Bring Me A Dream: Reveler Series 5 (11 page)

The secure Rêve had since logged off the network, and the revelers were back in the waking world. She’d been hoping for news. They needed a breakthrough.

“Okay, I’ll talk to her,” Allison said.

She took the long corridor to her office, the
clack
of her heels echoing off the floor and windows. Again, she wondered if she was really awake or asleep and just a pawn in Didier Lambert’s play. When she was near Marshal Fawkes, she felt more lucid, more awake. But then what woman didn’t wake up when he was around? And she was at least thirty years his senior.

The senator’s number was already in Allison’s message queue with an urgent red exclamation point next to it. She hit TALK and the phone dialed for her.

“This is Chimera Director Allison Bright for Senator Fleight,” she told the assistant who answered.

A short moment passed and then the senator was on the line. She wasted no time getting to the heart of the matter. “I need you to break into a secure Rêve and retrieve my daughter, Agatha Fleight. I have reason to believe she’s in danger.”

As the senator was very likely one of the Oneiros, Allison went with the company line. “Senator Fleight, it has been well established that shared dreaming poses no risk to the individual reveler. At worst, your daughter will simply have a—” Allison’s lips twitched “—nightmare.”

“Don’t you condescend to me,” the senator said. “This is my daughter we’re talking about. You and I
both
know there are dangers Darkside that might prevent her from ever waking. I want her out of that Rêve. Now.”

The senator sounded frantic, but Allison could presume nothing, so she continued with the standard script. “Does she have a history of substance abuse?” Drug use combined with shared dreaming was the official leading cause of revelers being unable to wake.

“No, she doesn’t have a history of drug abuse.”

“Has she established herself as both lucid and in control within the shared dreaming context?” Another very basic question. Being lucid and in control were the bare minimum to achieve shared dreaming. For that reason, all commercial Rêves required revelers to reach out and open a door before they could enter. In this way, everything that occurred was voluntary.

The senator didn’t deign to answer. “I can give you the code for the Rêve. I want it shut down.”

Allison took an audible deep breath for Senator Fleight’s benefit. “Go ahead.”

As Fleight listed the digits, Allison entered them in her Agora index. Sure enough, it referenced the secure Rêve managed by Didier Lambert that she’d been watching since Mirren Lambert and Vincent Blackman had entered Agatha Fleight’s residence.

“I really don’t think you have cause to worry,” Allison told her. “I’m not supposed to disclose this information, but that Rêve belongs to none other than Didier Lambert.”

“If you know anything,” the senator said, “then you know I have every reason to worry. Shut it down.”

“I can’t,” Allison said.

“I’ll give you whatever you want. A favor. Ask anything. Just shut it down.”

The call had suddenly become useful. Allison looked at the index listing. To the side of the Rêve’s unique identification number was the word
Inactive
.

Allison breathed through a few moments of silence. Then she said, “Done.”

“You shut it down?”

“It’s inactive.” Had been for the past thirteen minutes. “I’ll be in touch.”

“You do that,” the senator said and disconnected the line.

Allison hung up the phone and stared at the index of Rêves currently running. There were over three thousand. And those were only the general listings. She entered a code and another index appeared. The Rêve she wanted to access was not listed there either. The number existed only in her memory, but she could input it on this screen to see what was happening in there. So she did.

That ever-present, icy-hot paranoia made her mouth go dry. What if she were in a dream and didn’t know it? Then she had just given the code to Lambert. If she were lucid and no one had tampered with her interface, then she was safe. She prayed it was the latter.

A view of the Rêve in which she was holding Lambert appeared. Stark white, like all of the other Chimera holding cells. But this one had a very special construction, a dream within a dream via the ultra-compression of dreamwater.

Her eyes widened. The Rêve cell was empty.

Which was impossible. No one but her knew the access code.

The paranoia morphed into a giggle.

Was
she lucid? She’d thought so, but she was definitely not in control.

CHAPTER SIX

Mirren surged to standing as soon as she woke, but she was too late. Agatha had risen first and had propped a gun on Vincent’s forehead, her finger on the trigger, her wrist jacked so the weight of her arm was added to the barrel.

“Agatha, put down the gun. Vincent is my friend.” Mirren had known something was up with the woman. She’d been too accommodating. Something had been off. Agatha had ignored Vincent, even the blood on his hands.

“He has
deceived
you,” she said with a contrite and concerned wrinkling of the brow that made her look vaguely like her mother. “I knew what I would have to do from the moment I saw him at your side tonight. I thought Maze City would be enough of a distraction.”

Sirens wailed outside from somewhere in the vicinity of Agatha’s apartment. Mirren wished they were headed her way, but that kind of help wasn’t an option for her.

“He has never deceived me.” Mirren considered shoving Agatha back into sleep. It wasn’t hard to do—a mental push and she would drop where she stood. But what if the gun went off anyway? Her finger seemed so tight on the trigger.

“Your father warned me
specifically
about Vincent Blackman. He said that he might cause trouble.”

“He’s not causing trouble. You are.” A waking dream then, although that, too, had its risks. Mirren didn’t know how to predict this woman’s behavior.

“Your father said that he might make some accusations about him and involve the media,” Agatha continued. “That he might try to undermine the cause. I knew I had to look for a chance. I had to save you.”

“I don’t need to be saved,” Mirren said. “Look at me standing here, alive and well. Vincent is the one who is vulnerable. Not me. Never me.”

One moment, she’d been trading smacks with Maisie Lane, who Agatha had called the “custodian” of Maze City. It made no sense whatsoever that Jordan’s sister would be in her
father’s
Rêve, working for him, no less, but everyone thought they were telling the truth. Then Vincent had come around to separate them, and that’s when Mirren had felt the vacuum of Agatha’s absence. It hadn’t mattered that Steve Coll was suddenly pummeling Vincent. Mirren had known she had to wake.

Agatha gave her a patient smile. “Your father also told me that you didn’t understand the ways of the waking world, that you’ve been duped before. And wasn’t it a lucky thing that you bred true when you had David.”

Seemed Father had spilled all the family secrets, which meant Agatha was very high up in the Oneiros, maybe too high.

Mirren wanted to argue that she hadn’t been duped. She’d fallen in love, and her father had ended it cruelly. But Agatha wouldn’t want to hear an opposing point of view, especially after leading Mirren and Vincent to that incredible city. Father would always be a hero in Agatha’s eyes.

They’d overstepped by approaching her. They hadn’t planned well enough. Should’ve gone with Vincent’s contact from the One Group.

Mirren changed her tactic. “I was wrong once. I learned from my mistakes.”

“Not if you’re with Vincent Blackman. His father—”

“—was given to the Scrape,” Mirren finished. “I know all about that, and so does Vincent. In fact, a nightmare now follows him, too, and soon he’ll go back to the Scrape, this time forever. Vincent acknowledges His power. After all he’s seen, how could he not? But we have work to do first.”

The waking dream would have to be simple. Simple was best. Like dreams in general, a small suggestion was all that was necessary. The dreamer filled in the rest.

“I can’t take that chance.” Agatha tensed her arm and adjusted the hand holding the gun. “I can’t fail you.”

“You will
not
shoot him. If you do, I’ll make sure you die, too.”

Agatha gave her a beatific smile. “Then my loyalty would be proven.”

The sands were few and far between in the waking world, but Mirren didn’t need much to create this daydream. Just a small hint, real enough to fool…

The Rêve room door opened, and her father leaned inside. “There you are, Mirren,” he said. “I see you’ve met—”

Agatha looked over, delight brightening her face.

Mirren lunged and grabbed the hand that held the gun so tightly. She bent Agatha’s arm up, just as her attention swung back, and a shot cracked through the room.

***

Vince’s body was on fire. He choked on angry dreamwater, and then he was awake. He’d expected to be crushed by Demon Steve, but instead…

He blinked at a ceiling as he tried to modulate his breathing and slow his heart rate, but his mind sped up and figured it out. Steve, unwilling to throw him to certain death out in the Scrape, must’ve awakened him the same way Mirren had pulled him Darkside. Steve had simply thrown him out of Maze City a different way.

One last deep breath and he sat up. Mirren stood a few feet from him, white as a sheet, hand over her mouth, gaze cast downward.

Vince followed her line of sight. Agatha Fleight was collapsed on the floor, half her face missing. A handgun lay by her hand. Above and behind her on the wall was a scarlet splatter of blood and what he figured were little bits of gray matter. The next breath he took was filled with the rich and bitter scent of iron. He tried hard not to like it, but he did.

He stood. “What happened?”

Mirren didn’t move. “She was going to kill you.”

“Is that why you left Maze City?”
What a fucking lot of blood.

“She disappeared and I’d had a feeling…”

Vince grew irritated on top of disturbed. Agatha had to have been using SpiderSly’s tandem dreaming technology. Nightmares like Steve and Mirren might be able to do anything Darkside, but without tandem tech, a
normal
reveler couldn’t wake from someone else’s dreamscape. And according to Steve, Maze City was Maisie Lane’s. That’s what made tandem tech so valuable; a reveler could bounce from anywhere Darkside through their own to wake. It was also probably why the One Group had been interested.

Sirens caught Vince’s attention. “Did you call the police?”

She shook her head. “That’s not for us. They were there before the gun went off.”

So Mirren
hadn’t
abandoned him to Steve’s beating. She’d had his back. Agatha was dead instead of him. The pact was in full force, though by entering Maze City and momentarily burying Maisie Lane, they had officially lost the support of Steve Coll’s faction of Chimera. They were on their own. With a dead body. And sirens?

As it wasn’t the worst he’d been recently, Vince was hopeful.

He left the Rêve room and made his way through the jungle of Agatha’s plants to peer out a humidity-steamed window. Police cars were blocking the street below, and a couple of officers were walking toward the building.

A phone was ringing from somewhere. Vince followed the sound and found it inside Agatha’s evening bag. The screen read,
The Senator
. Not exactly mother-daughter warm and fuzzy.

They needed information, so what the hell. Looking at Mirren, who’d followed him to the apartment’s main room, Vince picked up the call.

“You get out of the Rêve all right?” he asked Senator Fleight.

He had no idea what to say about Agatha. The senator would’ve been on their side if she’d known the whole story—being anti-Didier Lambert and all that. But the body in the Rêve room would make her disinclined to believe anything they had to say. Plus, Mirren had been pretty ruthless about the senator’s pleas in the shared dream where they’d all met.

“Listen here, Mr. Blackman,” the senator said. “That
nightmare
will release my daughter, or I will bring down the full weight of my influence upon you and expose the Oneiros and its agenda for what it is.”

It seemed, after failing in the Rêve, the senator had sent the police to intervene in the waking world. That’s a pretty great mom. For years, she’d probably entertained Didier Lambert under the age-old maxim of keeping her enemies close. Brave and smart, too. It made sense that she also thought Mirren and Vince were her enemies, and that wasn’t going to change with explanations. Especially since Agatha’s gray matter was stuck to the Rêve room wall.

“You do that,” Vince challenged her. “Tell the whole fucking world. I dare you.” Then to make sure she did, he added, “By the way, Agatha is dead.”

He ended the call. Didn’t worry about fingerprints. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Mirren still appeared stunned, but she nodded her head. “This is bad.”