The Dream Runner (8 page)

 

 

T
he lake and I
had unfinished business, and when I left the hospital I drove directly to the accident site. When I saw the truck with the Alderson's Forestry Products logo parked by the road, I was tempted to keep driving.

I didn't. Will was another mess I needed to clean up. For the moment, at least, I was through running.

He stood on the shore with his back to me, skipping stones, and didn't look up at my approach. For the first time since I'd come home I saw him as he really was, without the overlay of the boy I remembered. He was built strong, but didn't have the need to show it off like Marsh. The t-shirt he wore was loose, his jeans were faded and there was a grease stain on one knee. Sunlight glinted in his hair, once almost white, now darkened to gold.

"Are you ready to listen?" he asked, still not looking my way. He bent down to pick up a stone, hefted it, dropped it, and selected another. The muscle in his arm bunched and released as he sent it off in one smooth motion so that it skimmed low over the water, touched, skipped, touched again. I counted eight skips before it finally sank.

By then I had a stone of my own and let it go. Without even trying we fell into the old competition. Mine skipped six times. His next only made five and mine, the last, didn't skip at all. Just splashed and sank. Tears blurred my vision and I couldn't hold back a sob.

"You've gotta know this, J," he said. "Words can't ever say how sorry I am. You're not the only one hurt by what I did. You. Your father. Mine. This whole town took a hit, losing him like that."

He threw another stone, still smooth and flawless, as though it had no weight and was meant to fly. "I—" His voice broke and he never did say what was on his mind in that moment.

As for me, the tears wouldn't stop, and despite the fact that they were pretty near blinding me by now, I was seeing a whole lot of things I didn't want to see.

The ambulance, the police cars, sirens wailing, lights flashing. Men in uniform scurrying around like ants, too late to accomplish any good. My father is under the water somewhere. I know he's dead. If they drag him up he'll just have to be buried all over again, this time in the dirt.

Wrapped in a blanket, shivering and struggling to catch my breath, I watch them put the cuffs on Will. He's soaking wet and covered in blood and his whole body is shaking with the cold or shock or maybe the realization of what he's done. The cops see it, too, and they're gentle with him. For just an instant his eyes come up as they lead him by me and I see a pain there that surpasses mine. As they put him in the car and take him away, I feel like I'm drowning all over again. He is the last person left in the world who still loves me.

And I love him, in that space of time before I let the rage take me. I love him with all I am.

"J?"

I realized he'd been talking and I hadn't heard a word. It was hard to speak around the tears, but I managed to find my voice. "Sorry, I got lost in a memory there for a minute."

"I just wanted to tell you I'm sorry. I've waited ten years to tell you that. Somehow I thought it might change something, for you. For me, or us." He threw another stone, and this time there was no skipping, just a full-scale release of energy. It splashed, way out in the lake. "Guess it doesn't really change anything at all."

I thought about the nightmare, trapped in the very walls of my house, and about my need to start cleaning up my own messes. And so I told him the thing I should have told him ten years ago. It took me two starts to get the words out—I'd had them locked up inside me for so long.

"He was dying anyway."

Will's arm stopped in the middle of a stone-throwing arc. He stood statue still, not even breathing. I couldn't look at his face. Guilt choked me, squeezing my throat like a giant fist and the rest of the words came out strangled, distorted.

"He had cancer, far gone. Only a couple of months to live."

The stone dropped onto the gravel with a little clatter. Will turned toward me and I almost ran away, but I grabbed a struggling breath and made myself look into his eyes. They made me think of rain on a window, rain on the lake. More grey than blue now, all the light quenched.

"And you let me think…"

All of my anger seemed like nothing more than a childish tantrum. We'd both had a drink on board that night, our first experiment with beer, but by the time Will got behind the wheel it had pretty much worn off. The truth was, it was late, it was dark, it was raining. And when we came around that corner there was a cow in the road. Will swerved to miss the cow.

I would have done the same.

I'd alienated the last person in the world who loved me over an accident.

"I'm sorry," I told him, knowing it wasn't enough.

"Why, J? All this time…"

"Don't you see? It had to be somebody's fault…" My voice broke. I'd been a vindictive, angry child, taking out my rage and heartbreak on the nearest target.

"I was the scapegoat? That's it?" Aghast, I watched the hurt fill his eyes from the inside out, the grief bow his shoulders and drain the color from his face. I took one long last look, to memorize the truth of what I'd done to him before he had a chance to cover it back up again, and then I turned and climbed up the steep bank to my waiting bike, leaving him alone with his heartache.

Just before I started the bike my phone rang. Shark music; nothing on the call display. I almost didn't answer. If the Merchant sent me to do another reading now, I really didn't think I could handle it. But I was already on thin ice with her, so I answered. I even aimed for a smidgeon of polite.

"Hello?"

"Dream request."

I sighed, letting resignation flow through me. At least it would take my mind off Will for a bit.

"Where?"

"One William Alderson."

"Oh no. No, I won't—"

But the phone had already gone silent.

He should have let me drown.

The thought flickered through my brain and then was gone. Death was not an answer. I couldn't see any way around what I was going to have to do. I'd hurt him so much already, and he had no idea how dangerous the dreams could be.

Still, a request was a request and there was no arguing with the Merchant. I'd tried to resist a few times in the past. It cost me physical pain and never ended well. I'd sold myself for a dream and now I had to pay the price.

But I couldn't do this thing. Not now. Not here.

I turned the key and Red roared to life. Will's dream was going to have to wait.

 

Thank you for purchasing
The Dream Runner
by Kerry Schafer! Keep reading to get more info on Kerry's books and read the excerpt for the second book in The Dream Wars series,
The Dream Thief
.

 

The Dream Wars Series:

 

The Dream Runner

The Dream Thief

The Dream Wars

 

The Between Series:

Between

Wakeworld (Coming January 2014)

 

Talk to Kerry on
Facebook
,
Twitter
, or visit her
web site
!

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

 

I
n all of my
years of indentured service as a dream runner, the Will Alderson assignment topped the charts as my worst job ever.

I owed him. He'd suffered a lot in the last ten years, much of it at my hands, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was cause him more pain. There was no way Will could know how dangerous a designer dream could be, or what it was likely to cost him. Bad enough that he'd ordered one at all, but the fact that I'd been tasked with delivering his poison was wrong on every possible level.

The Merchant owned my soul and sooner or later she'd force me to comply, but I had a small, irrational hope that Will would come to his senses if I could buy us both some time. So instead of following orders I fled the scene, knowing that the price for my disobedience would be steep.

The pain hit before my motorcycle rounded the first curve. Just a warning at first, nothing more than a headache with attitude. If past experience met anything, I figured I could hold out for an hour, two if I was lucky. In the meantime, I might as well double the misery and find out exactly what my mother's lawyer wanted with me.

Fallstone and Noland, Attorneys at Law, was located just off Main and 4
^th
Ave. It was a single-story stand alone business, sided with cedar. When I opened the door a wind chime announced my arrival.

The waiting area was all set up with comfy chairs and reading material, even a Keurig and a selection of coffee choices, but I had no intention of waiting. Getting past the receptionist would be challenge number one, but I figured I could take her, easy. She looked like the spokesperson for the Hire a Summer Student program, much more interested in her smart phone than running interference for her boss.

"I need to see Jenny Noland," I said, clomping right up to the desk in my motorcycle boots and leathers, helmet swinging from one hand. I kept my sunglasses on. "Now would be good."

"Oh, is she expecting you?" And then the blue eyes widened and her mouth fell open over perfect little white teeth. "Wait—you're Jesse Davison, aren't you?"

Now that threw me way off balance. I wanted to ask how she knew, but instead I just shrugged, keeping my face noncommittal. "Maybe. Can I see Ms. Noland?"

"Absolutely. She's been expecting you. Follow me."

All senses on high alert, head pounding with every step, I followed the child down a wood paneled hallway. When she opened a door at the end and gestured me in, I hesitated, looking things over.

Jenny Noland was all about living large. I estimated her weight at 300 pounds, which was likely conservative, and she carried it with pride. Her flowing dress was a garden of giant red and yellow flowers, and she paired it with earrings that dangled to her shoulders and a necklace made of raw unpolished chunks of some sort of green stone—jade, maybe. No squeezing into too-small chairs for Jenny; her office chair was custom designed to accommodate her with ease behind a bastion of a desk.

"Jesse, at last we meet." Her voice was a throaty contralto that thrummed inside my head like a plucked string on a cello. "Well, are you going to come in?"

I did, leaving the door cracked behind me and turning a chair around so I could keep the back of it between us. Jenny clasped her hands loosely on the desk in front of her, the expanse of which held nothing but a vase of red roses, and looked me over with the sort of scrutiny a police officer might give a suspect.

"You look like her," she said at last.

"I look like my dad."

"Your features may be his, but your expressions are your mother's and they shape you."

Three petals had fallen onto the gleaming surface of that desk, crimson as drops of blood. Rose perfume invaded my olfactory system, triggering memories I wanted nothing to do with.

"That I wouldn't know. I haven't seen her since I was ten. Listen, Jenny—this is not a social call for me. I didn't know my mother so I'm not grieving her death and I have zero interest in discussing her life and times. You sent me a letter that you wanted to meet with me. I'll sign whatever I need to sign, and then I have other things that need to be done."

For a long moment she looked at me, her face giving nothing away. "Perhaps I was wrong; you really don't resemble her at all." Reaching into a drawer she drew out a folder, opened it, and turned it around to face me. "Sign where the tabs indicate, please."

All I wanted was to be out of that office. Away from the cloying scent of roses, away from this woman who seemed to hold my mother in some regard. The pain had reached the stage where it felt like a metal band clamped around my brain, and the words I was trying to read swam before my eyes. I needed time to think, but if I didn't hurry up I was going to be incapacitated before I'd found out what I needed to know.

Jenny handed me the pen. I'd already started signing when a thought that had been nagging at me all day shook loose from the muddle in my head and came clear.

 I stopped mid signature and laid down the pen. "How did you find me?"

"It's not so difficult to track somebody down when you need them, Jesse."

 "That's not an answer."

It was also a lie. I'd been gone for ten years and got around a fair bit during that time, taking care to stay off the grid as much as possible. A determined PI could find anybody, I suppose, given enough time and connections, but an attorney needed a damn good reason to persist to that extent.

"It's all the answer you're going to get. Now—were you going to sign the papers? Or do you need me to go through them with you?"

"Just give me a minute." Pain or no pain, this time I was going to read before I signed.

I squinted my eyes to make the words hold still, and waded in. The legal language was convoluted and misdirecting, but beneath all that the gist of things seemed pretty straightforward. My mother was leaving me everything she owned. This included the house and property, as I'd already been told. And also any bank accounts, possessions, or debts.