Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel)

by Aileen Harkwood

  Again. Go through it again.

  He rebooted the events, this time examining the room around her. Where did she live? Who was she? She’d been sleeping alone, but was this normal for her? Or did she have a lover? A husband? If so, what signs might there be of him in the bedroom?

  Unfortunately, only the faintest glow from something outside her bedroom window dispelled the room’s deepest shadows, probably the same half moon that currently illuminated the softly lapping water just yards from his front door. He saw a full size bed and a comforter designed with an abstract, quilted pattern of leaves the size of beach balls.

  Curiously, that same part of him which insisted he knew her, derived relief from not finding signs of a man in her life. Only the one nightstand, not a matching one on the other side of the bed. No men’s clothing visible. No male grooming products or sports gear.

  After they’d injected her, and she ceased to fight, the man who held her down eased off the bed, flung the covers aside, and grabbed her up.

  There!

  In his memory of the events, something that had lain on the comforter slipped to the floor. A uniform of some type. Short-sleeved shirt. Too small to belong to a man, so it had to be hers. Khaki-colored cotton with a patch on the chest pocket. Letters, words he couldn’t read in the dark, and then a shape below them.

  What is that? A bird?

  A gull. It looked like the silhouette of a seagull.

  The memory ran its course.

  That was it. All he could glean.

  He woke his cell phone’s screen and glanced at the time. 4:16 am. Christ. More than three hours had gone by since Gavin had hung up on him. He didn’t give a rat’s ass if Grey Suits had stormed the gates back home, he needed orders.

  He wondered what he would do if his superior told him to let her go. Forget her. A broken run like Jack had experienced indicated a higher than average risk, not only to the finder, should he or she make another attempt, but to the Society as a whole. Who knew where the next attempt to find her might land him? Did saving her merit the risk if he ran and jumped through, only to find himself a target of the Grey Suits, as well?

  It was up to Gavin to assess the hazards and decide whether or not to authorize pursuit.

  You damn well better, you bastard.

  Sometimes he hated his life. No, more than sometimes. He hated at lot of it, but mostly he hated losing, which happened more often than he succeeded. Gavin wouldn’t let him go after her. Not hard to predict that. Gavin had told him to abort findings just three other times in his career, and each time had been over some trifling risk compared with a kidnapping. Three Lost Ones he’d had to leave to hang and fend for themselves just because Gavin couldn’t be 100-percent sure they weren’t already under observation by or under the control of their enemies.

  Then, there were the others.

  His hand slid into a pocket and pulled out an object he was never without. Round, made of plastic, and coated in gold paint, he’d kept the play coin that bore the face of an imaginary princess with him at all times for over a decade. He fingered the coin’s ridged edges where the coating had chipped away. Over the years his thumb had worn down the faux gilt across the princess’s cheek from rubbing it mindlessly while deep in thought. As he was now, slogging through his guilt. Gavin’s orders weren’t responsible for the others. He was.

  Get a grip. Stop living in the past. You’ve got a Lost One who needs help today. Right now.

  Did he really think his boss would let him go after her, now that they all but knew the Greys were involved? No, he wouldn’t, because Gavin was smart. He was cold. He calculated odds and applied them without any trace of remorse.

  Damn if Jack would let him.

  He punched in Gavin’s number.

  Gavin answered before it even rang. “Not now,” he said.

  “Not now!” Jack said, anger barely held in check. “Gavin, three hours ago we had a Lost One kidnapped. If not now, when? What’s so important it sends this to the back of the line?”

  “Taylor March,” Gavin said.

  Jack knew the name, and the man, a finder like him.

  “What about Taylor?”

  “He’s missing.”

  “How long?”

  “37 hours.”

  “And you just heard about it three hours ago when we were talking?”

  “No. I’ve known about it for more than a day, after he didn’t check in.”

  Jack didn’t get it. To have a finder temporarily fall off the radar was worrisome, but not the end of the world. If Gavin had known about his disappearance for this long, what had happened earlier tonight to get his Lost One’s fate sidelined?

  “So, three hours ago…?” Jack asked.

  “Was when we confirmed it,” Gavin said. “He’s with them.”

  Chapter 6

  With a rusty grating noise, the door to Lara’s cell swung inward.

  She had no concept of how long she’d been imprisoned or the length of time she’d been drugged prior to her arrival here. It might have been a few hours. It could have been days. Without windows, she didn’t even know if it was day or night. She tried to see something outside the room when the door opened, but opening inward the metal slab blocked her view. Only a slight amount of extra illumination spilled into the room. Lara could tell it was artificial, not natural light.

  “Miss Freberg.” The cold voice preceded his entrance.

  The man who approached was lean, walked with a tight stride, and had a short businesslike haircut. She couldn’t tell if he was one of the men who’d abducted her, but he was someone like them. His grey suit and off-white shirt were unimaginative in cut and materials. His head reminded her of the blank oval on which an artist began to build a facial composite from a verbal description, but the features put there by genetics were so bland he could be anyone. Except for the eyes. They looked down on her, viewing her not as a human, but an object, a thing. Why?

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  She noticed the quiet, predatory way he moved.

  “What don’t you understand?” he asked.

  They can’t have meant to take me. This is a mistake.

  Of all the scenarios she’d run through over the past hours, mistaken identity was the one that made the most sense. If only she could convince them they had the wrong person.

  “Who are you? I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t have anything, any money,” she spoke in a desperate rush. “I haven’t done anything. Haven’t seen anything. I don’t know anything anyone could want. You aren’t the police. Are you drug dealers? Human traffickers? Someone else who…”

  He smiled at her, but it was a smile that never reached his eyes.

  “Who what?” the man in the grey suit asked, prompting her when her words dried up.

  “Someone who takes people for–”

  Instead of answering, he slapped her hard, across the face.

  Stunned, Lara didn’t make another sound. She lifted a hand to her inflamed cheek, discovering blood. He wore a ring and it had cut her.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph.

  “What do you see?” he asked her.

  It was a poor quality inkjet print. It showed a room, or rather one corner of a room. She saw a narrow section of drapes on the left side of the photo, a nightstand and part of a bed. The wall behind the bed appeared to be paneled in dreary pine, which might date the room to the middle of the previous century. The bedspread was rust colored, the drapes the same. An unremarkable lamp on the bedside table could have been manufactured at any time in the last fifty years. It was yellow.

  “A room?” she said.

  “I need you to tell me where this is.”

  “What?”

  His expression didn’t change, but she could tell her response infuriated him. She expected him to hit her again. He continued to stare at her, examine her, as if he knew things about her she didn’t.

  A second man joined them, older
and less fit than the first. He wheeled in a stainless steel cart with three shelves. The top two were loaded down with medical instruments and tools, none of which Lara could begin to name. A car battery rested on the bottom shelf.

  The sight so alarmed her she jumped up, forgetting her ankles were still bound by the zip tie no one had removed. Her body twisted awkwardly and knocked the chair to the floor. She almost fell backward over it, but the man’s hand dug cruelly into her shoulder. Like a vise, it held her on her feet. He righted the chair.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her and nodded in the direction of the tools on the cart. “We’re saving most of those for later. We’ll start with something easy.”

  He shoved her back down into the plastic chair, while the older man filled a syringe with a cloudy liquid.

  “Please,” she said, begged. “Whoever you think I am, I’m not that person. I don’t know anything about your room. I’ve never seen it. I’ve never been there. I don’t know where it is, or what might have happened in it. Please. I won’t tell, because I don’t have anything to tell. I’m not a threat to you.”

  The man in the grey suit let go of her shoulder and straightened up.

  “You know what, Ms. Freberg? I believe you.”

  His sudden change of tone caused the man with the cart of torture instruments to pause, the syringe half filled.

  “You do?” Lara said.

  Grey Man knelt down in front of her chair and placed a hand on her bare right knee. The hand rubbed her slowly, so softly, slipping down along between her legs at the beginning of her thigh, the touch light, too soft, teasing in a way that communicated not pleasure but hate, and his absolute domination over her.

  “You aren’t a threat,” he said. “You’re a tool. My tool. And I’m going to use you to get what I want.”

  A needle stabbed her upper left arm. Again, she felt the rush of chilled liquid forced into her by a syringe’s plunger. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, though she kept herself from crying out loud.

  “What is that?” she asked, indicating the syringe.

  “Something to help,” he said. “Me.”

  Her body seized, back arching in her chair. Every muscle in her face locked in agonizing rictus as a door opened in her brain and the drug burst in like a fiery backdraft.

  Lara knew her life was no longer her own. Where until moments ago she’d been in denial, she now understood her fate. Instead of succumbing willingly to it, however, she stopped listening to her captor’s words. She told herself to instead find some wonderful, miraculous thought to distract her and occupy the next minutes until she died.

  Indigo eyes.

  She pulled up the memory of that third, ghostly man she’d seen in her bedroom, her imagined, would-be rescuer. If only he was real and not a fantasy. In her mind, while Grey Man threatened and tortured her, she rushed to her rescuer and grabbed hold with all she had, buried her face against his broad chest, seeking refuge. She visualized his hard, muscled arms around her, that towering feeling of protection he gave off.

  Lara. Her imaginings gave him voice, words soothing and powerful. Stay with me and no one will ever touch you again.

  Pain like a tsunami rushed in, washing away the fantasy. She couldn’t swim against or with it. Waves of agony tumbled her over and over and drowned her a half dozen times.

  How much longer until this was done?

  Blue eyes. A figment, but her figment.

  Please, God. Let it be him I see when I’m dead.

  Chapter 7

  “The Greys have a finder?” Jack asked. “You’re sure of it?”

  “We’re sure,” Gavin said.

  Jack slumped against his cabin’s bedroom wall and ran his fingers through his hair, thinking. His anger over having to put the search for his Lost One on hold died, taking a back seat to dread. This was disaster. The moment they’d all feared. He, Gavin, Gavin’s higher-ups, had gone over this in meetings, tried to come to grips with the idea that it might happen sooner, rather than later, but each of them understanding it was inevitable.

  For years, the Greys had sought the location of The House. They’d captured and imprisoned or killed as many as six dreamrunners in the past four years—that Jack knew of—but so far had been unsuccessful in learning where the Society’s most vulnerable were hidden and protected. As callous as they knew they were being, everyone had breathed a sigh of relief when, each time they learned of a capture, they also realized the dreamrunner stolen from them couldn’t tell the Greys what they wanted to know. Devastating though the losses had been to those who had known the victims personally, and to the larger Society community, none of the dead or missing approached being valuable assets for the Greys. None of the six were in full possession of their gifts. Neither field operatives, nor decision makers, they were innocents who just wanted to live their lives in peace. Life, instead, had burdened them with an ability they couldn’t control, making each day a challenge to their sanity, and had finally resulted in their downfall.

  Taylor March’s abduction was a whole other animal. Taylor was a finder. He knew the Society’s secrets, or at least enough of them to be dangerous, none more so than the directions to The House.

  Jack felt groggy, severely drained from his recent run. He should get some food, coffee, whatever he needed to kick his ass into gear. They would need him at home. Immediately. If they hadn’t already recalled all agents, he anticipated Gavin would receive the word momentarily.

  “I’m on my way,” Jack said. “Have they started the evacuation?”

  “Not yet,” Gavin said. “And they won’t.”

  “What? Why the hell not?”

  “They aren’t going to press the panic button until we know the extent of the damage.”

  “The extent of the damage!” Jack was stunned.

  “We don’t know if Taylor was taken or went willingly,” Gavin said. “We don’t know what he’s told them, if anything. We don’t know if he’s alive or dead, being tortured, or is injured and currently unavailable to them for interrogation.”

  “They have him, Gavin,” Jack said. “They have the key. That’s all they need to know.”

  “The House is on standby, Jack. They’re running the drills.”

  “Drills? A kill team could be up your collective asses any minute now and you’ve got babies going through the equivalent of duck and cover?”

  “I’m not calling the shots. I don’t have them doing anything,” Gavin said.

  “And that’s my point,” Jack said. “Someone should be doing something. Right now.”

  He headed for the kitchen, threw on a pot of coffee, and tore open cupboards in a search for energy bars, jerky or a bag of nuts, whatever he could find to consume without having to think about it. While he rummaged, his thoughts went to his own kidnapped Lost One, and knew he wouldn’t be able to eat any of it. The idea of abandoning her to the Greys made him physically sick to his stomach. He knew exactly what fate awaited her. She was his mission. His to save. Unlike any Lost One before, they’d had a connection. He knew her. This one meant something to him that he couldn’t pin down. She was special. They shared a mystery and now he would never have the opportunity to solve it. After failing to protect her on his run, he was about to fail her again because he had to make a choice. The choice pitted two equally grave duties against one another, but the scale was unfairly weighted, one life versus hundreds.

  Fuck. This is not happening.

  How could he live with himself if he abandoned her? To them?

  Just fuck this.

  He knew his duty. It had been ingrained in him over a lifetime.

  “I repeat. I’m on my way,” Jack said. “I’ll be there by mid-morning.”

  Will I be in time?

  “No,” Gavin said.

  “No?” Jack said.

  “You’re to stay put.”

  “You can’t be serious–”

  “That’s an order. Stay where you are.”

  “An
d do what? Play computer solitaire while strangers with assault rifles mow down seven-year-olds?”

  “Do you think I don’t hate this?” Gavin said. “I’m not giving orders arbitrarily. We need you right where you are.”

  “Why?”

  “When you’ve recovered from your run, I need to you to go back in after Taylor,” Gavin said. “I need you to find him.”

  “Me? But the regulations don’t allow another run for hours.”

  “A little over twenty,” Gavin acknowledged.

  “I don’t understand,” Jack said. “You’ve got at least two other finders who can do what I do.”

  “And they’ve both failed. What do you think has been happening since I hung up on you?” Gavin asked.

  Jack nodded to himself, taking in this information.

  “What did they find?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Not even a trace of Taylor’s signature in the fields?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Which means?”

  “We don’t know. Dead. Incapacitated. Sold himself out to the Greys and they’ve discovered a way of hiding people from us.”

  Jack’s coffee maker belched the last of its steam, signaling the pot was done brewing. He grabbed a mug and poured some, while thinking through the possibilities Gavin had just laid out.

  “No,” he said. “Taylor may not be the most responsible guy I’ve known, but he’s not a traitor. He has no motivation to be. He’s richer than sin. No amount of money is going to tempt him. He’s not the least interested in power. I’ve never known him to hold a grudge, and can’t think of a single thing someone could use to manipulate him. If they have him, they took him against his will.”

  “Agreed,” Gavin said. “My guess is he’s either dead, near to it, or they have him drugged with the same stuff they used on your Lost One.”

  Jack pictured her face the moment Gavin said this. That resilient beauty. Pale blue-grey eyes that had already experienced too much that wasn’t good for her. Where was she now? What were they doing to her?