Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) (19 page)

Lara stared back at her, but said nothing. Since waking, she’d felt it coming on, the sadness. It welled up inside her until she feared it would burst from her eyes in a torrent of tears, or maybe do the opposite and strike her dumb, muting her emotions, and her voice for the rest of her life. She didn’t understand the sadness, or why it had sunk its teeth so fiercely into her, but its grip couldn’t be broken. The sadness had her prisoner, just as much as this room.

“The bird,” the woman said, gesturing at the balcony with a tip of her head. “It’s trapped, but how did it get in there in the first place?”

Muteness. That was how her heart wanted to handle the moment. She wouldn’t speak because she didn’t have anything to say.

“I’m Poppy,” her visitor said. “I was Jack’s first Lost One. Or…” Sudden melancholy on her face mirrored Lara’s own. “…I should say I was the first he was able to save. The first two, well, he never talks about them, you know.”

No, I didn’t
, Lara wanted to respond and say, but her vocal cords wouldn’t cooperate. What was wrong with her?

“You want to know about the balcony, don’t you? Why you can’t see out?”

Lara’s body surprised her by allowing her to nod.

“You’re on the non-society member’s side of the hospital,” Poppy said. “They don’t know you yet. At least not well enough to trust you. They have to protect everyone in The House. There are hundreds that live here, many of them children, as well as people with serious illnesses. Their safety depends on an outsider never knowing how to find this place.”

“But…” Lara tried a question. The one word rasped from her throat and then her voice died.

“But, you’re thinking, now that you know what this room looks like, all you’d have to do is visualize it while dreamrunning, and you could find your way here.”

Lara nodded again.

“That would be what the guards are for outside your door, and every corridor is buttoned up tighter than a hospital for the criminally insane,” Poppy explained. “Trust me. I know.”

Lara wasn’t going to ask how Poppy knew what the inside of a psychiatric prison was like. Her expression didn’t invite the question. The two women fell silent. Finally, Lara couldn’t contain the sadness inside her any longer. It blurted out what she needed to know.

“Poppy, where’s Jack?”

Poppy gave her a long, somber look. At first, Lara thought she wasn’t going to answer. It evidently took her some serious internal debate before she decided what to say.

“He’s on the other side of the hospital, in intensive care.”

“He’s–”

“Holding on.”

“And?”

Poppy wouldn’t give her a direct answer. Rather, she said, “Your name was bouncing around inside him, you know. Just like the bullet. Just ricocheting around in there. I was the one who found him. Me and my partner, Rafe.”

She paused, as the bird out on the balcony kicked up an even louder fuss.

“It’s frantic to get out,” Poppy said. “The doors won’t open without a key. We’ll need to call someone to come and rescue it.”

“Poppy, what about Jack?”

Poppy returned her attention to Lara.

“He was dead. Dead, but he wouldn’t let go of your name,” she said. “It’s what stopped the blood. He used it, like a bandage. He put it over the hole, and your name stopped the bleeding.”

Maybe Poppy
did
know what the inside of a psychiatric hospital looked like. Her cryptic words made no sense to Lara.

“Can I see him?” she asked.

Again, Poppy evaded. “You haven’t even asked about your hand yet,” the petite woman said.

Lara had forgotten about the injury to her hand. She looked at it now, holding up the heavily bandaged limb in front of her face. She couldn’t feel her fingers, but the length of the bandaged part suggested, she hoped, she hoped, that they and the rest of her hand hadn’t been amputated.

When she lowered her arm back to the bed, Poppy was gone.

Dr. Matthews, the physician in charge of her case, was her next visitor. She recognized his voice. Lara wanted to like him. He was kind, thoughtful, explained bluntly, yet compassionately that her hand, while it would look almost normal again after several surgeries, would never be the same. Still, she struggled with placing her trust in him. He’d asked for it before in the ER when he told her not to fight their help. He’d put her under, thus forcing her to
let go
.

At the time, she’d been crying, rebelling at following his instructions. She hadn’t dared lose consciousness. It had been vital she hold on with all her strength.

Why? She couldn’t remember. Hold on to what? Why was she now so upset with this man? Her anger mounted to where she no longer heard anything he said. He’d cost her something without which her life became pointless. What had he done? What had she lost? Why did she want to begin sobbing and never stop?

“I want to see him,” she said, interrupting the doctor’s explanation of her next three scheduled surgeries.

“I’m sorry, what–”

“Jack. Take me to him. Now.”

“Lara. You’ve just regained consciousness. You aren’t out of the woods yet. You could still loose the hand if you aren’t careful.”

“Take me. I know he’s on the ‘other side’ of whatever this place is. I know you’re not supposed to let me out, but I swear, if I don’t get to see him in the next five minutes, I swear I’ll–”

“Do what?” another voice joined the conversation.

Gavin.

He stood just inside the door to her room. Through the opening, Lara saw exactly what she expected to see, a corridor with two men standing guard.

“Did anyone ever tell you that threats aren’t the best way to gain someone’s trust?” Gavin said.

The doctor, sighing uncomfortably, took the unexpected intrusion as an opportunity to beat a hasty retreat.

“Come on, Lara. Tell me. If you don’t get to see Jack, you’ll do what?”

She turned away and stared at the confused bird, trapped inside her room’s faux balcony.

“Nothing,” she said. “Can’t you tell a hollow threat from a real one? I’m as powerless here as that bird out there.”

“But do you wish your threats weren’t hollow?”

Lara turned back toward him, fixing him with a frustrated stare. “What do you think? Poppy just told me there are children here, somewhere. And sick people. I’m angry, but I’m not an idiot. My grief isn’t worth their lives.”

“Grief?” he asked, puzzled by her choice of words.

“Jack,” she said, as if that explained all. He knew more than she did about what had happened to him, so perhaps it did.

Rather than respond, Gavin walked to the French doors, dug in his pocket and pulled out a key. He used it, opening one half only far enough to slip inside, and then closed the door behind him. Instead of trying to catch the bird with his hands, which would have been futile given the height of the enclosure, he started at one end of the three-walled space and carefully examined the barrier, brick by brick. About a third of the way, he stopped, poked an index finger into a small chink in the masonry. When he pulled it out again, powdered mortar came away. It fell and dusted the tops of his shoes.

He’d found the hole where the bird had gotten in.

Lara observed him reach into another pocket for a Swiss army knife, which he used to scrape away at the disintegrating mortar that held the brick in place. He removed the loosened brick and set it on a small table next to the potted tree. Then he stepped as far away from the opening as he could, to allow the bird a chance to investigate. It took mere seconds for the bird to find the exit and leave.

Curious despite possible repercussions, Lara levered herself up on her elbows in an attempt to peer through the hole Gavin had made and see what lay beyond. She was soon disappointed. Another masonry wall faced hers, separated by only a few feet.

Gavin returned to the room without putting the brick back in place.

“Caged, but not powerless,” he said. “Give it a opening and it found its way out.”

He crossed to the door leading onto the corridor, and waved to someone waiting outside. A male nurse entered her room with a wheel chair. When she expressed shock, he added, tone somber, “I was coming to get you anyway.”

Gavin and the nurse escorted her along a maze of hallways, through several locked doors, to an elevator, also locked, and down two floors. When the elevator doors opened, it was onto a much larger facility, though still not as expansive as a city hospital. Another minute’s travel time lead them to an ICU with five beds, each in its own glass-walled treatment room.

Every bed was filled and from her lower vantage point sitting in the chair, Lara couldn’t see any of the patients. It didn’t matter. She instantly, intuitively, knew which ICU bay belonged to Jack.

Feeling a tug at her chest, she looked down and saw a ghostly ribbon of light enter her body over her heart. Tentatively, it curled around inside her and anchored itself there. She looked up again to find the golden thread weaving its way around equipment and other obstacles, straight for where she knew Jack lay.

Eyes wide with astonishment, she asked Gavin and the nurse, “Do you see that?”

“It connects you,” a now familiar female voice answered her. Poppy stepped out of Jack’s ICU. “It
is
you.”

“You can see it?”

“No,” she said. “But I can sense it. I can sense anything to do with a person’s body.”

“What are you two talking about?” Gavin asked.

Poppy gazed at him and shook her head, the message clear.
Leave it
.

Ignoring protests from the nurse, Lara struggled up out of the wheel chair and made unsteady progress on foot toward Jack. The golden thread of light moved with her, never giving up its place in her heart. She knew what it represented, Jack’s energy. His presence and soul connecting to hers. This thread was the precious thing she’d been holding onto with everything she had in her, just before they’d put her under. How had she even known of its existence? Did it matter? One heart had spoken to the other and she’d been terrified that by releasing it, Jack would cease to exist in that moment, moving beyond this life to a place she couldn’t go.

So faint was the golden thread, Lara knew what she saw when she reached Jack’s side would be bad.

Her heart jumped in her chest, alarm closing her throat.

It was worse. He couldn’t be alive. Not like that.

“Is it just the machines? Keeping him alive?” she asked. Her gaze took in the device that helped him breathe, another that tracked his vitals, tubes and wire leads everywhere.

“Until he comes out of it.”

“But he will come out of it?”

Poppy gave an inelegant shrug. On the surface, it appeared callous, but Lara could see the tears just barely held back.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“The bullet didn’t hit anything major,” Gavin, who stood just behind her, said.

“It was the blood loss. Massive blood loss,” Poppy said.

“How long has he been like this?”

“You’ve both been under for more than a week.”

“A week!”

No one spoke. What was there to add?

Lara leaned over the rail guarding the side of Jack’s hospital bed and ran her fingers gently through the panther-black lock of hair that had fallen into his face. His cheeks, so sunken! Skin ashen, but puffy in odd places. Those indigo blue eyes hid away behind bruised lids, also sinking inward. The sight terrified her more than anything Grey Man had ever done while she was his captive.

She lowered the rail and sat on the edge of the bed, fingers now moving over his bandaged shoulder where the bullet struck, attempting to soothe away the hurt.

“Leave us,” she said.

“Ms. Freberg,” the nurse said, the start of an objection.

“I need to be with him.”

“He’s not strong enough for lengthy vis–”

“Leave. Me. With. Him,” she said. “Now.”

“All right,” Gavin said, signaling to Poppy, the male nurse and a doctor that had just made it to the doorway to see what was going on. “Let’s give them some space.”

The others withdrew. Gavin waited for them to go, then laid his hand on her shoulder, encouraging her to look away from Jack and up into his eyes.

“You aren’t powerless, Lara, any more than the bird on your balcony. Far from it,” he said. “The bird needed a way out and got it. You needed a way in. Now you have it, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised that Gavin understood. He may not be able to see the golden thread, or even sense it the way Poppy did, but he knew what she could and wanted to do. The thread would open a way into Jack’s heart, where she would live for them both, until he was ready to wake up.

“Then…” he said, and backed out of the little glass room, leaving her to it.

Lara rearranged the tubes and wires as best she could one-handed, making a place for herself next to him. She climbed into bed and wrapped her arms around Jack, closed her eyes, and let her inner senses take over.

Back in her condo, when her hand had swollen to twice its size and infection had raged through her body, Jack had lain beside exactly like this, giving her his strength. Though out of her head with pain and fever, and not yet ready to believe in her new life as a dreamrunner, she’d still been aware of his energy pouring into her hour after hour, willing her to stay alive long enough for him to find and save her.

Lara did the same for him now, wrapping the golden thread around and around them until they were bound together inexorably. They would live or they would die, but they would do it together.

“Don’t go, Jack,” she whispered in his ear. “Don’t even think about leaving me.”