Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel)

by Aileen Harkwood

  “And?”

  “I was right. She wanted her own bed. They didn’t know she was there.”

  “Okay, but six hours?”

  “She’s dying.”

  Or died. Just now, in my arms.

  Jack lifted a very shaky hand and covertly wiped away the wetness that filled the corners of his eyes. He sat up awkwardly.

  She’s not dead. Repeat it. Make it your mantra. Not dead. You’ll find her. Not dead.

  “I’m sorry,” Gavin said, shutting down his phone’s screen. He laid the phone on the seat next to him, put his hands on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. “What did you learn?”

  “The Greys took her,” Jack said. “But we already knew that. I’m just confirming. They’ve alternately tortured her and drugged her. I guess as a way to access her latent abilities as a dreamrunner. She doesn’t know what’s going on or what she’s doing. She thinks she’s either hallucinating or already dead.”

  “Did she tell you how she found the safe house?”

  “A photo they showed her. What else? She’s not a finder, Gavin. At least not in the traditional sense.”

  “Does she know where the photo came from?”

  “No. She described it as poor quality. Something that might be taken by a cheap camera, except this photo had defects. Random glitches of color. I was wondering…”

  Jack paused, swung around and sat up straight in the seat. He massaged his forehead, the sudden migraine taking him by surprise. He didn’t usually get headaches after a trip, just the spasms. Why was he so exhausted, more so than was warranted for a run that required minimal time in the fields and little physical exertion?

  “You were wondering,” Gavin prompted him.

  “Who had my safe house before me?” Jack asked.

  “A newlywed couple from Falls Church.”

  “No. Which of us was there?”

  Gavin’s instant change of expression said it all. His lips pressed into a hard line and he slammed the steering wheel with the butt of his hand. Jack waited, but already knew the answer.

  “Taylor,” Gavin said.

  “Tell me, I don’t know any of the details about what happened to him. Did you recover his phone?”

  “No. No, phone.”

  “I love the guy, he trained me as a finder,” Jack said, “but Taylor isn’t the most responsible.”

  Gavin’s voice grumbled like a mountain of rock about to let loose. “He wouldn’t.”

  “Obviously he did,” Jack said. “He took photos of the safe house. The question is why?”

  “Who the hell cares, why?” Gavin said.

  He snatched up his cell phone off the passenger’s seat and tapped “4” on the screen’s keypad for speed dial. Jack only heard one side of the conversation, Gavin’s side.

  “Pull up a list of every safe house Taylor has used since he last switched to a new burner,” Gavin ordered. “Got it? Right. How many?” He stopped to listen. “Demo all three. What? I don’t care if they have tenants. Get the people out and tear them down. The townhouse? Okay, agreed. Demolition isn’t an option, but send a team over to gut the interior down to the wall studs. Yes, today.”

  He ended the call, replaced the phone on the seat and his hands on the wheel. This time Jack didn’t wonder about the silence. He could see Gavin thinking, calculating odds, sorting through probable futures, one likely disaster at a time.

  Jack decided to add his input.

  “Part of this doesn’t make sense,” he said. “If they have Taylor’s phone, and he used that phone to snap pics of the safe house, wouldn’t the Greys already have the GPS coordinates of the cabin? Why send Lara there and ask her to find the address for them? I mean can’t the Feds just pull the last 10,000 locations or whatever where a phone has pinged off a cell tower?”

  The Society drubbed certain rules into every finder. Never come within five miles of your safe house with the battery installed in your phone. Remove it every time and leave it out. If something happens and you have to put it back in to make an emergency call, securely dispose of the phone and purchase another.

  “Not quite 10,000. But at least the last several hundred historical geolocations,” Gavin said.

  “10K, several hundred, same difference.”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t jive. Having Taylor’s phone gives them the location.”

  “Unless Taylor did as ordered and destroyed his phone before they got him, but had a camera on him?”

  “Unlikely. It’s his phone.” Gavin ground out the words. “I know it.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “Let’s go on the assumption they do have Taylor’s phone, but for some reason they’ve been unable to pull as much information off it as they want or need. The historical locations associated with his phone could be in the hundreds or thousands and they don’t know which are relevant, which aren’t. Maybe the data dump provided by the cell carrier is incomplete. It could be Taylor knew they were coming for him, was in the process of destroying the phone, but was stopped. The Greys now have it and they’ve succeeded in recovering a few partial files, the photo of the safe house among them. It would explain the glitches in the image they showed Lara if the card had damage.”

  “Yes. Great. Wonderful,” Gavin said in high irritation. “Brilliant logic, Jack. But what I want to know is what else, who else and where else did that idiot photograph?”

  Jack went cold. The House? Would Taylor have been stupid enough to activate his phone to take pictures of the Society’s most secret and vulnerable location?

  This could be the end of us.

  “Did they show your Lara any other photos?” Gavin asked.

  “She didn’t mention it, but I didn’t ask. She’s in rough shape, Gavin. I thought her twin was dead when I first saw her.”

  “What?” Gavin said. “You know that’s not possible.”

  “Nor is losing consciousness as a twin, but she spent the last 6 hours slipping in and out of it,” Jack said.

  “How can that happen?” Gavin said.

  “I don’t know. She’s not like other runners. And when she went back, it wasn’t the normal way. Her twin literally dissolved in my arms.”

  Gavin studied Jack’s image critically in the rear view mirror. Jack felt himself being weighed and judged. For what? Truthfulness? Mental instability? PTSD?

  “Okay,” his boss said, and Jack knew the meeting had ended. “You’re over there.”

  Gavin gestured with a flick of his head toward another agent, who stood leaning against Jack’s Land Cruiser parked a few yards away.

  Gavin started his engine, already putting the vehicle in gear before Jack could set a foot out the door. “Go back to the hotel and rest,” he said. “I’ll call you when you’re needed again.”

  As Gavin’s SUV jounced over rocks, through ruts and piles of garbage, rapidly exiting the vacant lot beneath the bridge, Jack approached the tall, athletic agent who’d driven his car here and looked supremely bored with the mundane task.

  “Rafe,” he said to the man in greeting.

  “Jack.”

  Rafe continued to lean against the driver’s door, arms crossed, Jack’s keychain dangling from one hand. The man may have put up a façade of boredom, but Jack knew him better than that. Rafe was worried. He wanted to know what was going on.

  Jack wasn’t up for giving a second briefing. He held out his hand and Rafe dropped the keychain into it. Lazily, the agent moved away so Jack could open the door and slide behind the wheel.

  “Have they started evacuations?” Jack asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Dammit, what are they waiting for?”

  “A frickin’ miracle would be my guess.”

  Time for me to rescue that miracle.

  He had to find Lara.

  Jack slammed his door, jammed his key in the ignition and drove off, so preoccupied he failed to notice Rafe pulling out his cell phone and making a call, while watching to see which direction Jack took.


  “Yeah,” Rafe said into the phone. “It’s like you thought.”

  Rafe signaled to a car that waited behind one of the bridge’s massive concrete pillars. The vehicle came and picked him up.

  “Right. We’re on it.”

  Chapter 17

  Though awake, Lara couldn’t muster enough energy to get to her feet when the door to her cell opened and Grey Man walked in. A man carrying a heavy medical kit trailed him. Face down on the cement she observed both through heavy lidded eyes that wouldn’t remain open for more than seconds at a time, no matter how hard she tried to stay awake.

  The man with the kit came to her side, stood over her, and stared down at her with a sour turn to his lips.

  “This is how you manage assets?” he said to Grey Man.

  The tone in his voice elicited no confidence in Lara that he cared about her as a person. He discussed her the way you would a tool that hadn’t been properly put away.

  “Just fix her,” Grey Man said.

  Though she probably didn’t look it, her time with Jack in her bedroom had left her feeling marginally better. He’d pulled her back from the brink. She didn’t understand how hallucinating a man who gave her medication, lovingly cleaned her wounds and then held her tight in protective arms for hours could have an effect on her medical condition, but it had.

  Lara could have lain in those arms forever, imaginary or not. All she wanted in life was someone to make her feel safe, to help her get past the nightmares, but she had long given up on the idea of meeting a man who would stay. Not that many of her relationships had gotten that far, but the fact that many nights she woke up out of sound sleep screaming her head off, tended to deter even the most understanding males. The kinder ones suggested she seek professional help as they left.

  Lara had done just that, finding a therapist a few months after the dreams had begun. Initially, she’d believed the psychologist she’d found could help her through them, uncover what caused them. After their third session, however, distrust crept into their time together, along with the fear that the psychologist had another agenda. He acted far too interested in the dreams themselves and their specific content in connection with the horrible events that always followed them in the news. His concentration centered on documenting her dreams rather than helping her deal with them, or making them go away. A part of her began to wonder if he were using her somehow, maybe to write a paper about her he would publish without her permission or, worse, a book. His probing of her nocturnal experiences went so far as to suggest a prurient fascination with the violent acts she related. It creeped her out, and she never went back.

  Jack, on the other hand, struck her as the rare type of person she could trust with the dreams, someone who wouldn’t rush to judgment about her mental state. She could picture him listening carefully, offering genuine support, sending strength and resolve into the fragile areas of her life, exactly as he had when he lay next to her in bed.

  Wait. Remember. Jack isn’t real. He’s a just coping mechanism you’ve created for yourself to deal with this.

  Yet what about the healing strength she’d felt flowing into her from him while she’d curled against him in bed? Had she imagined that, too? Why wouldn’t her brain just allow her this little fiction? She deserved someone real who cared about her. Why did her rational mind keep ruining it for her, pounding at her to give him up because he didn’t exist?

  Jack had sworn he was real, that she’d really been home in her bed, that everything she’d experienced was all completely real. Dumb. Who trusted a hallucination to tell you the truth?

  Lara finally stopped denying the truth and accepted her situation. She wasn’t somewhere else having a stroke. Granted, she was confused, under stress, still sick with fever and the residual effects of the drugs she’d been given, she might even have hallucinated a thing or two, but she didn’t believe herself mentally incapacitated.

  Unlike her gorgeous, patient Jack, Grey Man was here with her. This, not Jack, was her reality. Grey Man was an actual person. He meant her harm.

  She had no illusions she could defend herself physically against him. She was a wreck. Her fever was down a degree or two, but it still held her firmly in its grip. Her hand was in terrible shape, a little less swollen than before, but badly damaged and infected. She hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink since the night of her abduction.

  For the first time since she’d unsuccessfully fought her abductors, however, Lara was ready to go to battle again. Did they have control of her physically? Yes, no question. Did they control who she was? No way. Inside Lara was still whole.

  Don’t try to be brave, Jack had told her. Let them think you’re broken.

  I am broken, she’d said.

  No! You’re not. You’re strong.

  He was right. She wasn’t broken. She wouldn’t allow them to do that to her.

  Don’t try to be brave.

  Bravery didn’t have anything to do with this. Resisting their insane demands to find places she’d never been just by thinking about them would be her way of taking control back from her captors. She already knew how this ended. She wasn’t leaving this cell, but she would go out true to herself, and no longer a victim.

  “Help me roll her,” the man with the kit said.

  Grey Man didn’t move, offering him no assistance.

  “Fine.”

  The medic set down his kit, squatted, lifted and tugged at Lara. She didn’t help him either, not that she could help much, but eventually he had her on her back. He snarled in disgust when he saw the burns and blood.

  “She’s filthy,” he said. “These burns are already infected.”

  He took her vitals, noted her high fever to Grey Man, and then took scissors from his kit. She expected him to attack the bandages around her hand, but he went for her clothes, cutting her T-shirt off of her and then her panties. Nothing about his actions was sexual, not even in a deviant sense. It was robotic. He worked briskly, expediently, never reacting when fabric that had stuck to the burns tore away skin with it and she flinched. Once he had her naked, he stood up again and looked around her cell, searching for something, stymied.

  “Water?” he asked.

  Grey Man pointed at the open door.

  Kit Guy returned, dragging a hose that ended in a nozzle.

  He sprayed her down like an animal in a pen, while Grey Man watched from the far side of the room.

  Lara wanted to cry in humiliation, but focused on the water. Cooling water to her fever. Her first in days, other than in her hallucination with Jack. She refused to shame herself by showing how desperately she needed to drink and didn’t open her mouth wide. Rather, she parted her lips subtly and was rewarded when a bit splashed inside. She licked her lips and stole a few precious drops that way, as well.

  The medic spread ointment on the burns, his fingers gouging carelessly into raw flesh. He dressed her unceremoniously in an orange jumpsuit with no underwear. Forced medication on her. He didn’t explain what it was, and she worried strong sedatives or more hallucinogens might be among the mix of pills, but he didn’t give her a choice, prying open her mouth and shoving them inside. Try though she did, she couldn’t deny the additional water that went with them. She swallowed it greedily.

  Lara endured all of this until his latex-gloved hands grabbed her injured one to remove the bandages. She’d been through this before with Jack and knew the intense pain it caused. Reflexively, she yanked her hand back, but he held it firm. With his first cut into the bloody wrappings, the movement traveled to the wound below. Like a spike driven through the palm of her hand, the shock was brutal.

  She pulled away, backing up, and when he wouldn’t let go, thrashed in panic. Despite her vow to remain silent, not give them anything, she couldn’t help the low whimper and words whispered to herself. “Not again.”

  No, please. I can’t take this another time.

  “What was that?” Grey Man asked, instantly on alert. “What did she
say?”

  “I think she said, ‘not again,’ ” Kit Guy said.

  Grey Man came over and leaned over her.

  “Not again,” he said, pretending to mull over the words. “Now why would you say that, Lara?”

  She quit her struggles, but wouldn’t look up at him. Looking up would get her a slap across the face. She knew it. He grabbed her hair and pulled her head back so far she had no choice but to look him in the eyes.

  “Not again?” Grey Man said. “Someone else cut this bandage off for you?”

  “I dreamed,” Lara said.

  “Where did you dream to, Lara?”

  She lied. Quickly, without putting too much thought into it. If she said it quickly and naturally, maybe he’d believe it. She would not give him Jack.

  “The hospital. I dreamed I was in the ER.”

  “The ER.” Grey Man exchanged a meaningful look with Kit Guy. “Which one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you’ve been to that particular hospital before?”

  “I don’t know. It was an ER.”

  “Did you give them your name?”

  “I don’t–”

  With her hair wrapped in his fist, he jerked it hard, and her head whiplashed on her neck.

  “No. No. I didn’t give them my name. They already knew it.”

  “Knew it?” he sounded skeptical.

  “How would they unless she told them?” Kit Guy said.

  Grey Man released her hair and turned his back to her, pulling a phone from his pocket. He called someone and spoke in a low, urgent voice. She allowed her head to nod forward again, her hair to fall in front of her face.

  Grey Man came back.

  “What else?” he asked.

  She kept silent, furiously thinking through the rest of the lie to give him.

  “What else happened in the dream?” he demanded.

  “The doctor wanted to cut off my hand. He had a big saw. I looked at him and…”

  “And what, Lara?”

  “He was you.”

  She waited while her story sunk in with them.

  Did she imagine it, or did Kit Guy sigh in relief?