by Adam Dark
Fine. It could have been a hijacked dream. Still.
Ben glanced at Chase, who looked like he’d just stumbled into something completely out of his comfort zone. Maybe. As far as Ben knew, April hadn’t gotten to the part in her gauging of Chase’s character where she told him about her dreams and the fact that most of them came true in the future. “You wanna talk about it?” Ben asked her, hoping she could give him something that would make the last eight hours less freaky.
“You first.” It wasn’t a dare or a defensive quip on her part. It sounded like April wanted more information too before she put anything else together in her head. They should probably all just take a number for that, then.
“Okay.” Ben chugged what little water one of the tiny plastic cups held, and when he was done, he found Chase draining one of the others. “Come on,” he muttered. It took a minute for Chase to realize Ben was staring at him, but the guy had always been this clueless.
“Thanks?” Chase said with a shrug, then tossed the empty cup onto the table.
Choosing to ignore that because it really didn’t matter how easily it had just gotten under his skin, Ben sighed and tried to put his dream together in a way that would actually translate into normal conversation. Yeah, right. “I had this dream last night,” he started. April raised her eyebrows. “Like one of those dreams inside a dream, maybe. Honestly, I thought I was waking up in my room, ‘cause I was freezing. But I was in some desert instead. And it was green, like the spirit realm, right? There was this black sludge under all the sand, and then this… thing showed up right in front of me.”
“What did it look like?” April asked.
“I mean, like a person. At first. Then it was just a bunch of rags flapping around in a… wind that didn’t move anything else.” But he’d felt that wind, all right. And it had been as cold on his face as the ice-covered sidewalk from which Chase had picked him up almost an hour ago.
“What, like a homeless person?” Chase asked.
Ben stared down at the last cup of water. “Like a mummy. Just with a bunch of that nasty black gunk inside instead of a body. And then it didn’t look like anything else.”
“Okay, so you had a creepy dream. It’s not—”
“Chase, let him finish.” To Ben’s amazement, April’s command was immediately obeyed. And she was looking so intently at Ben now, his initial thought to just leave his dream story at that shattered beneath her gaze.
He swallowed. “It talked to me,” he added. “Told me that they knew who and what I was, and that they wouldn’t let me stop them. That they’d been here too long to…” No, he couldn’t quite remember all of it that well. “It started to say something about when the Gorafrim return. Then there was this super bright light, and it came straight at the demon thing, and it said, ‘Not this one.’” He remembered that perfectly, especially after having heard it again with his face smashed against the sidewalk and thinking that same white light was coming from an ambulance. Of course that made him the most credible source for anything.
‘Did you totally forget about me, or what?’
Ben grunted. “Oh, yeah. Whatever that thing was, it somehow kept Ian… out of it. Like, he wasn’t there.”
Chase let out a nervous half-chuckle. “He’s in your dreams with you all the time too?”
The guy’s awkward smile faded when Ben just rolled his head toward Chase and blinked. “Ian’s always in my head. All the time. He can go into my dreams, but most of the time he doesn’t. Either way, he always knows I had a dream, and he knows what they were. He wasn’t in this one. The thing specifically said it made sure Ian couldn’t join us there.” Ben looked at April again. “And Ian didn’t know I’d even had a dream when I woke up. He had to… go through my memories of it just to believe that it actually happened.”
There was no possible way to comprehend the look April gave him now—some mixture of pity, surprise, sympathy, amusement, and maybe like she had a headache. Ben thought he knew her pretty well by now, but it was definitely possible that he had no idea how to decipher her expressions, because none of that made sense. It made him feel weirdly like he’d just read her mind instead, only he had no idea what was going on in there.
Chase flicked the overturned plastic cup, and it skittered across the table before dropping to the floor. Super great coping mechanism—make a mess.
“Ben,” April said, apparently ignoring Chase’s juvenile discomfort, “if there’s anything else that happened, please tell me.”
‘The sand, dude.’
No. He didn’t want to talk about that. That was crossing the line of what he even wanted to think about right now. And it was weird enough that he’d just been talking about Ian and how that whole thing worked, out loud, to people he knew, and they hadn’t even blinked.
‘She looks pretty serious. Like, I’d tell her.’
Ben just stared at April, hoping she’d be satisfied with what he’d already said.
‘Did you not learn anything at all about what happens when you don’t tell people what they need to know?’
“Jesus, okay! Fine. Just shut up.”
“Nice Jedi mind trick,” Chase muttered. When Ben turned to shoot him a look, the guy was eyeing April with wide eyes, like he actually believed she’d been the one to convince Ben to talk.
“Ian,” Ben told April, pointing to his own head. “Not you.”
For the first time today, she smiled a little. “I know.”
Ben sighed. “Okay.”
“So keep going.”
“I, uh… I thought it was a dream too. And then I woke up. And there was… sand. In my bed.” His swallow sounded as loud in his own head as if he’d just pounded his fist down on a packet of ketchup.
“That’s what you’re worried about.” Now Chase was making fun of him. “That could’ve come from anywhere.”
‘Hey, that’s exactly what I s—’
“No…” Ben shook his head and just told himself not to listen to either of them. “I don’t walk around with sand on me all day, and it definitely wasn’t there when I went to bed. So I don’t even know if this actually was a dream or what.”
“Dude, that happens to me all the time,” Chase said. “Like, I found some chips in my pillowcase the other day. Obviously, I don’t remember putting it there, but do I look all freaked out about it? No. I ate the chip.”
Oh, man. Of course he did. And judging by the massive bong Ben had seen in Chase’s house a few weeks ago, finding chips in the guy’s pillowcase didn’t seem like that big of a surprise anyway.
“You’re really gonna tell him that it’s not weird at all,” April said, leaning toward Chase over the table, “after everything you’ve seen? Everything we’ve all done and what we know about… the things that exist out there?” She glanced briefly around the coffee shop, but now that Ben had stopped yelling at Ian to quit yammering in his head, most of the other customers had returned to their regularly scheduled program—drink, talk, write, ignore.
Chase looked sufficiently berated now, and he just scratched his head through that stupid black beanie he always wore and shrugged.
“Right,” April finished, staring at Chase until she was apparently convinced she’d made her point. “So that thing either got inside your head and was powerful enough to… what? Block Ian out for the whole dream. Or it actually took you somewhere, like that desert, and brought you back.”
With a sigh, Ben bowed his head to run both hands through his hair. Wasn’t it just so nice to hear somebody else say it out loud? But now it wasn’t just a potential overreaction anymore. April seemed to think exactly what he’d been thinking; while that definitely made him feel saner, it didn’t make the rest of his day any better at all. He doubted whatever April had to share next would change that, but he had to ask anyway. “Your turn now, right?”
April nodded, blinking wide eyes, then shook her head a little—almost like she was trying to forget something she’d just seen or remembered. Whic
h definitely couldn’t be good. “Like I said, I had another one of those dreams. No demon made out of rags, but… Well, it was definitely the first time I’ve ever dreamed about the spirit realm. Or seen it. I think.”
‘Woah,’ Ian whispered. ‘How the heck could she have a dream about that?’
Exactly what Ben was wondering. “How do you know that’s what you saw?”
April tilted her head, like she was briefly warning him not to be condescending. “I see a lot of things, Ben. You know that. Some of them don’t make sense until the moment they happen, but I’m pretty sure I can put your descriptions of that place and my dream together and make the connection.”
“Okay,” Ben said, feeling like he should apologize for something but not really knowing what. “I didn’t know that worked with places you’ve never seen before.”
“Yeah. It does.” A cynical, airy laugh escaped her. “It wasn’t a desert, though. It was Boston, all green and… destroyed, pretty much. Then I saw New York, L.A., London, Paris, Tokyo. Like flashing pictures. Then you. You were shivering, like you were cold, and this… hand came up out of the ground and pulled you down into it. It dropped you in front of that Richard guy’s house, right next to another version of you. I mean, he looked like you, but he wasn’t exactly you. He looked…” She laughed again.
“What?”
“He looked really proud of something. Like he was about to get some kind of award. I don’t know.”
Ben let himself laugh along with her, though it sounded more like a disbelieving scoff than anything else. The only award he’d ever win was the ‘only person in the history of this planet to share his body with his technically not-dead friend’s spirit and still somehow manage not to be awesome at demon-hunting’ award.
‘That’s a mouthful.’
“So there was you, and the other you at that house from last night. More hands started coming up out of the ground, but they looked more like robots. And then the whole spirit-realm thing started to… I don’t know. Fade? Like I was looking at both worlds at the same time. A bright light showed up. White. Something like a ship or a submarine, maybe. With wings. Yeah, I know it’s weird. I’m trying.”
That wasn’t really prompted by anything, but Ben glanced at Chase to see the guy’s face smooshed up in disbelief. Just wait till he heard about how these dreams of hers had saved their lives on multiple occasions. He wanted to slap that look off Chase’s face, but April kept going.
“Another hand came out of the white-light-ship thing, and it pointed to Richard’s front door. He was standing there with his arms folded, the door open behind him, and then I heard somebody say, ‘The Gorafrim return with chains.’ The voice was so… terrified. And excited at the same time.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Anyway, after that, the real Ben walked inside Richard’s house, and then the other Ben did the whole glowing-hands thing you sometimes do. Only it was white. Aimed at all those hands crawling up out of the ground. So, that’s it.” She blew out a long breath, her cheeks puffing out, then pressed her lips together and nodded.
The silence around their little table at Speedy Joe’s lasted for about ten seconds. If there was ever a good time to use the word ‘guffaw’, it would have been to describe the sound that came out of Chase next. He’d leaned so far back in his chair with the force of it that he almost fell over. Then he slapped at the table and righted himself again, chuckling. “Are you kidding me? That’s what made you freak out and text me?”
“Chase, I can tell when something’s wrong,” April snapped. “I wasn’t about to ignore it.”
“Because of a dream? You said you thought Ben was in trouble.”
“Was he?” She asked it with no reaction whatsoever.
The gaping smile on Chase’s face froze, then he turned to look at Ben. “I mean…”
Man, this guy was so good at letting information slip in the worst possible way. Ben rolled his eyes. “It wasn’t that bad,” he said quickly. April’s immediate frown could have crushed the best poker face in the world. “Okay. It was weird. But I’m fine.” He thought.
“What happened?”
“I took a walk,” Ben said. “That was it. Then something happened. I mean, I think that demon from my dream—or whatever—found me again. Got in my head. It was bringing all the things I’d seen back up again. Just rifling through them. Then everything I was looking at on the sidewalk brought up something else. I’m not gonna lie and say it wasn’t painful, and I fell. On the sidewalk. Maybe caused a scene, because somebody called an ambulance. Paramedics showed up, then Chase was there, and that’s it.”
Way to go for the abridged version. Still frowning, April looked at Chase. It seemed all the guy could do was just keep shrugging.
“It did… uh…” Okay, he really just had to force himself not to leave anything else out this time. That had already gotten him into way too much trouble. “The demon thing in my head found my memories of you,” he told April. “Went through a lot of them, actually. Like it was looking for something specific. And I heard something else say, ‘Not this one,’ again. So now I don’t even know if it was talking about me or you.”
April rolled her shoulders back, like she was trying to get somebody to quit the awful massage they were giving her. “Maybe both.”
Chase snorted. “I always knew you guys were a little weird, but this is ridiculous. Okay, yeah, Ben fainted on the sidewalk—”
“I didn’t faint.”
“But going through your dreams like this like they’re actual proof of anything is the best way to dig up a whole lotta nothing.” Chase slammed his elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hands. He really did an amazing job of turning a gesture usually reserved for profound interest completely upside down. It made him look like a tool. “No, seriously, guys. I want to know why the hell you think this is going to help us at all.”
“Help us?” Ben said, leaning away from the guy. “I don’t remember you talking about any of your issues.”
‘Except for the fact that I can just keep blackmailing him whenever I want.’
True but irrelevant right now.
“Low blow, Ben,” Chase said, keeping his hands cupped stupidly around his chin. “I thought we were a team.”
“Not if you keep trying to pick apart everything we say,” April added.
The table fell silent again, then Ben sat back in his chair and watched April’s steely gaze not move at all from where it settled on Chase’s dumb smile. “Do you wanna tell him, or should I?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I’ll tell him.”
14
“Wait, you’re serious?” Chase stared with wide eyes at April, then Ben, and his mouth fell open just a little more. At least that reaction wasn’t nearly as bad as some of his others. Ben had anticipated something a little more over the top. “You’re totally serious.”
April had told the guy all about her dreams—that she saw the future in them, though most of the time she had no idea what they meant until an unknown moment in time. Then she knew exactly what to do. Already, Ben had seen enough proof of this to believe it completely—April throwing a rock through the Phi Kappa Alpha house window before the demon could cook so many college kids alive; chucking the stone at the Guardian to banish it when Ben couldn’t move; knowing exactly where to find the lantern to toss into that old house while Ben and Ian lit it up with green fire, just to make it look like an accident. She’d also kicked the pillow that had fallen over Peter’s demon-catching box and almost killed them. Whether or not she’d had dreams about the wooden cabinet and the creepy wooden figurine Richard Monday had anonymously sent Peter, she’d definitely known how to use both of those to keep demons from escaping their banishment and a creepy cat-eating spirit from doing any more damage to the alleyway—or the cats.
“Completely serious,” April said. “My grandmother was the only person who actually believed me. Sometimes, I think she might have had the same dreams. They got me into trouble,
once, but I know a dream of the future when I have it.”
Yeah, trouble. Her drug-dealer, stalker ex-boyfriend who’d been following her and circling her apartment complex until Ben, Peter, and Chase showed up. And with his super-hacking skills, or whatever, Chase had somehow managed to put the guy back in jail for violating his probation.
Chase swallowed, then dipped his head in acknowledgment and didn’t say anything else. He really couldn’t argue with the proof laid out before him like this, could he? And at least he’d stopped spouting stupid things at them because he felt uncomfortable.
“And we’re taking this dream seriously, too,” Ben added. Even if Ben’s dream—or abduction and return—didn’t make sense to any of them, they could focus on April’s. Peter would have said the same thing.
‘Yeah, where is he?’
Probably brooding in his apartment and still being pissed, if Ben had to guess. He hoped that didn’t last too long.
“So…” Chase leaned away from them, eyeing April again like she’d just shown him her third arm or something. “Do you ever know what the dreams mean before they… happen?”
April shrugged. “It depends. Sometimes it’s just a hint. Like the dream I had of Ben and Peter going back to that house to find Ian. That’s why I decided to go with them. Most of the time, I just have to wait and see. But I do think there’s one thing we can get out of this one right now.” She looked slowly from Chase to Ben again, and his automatic reaction was to desperately wish she wouldn’t say out loud what he thought she was going to say. “I think we need to ask Richard about Gorafrim, whatever it is.”
Yep. That was exactly what he was thinking and exactly what he didn’t want to hear. Or do. Crap.
“Anybody feel like having that conversation?” Ben asked. It didn’t surprise him at all when Chase and April both gave him pointed looks and shook their heads. With a sigh, Ben rubbed his forehead. “Okay, fine. I’ll do it. No objections to calling that Rufus guy instead?” Beyond the fact that he didn’t even have a number for Richard Monday, Ben really didn’t want to talk to their host from the night before and face being alternately scrutinized and yelled at for misunderstanding everything Ben didn’t even know.