonging a pain that you don’t need to bear. I hate that this has been your fate, my dear. We forgive you. We have the lab already shiny and new. You just needed a break, and we have incorporated that into our training regimen. More breaks. You have my word. Now, why don’t you be a good girl and wake up and we can bring you home?”
I had the odd impression that he held his hand up like scout’s honor.
There was one way to break a visitation. Consciousness was important. So, usually when you’re unconscious they wouldn’t be able to tap into you. But somehow he was able to get to me while I was unconscious. He was able to trip into my dreams.
And that was when I realized that he made his mistake. We were in dreams. My dreams specifically. That meant that I had power here. I was a dream walker after all, traipsing through idle minds and snatching secrets left and right.
That was how the good doctor found me in the first place.
“You think you’re so clever, doctor, but you forget. I also helped to create this s
ystem. You may have your special skills, but so do I.” Through the space between my fingers, I found what I needed.
With a deep breath, I focused on the pen on the desk, and in the next breath, I imagined in my hand, its weight, how it felt, the smooth metal slick and satin against my skin. And just like that, the pen moved from the desk and appeared in my hand.
Moving with instinct rather than conscious thought, I clicked the pen as if I would write a note to myself, turned my body, then drove the pen into the doctor’s eye.
He howled and jerked his head back. I had a firm hold on the pen and lucky too. I didn’t want to lose it. I stepped on his instep in a perfectly executed self-defense move, slapped his flailing hands out of the way and drove the pen already riddled with gore into his other eye.
There.
My heart raced, but this time, not from fear. “Between the both of us? I think you’re the one that needs to wake up.” With one last swing, I drove the pen in his temple.
The doctor, or rather his construct, disappeared from my mind. I hoped he woke up with a massive headache. If only the damage I’d initiated could be real. Wouldn't that be swell?
Seemed like the doctor had been working on stuff too while I had been tripping through Wonderland. There didn’t seem to be much time to just chill and hope to get better.
I crouched down over the place where the doctor’s body had been, inspecting the blood there. I touched it and it felt real. Dammit.
I had to face the fact that he truly had been here. He had finally worked the technology so that he could incorporate my abilities in there. He had always wanted the ability to teleport without the risk of some teleporters who broke apart at the molecular level and had to reassemble themselves again.
There was always a level of unacceptable risks for the scientists at the lab.
But when they had found me, they must have rejoiced. No wonder why they were thrilled to find me. And I was the stupid idiot to fall for the ploys that I was special.
There was a good chance that the doctor was still debilitated. I wasn’t superstitious. You didn’t really die if you died in your dreams. But there was a real possibility that he would be severely sick or at least needing to recover.
I could try to wake up? Or, I could try to track him through the dream worlds.
The good doctor brought the fight to me thinking to blind side me while I was weak in the flesh. He was too arrogant by far if he thought revealing himself to me right now wouldn’t gain him any retaliation.
He forgot that I was way stronger in my own head than I was when I traipsed in others’ dreams while on assignment. I found scalpels and a knife and pocketed those. Then I felt the tug, the tiny thread of blood that connected it to the mad scientist.
One thing was for certain. He should have stayed out of my mind.
It was time for me to turn the tables.
2
The Life Of A Dreamscape Reality
Growing up, I didn’t know the difference between my dreams and the real world. To me, my dreams were as much a place for me to go to as any other place in the real world.
Except they were better.
My dreams were fantastical and silly, a cross between the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and Pan’s Labyrinth. They were everything that I used to enjoy as a child.
Surreal.
Phantasmagoric.
Strange.
Everything dreams should be.
I remembered the last true dream that I had. The one that changed everything for me.
I had been running through the place I called the Garden. It had been so special to me, that I always thought of it as an official place deserving of being capitalized. It was one of those fancy places that I’d only seen in movies or pictures in a book. There was a big fancy house with a big fancy lawn that had a huge, elaborate hedge maze that had been sculpted and manicured.
I had loved playing there. The maze had so many places to hide in and explore. Almost every corner had a little secret passage or a hidden nook that took you to other spots in the maze. It even had tiny doors hidden throughout that were perfectly sized for my little body to pass through.
I’d spent hours there learning the maze’s secrets.
In that last dream, I had played in the maze as usual, waving in greeting to the gardener who kept it perpetually trim and tidy.
The Gardner was a funny creature with skin like bark and a twig for a nose, including a tiny little leaf that clung to the edge. My fingers had always itched to pluck off that leaf to see if he would grow back another one.
“Here now, miss, don’t forget your key.” The Gardner had given me the shiny brass key with a salute of his hat.
The key had always loomed large and fanciful before me as he handed it to me, but once I grabbed it, it was perfectly fit to my hand. Maybe it was the effect of being in a dream or if my memory had skewed over time. At any rate, I’d put it in my pocket like I’d always done, and with my thanks, had torn off through the maze.
I’d wanted to start off where I had been the last time, but there wasn’t a rush. Just being here, laughing and free while chasing a bunny or two was freedom enough. I hadn’t had this kind of space in the cramped apartments my mother moved us into.
Of course, the schoolyards only ever had metal jungle gyms.
Here, there were pretty topiaries and seats for tea parties. And, the Gardner almost always changed something different on the maze, so exploring to see what could be different was always a treat.
On that last dream, I’d heard my mother calling me from afar. I’d been annoyed because I wasn’t ready to go, but her voice felt very urgent. The ground beneath me had shaken, the white fluffy clouds stretched out to look more like a worn steel wool sponge, the kind my mother had used to scour away those really stuck-on foods on her cooking pans. The brilliant blue sky dulled to an ominous gray.
It had looked like it was about to rain, but I hadn’t heard the rumbling of thunder. The ground felt unstable beneath my feet, like a rolling earthquake that didn’t look like it would stop any time soon.
I hadn’t been scared. I had never been scared in my dreams no matter how outrageous they were. Besides, I had known what this was. Where this earthquake came from.
My mother had been trying to wake me.
That part hadn’t been new. What was new was that I’d never heard her so clearly before. Her voice had shook with fear, and it had been that fear that stuck with my most.
I had taken the shortcuts through the maze that day, opening and closing the wooden doors, hopping through the hidden portals so that I could get out of the maze faster.
I’d made it out of the maze and dashed all the way up the grand stone steps that led to the fancy house, and slammed through the doors.
My eyes had flown open as I woke.
My mom’s face had hovered above me, and I didn’t know if it was a trick of the light or what, but I could have sworn that she had the slit-pupils of cats’ eyes. When I’d blinked awake some more, they had become her usual gray-green.
“Mommy? Is it morning?” I could tell that my room was still pitch dark, the only light streaming in from the hallway. Despite that, the room, already sparsely furnished, had been packed away. Anything personal I might have had was gone.
“I need you to be very quiet now, Val. We need to be very, very quiet, and leave quickly.”
This hadn’t been the first time that my mom needed me to be quiet. Sometime during the night, she had packed up all of our clothes. We didn’t have much, but we didn’t need it. Besides, I’d always had a place to play in my dreams, so I never cared that my mom never gave me many toys.
My mom’s face had been lined with worry, more so than usual, so I kept myself from asking a million questions. I’d simply nodded, my head still groggy and heavy from sleep. She’d wrapped me in a coat, still wearing my PJs and socks, then had grabbed my blanket to drape over my back. My cheek had pressed against her thin shoulder, and I’d fought o
ff falling back asleep.
She’d carried me out that way and tucked me in the backseat of the car.
I’d fallen right back to sleep as she drove us away from that apartment in the middle of the night.
Later, we had moved into a new house, in a new town. I’d forgotten about the dream adventures from the night before. When my mom deposited me onto the new bed, and told me to stay still until she could talk to the landlord, I put my hands in my pocket and felt something. I pulled out a brass key with fancy loops on it.
That was the first time I was able to take something back with me.
And the last time that I’d played in dreams.
3
The Land I Lost Long Ago
In the back of my head, I knew that I wasn’t prepared to go after the Wizard, but I had to try. At least this once. If I couldn’t take him out and finish the job, then I could just retreat to the hiding place.
The Wizard wouldn’t be able to follow me there. The only reason he had been able to find me in the past was through my own memories. All the snippets that I’d seen throughout a day were catalogued in my subconscious mind waiting to be sifted through in dreams.
Once I’d learned that I could hide myself by avoiding looking at anything too memorable, say the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids, I’d been able to keep the Wizard and his helping hands away from me for longer stretches at a time.
Finding me in my dream today, though, was new. He’d never been able to do that before.
Usually, if Helping Hands had found me again, they would be scrambling their tactical teams to my location to try and subdue me. Try as they might, they were never subtle enough. There was always that coiled ball in the pit of my stomach that would tighten like a fist, signaling me to run fast.
The last time they’d found me, I only had half a mile of lead time.
They were getting better.
Being able to find me in my own head? That would change things. A lot.
Shadows and Sorcery: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels Page 18