Read Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) Online
Authors: Aileen Harkwood
Chapter 5
Jack paced back and forth in the living room of the modest house on the lower Chesapeake Bay. A beach cabin amongst the grassy saltwater marshes, it was the only remaining of five identical structures that once formed a small campground built by a retired couple in the late 1940s; the other four cabins lost to a hurricane. It continued to serve its original purpose as short term housing, with Jack the latest of numerous tenants renting by the week. Little of the Virginia shore’s warm light filtered into the cabin during the day. At night, Jack could switch on every light, yet with its worn furnishings and gloomy wood paneling, this relic of vacations gone by could depress even the brightest spirit.
Seconds after he and Gavin reached the joint assumption that Jack’s target could be in the hands of their worst enemy, Gavin had ended the call mid-sentence. Jack had heard a shout in the background, Gavin stopped talking, and the line went dead. Not even a word about calling back. Something was up back at The House. Whatever it was, had to be serious enough to trump the possible abduction of a Lost One.
Jack belonged to a secret community known as The Dreamrunners Society. They numbered less than a thousand, but while blood didn’t always unite them, they were a family, brought together by a single genetic trait and the dangers that went with it. Every member of the society was a dreamrunner. When the gift was active, the recipient had the ability to bilocate, to physically be in two places at once. Jack might appear to be asleep in bed on the Virginia shore, while a second version of him traveled elsewhere, to any location on the globe his will directed. Though limited in specific ways, his second self was almost as corporeal as his original body. When on a run he interacted with his environment. He talked to people and, if all went right, they didn’t see anything odd or different about him. He picked up objects, had to use doors. His
doppelganger
, or twin, as runners normally referred to their second selves, was subject to nearly the same laws of physics as everything and everyone else.
The ability tended to run in families, but every once in a while it manifested spontaneously in an individual who had no other relatives with the gift. Jack was known as a finder among his people, someone tasked with locating these Lost Ones, dreamrunners unaware of their own abilities, and bringing them safely into the fold.
Safe was the operative word here. Runners who didn’t understand who they were and what they could do lived under continual threat. Many died at their own hands. The suicide rate among Lost Ones was staggering. Others, not even realizing they were running, accidentally killed themselves during their first attempt. Having an ability like theirs without understanding what it was or how it worked, resulted in many literally becoming lost to insanity; wrongful institutionalization for mental illness that didn’t exist; or worse, splitting from their bodies, breaking the connection to it, and never finding their way home.
As if these weren’t tribulations enough for anyone without someone to protect and help, runners had enemies, none more mysterious and feared than the Grey Suits.
Jack’s head pounded from the cost of the aborted trip to locate his latest charge. He tried, unsuccessfully, to massage away the headache burrowing in behind his eyes. As his pacing continued, he told himself to pull it together, but couldn’t stop thinking about the unknown dreamrunner snatched right out from under him.
He knew this one.
He knew
her
.
He couldn’t pinpoint how he knew, but the recognition went deep.
Come on, Gavin. We’re wasting time
.
Who was she?
He’d never come across any of the Lost with a dream signature as strong or unique as hers. If he knew her from somewhere, had met her before, how could he have forgotten her signature? He never forgot one. He had an eidetic memory for them. It was one of the things that made him so good at what he did. Without that special skill, Jack would have become lost in the fields himself more times than he’d care to think.
Jack’s formation of his twin had been far from complete when the woman lost consciousness, which explained why he couldn’t reach her in time. Without a body at the target location, he was no more effectual than a ghost, his presence there comprised of thought, emotion, shadow and little else. What could a shadow do?
Nothing.
He’d been utterly helpless, useless.
He glanced at his phone for the fifth time, in case the call back from Gavin had come in and his phone, for some bizarre reason, hadn’t rung, or vibrated in his hand, or–
God! What the hell is going on back there at The House?
He shouted in frustration, looking for something to punch, realized doing so wouldn’t help, and strode to the bathroom. Yanking open the medicine cabinet, he shook twice the recommended dose of over the counter pain meds into his hand, and swallowed them dry.
The need to do something, anything, while he waited, drove him to replay his aborted run over and over in his mind, searching for a detail he might have missed during the hazy sequence of events, some clue to the woman’s identity or the location of the bedroom where he’d found her.
Clearest in his mind was her face, and
that
he would have remembered if he’d seen it before. Heart-shaped and pale, hers made him think of a victim of some unspecified abuse who might be beautiful to begin with, but was made exquisitely arresting by her determination to survive that abuse with her soul intact. Whatever was wrong in her life—and he had no doubt something was wrong—allowed her inner will to shine through. Though asleep when he’d first come upon her, he could see it was disturbed slumber, not the least restful. Her expression changed moment by moment as she slept, mirroring what must have been a terrifying dream.
Jack held the image he had of her motionless in his head, mapping each quiet plane of her face, strengthening the memory so he could describe her to a sketch artist should it come to that. She couldn’t be more than 24- or 25-years-old. Dark blonde hair long enough to hit the middle of her back and Nordic fine.
Eyes? What color?
He replayed the scene forward in his head to the point where one of her abductors had climbed on top of her and pinned her down.
Eyelids flying open, her panic had burst to life, the jittery infection of it striking him a blow now, again, almost as hard as the one he’d experienced in real time. Her terror, beating inside his heart, threatened any coherent thought. He’d never felt fear like this. It weakened, debilitated. He sensed her inner resolve to push beyond it.
Fight
, he willed her.
Don’t let them hurt you. Fight!
No, stop, he reminded himself. He wasn’t there any longer. This was over.
It’s already happened
.
With effort, he extricated himself from the intense memory, backed it up.
Watch it again. This time don’t feel. Look!
Eyelids flying open…
He saw.
Light colored eyes, more blue than grey
.
Her height? He couldn’t guess. She never stood up, and once her abductors hit her with what was in the syringe, his connection to her started unraveling. His view into the room shattered. He knew she was slender, though. She didn’t eat. Not enough. That same, unnamed trouble that ruined her sleep also killed her appetite. She was walking wounded.
Again. Go through it again
.
He rebooted the events, this time examining the room around her. Where did she live? Who was she? She’d been sleeping alone, but was this normal for her? Or did she have a lover? A husband? If so, what signs might there be of him in the bedroom?
Unfortunately, only the faintest glow from something outside her bedroom window dispelled the room’s deepest shadows, probably the same half moon that currently illuminated the softly lapping water just yards from his front door. He saw a full size bed and a comforter designed with an abstract, quilted pattern of leaves the size of beach balls.
Curiously, that same part of him which insisted he knew her, derived relief from not finding signs of a man in her life. Only the one nightstand, not a matching one on the other side of the bed. No men’s clothing visible. No male grooming products or sports gear.
After they’d injected her, and she ceased to fight, the man who held her down eased off the bed, flung the covers aside, and grabbed her up.
There!
In his memory of the events, something that had lain on the comforter slipped to the floor. A uniform of some type. Short-sleeved shirt. Too small to belong to a man, so it had to be hers. Khaki-colored cotton with a patch on the chest pocket. Letters, words he couldn’t read in the dark, and then a shape below them.
What is that? A bird?
A gull. It looked like the silhouette of a seagull.
The memory ran its course.
That was it. All he could glean.
He woke his cell phone’s screen and glanced at the time. 4:16 am. Christ. More than three hours had gone by since Gavin had hung up on him. He didn’t give a rat’s ass if Grey Suits had stormed the gates back home, he needed orders.
He wondered what he would do if his superior told him to let her go. Forget her. A broken run like Jack had experienced indicated a higher than average risk, not only to the finder, should he or she make another attempt, but to the Society as a whole. Who knew where the next attempt to find her might land him? Did saving her merit the risk if he ran and jumped through, only to find himself a target of the Grey Suits, as well?
It was up to Gavin to assess the hazards and decide whether or not to authorize pursuit.
You damn well better, you bastard
.
Sometimes he hated his life. No, more than sometimes. He hated at lot of it, but mostly he hated losing, which happened more often than he succeeded. Gavin wouldn’t let him go after her. Not hard to predict that. Gavin had told him to abort findings just three other times in his career, and each time had been over some trifling risk compared with a kidnapping. Three Lost Ones he’d had to leave to hang and fend for themselves just because Gavin couldn’t be 100-percent sure they weren’t already under observation by or under the control of their enemies.
Then, there were the
others
.
His hand slid into a pocket and pulled out an object he was never without. Round, made of plastic, and coated in gold paint, he’d kept the play coin that bore the face of an imaginary princess with him at all times for over a decade. He fingered the coin’s ridged edges where the coating had chipped away. Over the years his thumb had worn down the faux gilt across the princess’s cheek from rubbing it mindlessly while deep in thought. As he was now, slogging through his guilt. Gavin’s orders weren’t responsible for the others. He was.
Get a grip. Stop living in the past. You’ve got a Lost One who needs help today. Right now
.
Did he really think his boss would let him go after her, now that they all but knew the Greys were involved? No, he wouldn’t, because Gavin was smart. He was cold. He calculated odds and applied them without any trace of remorse.
Damn if Jack would let him.
He punched in Gavin’s number.
Gavin answered before it even rang. “Not now,” he said.
“Not now!” Jack said, anger barely held in check. “Gavin, three hours ago we had a Lost One kidnapped. If not now, when? What’s so important it sends this to the back of the line?”
“Taylor March,” Gavin said.
Jack knew the name, and the man, a finder like him.
“What about Taylor?”
“He’s missing.”
“How long?”
“37 hours.”
“And you just heard about it three hours ago when we were talking?”
“No. I’ve known about it for more than a day, after he didn’t check in.”
Jack didn’t get it. To have a finder temporarily fall off the radar was worrisome, but not the end of the world. If Gavin had known about his disappearance for this long, what had happened earlier tonight to get his Lost One’s fate sidelined?
“So, three hours ago…?” Jack asked.
“Was when we confirmed it,” Gavin said. “He’s with
them
.”
Chapter 6
With a rusty grating noise, the door to Lara’s cell swung inward.
She had no concept of how long she’d been imprisoned or the length of time she’d been drugged prior to her arrival here. It might have been a few hours. It could have been days. Without windows, she didn’t even know if it was day or night. She tried to see something outside the room when the door opened, but opening inward the metal slab blocked her view. Only a slight amount of extra illumination spilled into the room. Lara could tell it was artificial, not natural light.
“Miss Freberg.” The cold voice preceded his entrance.
The man who approached was lean, walked with a tight stride, and had a short businesslike haircut. She couldn’t tell if he was one of the men who’d abducted her, but he was someone like them. His grey suit and off-white shirt were unimaginative in cut and materials. His head reminded her of the blank oval on which an artist began to build a facial composite from a verbal description, but the features put there by genetics were so bland he could be anyone. Except for the eyes. They looked down on her, viewing her not as a human, but an object, a thing. Why?
“I don’t understand,” she said.
She noticed the quiet, predatory way he moved.
“What don’t you understand?” he asked.
They can’t have meant to take me. This is a mistake
.
Of all the scenarios she’d run through over the past hours, mistaken identity was the one that made the most sense. If only she could convince them they had the wrong person.
“Who are you? I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t have anything, any money,” she spoke in a desperate rush. “I haven’t done anything. Haven’t seen anything. I don’t know anything anyone could want. You aren’t the police. Are you drug dealers? Human traffickers? Someone else who…”