“We’ve got runners.”
“We’ve got theories, you know…” Sanders’ eyes were slits, darting from one end of the room to the other.
Andre had been prepared to tie him to a chair but I figured the flaming bodies of the Rogues between him and the door would be enough of a deterrent. Besides, he didn’t need his hands or feet to dream what he dreamed.
When Shay had caught him slipping around the back of the house she’d subdued him with one of her Tasers before he had a chance to dissolve it to pieces. Unlike Devyn’s ability to turn her skin into armor, Sanders’ ability to dissolve objects, and possibly even human beings, into the most finite parts of themselves, wasn’t just an inconvenience. It was dangerous, and not just to me, but to everyone around me too.
Roman circled him, easing into the intimidation. “Theories…”
“Yeah.” Sanders’ voice quavered as Roman passed behind him. “Like that you’re offing us one by one or shoving us back into our bodies and erasing our memories before dumping us in the middle of nowhere.”
“We saved your life,” Andre said. “Or have you forgotten?” The Rogues had found Sanders in a beachfront shack in the Bahamas. He’d been separated from his body while dreaming and when he went back for it after escaping from Anso’s prison it was gone.
“You found me when I was lost,” Sanders corrected, scratching at his blonde dreads.
“And the difference is?” Roman asked.
“The difference is, finding me when I just so happened to be lost could come across as a little suspicious.”
“Look,” I said, “unfortunately we don’t really have time to put your mind at ease. We’re kind of in a hurry.” I gave Andre a look and he disappeared down the hall in search of Sanders’ body. “But I need you to trust me.” I reached out a hand.
Instead of reaching back he crossed his arms. “I don’t trust you.”
Andre stepped back into the room, lowering Sanders’ sleeping body onto the couch. “How about now?”
Sanders was stricken, some awful pre-imagined realization clicking into place. He saw his body, Andre standing over it, Roman and I circling him, and that was all it took.
“You!” He growled and all of the mess Devyn had left behind was lifted into the air.
Pieces of furniture, abandoned piano keys, and shattered glass splintered even more. For too long I just watched, trying to sense the danger and the direction of Sanders’ rage. The brokenness all around us turned to sand, swirling until we were trapped in a maniacal dust storm. I flinched against the force, stinging flecks scraping past my arms. I shielded my face, the debris darkening. The moment I lost sight of Sanders I barreled straight into it.
I ran into something, someone. Andre was kneeling, clutching himself; face red and strained like something had snaked around his windpipe. His entire body convulsed, tiny tremors turning him liquid from the inside out, pieces of him falling limp as if they were attached to nothing but skin.
“Stop it!” I screamed, looking from Sanders to Andre.
Roman pulled Sanders onto his feet, trying to drag him towards his body. But he was still on alert, still not understanding.
“You’re going to wake up.” Roman took Sanders’ face in his hands. “Your body is alive, you dumbass. Now stop struggling and wake yourself up.”
The wind died down, Sanders finally willing to listen.
I took careful steps in his direction. “I don’t want to hurt you. We’re not here to hurt you, I promise. We’re here to help you.”
“Where’s Devyn?” He struggled, fighting the dueling urges to dream and wake at the same time.
The lie came easier. “She woke up.”
“I want to see her.”
I nodded. “I’ll take you to her.”
Sanders sat up, confused, hopeful, his body calling to him. I held out my hand and then he took it.
None of us had mentioned the fact that once Sanders woke up he’d no longer be able to dream like before. The moment he woke back into his body I knew he could feel the betrayal.
“It was the only way,” I said.
Sanders stared straight ahead. “They’re gone.”
“But you’re not.”
His aliveness didn’t even seem to register. What was more alive than being able to manipulate the world at your whim? Now he was nothing but a high school drop out with sunspots and dreads and a mortal body that was just as weak as the rest of them. I wondered if that was the first sensation he’d felt. Not the absence of the dreams but the new finiteness of every bone in his body. I could only imagine how terrifying those first few breaths were, knowing that you were trapped inside a ticking time bomb again with no chance of leaving it behind in your sleep.
Sanders’ eyes flicked up to mine, his gaze scalding. “Why?”
“It’s…” I hesitated, “complicated. Sanders…”
His voice shred to a whisper. “You’re like him.”
“No.” I backed away, Sanders glaring at me with something worse than suspicion. Disgust. “I am nothing like him.” The anger fizzled out and I crouched. “I’m trying to undo what he’s done.”
“How? By taking everyone’s power for yourself?”
“By putting the pieces back together,” Roman said.
I looked down, not sure how to start or where. But maybe I owed Sanders the truth. Even if I didn’t, maybe I could still give it to him. “A long time ago Anso had a daughter.” I hoped that trying to make sense of things for Sanders would help me make sense of things too, that it would remind me of the why in all of this. That it would remind me that there was one at all. “She was the first Dreamer and he killed her. But she left behind a curse.” I swallowed. “Me.” I looked into his eyes, my own burning. “And if I don’t find every Dreamer and take their dreams the world will end.”
Sanders’ breathing slowed but his rage was still hot. “You’re telling them the truth.”
I stood, tried to look authoritative. “We can’t do that.”
“Like hell you can’t. You just don’t want to. It’s easier for you if everyone just cooperates, ignorant instead of fighting back. But they deserve to know.”
“Which is why we explain it to them as soon as they wake up.”
“Then why not bring everyone in here at once? I’m sure as soon as they see their bodies again they’ll want to climb back into them.” He raised an eyebrow. “Unless, for some of them, it won’t be that easy.”
I looked away. “Take him upstairs for now.”
“Hell no. I’m not going anywhere.”
I loomed over him. “Then we’ll erase your memories and abandon you in the middle of nowhere.”
He glared up at me. “You wouldn’t.”
My gaze was a pronged hook and when Sanders started to whimper I realized he could actually feel it sinking deeper. I twisted it, maneuvering the pain straight into his gut. His flesh turned to thread that I couldn’t help but unravel. He doubled over, shaking just like Andre had when Sanders was pulling him apart, piece-by-piece.
Roman bound his arms behind his back. “Bryn, I’ve got him.”
I yanked a little harder and Sanders rolled, writhing like a marionette doll.
“Shit, please. I’ll keep quiet.”
Roman raised his voice. “Bryn…he’s done. It’s done.”
I released my hold on Sanders and stared at the ground, hiding from Roman’s gaze, from my reflection in it. “I…just take him upstairs for now.” I didn’t have time to analyze Roman’s response before my eyes were drawn towards the front door again. “Bring in the next one.”
Eric Gonzalez’s life existed in a Technicolor paradise of gas station candy, comic book collages, and RPGs. He had a homemade headset fashioned like an astronaut’s helmet and he ran the gamut of every tournament on the Internet. He lived in a black box of neon posters surrounded by the dim glow of monitors, his grandmother nothing but a sliver of light at the top of the basement stairs as she checked on him twice
a day.
She thought he was a recluse, eccentric and shy, but really he just preferred the world of ones and zeros to the real one. To Eric, numbers weren’t just something to count and measure, they were something he could taste. When I reached out and brushed his hand I could taste them too.
Walnut, gasoline, citrus, and copper. The number seven was like a slice of honey-covered watermelon and the number two was bitter and earthy like the skin of a vegetable before it ripens. I could see them too, ticking along in infinite digits as they told the story of how Celia’s house was built. Numbers clung to our skin and drifted in the air between us, stripping the mystery and magic from the world and replacing it with complicated code that revealed we were no greater than the stones beneath our feet. My hands maneuvered the numbers as if they were ornaments, strung up and malleable. They chimed, summoning another one of my senses, and suddenly I was smiling.
“They’re everywhere,” I breathed.
“I know.”
Eric’s body had still been alive and he’d woken back into it before I laid a hand on him. He looked shell-shocked and empty, never meeting my eyes as if he could hardly stand the thought of someone else seeing the trueness of the world the way he’d always seen it. He’d known it was a gift and he’d made that gift his entire identity. And then I’d stolen it.
“I’m sorry,” I said but it was halfhearted and miserable.
He clenched his fists, fighting to hang onto the stoicism he usually wore. But he was cracking, the foundation he’d built his entire life on turned into a black hole.
“It’s gone,” he said, “forever?”
“Yes.”
He looked at me, at all of us. “Forever.” Then he slipped to his knees, shaking and trying to breathe, everything inside him collapsing. But he didn’t cry. Maybe the storm inside him was only wind. Dry and churning, a cyclone that was tangling him into knots. He doubled over, flinching against the flying debris, the truth stabbing him in the ribs, in the lungs, in the heart. He clutched his chest and the tears finally came.
One by one we marched the Dreamers inside, scared them, subdued them, and placed them back where they belonged.
Magda. Mitchell. Stephen. Ashlyn.
Markus. Omari. Zandra. Claudio.
When the body was dead I tried not to look, but the moment the Dreamer who belonged inside saw the burns, their screams primal and ringing in my ears, I had to. Just the sight of it crippled them long enough for me to make my move. I reached for them, feigning comfort, and then I forced them back inside. I killed them. Over and over again.
Amara. Shawn. Isaac.
Rafiq.
He was last only because he’d taken to the edge of the yard, as far as Shay would let him go. He was staring up at the moon. We all crowded in the doorway, staring too. It was the color of…
“Blood,” Stassi whispered.
She startled me, still dreaming and detached from her body. I avoided the brush of her skin, the risk of waking her now much too dangerous. We had no idea where her body was and in what condition. Despite how painful it seemed for her to straddle that boundary between the dead and the living she had no other choice. For the time being it was quiet here but soon the dead would outnumber us like they had in Cologne and I didn’t want to think about what that would do to her.
“What?” I asked her, struck by how large the moon was and how low it hung. It looked like a ball of fire ready to devour us all.
“The moon’s covered in it,” Stassi said, biting her fingernails. “Not good.”
Everyone wandered out into the yard to stand right under it.
Celia clutched one of the porch columns, almost cowering as she said, “Because it doesn’t belong to us.”
The moon was bruised and bloodied like the corpses we’d been wading through all night. But it was more than just a mirror. It was a lit fuse, a looking glass casting morbid shadows of what was to come. More death. More nightmares. More blood.
Instead of dragging Rafiq away from the sight I was drawn to the patch of grass at his side. I almost reached for him before he could fight me but for some reason I sensed that he wouldn’t. I knelt next to him, almost falling. I was exhausted and he looked at me, apologetic and full of pity.
“Does it…hurt?” he asked, his English broken and beautiful.
“What are you?” I asked.
“An Empath.” He let out a deep breath and I knew he knew. Because he could feel what I felt and what I felt was grief.
“I sensed it,” he said. “The cold…”
“I’m sorry.” All I wanted was to sit there with him for a few more minutes, telling him everything I’d wanted to tell the other Dreamers but couldn’t. Because they were fighting me. Because they were scared. I just wanted to tell him, “I’m so sorry.”
I reached for Rafiq. His world was red and bloody and dying and wherever he went, feelings had been left behind like fallen leaves. They chased and clung to him, thorns that burrowed deep inside. Every person he’d ever met or loved or seen had carved something onto the flesh of his heart and when he touched my skin he gave it all to me.
I felt every blow and burn, every smile and soft touch until there was no distinction anymore between sorrow and joy. There was nothing but a muted pang, a second pulse that didn’t let go of me. I cried and heaved and emptied myself but the pang was still there and I knew it always would be. Because it wasn’t just an echo of the things Rafiq had seen. His touch had amplified the things I’d seen too. And after an entire night spent reviving the dead and burying others I couldn’t take it. I just couldn’t take it.
6
Roman
She cried. For the first time in all of this Bryn cried while all the rest of us could do was watch. I thought death had hollowed her but watching her tremble and sob only reminded me of the humanness we’d been fighting so hard to hold onto. The humanness we’d both started shedding so long ago.
All of the color drained from her face, her skin cold to the touch as if all their ghosts had climbed inside her. And I was angry. I was angry because I knew it would hurt. She’d used the word ruin the day I’d almost killed Drew, and as I sat next to her in the grass, it was happening right before my eyes.
I tried to reach for her but each blade of grass between us was a mile, the distance widening the longer she didn’t look back.
“It’s over,” I said.
Her crying reached a lull and I held my breath, waiting, wishing she’d reach for me, that she’d tell me what to do to make any of this better.
But when Bryn finally looked up all she said was, “That was just the beginning.”
Bryn shifted, uneasy. She sharpened her gaze on the night beyond the property line. I stared too; skin humming as I rose to my feet. It was a grey swirling dark, a storm moving closer. I waited for the smell of rain, for those first cool drops. But as the clouds rolled in, they calmed to slow-moving parts that looked more like the limbs of a beast. More than one.
“What the—?”
Bryn stood; Andre and Domingo alight at our sides. The glow bounced off oil, shimmers of green and purple cutting through the cloud cover.
The flap of wings popped overhead, too loud to belong to something small. Something real. The first wide body sank down, talons digging up the soil, long beak tossing feathers as big as my arm as it picked at itself. And I remembered them—the crows from Bryn’s dream, from Bryn’s memories. They’d been static, the sculptures circling a moss-covered fountain in her dream-state. But now they were alive, swooping down and surrounding the house.
They were awake.
“The shadows…” Dani clung to one of the porch columns, everyone having followed the sound onto Celia’s porch.
Bryn trembled. “Get back inside.”
One of the larger crows near the center of the murder raised its large head. Its wide eyes shifted, snakelike, and I froze. Because they weren’t the eyes of a beast. They were too hungry; too vengeful. They were the eyes of a hunte
r.
Anso.
The crow’s beak slid open, a sharp hiss slipping out. The crows all flapped their wings at once, cawing and shrieking at one another, every head half-turned with one eye poised on where we stood. Bryn let out the tightest gasp and I knew she’d seen him. When every hiss stretched into a wretched scream, I knew he’d seen her too.
Shay lit up and so did I, the light making them stir and twitch. They hissed, spitting, the ground quaking beneath their claws.
Rafael beckoned us toward the house. “Back up. Slow.”
Shay took the first step, igniting a few caws. Domingo moved in the same direction, pulling Stassi with him. Andre gave Bryn a nod; he and I ready to bolt inside behind her. She turned just her head, the crows cocking their necks in reply. They all stared right at her.
Bryn took one step and the crows charged, hiking up their talons and heading straight for us like lumbering black torpedoes. Rafael threw himself in front of her, Bryn falling against the bottom step as the crows thrashed against the heat. They leapt up, wings fanning the flames as Domingo, Stassi and Shay ran inside.
One of the crows spit at me, another swiping at Andre and barely missing his face. It hissed, skirting back from his flames. I hurled light at the wall of feathers in front of me, crows taking flight. Dust kicked up, as red as the moon, and all we could see were their shadows.
“Bryn, hurry!” Dani took Bryn’s hand, dragging her up the steps.
Felix pulled at them both as shingles snapped off the roof, a crack racing up the gable over the porch as the crows landed above our heads. A claw swiped down, catching Felix in the shoulder. He wrenched away, panting, bleeding. Rafael pushed him into Celia’s arms as Andre tried to wrestle the beast down from the roof. He singed the claw that had swiped Felix, Andre’s own arm coming back pink. I dragged him behind me just as an open beak aimed at us both, arms and hands pulling us inside the house.
The door slammed closed behind us, bodies barreling into it, talons slicing gashes straight through. Bryn pushed back, a clawed foot reaching in and pinning her hand to the wood. She cried out, pulling away just as the sliver of night through the tear was replaced by stone.
The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4 Page 97