The Sandman (7 page)

“I know you won’t.” He caught Harlen’s gaze. “Let’s go, eh?”

Rook didn’t even have to push to rise toward wakefulness. His soul already craved to wake, and he lifted in a painful rush of release. The waters moved as if troubled and rough, like a storm was brewing in the waking world. And yet, the blackness of the waking world was oppressive. He couldn’t move.

But it wasn’t the dreamwaters holding him back. He was in a dark room, his body restrained on a gurney.

“Jordan?” he called, fighting the bonds. What was this? Where was he? “Jordan!”

CHAPTER FOUR

A fear-fueled shriek from somewhere inside the facility made Steve open his eyes. A second one, high and desperate, joined the first. The cries were soon underpinned by a masculine voice bellowing orders, the words made indistinct by the walls separating Steve from the action.

The Sandman? Already?

Rapid footsteps passed beyond Coll’s door. “But my ex is dead!” a woman sobbed. “How can he still be alive? How can he be
here
?”

“It wasn’t your ex,” another woman responded breathlessly. “It’s one of
them
.”

Coll took a deep breath. Not the Sandman. A nightmare. That ex must’ve been quite the charmer for a nightmare to take his form.

“Third time this week,” a man’s voice said. “Best to throw it a bone. That nurse maybe.”

Throw it a bone?
Coll was disgusted. As a Chimera marshal, it was his duty to protect people from dangers originating Darkside. He couldn’t just lie there.

The room spun when he sat up, and he put a hand to his head to steady himself, fingers gripping his skull. A strange sense of
give
made him pull it away to find tufts of his hair falling through his fingers. He swallowed against the nausea that racked him.

He’d been out in the Scrape for extended periods over the years, even periods about as long as the couple of weeks he’d spent following the Sandman. He might have awakened disoriented in the past, wincing at the light and slow to gather his thoughts, but he’d never been…falling apart.

Another scream warped through the walls. The room had steadied, but a cold sweat dampened his skin. A glint caught his eye, and he turned toward it. The shiny metal IV stand made for a slender mirror, and in it, he spotted the reflection of a nightmare looking back at him, one gray eye in a sliver of a hollow-cheeked, colorless face.

He looked like hell. Or he looked like he was from Hell.

The catheter had to go first. Finding the thin tube, he gritted his teeth and pulled it out with a harsh curse at the burn that followed. The IV was nothing after that.

His legs dragged the sheets to the floor as he shifted around. The room spun again, but he breathed through it. When he tried to stand, the nerves in his feet lit like sparklers and the cramps in his calves made the whole attempt momentarily dangerous.

He hobbled to the door, and instead of putting his ear against it to hear if anyone was outside, he rested his forehead upon it, grateful for something to hold him up.

What would Maisie think of him now? He was unable to help anyone, not even himself.

He involuntarily coughed a short, hoarse laugh. She’d smack his butt through the open hospital gown and say,
Quit wasting time
.

“Okay,” he murmured.

Bracing his weight on the wall and the door handle, he managed to pull it open slightly and peeked into the hallway through the narrow space. No one was visible; they’d all fled.

He opened the door a little bit more to find a nurses’ station nearby, empty and abandoned. The screams had subsided, so maybe the nightmare was gone, too.

Might as well find somewhere to hide until Sera came.

He stepped out, looking both directions—all clear—and since he could sense that the majority of the sleeping Darkside revelers were off to his left, he went right to find a way out, where the administration and offices were likely to be, and beyond that, the exit. A hand to the wall, he shuffled forward as quickly as his racing heart would allow without black spots swimming in his vision. Sweat slicked his skin and dripped down his spine, yet the floor was cold on his bare feet. And his dick still prickled on the inside from the catheter.

He was concentrating on breathing deeply, so when a tall shadow flickered nearby, raw instinct flattened his back against the wall.

The nightmare was naked, its skin that familiar alien-gray clay. Its eyes were Steve’s own, though it didn’t spare him a glance as it passed, uninterested in what little humanity Steve had left. His body shook with weakness. He wasn’t afraid of the nightmare. Not afraid of the Sandman, either. He simply, deeply, didn’t want to be like them—dark, feared, solitary. Like that demon child again.

“Go back,” Steve told the nightmare.

It didn’t respond, just continued silently stalking down the hallway seeking prey.

Steve couldn’t let it pass. He looked around for something to chuck at it—that’d sometimes worked in the past—but the nurses’ station was too far away now.

On the wall. The fire extinguisher.

He wrenched it from its wall mount. Its weight made his arms go cold and weak, but he hefted it up against his chest, pulled the pin from the handle, approached the nightmare, and sprayed.

The nightmare’s hunched back was coated, milky white and dripping. Steve leaned back and kept spraying frothy suds borne under pressure.

In a sudden splat, a mass of liquid foam slapped the linoleum floor, the nightmare gone.

Steve whipped around to survey the hall going the other direction. It might just reappear elsewhere in the building. Or it might really be gone. No way to tell.

He transferred the fire extinguisher to one arm, but he wasn’t strong enough to hold it and the thing fell to the floor with a loud clang. Breathlessly, he watched it roll on its side until its nozzle stopped it.

Still, no one came.

They had to know the world as they knew it was over.

“You suffer from a chronic and potentially fatal form of seriousity,” Maisie had said once while straddling him. The
ity
had been an awkward add-on. “I know just the cure.”

“
Seriousity
is not a word,” he’d told her, enjoying the view of her breasts, the mess of her hair. Loving the feel of her.

“You just confirmed my diagnosis, Steve-o. It’s a word, because I say it is. Now I’m going to melt your brain with sex and hope for the best. Your prognosis isn’t good.”

“Ongoing treatment, then?”

She’d rolled her eyes and huffed a huge sigh. “I suppose. Seriousity is a terrible way to go. The weight of the world crushing you slowly. Lots of…ooze.”

Steve swallowed the gritty lump in his throat and shook his head. Seriousity—that’s what this was. He must have relapsed. He had to go back into treatment for sure.

The fastest way to get back to Maisie, to feeling human again, was to be ready for Sera—and anyway, so what if he was a monster? According to Maisie, the monster thing had never been his issue.

Sera was coming, and if she were discovered, the Oneiros wouldn’t hesitate to kill her. So he had to do
something
.

Steve moved toward the multiple sets of doors that led to reception. Another nurses’ station was tucked into a wall across from a closed doorway tagged with the number 1. He tilted his head to sense the telltale ripples of a dreaming reveler but got nothing.

He eased the door open—it was a private room—and lying on the bed near the window, sunlight burning between closed blinds, was a reveler. A man. And since Steve couldn’t sense his dreams, it meant that the reveler had been lost Darkside—perhaps consumed by nightmares in the Scrape. He would never wake again.

Steve closed the door. He was tempted to lock it, but that would be a dead giveaway that something was amiss when the nurses finally returned to their patients. He hoped he was up to casting a waking dream, making himself invisible, should a nurse come to check on the man.

The chill on Steve’s skin had the ache of a fever. Half bracing himself on a chair by the bed, half shifting it for the view from the window, he settled in to wait. Sera shouldn’t be long. By his estimation, it’d been at least half a day since Maisie and Rook had left him in the nebula room.

After searching for Sera out the window—from the gate to a long driveway leading to the parking lot and then beyond a fence—he took a closer look at the man on the bed. He near snorted with irony.

Didier Lambert. The man’s face was slack, but there was something distinguished about his brow and the thick salt-and-pepper wave of his hair. The gray stubble of his beard was just coming in. On his neck, a square of gauze was taped, presumably where Maisie had stabbed him.

In the Scrape, Coll had witnessed the Sandman reach out and touch Lambert. And Lambert had disintegrated into grains of sand.

And here laid his body, wasting away, never to wake again.

A nightmare phased through the door, bony, yet soft. It hunched, craning its neck and sweeping its gaze around the space.

Back again?

“There’s no one here for you,” Steve told it. “They’ve all run away.”

The nightmare ignored him and stalked toward Lambert.

“Nothing to see there, either.” The world’s fallen hero. The first Darkside explorer.

Another shadow climbed through the door, a second nightmare to join the first. Fresh sweat dampened Steve’s skin. His increasing heart rate made him feel dizzy.

He’d been surrounded by them—hundreds of them—when he’d followed the Sandman deep into the Scrape. And here there were only two, and yet, they made Steve’s skin crawl. Aliens from another world. A happy little confab around Lambert. Well, they could have him.

Steve glanced quickly out the window, but the parking lot was quiet. The gate beyond remained closed.

The nightmares were still there when he looked back. Why weren’t they leaving? He’d endured their close company before, but he just didn’t have it in him now.

His hand was shaking when he grabbed a nearby tissue box to throw at one of the creatures, attempting to knock it out of the world, hoping this time it’d stay Darkside.

Then Steve froze, his chill suddenly a hot flush making him tremble.

Lambert’s eyes were open.

***

Jordan slapped the table in front of her. “No one is listening to me.”

The Chimera marshal in front of her—a burly guy by the name of Osbourne—didn’t even flinch. He sat back in his chair and sighed as if this was tedious. “Try me. Start from the beginning again.”

Try him? She wanted to drop him—the third person to interview her—but that would help no one and get her locked up for good. She took a deep breath and tried to explain—yet again—the most urgent part first. “Marshal Malcolm Rook, Director Harlen Fawkes, and Sera Rochan went to the Darkside black market to investigate the nightmare activity there.”

She looked up at the two-way mirror where she knew the marshal’s superiors had to be watching the interrogation, and she got a good look at herself: circles under her eyes, skin tone uneven, hair in a sloppy ponytail with spastic flyaways.

Marshal Osbourne shrugged, which brought her gaze back to him. “But why did they care?” he asked. “Black market activity is outside the purview of Chimera. Revelers who go there do so at their own peril.”

“It wasn’t the black market they were interested in.” She’d already explained this to the senator, and then again to an official the senator had brought in later. “They wanted to see what the
nightmares
were doing. They wanted to be prepared in case the nightmares infiltrated the Agora next. And according to Sera—that is, before an Oneiros posing as a Chimera freaking
shot
her—the black market fell. So, why don’t you get off your ass and go out into the Scrape and find Malcolm and Harlen? Or, for the love of God, let me do it.”

He squinted at her. “I loathe the Scrape. Obvious reasons. And your last trip into the big bad storm didn’t go so well.”

“My last trip?” What the hell was he talking about?

“Director Fawkes showed us his memory of you and Marshal Rook breaching the Dragon’s Lair Rêve.”

Jordan sat forward. “I’ve been there
many
times since.” She shook her head. That wasn’t important. “You’re part of his Darkside Division?”

He smiled.

Which wasn’t an answer, so she waited.

He cocked his head slightly. “Handpicked by Allison Bright before she, too, was attacked by an Oneiros.”

And, therefore, a friend? That was the conclusion he obviously wanted her to draw.

Jordan sat back, breathless. She really wanted to believe it. She could see the bluey-dewy watercolor haze of a reveler around him, but beyond that—the fact that he was capable of being lucid Darkside—she couldn’t afford to believe a word he said. Osbourne might’ve been handpicked by Bright, but he could still be Oneiros.

He smiled pleasantly. “Now, how did you get inside the Revelations concert? We have no record of a breach there.”

Jordan swallowed hard, not sure how to proceed, then decided not to deviate from the information she’d already given the others. “Malcolm—Marshal Rook—showed me how. I piggybacked on a girl’s dream. No idea who she was. I’d been looking into the band, searching its message boards, and a lot of the chatter was about submerging the world in dreamwaters—Oneiros ideas. So I went to check it out. I discovered that Noah, Revelations’ lead singer, is a hybrid.” She frowned. “Do you know about the hybrids? Did Harlen talk to you about them?” Jordan looked up at the window. “Senator Fleight knows. You should seriously question
her
.”

“Hybrid? No, I’m afraid Director Fawkes hasn’t mentioned anything like that.”

So, this guy was a dead end, after all. She’d simply have to cling to the hope that Harlen and Malcolm had made it to Maze City after the market fell. Once there, they could’ve connected with Maisie, Vince, and Mirren. Maybe even Steve if he’d made it back from his extended Sandman field trip.