The Sandman (5 page)

“You will do your job,” a stern male voice told the woman beyond the door.

Which had to mean that the secret was out. People now knew about human-nightmare hybrids, half-breeds. Or the people here did.

“I’ll quit,” she said. “Better to lose my job than end up like that other nurse.”

“That other nurse quit first, too.”

It wasn’t the menace in the male voice but the ready acceptance of “alien creatures” that made Steve guess that his keepers were likely Oneiros. They knew what he was. Sera was going to need a lot of help getting in and out with him.

There was a moment’s silence, and then his door opened. A single set of footsteps approached. Something rattled, metal and plastic sliding together, and the footsteps retreated.

“He’s fine,” the nurse said.

“You didn’t even look at him.”

“The machines say he’s fine.”

A long pause.

“Can I go now?” she asked.

The man must have answered with a nod or gesture because the door closed. Steve kept still, in case one or both of them still lingered inside the room.

Waiting, remaining so still, made his nose itch.

Does it prickle?
Maisie would taunt.
Don’t you want to scratch it? It’s like a leeeetle bug is dancing right there. Don’t you want to swat it?

He wanted to live through this so he could laugh and kiss her.

Instead of scratching his nose, he sought farther, beyond his room. Broad vibrations in the water signaled revelers sleeping nearby in the building. There, and there…and another there, he counted. At least five, all like quiet, slow-moving fish in the murky deep.

Flashes of the other revelers’ dreams flickered through his mind. Without Maisie near, her bright spark of personality casting everything else into darkness, Steve couldn’t help but experience the dreams of those nearby.

One reveler wandered a dark and deserted city, its tall buildings looking down at him with sinister awareness. It felt like home to Steve. Maze City. The reveler had to be one of the survivors of the black market collapse.

Yet another reveler’s dream was amorphous and slow, as if he were trying to run at the bottom of a polluted lake stalked by the hungry specter of what could only be a nightmare. Silver damage, probably. The reveler had to have taken a bad trip on the mean drug. Unfortunately, it was unlikely that he’d ever get back to where he’d started.

People didn’t go to reveler care centers if they were able to wake, if they had control. They ended up in reveler centers if they’d had a bad hookup or went under while drugged and someone actually became concerned enough to get help.

A wave in the waters lifted Steve up and a shiver racked his body, making him aware of the slight burn of the catheter.

He tried very hard not to move, though pain snarled through his belly and chest.

Sera was coming for him. She’d be here soon.

Somehow, he had to be ready for her. The Sandman was rising.

CHAPTER THREE

Jordan woke sitting up, breathing hard, and spitting angry. That son of a bitch Noah had grabbed—

Movement in the room brought her attention to the door. Some kind of rifle was pointed at her, a scary guy in black hunkered behind it.

Oh, hell no.

He had the dewy watercolor halo of a reveler, so she pushed him the way Malcolm, still asleep beside her, had taught her.
Night night.

The man fell to the floor in a loud and clumsy clatter in the doorway.

“Rev up!” shouted a male voice nearby. According to crime TV shows like
Lullaby Larceny
, the phrase meant that a reveler found sleeping at a crime scene had awakened.

She rolled off the bed and crouched in the small alley made by the mattress and the wall. Malcolm lay exposed, an easy target for flying bullets. She stole a quick glance across the room and through the open door to find that the opposite bedroom door was open, another armed man in motion. His lunge blurred with his green halo and she pushed him, too, drowned him out of the waking world and into the Scrape.

What the hell was happening here? She had to assume there were more in the house. Crawling out of her space to get to the door, her attention shifted to the blocked yellow lettering on the fallen man’s black sleeve.
Wait…Chimera?

Why were they here? And with guns?

“Harlen!” a voice called. Gary, Harlen’s father. “Harlen, come quick! It’s Sera!”

What
was Sera?

Jordan debated for a half a second, but the anguish in Gary’s voice compelled her to speak up. “Mr. Fawkes, it’s Jordan,” she called out. “What happened to Sera?”

“She’s been shot,” he said. “Can you wake Harlen? He should be with her.”

Sera. Shot? And Harlen wasn’t with her? They’d gone Darkside to do a proxy, which was inherently
together
. Maybe it hadn’t worked. Maybe something went wrong. And since Malcolm had gone with them, why wasn’t he awake, as well?

Jordan’s mind was spinning. She was sure there was something smart to do, if only she had time to think. Were the Chimera agents here as the good guys or the bad guys? Since she didn’t know, she called out again. “I’m coming out.”

Raising her hands in surrender, she stepped into the hallway. A few steps away crouched another Chimera, who aimed his weapon at her.

“Stay where you are!” he shouted.

And so she stayed.

Behind the marshal, Sera lay on the floor. Some woman—Jordan leaned to get a better look.
Senator Fleight?
—stood, frowning down at Sera’s body while a Chimera soldier applied pressure to Sera’s chest.

Dammit, a chest wound?

And there was at least one additional Chimera in the small front room beyond Gary’s sleeping wife, Eleanor. Gary was out of sight, in the kitchen probably.

Jordan broke a sweat while her throat went dry. “Has someone called an ambulance?”

“Yes,” the senator said. “What did you do to those men?”

“Drowned them,” Jordan said. The senator had to know about talented revelers. “What happened to Sera?”

“A Chimera shot her!” Gary’s voice was full of distress. Jordan felt the press of it on her heart, too.

The senator looked over to her side, where Jordan could see the boot of a fallen man.

“He wasn’t one of mine,” Fleight said. “He went rogue.”

“But you brought him here,” Jordan said. Even the senator couldn’t trust all her people.

“Yes, I brought him here,” she admitted.

Finally, the pieces of what had happened were snapping into place. The senator, obsessed with her daughter’s death, had followed Harlen here, thinking it would lead her to Vince and Mirren.

“Sera isn’t part of this,” Jordan told her. “She doesn’t know anything about your daughter. Wasn’t involved in any way.”

“She’s involved, all right. She was talking about the black market,” Fleight said. “She said the black market had fallen.”

Fallen?
A tremor of fear ran through Jordan, but she stood her ground. “Sera was just helping out. Malcolm—I mean,
Marshal
Malcolm Rook had seen nightmares gathering in the black market.”

“Don’t tell her anything!” Gary shouted.

Finally, a siren wailed nearby.
Hold on, Sera.

“It’s okay, Gary,” Jordan lied. Nothing was okay. And if the black market had fallen, then the Agora would be next. Everyone needed to know. “Sera has experience going Darkside from back when she was in college, so Marshal Rook and Director Fawkes took her with them because they didn’t know who else to trust within Chimera. I think you can relate to that.”

“Did you go to the black market, too?” the senator pressed.

“No. I went to the Agora to see if there were nightmares gathering there, as well.”

“And were there?”

“I saw one nightmare-human hybrid, like—” Did the senator even know about the hybrids? “—like Didier Lambert. Lambert was part nightmare. And so is the lead singer of the band, Revelations.”

“Where is your sister?”

“At this hour? Probably in her dreamscape,” Jordan answered, though she knew the senator was asking where Maisie was in the waking world. Her sister was hiding out with Vince and Mirren, and Jordan had no idea where for exactly this reason: so she’d be unable to answer the question when asked and not be found lying. But since this wasn’t the time to play games, she added, “Vincent Blackman and Mirren Lambert killed your daughter in self-defense.”
Truth hurts, but there it is.
“Your daughter was Oneiros. I know you know that. I’m very sorry for your loss, but you have to stop this. If the black market has fallen, then Harlen and Malcolm—” God, she was going to lose it “—may be lost, too.”

And they couldn’t even ask Sera about it.

“That’s not good enough,” Senator Fleight said. “I want Blackman and Lambert, and I intend to get them. What happens to your sister when I find them is up to you.”

Maisie had stabbed the esteemed Didier Lambert in the neck. She was in trouble, with or without the senator’s help.

“I don’t know where they are,” Jordan said. “No one in this house knows where they are.”

Red lights flashed through the front windows of the house.

The senator’s lips pinched together. “If you come with me quietly, be
cooperative
”—which meant no drowning people—“I’ll let Mr. Fawkes go to the hospital with the woman.”

Didn’t seem like there were many choices. Jordan couldn’t exactly sink everyone and then wait, twiddling her thumbs while Sera bled until the others woke up. And Harlen wouldn’t want Sera to be alone.

Jordan nodded.

“Take her,” the senator ordered.

A soldier rounded the corner from the kitchen and stalked toward her. “Turn around,” he said. “Kneel. Hands behind your head.”

Two seconds later, her arms were being efficiently, if roughly, manacled. She hoped she hadn’t made a big mistake. Her attention was on the sound of urgent movement behind her—the EMTs entering the house. There was a brief stall because of the dead body blocking the doorway, but then they got down to lifesaving.

“I want all the revelers transported to Chimera headquarters,” Fleight said.

Take a good look, boys.
Two of those “revelers” were Chimera themselves, one of them the Director of the Darkside Division, so a little respect was warranted. But Jordan bit her tongue. If Rook and Harlen were gone…

Heat flushed her face. Her eyes pricked, but she blinked quickly to fight her tears.

“What if the black market really
has
fallen?” one of the Chimera asked.

Well, duh, then they’d really need Director Fawkes and Marshal Rook.

A hot, wet tear streaked down her cheek.
Can’t think about them. Don’t know what happened.
Senator Fleight was the only person in a position of power to help. Plus she wasn’t Oneiros.

Those were very low standards, but that was all Jordan had.

***

Rook’s nose was so clogged with gold grit that he could barely breathe, but he tried one more time to sniff, to hear, to touch, to, in any way, sense a reveler lost on the howling plain of the Scrape. He was a tracker; it’s what he was good at.

Instead, he coughed hoarsely, hacking against the shards lodged in his throat. His lungs were on fire, his eyes were dim, his strength was flagging.

They’d done what they could. If there were any survivors left, they were too far away…or too far-gone.

Vince, his pretty face splattered with nightmare blood, grinned at him as if death and mayhem were fun. The thick, black liquid smeared his teeth now, too, but he didn’t seem to mind. The Scrape had addled him weeks ago. Rook didn’t know if that was a mercy or a curse. Probably both.

As his voice was too raw to attempt to speak, Rook made an exaggerated wave forward to say,
Time to go back
. Check in. Then figure out how best to go after Jordan.

Vince lifted an arm to show agreement and turned into the storm.

Rook trudged against the wind in Vince’s wake. All hope that he’d see the light of Maze City was sheared away by the airborne sand. Gusts of cold buffeted him—nightmares somewhere nearby—and the grains of Scrape sand pushed him so that he stumbled to the side, almost losing sight of Vince. There was a blind moment when he felt something seize him, but it was just Vince grabbing his arm to pull him forward. Eventually, a ruddy glow filled his vision.

Then he tripped over something and fell into a sprawl in the drifts of sand. He looked down at a body half-buried in gold. He crawled off it, and his hand touched the welcome gritty hardness of a street. A lost reveler had gotten
this close
to salvation. Two steps would’ve done it.

Vince, the crazy bastard, unnecessarily turned the body over with his foot. The head lolled to the side where Rook could see it. Sand had filled and crusted in the eye sockets and the man’s nose was askew, but Rook thought he knew what the face had looked like before death. Roy something. Rook had seen him inside Maze City—one of the shitheads kicking Steve when he was down. Which meant the nightmares didn’t get Roy. Or rather, they didn’t get him first.

Trouble in Maze City.

“Bring—” Rook began, but the heat in his lungs flared. Speaking was impossible. So he pointed to the body and gestured for Vince to drag it into the city. It was unlikely but possible that Maisie had made good on a threat to throw someone out for bad behavior. More likely, some black market survivor had taken advantage of their…
transitory
situation and knocked off a competitor.

Murderers and thieves, the lot of them. And he’d brought them here.

Vince left the body at the edge of the city, and they both slogged up the dark, empty street toward a blond nightmare in a tight dress and towering heels. Mirren.

She didn’t hug or kiss Vince, but she ducked under Rook’s arm and wrapped hers around Rook’s back to help hold him up. “I see you brought back a gory present.”

“Did Maisie throw him out?” Vince asked.