Bring Me A Dream: Reveler Series 5 (10 page)

There
. And how perfectly silly. “We go through that laundromat.”

“Are you pleased?” asked Agatha. She looked like she was close to doing an up-down bounce like a teenager. “Isn’t it amazing!”

“Laundromat looks rinky-dink to me,” Vincent said. “I don’t think it goes through.”

“That’s the point.” Mirren was grinning now. Her father
had
built this with her in mind. Not even her father could manipulate sand the way she could. Only
she
could find her way through it, no one else. The city was safe. “I might have to forgive him,” she confessed to Vincent.

“If my dad built me a city like this, I’d forgive him, too.” Vincent’s expression darkened. “You don’t expect me to forgive your father, though, do you?”

Of course, Vincent still wanted to kill him. Her father had committed a despicable crime against him. A niggling thought emerged from her brain like a worm. Her father might be the ally she needed, not Vincent. Her father had big, ugly traits and did utterly reprehensible things, but if she and David were going to survive…
Just look at this city!

She found herself saying, “Your business with my father is your own.”

“Good!” Vincent was cheerful again. “How long do you want to stay? We have other things to do. Pressing things.”

The Sandman.
“I want to stay forever, but you’re right. This will keep.”

As Mirren turned back toward the laundromat, a shimmer of sand caught her eye.
What…?
The walls of a three-story black brick building were falling. She dissolved it into sand as it folded on itself and collapsed, the grains raining on their heads and shoulders before disappearing into nothingness.

“Get the hell out,” a female voice said.

Mirren wheeled around to find a short, punky woman, very young, with dark-pink hair.

“It’s the custodian,” Agatha said.

Custodian? Well, good thing Mirren knew how to handle help.

“I’m Mirren Lambert,” she said. “This is my city, and you will not speak to me that way.”

“Um…Mirren?” Vincent said.

“
Lambert
,” the woman repeated, still rude. “I should’ve known. You’re
just
like your father. Get out, or I’ll throw you out.”

Enough.
Mirren lifted a finger, and the pavement swallowed the girl like quicksand. Then Mirren turned to Agatha. “What was my father thinking? Why is this woman my custodian?”

Agatha put a hand to her throat and shook her head. “It’s not my place to ask questions. I
had
heard the city might have a few rats. I thought your father had already taken care of them.”

Rats. Well. “Guess there might be some cleaning to do.” She looked over at Vincent, who had an odd expression on his face, a hand lifted as if he’d drawn breath to say something but hadn’t quite gotten it out yet. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

His brows drew together in an expression of terrible consternation and he rubbed his hand across his mouth. “I’m pretty sure you just buried Maisie Lane,
Jordan
Lane’s younger sister.”

Agatha looked back and forth between them.

A cold shiver racked Mirren. “The Jordan who—”
—has my son?

“Yep. That’s the one.”

***

“Get her out,” Vince said. “Now.”

He’d known Maze City was familiar. Jordan had said something about it. Maybe Harlen, too. But neither had stopped to explain what it was. They must’ve found Didier Lambert’s special Rêve for Mirren. And Maisie was…guarding it? But why had Agatha called her the custodian?

This was bad. He’d only met Maisie once, and only for snatches of time over the course of a few hours, but the pink hair was distinctive. So was the attitude. He’d met her the night he’d arranged to “bump into” Jordan at a tacky beach paradise Rêve. The job had been to convince Jordan to join the team at SpiderSly, when really she would’ve been shunted through by his contact, Murray Graeme, and on to—Vince hadn’t known this then—Didier Lambert. The sisters had been fighting that night. Maisie had gotten into some kind of trouble. Lots of tempers had been flaring.

“What is she doing here?” Mirren made a two-handed lifting motion, and the concrete disintegrated into gold grains.

Maisie’s body rose kicking and clawing to the surface, shaking Scrape sand from her hair and spitting from her mouth. “You. Fucking. Bitch!”

“I’m so, so sorry,” Mirren said, wading in and reaching out a hand to help her up. “I didn’t know—”

Maisie levered herself up on her elbows and swung a leg to knock Mirren off her feet.

She fell on her back with a hard
uff
.

Maisie was about to straddle her, but Mirren swatted defensively, and Maisie ended up collapsing on top of her while whaling with her arms.

Mirren, not a passive bone in her body, whaled back. She grabbed at pink hair to pull her away, shrieking, “If you’ll just
listen
—”

Yeah, right
, Vince thought.
Jordan
was the sister more inclined to listen to explanations, and occasionally
she’d
jump to conclusions, too. She’d recently left him ill and unconscious on a city sidewalk at night.

Vince went in to separate the women. Really, it was a funny story in the making. Later they would all laugh about it. He was just grasping Maisie under her arms when a hand clamped around his throat. He let go of Maisie as he was lifted off his feet and then was slammed onto the pavement. It felt like his ribs were shattered, his spine in pieces. Pain and molten crackle blanched his vision white.

Starkly clear, however, against the blinding sky were the nightmare eyes in Demon Steve’s enraged face.

Whoa, man…

A strike across Vince’s jaw turned the lights off completely, but the rush of air told him he was airborne again. Impact smacked into him at his right shoulder. The deep percussive crash that followed suggested he might have been used to knock over another wall.

He blinked back his sight, just as Steve came at him again, this time meeting grapple with grapple, violence with violence. Vince had been itching for a fight for days. With their arms clasped around each other, Vince brought his head down fast. Steve reeled backward.

“We didn’t know who Maisie was at first,” Vince ground out between clenched teeth. His bloodstained hands went to Steve’s neck. “We found her here in Lambert’s Rêve. It was an easy mistake.”

Steve swung up and bashed Vince on the side of his head again. Vince’s hold broke, and he stumbled drunkenly.

“This isn’t Lambert’s Rêve,” Steve said. “It’s Maisie’s dreamscape.”

Vince snorted as he straightened again. “I don’t know
what
this is, but it’s no dreamscape.” No one dreamed
this
big. “Lambert built it for Mirren, and you guys…appropriated it.”

Steve hit him across the jaw again. “Lambert didn’t build anything. Maisie was
born
with this. Built the city herself. Lambert couldn’t take it from her. And neither will Mirren. Definitely not you.”

Vince glanced at the skyline, which had doubled in his vision. The city was huge. No single person could imagine all this. Most dreams were unfinished things with bits of clarity that the sleeper used to fill in the rest. Dreams were suggestion, cobbled together bits of experience and imagination. Even commercial Rêves worked that way.

He tried to remember back to what Jordan had said about Maze City. Whatever she’d said, it was nothing to make him think that Maisie had conceived anything like this.

“Maisie’s incredibly talented,” Steve said. “Talented like no one else. She has more imagination than the rest of the world combined. And this is the only time you’ll experience it. You will never come back here again. And if
Mirren
shows her face here? I’ll orphan her son.”

Mirren.
Vince looked around for her, and spotted Maisie sitting on a park bench—one he hadn’t noticed before—swinging her crossed leg and examining her nails. Next to her sat a funny-looking woman wearing a straw hat with a daisy growing out the top. Both women seemed to be waiting for Steve to finish wiping the street with him.

Vince wheeled around again. “Where’d Mirren go?”

“Got away,” Steve said. “Must’ve known what I’d do to her.”

Vince looked over to the park bench. “Maisie?”

Maisie shrugged. “One minute she was pulling my hair out, the next she was gone.”

“She
just
learned about this place,” Vince said. Agatha could explain. Vince looked for her, too. Also gone. “That woman you sent us to find? Agatha Fleight. She told us that Lambert had created this amazing city, Maze City, for Mirren and David. Mirren only wanted to see what Agatha was talking about.”

“I don’t know if you’re a liar or an idiot,” Steve said.

If Vince were lying, Steve would’ve been able to sense it in the dreamwaters. Which left—

“Yep,” Maisie said, still looking at her nails.

Vince shook his head, looked around again. Where had they gone? Had
Agatha
done something to Mirren? No. Mirren was all-powerful Darkside. Agatha couldn’t do anything to her. But then where was she? They’d made a pact to stick together. Allies. And they hadn’t even slept together yet.

“You’re supposed to be finding out about the Sandman,” Steve said icily. “FYI—he’s not here.”

“We
are
looking for him,” Vince answered back. “Or we were. When we heard about the city Lambert built for her, we came to check it out first. We had to make sure we had it under our control before the Agora came down.”

“The Agora is coming down?” Steve asked. Again the silky tone of danger.

Vince was pretty sure Steve was going to hit him again. “It’s what Agatha said.”

“Uh-huh. Using you was a mistake. We can’t trust a word you say. You’re never where you’re supposed to be, always suddenly cropping up elsewhere professing ignorance. I think it’s very simple. You were working for Lambert before, and you still are now. Which means
we
will no longer work with you. Shall I escort you to the boundary, or can you find it yourself?”

Vince finally settled his attention on the quaking fury that was Demon Steve. “You’re seriously pissed.”

“You’re just getting that?”

“This is a misunderstanding. Mirren’s son is at stake. She would never risk him.”

“Mirren is a
nightmare
,” Steve said. “I know exactly what she is capable of. And now you do, too.”

“Have you considered that she might be in danger right now?”

“No. She left you here to be torn apart by me.” Steve lifted his chin toward the boundary. “Or attacked by others of our kind in the Scrape. And now you’re leaving.”

Vince couldn’t believe this. “You’re going to throw me back out into the storm?”

“It’s the way you came in.”

“It took me
days
to find my way back last time. I almost died.”

“Maybe she’s out there waiting for you. You’ll come no farther into the city.”

“What about her son?”

“We’ll contact you about where we’re dropping him off. We want no connection with Mirren Lambert any longer.”

Vince looked back toward the Scrape, and then turned back around to Steve and Maisie. “I won’t survive out there,” he said. Nightmares had followed them to Maze City; they’d only stayed away because of Mirren. “Not a second time. Why don’t you just finish me instead?”

Fight it out. Not a bad way to go.

“All right,” Demon Steve said. “It’d be my pleasure.”

He advanced again, and Vince felt a hot calm ease the tension throughout his body. Fighting felt good.

Steve telegraphed a high blow, so Vince ducked, going for his gut.

***

Director Allison Bright shook hands with the visiting Minister of Dreams from Singapore and his staff. They were just initiating a pan-Asian complex for shared dreaming, and while she’d escaped most of the Rêve tours sponsored by corporations that were hoping to expand, the portion regarding Chimera had been left to her. She’d counseled vigilance for signs of corruption in the ranks, but she couldn’t very well tell them to beware the Sandman.

Marshal Harlen Fawkes approached them, a signal in his quick eye contact. She excused herself and exited the chatter of the conference room, stepping into the cool and quiet hallway.

“You have a call,” he said. “Senator Fleight. She began by demanding to speak with Mr. Dugan. I just heard him say to pass her on to you.”

Interesting. Why wasn’t he taking the call? The little ladder-climber wanted her job and was under Lambert’s thumb. There was a prestigious senator on the line and he was passing her off?

“Have you heard from—” She cleared her throat to try to get across her meaning “—anyone else?”

Fawkes shook his head. “All we know is they went back to her daughter’s residence.”

Allison actually knew more than that. One of Lambert’s secure Rêves had been initiated as well, but she hadn’t thought it prudent to override the securities and eavesdrop without potentially alerting the Oneiros that they had been infiltrated.