Dream Snatcher

by Clara Coulson

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t…”

  “Couldn’t what?” He gives her a sharp look. “You did nothing wrong at Braun’s house. In fact, from what Ada told me, if it wasn’t for you, they’d all have died, her, Braun, and everyone else at the scene. So you shouldn’t be blaming yourself for anything.”

  Ella hugs the pillow tighter. “I know that. I just wish I could have done more. I was standing across the street when Sartell killed the agents in the front yard. I saw him, and I was going to warn the agents, but I…I wasn’t fast enough.”

  “Still not your fault.” He grasps her shoulder sympathetically. “These things happen, and sometimes they’re beyond our control.”

  “But they’d be beyond my control less often if I was a DSI agent.”

  Riker smacks himself in the face, grimacing as he jars his nose. “Look, I can’t stop you from applying to the academy, but please think this through. Give it a few weeks. Figure out what you really want to do. Shocks like this—learning the things you’ve learned, seeing the things you’ve seen—often cause people to make irrational decisions. So, for now, sit on that little spark of desire you have to join DSI, and if it’s still there in, say, September, then come talk to me about it, and we’ll go from there.”

  He stands up and straightens his coat. “Now, why don’t you get some rest? You’ve had a long day, and I need to go downstairs to make a few lengthy phone calls, see where my team is in the cleanup, report your side of the story, and all that. When I’m done, I’ll grab us some food, probably from a restaurant down the street, because ugh, hospital food. Okay with you?”

  Ella snorts. “Yeah, that’s fine.” She hits the button to lower the mattress to a comfortable sleeping angle. “Say, what happened to my backpack?”

  “Oh,” he says, rounding the chair, “I think Siobhan picked it up and stuck it in the van. I’ll have it brought over.” He makes for the door with a casual stride, but there’s a heaviness to the way he holds his shoulders, like something is bothering him. Opening the door, he steps onto the threshold, but then pauses and stands silently for a long moment. Ella can’t see his face, but she imagines he’s arguing with himself about whether or not to ask a question.

  The pro-question side wins, and he says without looking back, “Earlier, when you stormed out of the office, you said you didn’t have a home. What did you mean by that? You’re not…homeless or anything, right?”

  Ella clenches the thin hospital sheets with her skinned-up hands. “I live with my dad.”

  “And?” Riker presses.

  “And he’s a deadbeat alcoholic who probably wouldn’t give a damn if I ended up right next to my mom.” Her eyes fixate on the white tile ceiling, and she counts off each square in her head to stop the resentment from infecting her words. “Throughout my childhood, he only ever showed up when he thought he could weasel money out of my mom. Parties. Birthdays. Holidays. That kind of shit. He didn’t even visit me in the hospital. He begrudgingly picked me up in his truck filled with beer cans the day I got discharged, and then he stuck me in a tiny back bedroom in his house. That’s where I live now. It’s not a home.”

  She waits with bated breath for Riker to react, not sure what to expect. Most people who know about her “housing situation” either don’t care at all, or awkwardly scramble away from the topic whenever it comes up because it makes them uncomfortable.

  Riker inhales, rolls his shoulders into a more relaxed position, and peers back at her. Sympathy is written across his face, an overlay that can barely hide his rage. “Would you like me to look into alternative housing situations for you? I know you’d scoff at foster care, being sixteen, almost seventeen, but there are a few places in the city that would overlook your age and let you rent, as long as you have a co-signer for the lease.”

  “I…I don’t think I can afford it.” Ella’s heart rate picks up, and a machine next to the bed beeps loudly to scold her. “But if you’d check anyway, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Don’t worry about the money,” he says, resolute. “I’ll find a way to handle that until you’re making enough to support yourself, or when you go off to college.” His eyebrow quirks. “Hint, hint.”

  “I got it! Your preference is clear.” She smiles. “And thanks, for helping me out like this.”

  “It’s the least I can do. Honestly. If it wasn’t for you, who knows what Sartell would have done?” He leans against the doorframe and closes his eyes. “He played us, and you were the only one who figured it out. You did our job for us, and you did it well. But you shouldn’t have had to do it at all. It was my team’s case to resolve, and we failed to do so. So we owe you—I owe you—a great debt. You really have nothing to thank me for.” He smiles back. “But the gratitude is appreciated.”

  He knocks his knuckles on the doorframe and moves into the hall. “All right. Take your nap now. We’ll talk some more when I get back.”

  Ella nods, but as he starts to walk away, she suddenly remembers a vitally important piece of information. “Wait! One more question.”

  He pauses, halfway out of view. “What?”

  “Do you have any spare room in your house?”

  “What?” He gawks at her. “Why do you want to know?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Don’t make it weird. It’s a simple question. Do you have any spare room?”

  “How much spare room?” he asks, suspicious.

  Ella lets a wide grin slowly stretch across her face. “Enough for a piano?”

  One Year Later

  Epilogue

  Jerry Johnson goes down like a sack of bricks. Ella slams him onto the mat, pins him in place with her knee, and wrenches his arm back hard enough to make him squeal. He smacks the mat with his free hand, the sign of surrender, and Ella releases him with a smidge of reluctance, annoyed the fight ended so quickly. Johnson was her last opponent for the hand-to-hand combat exam, and she’s fresh out of people she can use to let off steam after her mediocre results in the second part of the written exam. She passed, sure, but she wanted to pass with flying colors.

  She rises from the mat and adjusts her shirt, turning to the exam proctor for confirmation she won using fair tactics. The man scrawls something on the exam report pinned on his clipboard, reviews all the scoring criteria, and gives her a thumbs-up. Ella pumps her fist in the air, triumphant, and strolls over to the benches on the left side of the gym, where all the other successful fighters are seated.

  As she goes, the proctor says, “Get your butt up, Johnson, and step back in line. You have to win at least three fights if you want to pass this exam, and you’ve got exactly zero under your belt right now.”

  Johnson groans as he staggers back to the line of academy students still itching to win their three marks.

  Ella plops down next to a Chinese woman nicknamed Teddy, who playfully smacks her arm. “Damn, kiddo, you sure do pack a punch. Where’d you learn to fight like that?”

  Ella recalls late nights at the gym with a cute blond man, whom she’s successfully decked about twenty-five times now. (The broken nose was only the beginning.) She shrugs at Teddy. “Nowhere in particular. I just paid attention in class.”

  Mason, a bulky navy veteran, leans over Teddy’s shoulder and gives Ella a knowing wink. He walked in on her and Riker more than once when they were having extra practice sessions, because he’s a weightlifting freak who works out in the middle of the night. “Sure, Dean, sure. A few hours of karate practice and a pinch of taekwondo, and you just magically transform into a five-foot-eight can of whoop-ass.”

  The surrounding students chuckle, and Ella tries to hide her blush.

  She flicks Mason’s forehead. “Hush.”

  Lots of the older women fawn over the infamously handsome Nick Riker, who struts around the office looking like he stepped off a movie set. The last thing Ella needs is all of them making fun of her, thinking she has some silly teenage crush on the man. She’s already the butt of half the jokes at the academy, the skinn
y, baby-faced, seventeen-year-old girl whose most badass skill is piano. More than one person asked her, on her first day at the academy, if she was part of some office-wide prank on the incoming class.

  Thankfully, most of the naysayers shut up after she got really good really fast at hand-to-hand. (And she’s not a half-bad shot either, judging by how many men at the shooting range looked on in terror when she nailed a flawless crotch shot eighteen times in a row.) But there’s always at least one joker in each course who gets a kick out of embarrassing Ella Dean, “the little girl with big dreams.”

  To Mason’s merit, however, he takes the hint and lets the joke rest this time.

  And before anyone can stir up another scandalous conversation, the exam fights resume.

  Eight of the remaining fifteen students pass. The rest fail. (Including Johnson.) Which means they’re stuck in the academy for at least another semester. Or they have to switch specialties. You can’t be a DSI detective if you can’t hold your own in a fistfight. The admin are very strict on that point.

  They lose enough agents in combat as it is.

  After the failures file out, the proctor quickly sorts through all the results and hands them out to each passing student. Some of them aren’t finished with their exams yet, so they add their results to their other pass sheets and scuttle off to prep for their next test. But for others, like Ella, hand-to-hand was the final test, and now that they’ve got the green light, they can take all their signed exam sheets, head to the admin office, and start final processing for their status change to active agents.

  The official graduation ceremony will take place on Friday, after all the testing groups are finished and all the passing agents have been assigned their first jobs.

  The proctor pauses in front of Ella, silently judging her for a second—everyone does, given her age—then he nods in respect and hands off her pass sheet. “Good work, Dean. Best of luck out there.”

  All the tension in Ella’s shoulders melts away.

  She did it. She passed the academy. And she did it in one year instead of two.

  Oh ho, she thinks, somebody owes me money.

  To avoid the stampede to General Admin, Ella makes a detour to the women’s locker room, takes a quick shower, and changes into some spare clothes she brought along. After she finishes freshening up, she chooses the scenic route to the admin office, bypassing the hilariously slow elevators via the stairwell on the west end of the building. When she finally reaches the long corridor that ends at her destination, she finds the line not quite short, but not long enough to scare her away. She situates herself behind a short man she doesn’t know and waits her turn.

  At the processing desk, she’s greeted by a high-level administrator, a man in his early thirties Ella has seen standing next to Commissioner Grayson at many of his speeches to the academy class. The man’s nametag reads T. Bollinger. Ella slides her exam sheets across the desk toward him, and he gives her an absent smile, not really looking at her, as he grabs them and sets them next to his clunky computer.

  “All right, Dean-comma-Ella,” he says. “Let me just enter your results, and you’ll be placed in the queue for team assignment. The final decision will be posted in your cubby box by noon Thursday, and if you want to appeal your assignment, you’ll need to put it in writing by five o’clock that same day. Any questions?”

  “Nope.”

  He pauses at the sound of her voice, young and high-pitched, and finally makes eye contact. “Oh! You’re that girl who…” He cuts himself off and clears his throat. “Anyway, your results are in the system, Miss Dean.” He hits the enter key on his keyboard. “You’re all finished.”

  A printer near the wall behind him groans into gear and spits out two sheets of paper. Bollinger rolls his chair back, snatches the printed pages, drags his chair forward again, and offers the sheets to Ella. “Here’s a summary of your exam scores, confirmation of your graduation from the academy, and a list of tips for how to prepare for your first day as a detective.”

  Ella accepts the papers. “Thanks.”

  He gives her a thin-lipped smile. “Anything else?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Then you’re free to go. Enjoy your afternoon.”

  Ella returns his smile with a similar one, and exits the admin office.

  To her complete lack of surprise, she finds Riker waiting by the elevator. She marches confidently up to him, and when she’s a foot away, violating his personal space, she shoves the printed pages in his face. “Pay up,” she orders.

  Riker sighs, rustling the papers, and pulls out his wallet. He produces a hundred-dollar bill.

  Ella plucks the money from his fingers and tucks it in her pocket. “And dinner?”

  He grabs her wrist and forces the papers out of his face. “Covering that too, as promised.”

  “Awesome! I’m starving.”

  “Do we need to make a stop first?” He gestures to the gym bag with her dirty clothes inside. “Don’t want to carry that along, do you?”

  “Oh, I guess not.” She shrugs. “I’ll just run in and drop it by the door. Won’t take but a minute.”

  Keeping hold of her wrist, he spins her around, pointing her toward the exit. “Lead the way, then, graduate girl,” he says in a less-than-enthusiastic tone.

  “Oh, don’t be a sore loser, Nick!” She tugs her wrist free and exaggerates a wink. “And that’s Detective Dean to you.”

  “Yeah, no.” He nudges her forward. “I’ll go over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel before I call you Detective anything.”

  Ella flips him off and struts down the hall.

  She doesn’t have to look back to know Riker’s rolling his eyes.

  And he doesn’t have to see her face to know she’s smiling brightly.

  From the office, they ride across town in Riker’s personal car, a rusty clunker with laughable mileage per gallon. But despite the vehicle’s questionable quality, Riker expertly backs it into Ella’s assigned spot outside the moderately priced apartment building on Queensland Street. Ella hops out and hurries inside to her tiny studio apartment, tossing her bag in the six square feet of tile flooring the building manager likes to pretend qualifies as a foyer. Then she’s out the door, back in the car, and riding toward the best pizza joint in the city.

  GREAT SLICE, as it’s called (and yes, it’s in all caps), isn’t usually too busy at four-thirty on a Tuesday afternoon, but today, there are several booths occupied by men and women in distinctive black uniforms, interspersed with others dressed in casual clothing. According to Riker, eating pizza at GREAT SLICE after you pass your academy exams is a DSI tradition, so you always see a lot of agents in the joint come mid-June. Ella doesn’t mind the crowd too much—it’s a big restaurant—until Mason, in a corner booth with a few detectives Ella hasn’t met, whistles at her and shouts, “Check it out: it’s the Great Child Detective!”

  Ella almost swears at him, but Riker beats her to the punch. “Fuck off, moron, or I’ll send you back to History 101.”

  Mason wilts.

  Supernatural History 101 is the single hardest academic class in the academy.

  Ella snickers inwardly. Serves you right.

  On the opposite side of the restaurant (thank god for small miracles), the rest of Riker’s team is already seated, menus in hand. Noticeably, Captain Mortimer is missing, but Ella didn’t expect him to be here. Riker wasn’t exaggerating when he said the man wasn’t personable. She’s seen him all of six times in her entire year at the academy, and every single one of those times was a required function. He apparently spends all the time he’s not out in the field locked in his cramped office, scribbling out reports and finishing paperwork.

  Whatever.

  Ella likes the rest of the team better anyway.

  Siobhan gives her a hug when she sits down, Chantel shakes her hand and welcomes her to the fold, the reserved Nakamura nods respectfully, and Riker smacks her upside the head with a menu.

&nbs
p; “What was that for?” she says as she snatches the laminated sheet from him.

  “For that budding look of arrogance on your face,” he replies, plopping into the booth next to Nakamura. “Don’t want you to get ahead of yourself.”

  She kicks his shin. “You’re one to talk.”

  “All right, kids,” Chantel cuts in like a referee, “cool it so we can order some pizza.”

  The pizza, it turns out, is delicious, and Ella commits the address of GREAT SLICE to her memory. As she eats, she chats with the team about mundane topics—the weather, local sports, and what’s on TV—and more specialized things—like the werewolf who wrecked a hardware store on Cicada Lane—until they’ve woofed down two large pizzas in under an hour. Everyone chips in for the pies, save Ella. Another DSI tradition, paying for a graduate’s first meal as an active agent.

  When their appetites are sated for the time being, Riker bids farewell to his team, and he and Ella head back to his crappy car for the next leg of their trip. Siobhan shouts across the parking lot as they’re pulling onto the road, “Hey, Ella, you want ice cream cake or regular cake?”

  Ella rolls down the window and replies, “Regular cake, please! Vanilla, if they have it.”

  Siobhan gives her two thumbs up, and hops into the team’s van.

  Riker snorts as he drives away from GREAT SLICE. “You know, it’s not that I mind turning game night into a graduation party, but the least they could have done was not wait until the last minute to buy literally everything.”

  “They don’t have the decorations yet?”

  “Not a single streamer.” He stops at a red light. “I’m about eighty percent sure we’ll walk in on them while they’re still setting up. My house is going to look like a surplus store for children’s birthday party supplies. You watch. It’ll take me days to clean it up.”

  “Well, we could have had the party in Mortimer’s office.”

  Riker barks out a laugh. “Oh, don’t even joke. He’d have literally murdered us.”

  They drive on through the city, until they come to the small parking area reserved for visitors to the Mission Road Cemetery. Riker pops the trunk as they swing around the back side of the car, pulling out two bouquets he purchased while Ella was still knee-deep in her exams. He hands the bouquet of lilies to Ella, and keeps the hydrangeas for himself.