Read Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) Online
Authors: Aileen Harkwood
Lara passed out of sight of the open draperies, heading for another part of the condo. Her bedroom?
“Mona, did they see her?” Jack asked. “Do they know she’s there?” His entire focus had been on Lara, not the two Greys down on the street.
Gavin reached up, grasped Jack’s binoculars and forcefully lowered them so that Jack had to concentrate on his boss.
“Forget it,” Gavin said. He wasn’t going to let Jack go in.
“No,” Mona answered Jack’s question. “No reaction from our Greys. The one in the passenger’s seat just poured his cold coffee out the window. The other one is busy studying the side mirror. My guess is he’s wondering where their replacements are. But I told you. They don’t have an angle on the window anyway.”
“I’ll enter through the bedroom. I almost got there before,” Jack said.
“No!” Gavin put some bite in his bark.
Jack ignored him. Quietly, keeping his movements low key, he got out of the car, opened the rear passenger door and climbed in. He lay down across the rear bench seat, trying to make his body as comfortable as possible in a space not meant for bedding someone who was 6'4". Nothing like coming back after a run twisted into a cramped knot it would take minutes to unkink. Gavin watched him in the car’s rear view. His expression may have been neutral, but Jack had known him long enough to read him. His boss fumed inside. He thought Jack was being stupid, putting the entire society at risk.
Jack didn’t care. At the moment he couldn’t think of anyone but Lara. He’d let her down twice so far. He wasn’t going for a third.
“What if we have to move?” Gavin asked.
“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “I’ll find my way home.”
Chapter 15
Lara huddled beneath her favorite comforter, shivering violently. Her pain had grown so intense it now overwhelmed everything else. Even her terror of dying locked up and abandoned in her cell, couldn’t compete. She knew she no longer had the capacity to think clearly and her ability to keep track of what went on around her diminished by the hour. A high fever drenched her in sweat to accompany the blood on her clothing.
She had no idea how she’d gotten here. Was she really back home in her condo, lying in her own bed? It couldn’t be real. Was it another hallucination? She hadn’t dared look for her reflection in her closet mirror when she’d passed it, coming from the kitchen, for fear of what she might see, that ghostly version of herself she’d faced before in the room with the rust drapes and yellow lamp.
Someone slid into bed beside her. Right away she noticed how good he smelled, clean, that masculine scent that rose off a man’s skin when he’d recently stepped out of the shower. She instinctively snuggled into his warm, hard chest. She was too far-gone to care that she must look and smell disgusting herself. What did it matter? Her life was over.
Heavily muscled arms wrapped around her and held her tentatively, trying to be gentle. His touch jostled her injured hand and she wanted to scream, but she bit down, holding it in so that only a tiny wince of sound emerged. She didn’t want to do anything to destroy and chase away this incredible, comforting fantasy her imagination gifted her. She tipped her head back and looked up into the face of the man leaning against her headboard, cradling her body protectively against his.
“Jack,” she said.
He smiled at her, but it didn’t mask his grim expression.
“Am I dead?”
He looked solid, not like last time, when he’d been transparent, resembling a ghost.
“Not even close,” he said.
Strong fingers trembled slightly when they brushed aside a tangled lock of her hair that had fallen over her eyes and was matted with dried blood. Unlike the previous two times she’d seen him, he was fully dressed from shirt to jeans to boots. He smiled at her again. She could see him putting greater effort into hiding something.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“Home,” he said. “That’s where you wanted to be, wasn’t it?”
“More than anything. I just wanted them to let me go.”
She put her good hand flat against his chest for leverage and pushed, trying to sit up, but she couldn’t manage it.
“Oh my God. I’m here? Really here?” Lara asked, overwrought with relief. “They let me go. Oh my God, they let me go.”
“Shh,” he said. “Let’s just lie here for a few minutes, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, and sank back against him. She was too weak to realistically do anything else.
Feeling safe, with his fingers stroking her hair, she closed her eyes.
She slept. It seemed like minutes, but it could have been hours. Eventually she felt Jack release his hold on her, shift her off of him, and slide out of bed.
“Jack?” she asked.
“Hush,” he said. “I’m not leaving. I’ll be back in a minute.”
She heard him go into her bathroom and rummage around in the cabinets. The medicine chest was opened, and then a minute later closed. Water ran in the sink.
She fell asleep again.
Jack roused her, calling softly to her. “Lara. Wake up.” He touched her face. It was partly a caress, partly, she knew, in order to gauge how bad her fever raged.
She didn’t want to wake.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Yes, you can. I need you to sit up for a minute.”
He lifted her and propped her against pillows he fluffed. Her eyelids continued to drift downward, but she caught the assemblage of items he’d carried from her bathroom and set on the nightstand, a towel and several damp washcloths, one that had been soaped, a comb, scissors, bandages, aspirin, glass of water, and a prescription bottle with leftover medication for an infection she’d had earlier in the year. Despite her doctor’s insistence that she take all the pills until they were gone, she’d forgotten once she’d felt better.
Jack shook out two pills from the bottle, and three aspirin. Sliding an arm around her shoulders, he lifted her up far enough to enable her to take the pills and swallow them with the glass of water. Her mouth was so dry that even with the water, she struggled to swallow all five tablets. She coughed and choked, but Jack was patient and they worked to get the pills down her one at a time.
He let her rest for a few minutes after this, and used the wetted washcloths to cool her skin, then bathe her face, shoulders and her good arm. He worked most of the blood out of her hair with another washcloth and a comb.
“I’d help you change out of that,” he said of the T-shirt, “but I think it would cause more pain than it’s worth. Besides…”
“Besides, what?”
He didn’t answer her. Besides, what? Why would changing out of these horrible, blood-crusted clothes not help her? Was she really near death, then?
Finished with the limited bath he gave her, he dried her and then spread the towel out on the bed at her side. He reached for her injured hand, which had swollen grotesquely within its tightly constricted wrappings.
“No,” she said and pulled her arm to her chest defensively.
“Lara, I have to look at it.”
“No!” Tears welled in her eyes. “Leave me alone.”
“Lara.” He was apologetic.
“No. Please? Just please,” she said.
Despite her protests, he reached again for her arm.
“No, Jack. No-no-no,” she said, even as she surrendered her hand to him.
“I’m sorry, Lara,” he said. “I know it hurts, but we need to take a look at what you did to your hand.”
He used the scissors from her bathroom to cut away the bandages. Each snip equaled a tug on her wound, followed by a gradual release of the tourniquet tight bandages. As the flesh was allowed to expand, the pain amped up more and more, until fresh air wafted across her open wound.
Lara cried out.
“Oh, God, that hurts. It hurts so much.”
Gazing down at her exposed injury, Jack sighed. The grimness she’d noted earlier in his face returned, but was just as quickly wiped away as he looked her in the eyes and smiled. “Not so bad,” he said.
“My fingers?”
“Still there,” he said. “All four and the thumb.”
“Why can’t I move them?”
“Let’s not worry about that right now.”
“No, tell me. Jack. Tell me.”
“Hush. Everything is going to be all right. Take a deep breath for me, okay? In and out,” he instructed her.
She complied, breathing in deep and then letting it go.
“In and out. That’s right. Slow. Slow. Quiet your mind. You’re not alone any more.”
She took one more deep breath and let it out. He smiled again. She was so focused on doing as he asked, she didn’t notice the bowl of water and washcloth in his hand until wet fabric touched her hand.
Lara cried out in shock and began sobbing at the pain his movements caused. Jack’s lips tightened, but he diligently dabbed at the edges of the wound, cleaning it as quickly as he could.
“Okay,” he said, as much to himself as he did her. “Now we bandage it up again. Though not as tightly.”
Lara, hating herself for being crying, swiped away tears.
“Is this real?” she cleared her throat and asked.
“Yes,” he said. “All of it. You’re not hallucinating. Everything that has happened to you so far is real.”
“We’re in my bedroom?”
“Yes, we’re in your bedroom. Neither of us is dead. You aren’t dreaming.”
“Then why aren’t you calling 911? Why aren’t you taking me to a hospital?”
Jack looked up from his work, but his face was unreadable. She struggled to hold onto consciousness. With each moment that passed, the effort grew more and more difficult. Had he answered her question and she just didn’t hear it? She couldn’t remember what he said from one minute to the next. He pressed the washcloth into the palm of her hand at a particularly vulnerable spot and her body went rigid, the agony shooting up her arm, up through her neck, exploding behind her eyes.
When she could think again, she found herself in the middle of a conversation she didn’t know they’d begun.
“Do you know who the people are who took you?” Jack asked.
“No.”
“Ever seen any of them before?”
“No.”
“Do you know what they want?”
“The bedroom. Your bedroom. They want to know where it is.”
“Did they tell you that?”
“They showed me a picture.”
“A photo?”
She nodded.
“Do you know where the photo came from?”
She shook her head.
“Describe it for me.”
“It’s just a photo. Dim. Bad quality. Little bits of random colors mixed in.”
“Grainy?”
“Glitches. Like a photo taken by a cheap camera.”
Jack went still, more worried than she’d seen him so far.
She didn’t understand his reaction, but continued with her story.
“He hurt me. Then they gave me something. Drugs. More than one. Then he hurt me some more and kept waving the photo in my face. After a while I…I don’t know what happened. Suddenly, I was in your room.”
“He? You said
he
hurt you.”
Her eyes closed.
“Lara? Lara? You said
he
hurt you.”
“The Grey Man. That’s what I call him. He’s the one in charge of pain. He wears a grey suit and he’s just, somehow…grey.”
Anger played over Jack’s face, barely contained. Why did he look like that? Had she done something wrong?
“Did I do something horrible just now? Back there…I mean in the other place…”
“No. What?
No
,” Jack said, quickly reassuring her. She watched him tamp down on his emotions, hide them away while he laid her arm across her stomach, bandaging finished. “Nothing at all.”
He got back into bed with her, pulled her to him and held her close. She listened to the breath go in and out of his powerful chest, the sound of it and feel of it in her hair lulling her toward sleep again.
“I promise you, I will find you,” he said, placing special emphasis on the word
find
.
“What are you talking about?” Lara asked, alarm renewing itself in her. “I’m here. You found me. You said yourself this is real.”
At the same time she spoke, a shudder ran up her spine and weakness greater than any she’d ever felt in her life washed through her, consumed and drained her. Her eyesight began to fail, the world around her fading not to the blackness she’d expect from fainting, but to nothingness, her brain forgetting what it was to see anything at all.
Death. She was dying. This was what death had to be.
“Jack?”
He hugged her more fiercely in his arms.
“Jack, what’s happening?”
“You’re going back now,” he said.
“No.”
He kissed the top of her head.
“Don’t lose hope, Lara,” he said. “I’m one of the best at what I do. I will find you.”
“Don’t make me go there,” she begged.
“I don’t have a choice in the matter. You couldn’t stay here forever.”
“Jack!”
“Don’t try to be brave,” he told her. “Tell them anything they want. Tell them my name if you want. Jack. You don’t know my last.”
Her very being began to evaporate. She felt her body disintegrating. Nothing in her life could equal the panic of being extinguished atom by atom. At the end, she wasn’t even sure if she heard his voice or if his words were just something she made up to finish the conversation and close out her life.
“Don’t resist their interrogation,” Jack said. “Let them think you’re broken.”
“I am broken.”
“No, you’re not. You’re strong. Stay alive, Lara. Survive for me!”
Then she heard and felt no more.
Chapter 16
Jack had never witnessed someone unconscious on a run before. He hadn’t thought it possible. Runners were either aware and present or else, if something catastrophic happened, the runner was slammed back into his or her body an instant later.
During his previous encounters with Lara, he’d connected emotionally with her, been able to feel what she felt. Staring at her in bed when he first arrived here, he got nothing. Her twin had lain unresponsive beneath her quilted comforter. She didn’t breathe, didn’t move, didn’t react to his voice or touch. It scared the crap out of him.
Dead as a twin? How was that possible? And what did it mean to her true body back where it resided? Was she dead there, as well?