Dream Snatcher

by Clara Coulson

  What the heck was that all about?

  Ella stands up, scratches her head in confusion—and promptly gets her wrist stung by two angry wasps she inadvertently disturbed. She yelps and swats the wasps away, then gathers her backpack, shoves the camera in, and hurriedly exits the Laundromat so she doesn’t lose sight of Sartell.

  She can’t quite pinpoint what the wizard is up to, not yet, but she’s got a very bad feeling about his behavior. He’s acting methodical, as if he’s marking off points on an extensive checklist, bits and pieces of a complex plot slowly coalescing into a perfect execution, an execution that Ella is one hundred percent sure will end with more innocent people dead at Sartell’s hands. So she can’t lose him. Not until she’s decoded his actions. Not until his end game is clear.

  As soon as she uncovers his goals, however, she’ll go straight to DSI with the information. And she won’t leave—not even if she has to throw a real tantrum—until they listen to what she has to say.

  Chapter Eight

  Sartell treads through the fringes of Aurora for almost five miles, crossing nine residential streets, a small factory district, and two public parks, before he arrives at a townhouse on Brambleton Lane in the process of being gutted for a reno. From behind a tree in a children’s play park, Ella watches Sartell jump the chain-link fence and disappear into the basement of the in-process home, left unsecured by an array of missing windows and doors.

  Ella doesn’t miss the irony of this scenario. Sartell’s strategy is a lot like her own from this morning, squatting at a construction site that’s not currently active. A location most people would overlook, or intentionally look away from, because it’s unsightly compared to the rest of their surroundings.

  According to the development sign strapped to the fencing, the townhouse won’t be finished until October, so Ella figures that Sartell isn’t pressed for time and won’t be vacating his squat in the near future. And if that’s true, then he might have a “camp” set up inside the basement level of the house, strewn with incriminating evidence of his plot in motion. And if that’s true, then all Ella needs to do to prove her suspicions to Riker and crew is snap a few shots of the squat, develop the pictures at a twenty-four-hour photo shop, and deliver the proof to DSI’s front door. Then they can launch some kind of sting operation, burst into the squat armed to the teeth, an army of agents in SWAT gear surrounding the building.

  Sartell can’t possibly dodge a hail of high-powered rifle fire, right? Fireballs or no fireballs, he’ll be forced to surrender…or die. Ella doesn’t care which, honestly, as long as justice is served.

  She hunkers down behind the tree for nearly an hour, until the sun starts to sink toward the Aurora skyline. She’s not worried about staying out late into the night—she’s done it before, many times, since moving into her father’s house—but she is concerned that the lack of light might hide Sartell’s exit from the townhouse squat. If she loses track of his movements, he might end up returning before Ella is done mapping the place. And the last thing she wants is for Sartell to catch her red-handed and ruin her chances of ending his stranglehold on the DA’s office.

  But it turns out her fear is unfounded. Thankfully.

  At about five o’clock, Sartell clambers out of the basement, jumps the fence, and strolls off to the east with a suspicious kick in his step. Like he’s pleased about something.

  Ella’s tempted to follow him and round back to check the squat later, but she knows she might not have another chance to get a good look at the place—especially when Sartell plops down on a bus stop bench and waits, presumably, for the bus to arrive. She takes that as a sign he’ll be gone for a while. Maybe to fake out Riker’s team again. Maybe to run some other strange errand.

  Either way, she needs to use this opportunity to the fullest extent.

  A minute after the bus picks up Sartell and disappears around the block, Ella crosses the street, checks for any nosy passersby, and scales the fence in front of the townhouse. Quickly crossing the churned-up dirt that was once a grassy lawn, she surveys all the possible entrances to the house. Sartell used a particular window to enter, and though Ella’s not sure why, she feels compelled to enter the same way. Maybe her gut thinks Sartell is the kind of man to booby-trap a place. Makes sense, considering he’s the kind who kills without remorse.

  Ella tosses her backpack through the designated basement window first, just to make sure there aren’t any tripwires rigged to grenades, like she’s seen soldiers and special agents use in action movies. But nothing happens as her backpack hits the floor and slides across the dusty concrete, so she sinks to her knees and carefully slips through the empty frame, then lowers herself down into the room. She has to drop the last foot or so; she’s not tall enough to reach the floor from the window’s height.

  Her shoes thump against the concrete, the sound rebounding throughout the expanse of the gutted townhouse. Ella waits at the window while the sound of her entry fades into silence, but nothing responds, so she moves farther into the room and collects her backpack from where it came to rest. As she’s situating the bag on her shoulder again, she takes stock of the room. And finds some very weird shit:

  The entire back wall of the basement is plastered with hundreds of papers. Newspaper clippings. Printed photographs. Maps of the city. The papers are pinned in place with thumb tacks of all colors, and thick pieces of yarn connect different pins in a vast, interwoven web of threads that Ella can barely follow with her eyes. Many of the papers are also streaked with permanent marker, mostly red, the most prominent writing in the far left corner of what Ella can only refer to as a “master plan board.” That writing, Ella realizes as she steps closer, is a harsh, uneven X drawn over a printed picture of Abigail Dean.

  An X. To signify that Sartell killed her.

  Ella is standing in front of Sartell’s entire revenge plot, laid out in the same convoluted, fucked-up way the wizard’s mind works. This is it. This is all I need to document for DSI. Once I hand this over, they can unravel all of Sartell’s schemes. She fishes the Kodak camera out of her bag and steps back from the master plan board. It takes six pictures to capture the entire thing at a size that’ll be comprehensible in the final photographs.

  A spark of adrenaline surges through Ella’s veins.

  She’s got Sartell by the balls now. All she has to do is…is…

  Ella lowers the camera.

  Above the marked-out picture of her mother is another woman’s image. A woman Ella recognizes. Charlotte Braun. Ella possesses vague memories of this woman, including a tidbit of information floating around in her head which states in no uncertain terms that Braun was working alongside Abigail Dean on the original Sartell trial. And if Ella’s mother was on Sartell’s hit list, then the other assistant DA trying to lock him up for life is definitely on it.

  There’s something Ella is missing here.

  Something important.

  She stares at the picture of Charlotte Braun for a long time, then scans the rest of the master plan board, searching for similar images. But she doesn’t find any. Everything else is either a group shot—various teams of DSI agents, trios and pairs of suit-wearing professionals walking in and out of government buildings—or a location photo. Braun is the only person besides Ella’s late mother to have earned a blown-up portrait on Sartell’s board of nightmares.

  What does that mean?

  Ella ruminates on it for several minutes, pacing back and forth in front of the board, trying to coax meaning out of the thoughts of a madman laid bare. She runs through all the information she had before she entered the squat: Sartell is on the loose, DSI is hunting him, all the affected people on the wizard’s hit list have protection details, Sartell made fake-out emergency calls to Riker’s team twice in one day, once when they were out of the DSI building, and once when they were in Captain Mortimer’s…

  Oh, no.

  Ella backtracks from the board, scouring its expanse as fast as she can, cataloguing
every image of a DSI team along the way. Scrawled along the bottom of each candid DSI group shot is a series of numbers, marked with lowercase M and S letters. Minutes and seconds. The thumb tacks pinning each DSI photo to the board are connected via two lengths of yarn to four different locations. One location set involves two destinations either five, ten, or fifteen miles apart in random stretches of Aurora. The other location set involves two destinations twenty miles apart, and in that set, one location is always the DSI building.

  The fake-out calls aren’t a new thing. And they aren’t some game either.

  Sartell has been testing DSI’s response time, seeing how fast they can get from Point A to Point B after being alerted to an emergency.

  Oh, god. Oh, god. Oh, god. Don’t tell me…

  Ella spins her backpack around and fumbles through its contents until she draws out her mother’s address book, which was part of the detritus from her mother’s home office that the bank dumped on Ella when they were cleaning out the repossessed house for new showings. (They refused to give her the piano, but they were more than happy to throw all the literal trash on her lap.) Ella kept the book because she figured she might need to interview people her mother knew—or, well, break into their houses to gather information if they weren’t forthcoming.

  She flips quickly through the book, scanning each contact name until she finds Charlotte Braun. The woman lives in a well-to-do neighborhood on the south side of Aurora, filled with two- and three-story homes that regularly clock in at half a million dollars on the market. It’s just the sort of place that emergency responders would hurry to when called, and just the sort of place that no one would expect a mad wizard to attack in broad daylight.

  Ella looks back to the map and matches the address with the corresponding neighborhood. There’s a red circle drawn on the map, right where Braun’s house should be.

  There’s also another red circle on the map, about twenty miles away—the maximum distance, Ella notes, that Sartell was testing DSI’s reaction time for. Ella doesn’t recognize the other neighborhood, but it’s very close to Aurora’s central courthouse. And the type of person who would likely want to live near the courthouse…Ella speed reads through several more pages of the contact book until she finds an address in the indicated neighborhood: it’s a penthouse suite owned by one Frederick Sutherland. The judge in charge of Sartell’s case.

  Ella drops the address book.

  The revelation lands on her shoulders like a physical weight. She falls to her hands and knees, hyperventilating, the air rushing in and out of her chest so fast she nearly faints. She commands herself to calm down, but the panic won’t pass, because it all makes sense, makes so much sense, makes too much sense, and she wishes, more than anything, that she hadn’t followed Nick Riker from her mother’s grave, and she hadn’t stolen the case file, and she hadn’t discovered any of this crazy bullshit. Because she can’t handle it. Can’t handle what’s about to happen.

  Sartell is plotting a diversion. He’s setting up some staged attack on the judge’s penthouse. And when DSI gets a call that Sartell is angling for Sutherland, they’ll leave the office in force and storm all the way over to the penthouse.

  Meanwhile, Sartell will be twenty miles away, murdering Charlotte Braun. Ella has a feeling that if Sartell is smart enough to plan all this, then he knows for sure he can overpower Braun’s current protection detail. And by the time the rest of DSI catches on to the ploy, Braun will be dead and Sartell will be long gone, free to kill another day.

  You have to go, Ella. She beats her fist against the floor until it hurts, trying to ground herself. You have to get your ass up and go tell everyone, before it’s too late.

  Because the way Sartell walked away from the squat, the pep in his step, the self-satisfied tilt of his shoulders, the smirk she could not see behind his hood but could feel all the same—she knows, with some raw instinct inside her heart, inside her mind, inside her bones, an instinct waking from a long, deep hibernation, she knows that Sartell is planning to kill Braun soon. Very soon. Today soon.

  It’s a warm May day, after all, with the perfect weather to have an outdoor dinner in a well-to-do neighborhood. The kind of weather that tricks people into thinking nothing can go wrong. But Ella knows better.

  People don’t just die on rainy days.

  They die under clear skies too.

  Ella Dean rises to her feet, heart pounding in her chest, and stares at the deadly red circle around Charlotte Braun’s house. “Hold on, Charlotte,” she whispers in an empty basement filled with a madman’s ramblings, to a woman her dead mother used to know. “Hold on. I’m coming to save you.”

  Chapter Nine

  Charlotte Braun doesn’t answer the phone.

  Ella calls her six times from a payphone outside a small grocery store, using the home number listed in the address book. But each time, the answering machine picks up after eight rings, and Charlotte’s recorded voice asks Ella to leave a message and claims the attorney will get back to her ASAP. After the sixth call fails, Ella slams the receiver back on its hook, frustration roiling in her stomach alongside her building fear. You won’t get back to me later, you idiot, she nearly screams out loud, because you’ll be dead.

  She taps her foot rapidly on the cracked sidewalk as she considers what to do next.

  The DSI building isn’t too far away. She could catch a bus there and tell the first agent she finds about Sartell’s impending attack against the assistant DA. Thing is, even if they believe her, even if they accept everything she says as true without first confirming the existence of Sartell’s squat, even if they dispatch every available agent immediately after Ella finishes her spiel, the odds of them arriving in time to save Braun are slim.

  That was the whole point of Sartell’s extensive response tests. He wanted to record how long it takes, on average, for DSI agents to cross various distances in the city, so that he could plot Braun’s murder in a way he found both efficient and satisfying. He wanted to maximize how long he could spend with his victim, scaring her, torturing her, killing her, while still giving himself plenty of time to flee, to avoid the risk of being recaptured by DSI.

  Sartell killed Abigail Dean as quickly as he could.

  Apparently, he found that boring.

  Ella stomps her foot on the ground. No, she can’t go to the DSI office. They won’t be able to move fast enough. But the only alternative is…

  She’ll have to go to Charlotte Braun’s home to warn the woman directly. And in so doing, put herself in Sartell’s line of fire.

  Ella presses her palms against the brick exterior of the grocery store, forcing herself to take deep, even breaths. I’m going to get myself killed before this day is over, but even so, I can’t let Sartell get away with this. Braun doesn’t deserve to die, and the mad wizard doesn’t deserve to win. And if Ella doesn’t try her hardest to stop Sartell, and he murders Braun and several others in cold blood, she knows she’ll never forgive herself, not for the rest of her life. Ella Dean might not be a DSI agent, or a soldier, or a cop, but that doesn’t mean she lacks a heroic spark in her heart.

  Everybody has one of those.

  You just have to be bold enough to light your kindling with it.

  Or reckless enough, Ella thinks, chuckling dryly.

  Pushing off the wall, Ella adjusts her backpack, smacks her cheeks until they burn to shake out all traces of hesitation, and then grabs the payphone again. She inserts the last of her spare change into the slot and dials the number for a cab company whose peeling sticker is stuck underneath the metallic dial pad. After a brief conversation with the dispatcher, the nearest available cab is sent her way. The cabbie pulls his aging yellow car up to the curb less than five minutes later, and Ella hops in, directing the man to take her not to Braun’s house but to another house farther down that same street.

  Ella doesn’t want Sartell to see her coming until she’s literally in Braun’s back yard.

  Bouncing her kn
ee impatiently, she watches the city zip past her, townhouses and small businesses morphing into office buildings morphing into schools and parks morphing into single-family homes. Ella has lived in Aurora all her life, but for the first time, she wonders how many of these normal features of city life are actually façades masking supernatural happenings that normal people aren’t supposed to see. Is that club a front for a vampire hangout? Is that gym where werewolves work out? Do witches and wizards own the banks or the hospitals? Do all these creatures—and whatever else is out there—live and work and interact with regular society in regular ways, as if there are no differences between the supernatural and the totally mundane?

  How does it all work? she mouths to her reflection in the window.

  And how often does the hidden world beneath their own suffer from “malfunctions” like Sartell? It must not be too rare an occurrence, for a witch or wizard to go on a rampage, or for some other creepy creature to disturb the waters on the surface of society. Because if it was, there’d be no organization with the dedicated purpose of correcting these malfunctions, of putting the monsters in cages where they belong. There’d be no Department of Supernatural Investigations.

  Ella lived her entire life up until Sartell’s attack thinking the world was a relatively stable place where foolish humans sometimes went to war. But in reality, they’ve been sitting on a social super-volcano the entire time. And Sartell is just a single ember from a devastating eruption that could happen any moment: exposure of the supernatural to the general public.

  Ella shudders at the thought of the chaos that would wreak, and recalls her bluff from the diner, about exposing the Sartell story to the press. That’s all it ever would have been, she confirms to herself, a bluff. I never could have blown the lid on this supernatural underworld stuff. Exposure like that would destroy the world. And the supernatural have already destroyed enough.