Her headlong flight caught him by surprise, but that didn’t stop him from jumping up and going after her.
She knew her way around this patch of forest. And he didn’t. She dodged past trees and boulders, but he kept her in sight as she ran into a clearing, past a cold campfire and a group of tents, then farther into the woods.
“Miranda!” he shouted. “Miranda, stop.”
Four
Caleb pounded after Miranda. She slipped on wet pine needles, then scrambled up—which gave him the seconds he needed to catch her.
When he tried to hold her, she fought him, her movements jerky and disorganized. The way she’d described her thoughts.
He easily ducked under her defenses and grabbed her, wrapping his arms around her and holding tight.
“Let me go!” she shouted, sounding as if she was fighting panic as much as she was fighting him.
“Not until you listen to me,” he growled.
She went still as a statue. Then, to his dismay, all the starch went out of her. Sagging against him, she started to cry—great wracking sobs that shook her whole body. Leaning back against a boulder, he held on to her, his voice low and soothing as he stroked her and rocked her.
He could feel her trying to get control of herself. And finally she calmed in his arms.
“I’m sorry I frightened you,” he murmured.
She made a hitching sound.
“But you have to listen to me,” he added.
She nodded against his shoulder.
This time he kept his voice level and reasonable as he suggested, “Let’s take this step by step. Okay?”
“Okay,” she agreed in a small voice.
“Do you remember driving in your truck?” he asked gently. “From your house—down toward town.”
She answered with a small nod.
“Then what do you remember?” he asked.
This time she answered with a gasp.
“What?”
“He drove up close and rammed my back bumper!”
“Who?” he pressed.
“Someone. I said ‘he,’” she mused. “But really, I don’t even know if it was a man. I couldn’t see him. The sun was hitting his windshield.”
He’d felt the impact. “Who would want to hurt you?”
“I don’t know! Maybe it was the kids up the hill—playing games.”
It hadn’t felt like a game to him. But he didn’t think she could answer his question. So he focused on what else she might be able to remember.
“What happened after that?”
She tensed in his arms, and he was afraid she might bolt again. But she stayed where she was, tipping her face toward his, her eyes large and round. “He ran me off the road. I . . . I went down the hill.” She gasped and he felt her terror, because he had been there with her. In her mind.
“There was a tree in front of me. I must have hit it.” She stared at him, panic gripping her features. “What happened to me? Am I dead?”
“No!”
“Then what?”
He held her firmly by the shoulders, feeling her fine bones. “I told you. You’re in the hospital, unconscious.”
“How did you find out?”
“I . . . I saw your truck piled up against that tree,” he said, because the part before that was too hard to explain.
“You were there?” she whispered.
He sighed, wondering if she would believe him. “No. I saw it in . . . my mind.”
Fear bloomed in her eyes. “Like fortune-telling? Like your mother? And your aunt?” she asked in a barely audible voice.
“Yeah, like that. Sort of.”
“No!”
He tried to reassure her. “It’s all right. I wouldn’t eavesdrop on you.”
“I’m not worried about that. My father . . .”
“What about him?” he asked sharply.
“I . . . I remember . . . He didn’t like what your mother and aunt told my mom.”
“About his affairs?”
She made a strangled sound. “You knew about that?” “I heard my mom and my aunt talking—after they thought I was in bed. They were afraid of the colonel and they were arguing about whether to tell your mother.” He swallowed. “I guess they did, because she left him, didn’t she?”
“That’s not why!”
“Then what?”
She turned her head away.
“Miranda, you can’t just say something like that—then clam up!”
“Caleb, don’t ask me any more questions.”
“Why not?”
“It’s dangerous.”
Before he could get her to explain what she meant, the world shook around him.
At first he thought she was fighting him again—until he saw the look of stark terror on her face.
“What?” she whispered. “What’s happening?”
A wind sprang up, whipping her hair around her face.
“I don’t know,” he answered, but he felt his grip on reality slipping. This reality. The dream reality.
He reached for her, but somehow she was beyond his grasp. Not in distance. Her body had turned to mist in his arms. And when she said something else, he could see her lips moving, but he couldn’t hear the words above the roaring in his ears.
Then he was speeding away from her, not on his own feet but as though he were on an open railroad car, racing down a track.
“Miranda!” he called out.
He saw her lips form words. “Caleb, be careful.”
She screamed something else to him. But he couldn’t catch the words. And billowing fog shrouded his vision, blurring his sight of her. The vapor poured down on him, wiping out the forest scene.
All at once he was somewhere else. Sitting on a hard bench, feeling sick and disoriented.
“Are you all right, young man? Are you all right?”
His eyes blinked open and he found himself staring into the wrinkled face of a gray-haired woman.
“What happened to Miranda?” he asked stupidly.
“I don’t know. But you were sitting there, looking like you were in a trance. With your eyes open and your jaw slack.”
“Charming,” he managed, then sat up straighter. He was back in the hospital chapel. Alone, except for the old woman.
Lurching to his feet, he had to steady himself against the back of the pew when he wavered on unsteady legs. The back of the stained-glass window had been illuminated with floodlights when he came into the chapel. Now he could tell he was seeing daylight.
When he looked at his watch, he couldn’t believe the time. It had seemed like he was in the dream with Miranda for less than an hour. But out here in the real world, half a day had passed.
He raised his eyes to the old woman. “Sorry I alarmed you.”
“Not just me. The man and the woman.”
“Huh? What man and woman?”
“They had to leave. They asked me to wake you.” She shook her head. “But I didn’t do it.”
He struggled to take all that in. “You didn’t wake me up?” he asked stupidly.
“No. It could have been dangerous. What if you’d been having a seizure?” she asked.
He didn’t bother to tell her that if he’d been having a seizure, he doubted she would have had any effect on him.
The important point was that he’d been yanked out of the dream—by something. Not her, apparently.
He started to turn away, then saw she was staring at his jacket sleeve.
“Your arm!” she wheezed.
Her words brought a stab of pain—pain that had been there all along, under the surface. He looked at his left arm and saw the tattered jacket. Blood had oozed through and dried on the dark leather.
He stared at the bloody patches. Gingerly he pulled his arm through the sleeve. Below the jacket, his shirt was shredded—and so was his skin.
“Young man, what happened to you?” the woman asked.
“I was attacked by a bear,” he answered, stil
l trying to come to grips with what he saw.
She sucked in a startled breath. “Where?”
Where, indeed?
It had been in Miranda’s dream. And contrary to all logic, he could see the marks on his arm—in the real world.
A lightning bolt of fear shot through him. Not for himself. For Miranda. If he could be hurt in that place—so could she.
What dangers, besides wild animals, waited for her there?
And what had jerked him awake? Some disturbance in her dream? Was her medical condition worse? Or was she awake?
Frederick Grove had never learned how to sit around and wait. He was a man of action. Now anger made his blood pressure throb in his temple as he leaned over his daughter, shaking her by the shoulders. She was still in intensive care, and they were keeping him out of her cubicle most of the time—like her father wasn’t entitled to see her.
He’d had to sit in the waiting room and jump up like a trained monkey when they allowed him to come in here and stare into her pale face.
She had one of those air tubes sticking in her nose. And an IV drip in her arm. Stitches in her head. And she was attached to a bunch of monitors.
She’d already had all the standard tests. The doctor had said that if she didn’t wake up soon, they were going to do an MRI. And another CAT scan, with contrast, whatever that meant.
So far, she was just lying there like a lump. “You can’t do this!” he shouted. “You have to wake up and tell me what happened to you. You’re a good driver. You wouldn’t have a goddamn one-car accident. So what the hell happened? Who did this to you? That son of a Gypsy—pretending to be all concerned when he was probably up to his ears in this?”
When Miranda didn’t answer, he gave her another shake.
Her eyes stayed closed, and her only response was a moan. She seemed to sink further into unconsciousness—making him madder than he had been a few minutes ago.
“You can’t get away with this,” he told her. “Stop burying your head in the sand like an ostrich.”
He was sure he could get through to her—given enough time. And given the fact that she was malingering. At least that was the way he saw it. The doctor didn’t know why she wouldn’t wake up. But he did. She was hiding in there. And he wasn’t going to allow it!
As he reached for Miranda again, a hand closed over his shoulder.
“Sir. Stop that, sir.”
He looked up to see one of the nurses staring at him in horror.
They had caught him. They could call the security guards if he didn’t do what they wanted. So he stepped away from Miranda and stalked out of the unit.
Caleb came pounding up the stairs to the intensive care unit, praying that Miranda had regained consciousness.
“Is she awake?” he gasped when he saw her father.
“No.”
The colonel’s eyes shifted away, and Caleb felt a spurt of fear. Lord, had the fool been acting true to form. Had he tried to wake her up? Was that what had happened to tear the fabric of the dream?
He warned himself not to jump to conclusions. Yet now that his sixth sense was operating on overdrive, he thought he wasn’t off the mark.
Forcing himself to speak in a low, calm voice, he said, “Let me talk to her. She might respond to me. I’ve heard that when people are in a coma, sometimes they can hear what people are saying to them.”
Colonel Grove laughed in his face. “You must be kidding. She gave you the boot eight years ago. If she’s going to respond to anyone, it will be to me. To her father. So get the hell back where you belong—that fancy art studio of yours.”
The urge to land a punch in the middle of the man’s thin lips was overwhelming. It took every ounce of control Caleb possessed to back away. Once again, he reminded himself that if he got into a fight with the colonel, they’d both get thrown out of the hospital. And neither one of them would know when Miranda woke up.
That was the only thing stopping him from physical violence. But he sure as hell wasn’t going to follow Colonel Grove’s directions. He was going to stay right here in M-C General. Close to Miranda.
Slipping his hand into his pocket, he wrapped his fist around the opal ring. It helped to center him, and he clung to it as though it could make a difference in his destiny as he walked away from the intensive care unit.
As he passed the elevator, he saw a man get off. A man with a hard face and salt-and-pepper hair in a buzz cut. He noticed the guy because he looked like an ex-army officer. A friend of Colonel Grove’s? Come to lend support?
Turning, Caleb watched to see where the guy was going. But when he walked on past the unit, Caleb switched his attention back to his main objective—communicating with Miranda.
As Frederick stood in the waiting room looking out the window, he heard the sound of footsteps behind him. That son of a Gypsy was back!
Whirling, he prepared to lunge across the room. He changed his stance when he saw his business partner, Dustin Auger, standing in the doorway.
Carefully he studied the other man’s face. “It’s about time you got here,” he muttered.
His partner spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Sorry. You know I was in San Francisco receiving that shipment of Chinese porcelain.”
“Porcelain vases. Yeah.” He wanted to ask some questions—like about what else had arrived. He wanted to ask more pointed questions about where Dustin had been for the past thirty-six hours. Instead, he simply said, “I left a message on your cell phone.”
“Sorry,” Dustin said again. “The battery went out. I couldn’t pick up my messages until I got home.” He looked over Frederick’s shoulder toward the door to the intensive care unit. “You said Miranda had an auto accident.”
“Yes.”
“I just saw that big celebrity sculptor guy. What’s he doing here?”
“Sticking his honker in where it doesn’t belong.”
Dustin nodded, his eyes probing. “You look pretty wrung out. Why don’t you go get something to eat. I’ll stay here, in case they have some new information on Miranda.”
“Maybe later. I’m not hungry now,” he answered. There was something about the tone of Dustin’s voice that made his nerves prickle. Not just his voice. Their business had been running smoothly for a while, but he was coming back to the conclusion that trusting Dustin Auger was a mistake.
“It won’t do her any good for you to sit here if she’s unconscious,” his partner said.
“I’m doing it for me,” Frederick snapped. “When she wakes up, I want to know about it.”
“I’ll sit with you for a while,” Dustin offered.
As she pressed her shoulders against a tree trunk, Miranda felt as though she were holding on to her sanity by her fingernails.
She’d thought she’d lost a group of tourists. After talking to Caleb, she was pretty sure there had never been anyone in this woodsy prison but her—until Caleb had somehow battered his way into her dream.
She’d accepted his word on that—too late. Because he’d vanished as quickly as he’d appeared.
She pressed more tightly against the tree bark. Bending her legs, she clasped them in her arms and lowered her head to her knees.
Although the hard surface behind her felt reassuring, her heart was still pounding like a tom-tom inside her chest. Caleb had forced her to remember the accident in her truck. He’d said she was in a coma. She didn’t want to believe it.
But she had no choice. Because now she remembered the shock and terror of trying to steer while another driver bashed at her bumper.
Somebody had driven her off the road. She knew that much, even if she didn’t know who it was.
Panic threatened to swallow her whole, and she struggled to fight it off—and to think calmly. Her memory was flaky. Maybe from the accident.
Where had she been going?
She couldn’t remember! Still, she was pretty sure that she’d been on an important mission.
Her jaw clenched. If s
he could wake up, maybe she could figure it out. Or maybe she didn’t want to. Maybe she was staying here because she was afraid to go back to the real world.
Her head started to ache again, and she pressed her temple against her knees. It didn’t feel like she wanted to hide. She wanted to wake up. She had to wake up!
Raising her head, she shouted, “Let me out!”
Her voice reverberated through the empty woods. She looked at the sunlight filtering through the branches over her head, and her breath caught. It was late afternoon. It had been late afternoon ever since she’d arrived here. The time never changed, she thought with a shiver.
Feeling exposed and vulnerable, she struggled to stay calm, even when fear clogged her throat.
She could go back to the campsite. That was where she’d picked up the rifle earlier. It had been lying on the ground. But she hadn’t looked in any of the tents.
Maybe there was something else she could use there. A jacket to keep her warm. And another gun. She’d feel safer with a gun in her hand.
“Stop drifting back to that way of thinking,” she said aloud, speaking to the trees and the sky. “Caleb told you the truth about this place. You’re trapped in a dream. No, a nightmare. And you’ll never be safe here. You need to wake up.”
She sent her thoughts out—searching for the door to reality. Instead she sensed a wall, wrapping around the forest. And when she mentally shoved against it, she could make no headway.
All at once she remembered that her cell phone was in her pocket. Pulling it out, she pressed the End button. The screen lit, and she felt a spurt of hope. But when she tried to make a call, the roaming symbol came on, telling her there was no connection. Apparently she wasn’t going to be able to call out of this place.
Had she walled herself in here? And now she was caught in her own trap? Or had someone else locked her in?
As Caleb descended in the elevator, he wondered what he was going to do now. He couldn’t go back to the chapel because the mystery couple who had found him there once could do it again. But there must be lounges and waiting rooms all over the hospital. Maybe he could find one in an out-of-the way location—where he could sit quietly and get into Miranda’s dream again.
What Dreams May Come (Berkley Sensation) Page 10