I made another call to Kelly, but there was no answer, so I sent a text telling her to call me when she got a chance. Pretty soon, I was engrossed in my work; the terms that had been proposed for the deal were pretty straightforward, but simply doing the most basic possible job of filling out our standard short form agreement in line with them took me the best part of three hours. It was horribly tedious, but I was pretty sure that it was the longest I’d gone in the past two weeks without someone trying to beat me senseless. Hooray for paperwork.
I had just finished e-mailing across my first draft with a short list of clarifications that I needed to get from Ena (ugh) when my phone rang. “Julian, what’s up?” Kelly asked. The music thumping in the background made it almost impossible to understand her through the bass line. She sounded a bit drunk, and I almost screamed down the phone with frustration but managed to bite my tongue and force out a civil tone.
“Kelly, I don’t know what you’re doing, but we’ve still got some serious problems.” I heard the music decreasing in volume and the sounds of movement. I was pretty sure that she had stepped out of whatever club or pub she’d been in.
“I’m celebrating tonight. One last big London bash and then, when my statement is official tomorrow, they’ll put me under protective custody while they shut the firm down for the investigation. I’ll swing by your house in time for the ceremony, but I’m going to have a good time before I go away,” Kelly said. There was no bitterness in her voice, but there was a resigned desperation; I could almost hear the layers of too-bright makeup. Kelly certainly knew that she was guilty, but it sounded like she wasn’t thrilled about the idea of paying the price for her deeds. She’d be even less thrilled after I finished speaking to her.
“The chain is gone, Kelly. Someone stopped by my house today and took it.” I heard her gasp. “Of course, in the process they shot at my family and burned the whole damned place to the ground.”
There was a pause before she spoke again, and I wondered for a moment if the call had dropped. “I’m sorry to hear that, Julian, but if you don’t have the chain, there isn’t really any hurry. I’ll be by to destroy the book before they bundle me off. I’ve already provided Superintendent Singh and the Serious Fraud Office with a sworn statement and enough of our records that I’m sure they’ll be issuing a warrant for Ena in the next couple of days.” Her detached tone made me want to scream down the line at her. Didn’t she understand what had happened to me? Didn’t she recognize that none of this would have occurred if not, at least in part, for her actions?
“What, so you’re just going to party the time away? It doesn’t matter to you that someone might try to grab the book again? It doesn’t matter to you that someone attacked my family because of what you were involved in?” My voice had risen almost immediately into a shout. There was another pause, but this time I was afraid that she had simply decided to hang up after my outburst.
“I know that you’re angry, but you killed my best friend yesterday. Yes, she was a horrible psycho bitch, but she was mine. Now she’s gone, with no chance for redemption. How am I supposed to feel about that? How am I supposed to get worked up about someone who I’ve known for ten days getting hurt when someone I’ve known for ten years is gone? So tonight—yes, I’m going to party, and I’m going to go home with a good-looking man, and I’m going to get a good shag and a good night’s sleep, knowing that the book is safe. Good evening, Julian, and good-bye.” There was no pause after the coldly delivered monologue; the call just ended. It was the best part of eleven at night, and with no home, no clothes, no family, and nothing to do, I headed to the nearest hotel and looked for a room.
A couple of hundred pounds later, I was delightfully ensconced at the Marylebone Travel Inn. I thought about who I could possibly call, but I came up empty. By one in the morning, I was struggling to keep my eyelids open but afraid of closing my eyes to an extent that I hadn’t experienced since I was a child. I thought about going out to try and find some kind of chemical help to stay awake. Would have made me more like Sherlock Holmes, but if I remembered correctly, there wasn’t any happy ending, so maybe not. Big Brother it was, then…
CHAPTER 44 0005–0200, Thursday, August 6, 2015
***Kelly***
Kelly surveyed the dance floor and smiled. She was on her farewell tour and had been smashed by eleven, but she’d just danced it off and was searching for someone to buy her a top up. She didn’t want to have too much time to remember, so she maneuvered toward the bar and tried to pick out an interesting-looking guy. It was only Wednesday night, but in the central London tourist trap nightclub that she’d chosen, that didn’t seem to make a shit bit of difference, and the bar was tropical with humidity from close-packed bodies that made even the interminable heat outside feel comfortable. The lonely-looking ginger guy at the bar made her think of Julian, and she wondered what the strange American was up to right now, feeling a pang of remorse at what had happened to him and how she’d spoken. This quickly segued into a thought about Tara, which made her eyes mist up and put a lump in her throat. Definitely time for another drink.
As if on cue, she felt a hand on her arm and glanced backward and up, way up, into the dark eyes of an extremely tall man with dimples and a shock of black hair. Kelly felt her belly flutter, and she flashed him a smile. Yeah, he’d do.
A couple of hours later, the first birds were just starting to chirp outside of the window of her comfortable, air-conditioned flat. Kelly stared at the ceiling while she luxuriated in the closeness of the body next to hers, savoring the tall man’s masculine smell and the feel of his muscular arm draped just below her breasts. She could have done without the snoring, but as the movie said: nobody’s perfect.
She thought once more of everything that she’d lost in the past few days and the horror that she still felt at what she’d been complicit in, but she knew that she’d done all that she could: throwing her company away and ratting out her best friends to the police. It was really sad that the chain had been taken, condemning everyone that was already marked to their fates, but at least they had the book, so no one else could be subjected to the same fate. A yawn escaped Kelly’s full lips, and she reflected on how lucky they had been to have retrieved the book before the others had a chance to set the puca on her trail. She cuddled up next to the guy from the club and closed her eyes.
******
Kelly padded down the shortcut, through Aske Gardens, in the gray of false dawn. The birds were out in full force already, but no one else was up yet to see her walking back from the office in the clothes from last night. The four-inch heels were killing her, and she wondered idly why she’d chosen them. Maybe she was more hungover than she’d thought.
Kelly had been just about to drift off when a thought had thrust itself into her consciousness—she had to retrieve some important files from the office. At this time of the morning, she had figured that she’d be able to get in without being seen, and it seemed she’d been right as she bounced the memory stick in her hand.
“Shit.” Kelly’s voice cut through the air as the flash drive slipped between her fingers, and she bent to pick it up. Her skirt rode up, and she was conscious of the show she was putting on, had anyone actually been awake at this ungodly hour. She considered putting on a similar show in the morning for her handsome guest.
A stick snapped, and Kelly froze, suddenly entirely clear headed and cursing the outfit she had on, or lack thereof. Five seconds went by, and then ten more passed without any further sound, so she straightened and scanned the immediate area. She knew it was futile almost immediately because everything outside of the actinic glare of the streetlights was cloaked in impenetrable gloom. Her skin prickled in air that suddenly felt ten degrees cooler than it had a few seconds previously. The journey was only a couple hundred yards to her apartment; just two or three minutes’ walk at a good pace. She slipped her shoes off and carried them in her left hand as she started walking as fast as someone could without brea
king into a run. Her eidetic memory conjured an image of blood on the African savannah. Predators chase things that run.
After half a minute, the gates of the small park were left behind as she walked out onto Pitfield Street. She paused as she stepped onto the pavement proper, intending to put her shoes back on before someone saw her and thought she was a nutter. Was it more nuts that she would have sworn that she heard the slap of an extra footstep after she had stopped? Was it crazy that she was sure that someone or something was watching her?
She clutched a spike-heeled shoe in each hand, knowing that they’d make poor weapons, but better than nothing. Looking around, she thought it unlikely that anyone would try something on a street this well lit, but immediately after she had finished that thought, the first streetlight burst. Halogen bulbs exploded one after another in showers of glass and sparks, and darkness marched toward Kelly, making her throat feel like it was going to clamp shut in terror. There were only two hundred yards to her front door.
Kelly ran.
***Julian***
I opened my eyes. My trench coat and gladius were already in hand, so I surveyed the Dreamscape about me. When it was clear that I hadn’t found myself back in the strange pocket of unreality where I’d encountered the puca’s feeding ground and approximately a trillion other disgusting things, I sighed in relief.
I rolled my shoulders as I looked around and was unsurprised to feel the stiffness and heat of the infected lacerations pulsing in my back. I’d checked in the mirror before going to sleep, and I’d tried to tell myself that the growths hadn’t gotten any bigger. I’m a terrible liar.
Those thoughts took only a fraction of a second. I took in my surroundings: narrow streets, brown bricks, streetlights broken, but the gray light of morning providing just enough illumination to see. Somewhere in London for sure, probably north of the river and well east, based on the lack of skyscrapers blocking the sunrise.
There was no obvious or immediate danger, so I reached out to the Dreamscape. I was looking for the mind of whoever was generating this place, but the scream that smashed into my eardrums a heartbeat later made my mystical search moot.
I spun in place, and in the way of such things in dreams, it only now registered that there was just one light on in the entire street, burning in a second-floor window. I pulled up a memory of being ignored at school as a child, concentrated for a second, and then I could practically feel the shadows crawl over my skin as I faded from view. I put the steps of the building behind me in a single leap and slipped inside the door as quiet as moss on a stone.
The foyer of the house was dark, but I could make out an open-plan living space on the ground floor and a staircase leading upward. I heard a woman crying upstairs, followed shortly by a man’s voice. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but it seemed that maybe I actually was in a pretty standard nightmare. It probably didn’t say anything good about my last few days that the prospect of dealing with domestic abuse was on the preferred end of my current expectation index. If it really was just some poor woman’s fears playing out, then I could handle this easily; I’d handled a dozen situations like this before I hit puberty.
Eight wooden steps took me to the landing, and I peered underneath the door to see if I could get any more information before barging into the bedroom. There were feet visible, large and hairy enough for me to be sure that they belonged to a big man.
“You thought you could move to London and run away from me, girl? I worked my arse off to make sure that you had a roof over your head. Were you ever as poor as those two girls you room with? No, you weren’t, and it’s because of me. Now I just want a little bit of payback, but here you are denying it to me like some kind of ungrateful little bitch.” The deep voice held a thick Irish accent, and I thought about how often I’d run into the natives of that particular island lately. Well, shit.
“No, Daddy, I left. No, you can’t be here. I didn’t tell anyone, and you promised you’d stay away if I didn’t show them the pictures. No, Daddy…” The woman’s voice on the other side of the door was a bit higher than I was used to, and the accent was a bit thicker, but there was no doubt about its owner. I’d lost my health, my house, and my family today, but in that instant, I felt pity for Kelly, and I thought that maybe I could forgive her. Time to wrap this up.
I lifted a size-twelve foot and, ribs protesting and back threatening to go on strike, I gave the door a solid kick. Most people overestimate the strength of interior doors, but I’ve been doing this long enough to know that a single good boot right on the doorknob is usually enough to take it down. A good boot in the knob tends to do that to most men too.
In line with, and probably in part because of, my expectations, the door flew open explosively, knocking the man off balance and sending him sprawling across the floor to land in a heap of clothing at the end of the bed. Part of that heap clearly belonged to him, as he stood stark naked in all of his glory. The man was at least six foot four and probably weighed in around three hundred pounds. I would have bet that in his younger days he could have cracked walnuts with his bare hands, but now he had a ponderous beer belly, and the beard covering his double chin was more gray than red.
On the bed, I saw Kelly huddled under a blanket and presumably unclothed. She looked maybe eighteen, and my guts boiled with rage hotter than the infection pulsing in my back. The man was slow in getting his bulk back up, so I had time to turn to the girl.
“Do you want to see him gone?” I asked as gently as I could. Tears glistened in her eyes, and she nodded her head vigorously as I sensed her will focusing down and solidifying the Dreamscape.
“I left the bastard in Eire and don’t know why he’s followed me here.” She pushed herself into a small ball at the edge of the bed, but I didn’t have time left to pay her any more attention, as the big man finally got to his feet. I was a bit surprised when he didn’t attack immediately.
“She’s mine! I fed her and clothed her, and this is all she’s good for to anyone. She hurt all those people; it’s only fair if I hurt her,” Mr. MacDonnell bellowed. The dream construct’s words were disturbing because they demonstrated the levels of damage and self-loathing that lurked in the young woman’s mind. Maybe I was over-thinking it. Hell, I wasn’t a psychologist. I was a Dreamwatcher, and I was going to make this bad dream go away.
“This is the part where you’d expect me to make some quip back to you about freedom and morality, but I’m really not in the mood, old man.” As I said the words, I pictured an old man that I had seen walking through Paddington earlier that day and the way he had to lean on his cane for support. I remembered the feeling of stiffness in every joint after my recent beatings and imagined all of that layered over the man in front of me. He snarled in rage and threw a looping punch. There wasn’t much in the way of technique behind the roundhouse, but as big as he was, the impact would still have been enormous if it had landed.
It didn’t. Not even close. The blow had come at me with not just the deliberate pace of late middle age but with the feeble slowness of the very old, so I dodged it with a single lazy step to my left, looping around behind him and using his own momentum to fling him into the wall.
Once the big man was against the wall, I focused again, remembering how, as a child, my foot had gotten stuck in sticky pine resin so badly that my shoe came off; my grandfather had needed to climb the tree to get it back down. As quick as thought, the wall changed to the consistency of flypaper, and the man groaned, unable to move.
My gladius flashed out again, and I plunged it into the wall next to him. I concentrated on nothingness, my attention narrowing down to a point on the wall in front of me. With a grunt, I ripped downward with the sword. With a pop of displaced air, a yawning void opened into oblivion before me, and a few sharp tugs on the blade resulted in a crude cutout of Kelly’s father outlined on the wall. I turned to her with a smile.
“Kel, do you want to give the old man a push into oblivion? It’ll be�
�” I abruptly stopped speaking as my attention was released to take in the whole room.
“Awww…shit,” I whispered, sword arm falling to my side.
Staring at me from the other side of the room, one enormous, taloned hand wrapped around Kelly’s throat, was the puca. Its inky-black features were only relieved by two burning pits where its eyes should have been, and it rested its free hand on the ground, hunched shoulders bulking up almost as high as the long, snouted head that had to duck to avoid the eight-foot ceiling. Kelly beat the air frantically with her feet, face turning purple. I wasn’t sure how it had arrived and attacked so soundlessly, but the shadowy demon was more massive than ever, and I was sure I was outclassed.
The thing stared at me without attacking while five seconds ticked by. I decided to remove any distractions; I shoved the fat, rapist pig stuck to the wall through the hole I’d cut and watched him disappear utterly. I tried to make a clever quip, but I was pants-shittingly scared and couldn’t force any words past the lump in my throat, yet I did my best to plaster a confident smile on my face. Let the thing wonder if I knew something it didn’t. Kelly’s struggles were slowing down, and I realized that the light in the room was darkening. That seemed like a bad sign.
Nothing I’d thrown at the puca had made a dent so far; I had a bit of a plan that could even the odds, but that notion would require me to lead it to a particular place. I didn’t have a clue how to sucker the creature into showing up…but I did have an idea for an incredible sucker punch; if it failed, then I was going to die looking really, really stupid. No change there. I faced the creature, put on a bad Austrian accent and spoke.
“You're one ugly...mother-” The quote was delivered as I focused with every iota of my will on the original movie scene, and my will evoked a memory that lived not only in my mind but in the minds of millions of people all throughout the world. Mass media had provided the fodder for countless bad dreams over the years, and I’d learned how to turn it to my advantage from time to time.
Dream Job (The Dreamwalker Chronicles Book 1) Page 28