The Sandman (13 page)

Malcolm’s head was close to the nightmare’s, to—God, yes—Steve. Had to be. “What happened to you, man?”

This close, there was no doubt. It was Steve, just the bone and sinew of him, all raw.

Sand. Man
, Steve mouthed, but the wind gave him voice, a high whine that ended in a reedy burr. Not human. Not nearly.

A sob broke free from Jordan’s throat. This wasn’t happening.

“The Sandman did this?” Rook confirmed. “The Sandman is here?”

Steve nodded, once, like a modest bow.

Jordan swiped at her tears with her free hand. “Are you in pain? Can we help you?” How was she ever going to tell Maisie?

The wind wailed and hissed as he mouthed,
Can’t. Hold. On.

“How do we stop him?” Malcolm reached out to touch Steve’s shoulder, but his hand passed right through.

Mirren. Can. Get. Close.
The wind was crying.

“Because she’s like you,” Jordan concluded. “A hybrid.” What a sacrifice, though. She’d have to leave her son. What mother would do that?

“Because the Scrape wind doesn’t bother her,” Malcolm said. “Because she can control it.”

Steve bowed his head again.
Kill. Him.

“Do you have a message for Maisie?” Jordan had to give her sister something. Though it would never, ever be enough.

Tell. Her. I’m. Sor—

The wind pounded the road. Jordan blinked against the sting in her eyes, and therefore only caught the shredding of Steve’s shadow as he disappeared into the air. She searched, but the atmosphere was too polluted to see anything, and deep down she knew he was gone.

CHAPTER NINE

“Psst.”

Across the street from the dark alleyway in which Maisie huddled, knees to chest, she saw a flash of a hand wave.

Who…?
Oh, it was that woman—Corentine—who’d been a little too friendly with Rook.

But Maisie couldn’t respond. The fear contracting her limbs wouldn’t allow her to come out of hiding.

There was a bad man out there playing games with them.
Psycho
is what he was, laughing it up while messing with people’s heads.

She wanted Steve. She was never scared when he was around.

“Can anyone tell me where there’s a bathroom?” Teleporting Ivan sounded desperate. He had beamed himself through the wall Maisie had built, only to be immediately captured by Noah’s dream control. The need-to-pee dream was just mean, though. No Darkside toilet would satisfy the urge.

“Maisie!” came a sharp whisper. Corentine again.

If Maisie moved a hair, took a deep breath, even gulped, then Noah would see her. He’d set her running again, terror crackling in her wake.
Please, just go away.

“Maisie! I can’t figure out how to get to you.”

Duh.
The city was a maze, and Corentine didn’t know the way across the street from her shadowed alleyway to Maisie’s. Newsflash: it wasn’t a straight line.

“Maisie!”

“Shh…” Maisie breathed. It was all the warning she had nerve to give.

“He has a weakness,” Corentine whisper-shouted.

Soft footsteps nearby set Maisie’s heart quailing. Why wouldn’t Corentine shut up? Noah was going to find them.

If they lived through this, Maisie was going to kill her.

“A coordinated attack will be too much for him. All of us working together.”

Corentine didn’t get it. Maisie couldn’t
do
anything. He’d locked her in fear, and there was no breaking free. Waking was the only way out, but if she did that, everyone would be dumped. She was already doing the best she could by staying.

If only Steve were here…

Someone knocked on a door not far from where she crouched.

“I just want to use your bathroom! Please!” Ivan begged.

“Mirren’s going to set your monsters free,” Corentine hissed. “Then we all go apeshit on this guy.”

The monsters under the city? Maisie tried to think if that would work, but it made her dizzy. The monsters were
her
. And she was hiding. She was her own monster.

“Well, who do we have here?” Noah and his bare chest had come up between the two alleyways. He had no trouble with the architecture of the maze.

Maisie tried to disappear into the wall at her back.
Please don’t see me. Please don’t see me.
She hated herself for losing her city to him. She’d failed everyone.

“Corey…” said Noah thoughtfully. “Nice to meet you.”

“Only my friends call me that,” Corentine said. “And you’re…one of them?”

Maisie couldn’t hear Noah’s response, so she guessed he was talking in Corentine’s head. Corentine staggered back, her hand to her mouth. Fingers
in
her mouth. A front tooth fell onto her bottom lip, its root long and bloody.

Corentine tried to shove it up into place—Maisie shuddered—but it just dislodged the one next to it. Corentine wheezed with frustration, and the front tooth and spittle sprayed out of her mouth and onto the pavement. She dropped to her knees to retrieve it, her lips sealed tight, weirdly moaning.

The teeth-falling-out dream. Also common. He had no imagination.

A knock sounded on another door. “If I could please just use a bathroom?”

Noah ducked into Maisie’s alley. “Hey there.”

Maisie screamed. She couldn’t help it.

“Corey will be quiet now,” he said. “Just like you wanted.”

Maisie tried to turn her head away, but it made her brain swim.
Steve.
Steve could beat this guy.

“Who’s that? Steve, you say?”

A tremendous rumbling in the ground, under the ground, quaked the buildings stretching above and brought his attention sharply up. For a second, Maisie was free. Lashing out a hand, she scraped his face with her nails and ducked out of the alley.

Two blocks. Then a left. Up a—

But fear crawled between her shoulder blades again, and she had no idea which direction to go. He’d be able to find her anywhere. He was right behind her.

The rumbling rocked the street beneath her feet. Cracked it with a deafening shockwave, and where fissures formed, gold sand poured out like water into the void beneath. Dust lifted into the air in great coughs of dust. The glass burst from windows in the brick buildings to each side of her, and gargoyles plummeted from the eaves to shatter on the pavement below.

Mirren was doing something.

Noah came up beside Maisie and draped an arm over her shoulders. “So I finally get to meet her?”

A sob of frustration, and Maisie found Corentine lying on the street, an arm reaching down into a fissure—for a tooth that got away?

No, don’t do that
, Maisie thought, but she couldn’t lift her voice to warn her.

“Slippery suckers,” Noah said.

A single jerk and Corentine slid down into the fissure headfirst, and climbing up her back like a ladder was—Maisie shuddered again—another Maisie. A monster Maisie, very different from a nightmare. Pink-haired and pouty, monster Maisies did not build. They ruined everything in their path—home, relationships, opportunities. Maisie didn’t need nightmares if she was more than willing to torment herself.

Why do you
do
things like that? Can’t you think first? What did you think was going to happen?
It was only Darkside, in her city, that she’d been able to vanquish them.

“I see you have issues,” Noah said.

Pfft.
Noah’s issues now.

The monsters crawled out of the break in the concrete like rats escaping a sewer. One, two, ten of them, at least. As they streamed toward Noah, Maisie had the extreme satisfaction of feeling his fear sour the dreamwaters. Yeah, she scared herself sometimes, too.

The first Maisie leaped at his head and somehow got her legs over his shoulders. He went down. She was joined by her sisters, all of them disappointed and angry, erratic and self-destructive. Ultimately, Maisie knew they’d turn on her, too, but not until they’d finished with the dude who’d trapped her in fear.

“Thank you for the wall,” Mirren said behind her.

Maisie turned. “Had to keep David safe. He’s like my baby brother now.”

Noah screamed, a sweet,
sweet
sound to Maisie’s ears.

“David is with Vivienne now.” Mirren gestured to the heap. “Who’s this?”

“Half-breed. Can take your dream control.”

Mirren smiled. “Not mine.”

“Then you’re lucky,” Maisie said. “Vince coming?”

“Went ’round the other way, just in case. He must’ve gotten lost.”

Maisie winced. “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. We’ll need the maze even more now that the city will be inhabited.”

Ivan appeared next to them, fury written all over his face and coloring the waters. “Asshole needs to die.”

The screaming had gone quiet, the pile of monster Maisies still.

“That was easy,” Mirren said. “Though a little rough for our first group effort. We’ll get better at this.”

But Maisie had a bad feeling. The monster forms of herself disentangled from the pile and now, one and all, stared at her. Pale and resentful, they gathered to share their hatred, to pass it around like a joint.

Shit.
He’d turned them.

“Go!” Noah shouted.

En masse, they ran at her.

Mirren drew ropes of gold from the street to bind them, but the street was theirs just as much as it was Maisie’s. The ropes didn’t even slow them.

That now-familiar electric fear zapped along Maisie’s nerves and…she ran. She had no choice. Noah controlled her dream again. She pelted down the street to the city center, where the buildings were more widely spaced and speared higher into the silver sky.

Ivan materialized in front of her. “What do we do?”

She didn’t know. “Pee while you can.”

Panic drove her forward, but her mind was clearer. Corentine had been right. Noah’s weakness was working on too many fronts. Distractions.

Maisie spotted Vince ahead in the square courtyard of a modular building, the construction she’d designed for people who could only walk in straight lines. Like robots. It was an anti-tribute to the waking world that she’d come to find oddly peaceful, probably the same reason some people lived like that. Order was quiet.

But Vince was not a robot. He had a length of steel in his grasp and the smile of a maniac on his face. He was braced to swing.

She headed for him. Passed him. And felt the ghost of the impact as he batted a monster from the pack. As Maisie turned, she found a pile of gold sand where the monster had been.

The ground quaked with another deafening rumble. Concrete split with a crack, but the noise and commotion didn’t seem to faze Vince, who batted at the Maisies like a pro baseball player, or juvenile mailbox smasher, or zombie-head melon buster.

The Maisies couldn’t really die, of course. She’d tried to kill them in the past—no luck—but then she’d decided to just accept them, like a good little girl who’d had years of expensive counseling. Eventually, they’d rise again. Better to clean up the mess and go on with her life than wallow in her past mistakes.

Go forward, with Steve. Make a better life. Build.

The piles of used-to-be-Maisie gold turned black and melty like hot tar.

This was working. Eventually, they’d find a way to fight Noah off. They had to, and with all this talent, why not?

From far away, a voice called, “David?” and Maisie’s spirits sank.
Not the kid.

Her fear returned, deeper and even more real because she loved him, too, and then doubled when Mirren ran down the main street, terror and anguish on her face.

Which meant…Noah had Mirren.

With a sudden clang, Vince dropped the steel bar he’d been using to bat Maisie heads and went after Mirren. Maisie followed, dread tightening her belly. She watched from the top of a broken street fragment as Vince and Mirren met Viv, who was running toward them, distress aging the classy lady’s features.

“Where’s David?” Mirren demanded, audible even from Maisie’s location.

Viv shook her head and lifted her arms helplessly. “He was with me, and then—”

Mirren slapped her. “Where’s David?”

“Thousands come to hear me sing,” Noah said, appearing beside Maisie and observing the two women. She hadn’t even sensed his approach. “I can control them all.”

Apparently, even another hybrid like Mirren.

“It’s mothers, in general, actually. If it gives you comfort, you guys had me for a second there. But the human part of Mirren…she cares too much. Her father was smarter.”

“David!” Vince called.

If Mirren needed proof that Vince loved the kid, she had it now. David’s loss was Vince’s fear, too.

But there was no beating Noah.

Afraid not. You will rebuild, of course. This is a mess.

Maisie surveyed her broken city. Her monsters were humps of gold, now inert. The pavement was cracked everywhere, the maze broken. And her friends had lost dream control.

I was thinking fortress. Something clever with traps everywhere.

Was it time to wake?

You won’t do that. Can’t. Not ’til I’m sure you’re mine.

She would never be his. Would just have bad dreams for a while.

I know where you’re hiding in the waking world.

Okay, so that was bad.

And I’ll hunt you.

I’ll run.

Yes, you will.

The dust slowly settled, and silver light glinted through the murk of destruction once more. Within it stood a dark figure in the silhouette of a man.

One glance and all worry and fear left her.
Steve.

His head was bowed, and he was naked, his body too thin, his skin tone wrong. If anything, he seemed to have gotten worse since she last saw him. He seemed to have lost
more
of his human aspect. All of it, maybe.

The set of his shoulders was tense. His gray nightmare eyes met hers for a fraction of a second, and profound sadness and shame nearly strangled her. But then his gaze shifted to Noah, a feral slant to his bald head.