Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel)

by Aileen Harkwood

  As dizzy as she’d always been inside the dream, she reached for the same striped maple tree to steady herself and encountered the identical film of blood and tissue splattered on its trunk. The butt of her hand slid and faltered in the warm gore and it made her wonder. She glanced down at her other hand.

  No longer whole and perfect as it had been the first time she’d had this dream, her hand bore a cast to the wrist, except it wasn’t the same one she’d just worn to bed. It looked more permanent, like something meant to be worn for weeks, not days. Seeing it touched off dread so powerful, gooseflesh rose instantaneously on her arms, spread up her neck and raised the fine, nearly invisible hairs at the edges of her face.

  This is the future.

  Her confidence in what she saw solidified until she could imagine no other outcome or explanation. Bombings. Explosions. Death. Wherever this was, the events here were coming, and would end hundreds of lives.

  Like an automaton given one program and one only, Lara repeated the same actions she’d performed in the previous two iterations of this dream. She knelt down to wipe her hand on the grass, but the blood and other stuff wouldn’t come off. She watched it sink into her skin and doubled over at the pain that followed, then suffered dry heaves. She hugged her knees to her and rocked, with one alarming difference in this version of the dream. Grief. Grief wailed from her chest. Hysterical sobs wracked her body. The loss felt inconsolable and very, very real. It could mean only one thing. She knew the dead.

  No. Stop. You have a gift. Put it to use. Don’t just sit there weeping.

  Wrenching herself out of the dream’s inevitable storyline required strength she didn’t think she possessed, but she pushed herself to action.

  Hurry. Get up. Look. Memorize.

  Weaving her way back to her feet, this time she paid attention to every last nuance of her surroundings as she turned in a circle. Gutted and consumed by flames, roofs and walls no more, little remained to identify the five buildings or what purposes they may have served. Her mind took in the materials they’d been made of—bricks with roughly dressed pale-colored stone—plus each building’s general size and layout within the collegiate setting. She committed the streets in front of and connecting the structures to memory. She imprinted the landscape plantings and the distant hills and the crescent moon in the sky on her thoughts.

  “Lara.”

  Someone whispered her name, the sound coming from behind her.

  “Lara.”

  She knew who called. It was the one voice she didn’t want to hear. Not now. Not here.

  “Lara.”

  Hearing the voice meant something bad had happened, worse even than this unfathomable atrocity. The voice begged her to turn and look at him.

  “Don’t make me look!” Lara asked for mercy. “Please.”

  Slowly, every second bringing the horror closer and closer to her heart, Lara turned to see.

  His eyes met hers, already clouding with death, though his voice continued in her mind.

  “Never forget,” he said.

  “Never forget,” Lara whispered and opened her eyes. Her heart pounded and she fought back the scream that wanted to let loose. She shivered in the aftermath of her nightmare’s revelation.

  She’d slept well past early evening and into the middle of the night. A thin line of light shining in under the bottom of the hospital room’s door provided the only illumination, but it was enough for her to see Jack, asleep in one of the two comfortable arm chairs that formed a seating area for their room. Still dressed in the clothes he’d put on that morning, his jean clad legs and booted feet stretched out in front of him, while his chin dropped to one side so that his forehead pressed against the chair’s cushioned upholstery. Something glinted between the fingers of his right hand.

  His gold coin. Good. He found it.

  She didn’t know what the bit of plastic sprayed with gold coating symbolized for him, but she knew its loss would have devastated him.

  She smiled poignantly as she continued to observe him. So peaceful and, frankly, innocent in sleep, compared to his habitual expression of skeptical, suffer-no-idiots intensity.

  He’d returned to their room to sleep, but hadn’t climbed into bed with her. Lara wasn’t sure what that said or didn’t say about their relationship. Had he not wanted to risk waking her? Or had he accidentally fallen asleep while waiting for her to wake so they could have “the talk,” the one where he told her he was glad she was safe, but it was over?

  Either way, she didn’t want to wake him. She needed time to process this third visitation of her nightmare, parse its meaning and potential warning. In all honesty, she didn’t know what she’d do or say right now if he woke.

  Moving carefully as possible, she climbed out of bed and walked to the room’s only window. Unlike her yellow room on the non-society member’s side of the hospital, this view was unrestricted. This afternoon, she’d glanced toward it and noticed soft blue sky marred by just a hint of overcast inviting her to look outside and finally learn her whereabouts. Strange, she’d been reluctant to do so. Why hadn’t she rushed to the glass to take in her new freedom?

  Silently, she padded to it now. Crossing her arms tightly about her chest to ward off the shivering that hadn’t quite dissipated, she surrendered her worries to the outdoors and the night sky. Mindlessly, her gaze followed the slumbering contours of the land, hills, a river reflecting ghostly shards of a heaven swirling with so many stars she might as well have been in a Van Gogh painting. From the lack of light pollution dimming the Milky Way, Lara guessed them to be far from the nearest city and likely several thousand feet above sea level.

  Her casual investigation came to an unexpected halt when she zeroed in on a particular object well into the distance. She stepped closer to the window, fixated by what she saw hundreds of yards away.

  She stiffened, took an awkward step back, and then rushed on bare feet to the door. Without a sound, she slipped into the corridor and broke into a full sprint toward the nurses’ station at the end of the corridor.

  Startled, the two women on duty glanced up at her frantic approach.

  “I need Gavin,” she said.

  “Ms. Freberg–”

  “Now!”

  Chapter 32

  “You’re certain this is it?” Gavin asked.

  Almost before he could bring the SUV to a stop, Lara pulled on the door handle and launched herself from the vehicle, racing to the striped maple tree from her dreams. Stopping in front of it, her eyes searched its trunk. Her good hand reached out and fitted itself around the curved surface, at the precise spot where it skid and slipped in gore in her dream.

  Frantic, she turned in a circle, exactly as she would at some unspecified time ahead, gaze raking over the buildings, the stream and hills in the distance. Everything was identical down to the last walkway, trashcan, bench, the last shadowy mountain laurel. Except here, in the now, the buildings rose whole and unscathed within their setting. No explosions. No flames. The air smelled earthy and damp, but sweet with some native bloom she couldn’t identify. Carefully trimmed lawns covered the large, open spaces between buildings like rugs of dark, shorn fur. Unlike her nightmares, no bodies or body parts littered the grounds. Midnight’s black cape shrouded the land, lulling everyone into a false sense of safety and security.

  “Lara?” Gavin spoke softly.

  He stood off several feet away, waiting.

  She squinted into the dark, found the hulking shape of the hospital they’d just driven from, perhaps two hundred yards away, and counted until she found her room’s unlit window on the third floor.

  “The House, Gavin,” she said. “Which one is it?”

  “They all are. The House isn’t just one building. It’s all of them. Over a dozen.”

  “Like a campus.”

  “You could call it that.”

  She knew her eyes must look wild. He probably thought her deranged.

  “You’re in danger,” sh
e said. “All of you.”

  “We know that.”

  “No. You don’t. Or at least not what I’ve dreamed.”

  “Tell me.”

  “That building, that building,” she said, pivoted, and pointed at each of the five closest structures. “That, that, that. They’re all gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Blown up. Fires in the ruins. Bodies everywhere. Bits of people on the ground.”

  Even in the poor light, she thought she might have seen him pale in reaction.

  He said nothing at first. Took a deep breath. She had the feeling that even unflappable Gavin needed a moment to deal with this.

  Then the cool, calm man was back.

  “When did you have the dream?” he said.

  “I’ve had it three times, the latest just before I called for you. The first on the night the Greys took me.”

  “Three? Is that usual for you?”

  “No. I’ve never had the same nightmare more than once before now.”

  “You’re sure this is the exact same place in the dream?”

  “Positive.”

  “Day or night?”

  “Night?”

  “Time of the year?”

  “Like it is now.”

  “The weather?”

  “Clear.”

  “Is there a moon?”

  “A moon? Yes!”

  “Full? Almost full? Crescent?”

  “A sliver. Barely there.”

  “Okay. Good. Where was it in the sky?”

  Lara studied the horizon, and then pointed.

  “Waxing or waning?”

  “I don’t know which is which.”

  “Show me which direction it was facing.”

  She used her good hand to mimic the shape and position of the crescent moon in her dreams.

  “Good. What else, Lara?”

  She hesitated. “Nothing.”

  Do I tell him?

  Should she reveal what she’d seen in her most recent version of the dream? She didn’t want to think about it herself. She wanted to forget it and pretend it couldn’t happen. The idea that this was the future. Her future, since she would stand at this very spot and hear the voice calling her name.

  “Do all the dreamrunners live here?” she asked.

  “No. Only a fraction. I do. My agents don’t.”

  “You do?”

  No. I’m not telling anyone.

  If she didn’t tell, it wouldn’t happen, she rationalized to herself. Her dreams weren’t foolproof predictions. She didn’t always get it right.

  “I believe the reason your nightmares don’t always come true is because sometimes something happens to change the future,” Gavin said, matter of fact.

  Lara froze like a small defenseless animal in a predator’s sights.

  “What did you say?”

  Can he hear me? He hears my thoughts?

  I do, his voice answered in her mind. I have since we met.

  Oh, God. Were all the dreamrunners telepathic? What embarrassing things had she been thinking since she’d arrived here?

  Nothing too terrible.

  She hadn’t yet witnessed Gavin laughing, and half-suspected he wasn’t capable of it, but here was this gentle laughter riding his mental voice.

  “But I thought…Jack told me he’d never…that we were the only ones he knew of who could talk that way,” she said.

  “Other than myself, he was right,” Gavin said. “You two are the first I’ve encountered with the ability.”

  She noticed he held a smart phone and thumbed the screen several times, tapped it, and then gave a dour smile.

  “At least this is good news. If you’re correct about the position and phase of the moon, we have at least 22 days before this happens.”

  “That can’t be. I’ve never had a dream that far in advance of an event.”

  “Then let’s be grateful this time you have.”

  “It could just be a dream.”

  He nodded. “It could, but I don’t think so. You’re a runner. What you’re describing is a run. Other than when they pass through the fields, runners don’t run to imaginary places. If I were to hazard a guess, your gift allows you to run to the future. A very limited, specific one populated by extreme violence. When something as momentous as the events you’ve witnessed occurs, it’s my theory that some of the emotions they create leak back through time. Similar to Jack and other finders like him, you travel using a signature as your guide. You don’t need a photo any more than he does.”

  The future suddenly crystallized before her, real and horrifying. She wasn’t imagining things. She never had. “So this is really going to happen? These five buildings destroyed. All the people I saw around me dead. Children. Even…”

  “Even what, Lara?”

  She wouldn’t answer him.

  “Even what, Lara?” He pressed her harder.

  “Hey!”

  Jack’s angry shout came from across the lawn in the direction of the hospital. He ran full out toward them.

  “What are you doing to her?” Jack demanded and inserted himself between Gavin and Lara, instinctively shielding her with his body. “You’re interrogating her? Now? Here? Why?”

  He was a lot more spent from his ordeal in the ICU than he would let on to either of them. When his stiff neck had cramped up a little after midnight, rousing him, and he’d found Lara’s bed empty, his groggy mind had conjured the worst. He completely skipped over the fact that they were safe within the Society’s compound, flashed back to the cabin where Lara had been taken from him by her Grey Man, and hit the panic button, afraid she’d been abducted her again.

  His relief, once he learned from the nurses on duty that nothing had happened to her, was profound, but short lived. She’d asked for Gavin, blurted out that it was an emergency, and then driven off with his boss as soon as he’d arrived.

  Again, Lara hadn’t trusted him. If she had an emergency, why hadn’t she come to him for help? She couldn’t have missed him sprawled in their hospital room chair. Why hadn’t she woken him, confided in him?

  Which had left him standing outside the hospital entrance, pacing back and forth, wondering where Gavin had taken her, when he spotted the familiar SUV pulling up to the curb in front of the Society’s orphanage several buildings away. Lara dashed out of the vehicle first and ran to the old striped maple that had been a fixture of his childhood here at The House.

  Jack begun to run and saw Lara go from agitated to bat shit terrified. He could see, but not hear, Gavin firing questions at her, one right after the other. By the time he reached the pair, she stood paralyzed like a helpless animal, pinned by Gavin’s intense stare and the question, “Even what, Lara?”

  He pushed Lara safely behind him.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  “Jack–” Gavin said.

  “I want to know what’s going on. She shouldn’t be out here in the middle of the night,” he said. “Being questioned.”

  “It’s not what you think,” Gavin said, his tone quiet and grave.

  “She belongs back in the hospital. I don’t see any doctors signing off on her release.”

  Lara touched his shoulder, urging him to turn and face her.

  “Jack. I’m all right. Really.”

  “She’s had another dream. Three to be accurate,” Gavin said. “The first was more than two weeks ago, right before the Greys took her.”

  What? Why didn’t you tell me? he asked Lara silently, his brow furrowed in worry. Why didn’t you wake me?

  She ran her fingers along his tensed jaw, coaxing the muscles to ease up.

  You needed your rest, she told him. Remember you were mostly dead until day before yesterday.

  Aloud she said, so their silence wouldn’t seem strange, “The third dream was just a few minutes ago. They’re the same thing over and over. Always identical. Or almost.”

  “So why are you out here?”

  “Because this i
s the–”

  “No,” he said, understanding hitting him like a Taser to the chest. Her dream was about The House? He glanced from Lara to Gavin. He didn’t want it to be true, but their expressions gave his conclusions nowhere else to run. “No. That’s not possible. Not here.”

  “Here,” she said.

  “How? I mean, what happens?”

  “Bombs, I think. Or explosions of some kind. I’m never here when it happens, only during the aftermath.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “We don’t know exactly,” Lara said. “At least I can’t tell from the dream, but Gavin has a pretty good idea.”

  “A little over three weeks,” Gavin said.

  Sliding his cell phone back into a pocket, he backed up, then swung around and started for his vehicle. He waved for them to join him in the SUV.

  Jack continued to have a hard time putting his resentment toward Gavin aside. Lara may not have thought it necessary to wake him for this, but Gavin sure as hell should have.

  “How long have you known? About these dreams?” he asked his boss.

  “I’m only just hearing about them,” Gavin said.

  “Jack. Let it go. Please,” Lara said.

  In the short time it had taken them to drive from the tree back to the hospital, Lara’s tense, erratic energy had faded. She sounded tired. Utterly worn.

  This was too much for her. Damn. How could I have fallen asleep when she needs me?

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  He scooped her up out of the backseat while Gavin’s SUV idled at the hospital entrance.

  “She’s just like any other runner, Jack,” Gavin looked over his shoulder from the driver’s seat and said. “It takes it out of her, the same as it does any one of us.”

  “More for her, I think,” Jack said.

  “What do I do?” Lara half-mumbled. “How do I stop it from happening?”