Delirium (12 page)

“Holy shit,” Sera said.

Darksight.

Some people had it, and it seemed Sera was just discovering the ability, and through her, Harlen was, too. In fact, the illusion of a child was now mostly just a shimmer. The
man
was more real, projecting the form of a boy.

“That’s just disgusting,” she said, shaking her head and ripping her gaze away.

Her Darksight was revelatory. Sera’s gaze darted around the Underground—she had to be curious as to what else she could now see. He was powerfully curious himself.

Mottled shadows dominated the space, filling in the pockets between revelers. Flickers of light were superimposed on people or objects here and there, thereby revealing both iterations—the true form and the dream-imagined one—at once. If business involved the illusions, then the merchants had to know what they were really selling. Which meant that at least a few others in the black market had to have Darksight, too.

Her gaze scoured the crowd, quick and thorough, as if tearing off masks with her sight alone. She stopped on one figure, arms folded, head cocked, just long enough for the shimmer to fade and Harlen to see Chimera Marshal Taylor, the young woman he’d thought too young, too green, but too talented not to include in his new division. The expression beneath her unfamiliar facade was avid, excited, her gaze flicking among the crowd.

And then Sera’s own gaze shifted.

Wait. Go back.
Marshal Taylor shouldn’t be here. Maybe a Darkside Rêve, if she had some fringe predilections, but not in what Rook was calling the Underground. Questions set Harlen on fire, just like his parents’ house. The odds were that at least one Oneiros would be among his division picks. Was Marshal Taylor the one? Because if she was, he wanted to shake answers out of her, make her teeth rattle.

He strained to see her out of Sera’s peripheral vision, but Sera’s interest was trained elsewhere. And she couldn’t read his mind.
Goddamn.
Marshal Taylor.
At least he had a lead. And he’d damn well follow up.

Sera jerked as if stung. She folded her arms, and with a tremulous, small voice, very unlike her, she said to Rook, “Not freaking. But holy shit.”

Harlen’s concentration shifted. Sera was peering into the mottled shadows
between
revelers.

She cocked her head. “Okay, maybe freaking a little.”

Then Harlen saw them, too. Or rather, he recognized the mottled shadows for what they were: nightmares. The place was
teeming
with them, like ants in a hive. The gray creatures moved unimpeded and undetected among the throng.

“So many,” Sera breathed. “Does anyone else see them?”

Maybe those who could see them had already bolted from the black market. Who in his or her right mind would stay?

Harlen felt the emotion rattling her, which made it harder for him to hold on. But this was exactly what he’d come for. The nightmares were organizing. But how? Why?

Ten bucks said the nightmares were what was getting Marshal Taylor so hot and bothered. Which meant she
was
Oneiros. Come to watch the show.

“Some revelers
must
see them,” Rook said, voice low. “A lot of talented Darksiders work the black market.” He swore under his breath. “Earlier today, there weren’t this many, though. They must’ve been building up since then. I’d wondered if the nightmares were Rêve-specific since Viv didn’t have any, but it seems that was just luck.”

Maybe the nightmares knew to avoid her Rêve.

“This many,” Sera said, bewildered, “what does it mean?”

A rumble sounded, and as if from cracks in the construction overhead, golden sand hissed down in streams and swirling puffs. A number of faces among the crowd in front of Sera turned up, eyes wide. Alarmed.

Yes. Some revelers
could
see them.

“It means something’s happening,” Rook said.

An even larger rumble shook the Underground. Sera’s vision swung wildly side to side as sand poured down. Grabbing Rook for balance, her senses reeled. The concrete floor bucked, cracks crawling out in every direction.

Harlen tried to hold on to the proxy but he was thrown from Sera, landing among the crowd of half-cringing revelers who were just realizing that this dream was going very wrong. He would’ve worried about being recognized but the ceiling above was dissolving into rushes of sand. Screams lifted, and the Scrape wind—frigid from nightmares—battered through what should’ve been calm, still Rêve air.

A vicious pain speared into his shoulder, so cold the burn crackled down his arm and across to his neck. He reached over and grabbed the nightmare chewing on him by the shoulder and ripped it free. “Sera!”

The creature clawed at him—so damn strong, so damn cold—but Harlen shoved it into the melee, where it—or another like it. They were hard to tell apart—clambered onto the back of another reveler and drove the poor soul down into the foot space of the panicking crowd.

“Sera!” But his voice barely bruised the clamor of the riot.

In the pandemonium of revelers and nightmares, he couldn’t find her. Scrape sand roughened his sight, but he could discern that the trappings of the Underground’s parking lot structure were gone. The gale of the Scrape had risen to full force. Revelers were stranded in its endless dust-stormed desert. And the nightmares had initiated a feeding frenzy.

The black market was no more. Just sand and wind, and more sand and wind. Humping shadows within the twisting squalls of gold looked like sex but he knew they were the death throes of the feast—nightmare on reveler.

“Sera!” Harlen roared again. She had to be close-by. How far could he have been thrown from her?

He needed her. Sera was everything. He should’ve never let her come.

The rage of his parents’ burned house and his terror over losing Sera provoked a reckless, wild heat inside him. He
hated
war.
Hated
all the fighting. And goddammit, he was going to make it stop.

A nightmare came at him then. He swung and struck it away while reaching down to pluck another off a reveler’s body.
Sera?
When its teeth wouldn’t dislodge from its victim, he ripped its head off its neck.
Not Sera.
The black nightmare blood splattered through the violent air. For a second, the arc of the blood cleared the air of sand and he caught a flash of Sera’s profile—
There!
—as she struggled against a nightmare that was bearing down on her.

The wildness within his mind and chest condensed into pure, fearless fury. He felt no pain, only lightning quickening his limbs. His vision went gold. And that’s the last he knew.

***

Rook sat on his ass in the sand, mouth agape as he tried to comprehend what was happening. It was difficult because the Scrape wind obscured everything and made it hard to really
look
without gritty grains sticking to his eyeballs. And anyway, the forms he
could
make out didn’t make sense. People were on the ground, screaming as nightmares ate them. Right in front of him, a man scratched around in the sand, reaching for help while a nightmare leaned in to feast.

The unwanted conclusions came, nevertheless: The black market had fallen. All the Rêves inside it were gone. The revelers within the Rêves were now cast into the desert with nowhere to go. Thousands upon thousands of people were stranded. No way to wake up from here. All the ties to the world above had been severed.

What about…?
Oh God, Sera.

Rook flushed with shame. He struggled to rise, only to be leaped upon by a nightmare from behind. The thing was light but strong, scraping a claw across the back of his neck. Rook flailed backward with his arms but only managed to beat at the creature’s thighs.

Falling face forward in the sand, getting a mouthful of the sharp grains, a second burning score tore across Rook’s scalp. He tried to roll but he was pinned, suffocating on the Scrape ground, inhaling sand through his nose. The nightmare was so strong that it lifted him up by the head and shoulders.

Rook collapsed to the side as the nightmare suddenly let him go. No, it was thrown to the side. The nightmare hadn’t lifted him. Harlen had lifted him and the nightmare both.

“Where’s Sera?” he demanded.

Rook shook his head. “I’m so sor—”

Harlen didn’t wait for him to finish. He plunged into the fight, ripping and beating away the nightmares, a big man crazed with violence.

Some smart reveler had moved into Harlen’s wake. Damn smart, in fact. Rook lurched to his feet and joined them, making a triangle of fighters. The carnage lumping and roiling in the shadows through the bluster of wind was unreal, but with Harlen going berserk, and him and the other guy keeping the nightmares off Harlen’s back, they began to make headway.

A fourth ally attempted to join them, only to be snatched into dusty oblivion by a pair of gray hands. His scream rode the wind.

Rook collected what revelers he could, situating the weaker ones behind them, the fighters making a perimeter of resistance. All were bewildered and banged up. Some weeping, gold sand stuck to their faces.

Harlen bellowed harshly. Rook guessed that meant he’d found Sera.

Rook glanced over and spotted her on the ground, kicking at a nightmare with bicycling feet.
Still alive and fighting.
He could’ve never lived with himself if she’d been hurt.

Harlen surged, cracking the nightmare’s spine in half, then stomped on its head. Turned out a nightmare skull was full of black goo. It settled in an oily puddle in the sand.

In one swift movement, Sera was in his arms, looking at Rook over Harlen’s shoulder. She had a dark, three-striped gash on one cheek, like some kind of tribal warrior. Tipping her head slightly to Harlen’s ear, her mouth made the shape of the words,
I’m okay
.

Harlen tried to push her behind him with the other revelers, but she found a spot at his side, between him and Rook. She was shouting something else, but Rook only caught the word
city
. He nodded, because yes, that made sense. It was the only place to go. Maze City.

The Agora was the other obvious answer—with Chimera to defend it—but Maisie’s city had been built to be impenetrable. If the nightmares had gone undetected in the black market, then they might’ve done so within the Agora, as well. Plus, the Agora was infected with Oneiros.

“I’ve got to find Viv,” Rook yelled back. And collect as many survivors as he could. Make himself useful. He had no idea how far the tumult stretched. He’d fought a single nightmare before and had barely survived. The odds they’d get out of this alive…? A joke.

The farther their party ventured, the more nightmares they found already feeding. Just there, some poor soul’s guts pulled out like one long, red sausage dusted with golden sugar crystals. Skirmishes and screams made shadow puppets within the storm. The cold was its own monster, gripping, making movement painful and difficult.

As they moved, they collected the lost and confused. A crowd grew behind him. But there were those who didn’t understand that they weren’t in a dream gone bad. They’d gotten a bum deal in the market. He tried to reach out to one of them, but the woman swatted him away.

“I want to wake up
now
,” she demanded to the sky, her voice partially muted by the howl of the wind. “I
paid
—” and then she fell back into the sand and ominous silence.

Next to him, Sera tapped his arm.

He looked over.

She lifted her hand to show that she was holding the hand of some poor reveler woman who was naked—had tried a sex Rêve, no doubt—and was shaking so hard she’d probably never want to sleep again. “To Maze City…”

Only then did he notice that a twitchy young man held the other hand of the naked woman. And someone else, lost in swirls of gold, held his. They were making a chain.

Good. Yes, that was the only way.

“Harlen’s going to lead,” she shouted, as if a million miles away.

No, Harlen was going to have a hell of a time keeping the nightmares off the line. But Rook nodded. “I have to find someone. I’ll be right behind you.”

As the knot of people behind him began to unravel into a clumpy string of shuddering dream refugees, Rook inhaled deeply—and got a nose full of grit—but the sixth sense buried deep in some part of his soul sparked. He was a tracker and he always found his marks. Vivienne Kennedy was within the blizzard—
over there
—though he couldn’t tell how far.

Stepping away from the throng at his back, he tripped over a broken body in the drift. A nightmare leered at him from a gust of wind, and Rook dodged and folded himself back. He crawled over the mounds made of bodies buried in the sand, blood and wind and dream magic all gone awry. The night thieves, pimps, and memory peddlers had been cast out of their houses. The sinners had been ambushed by a legion of fear.

Cloaked by the gale, Rook found another mass of revelers clutching on to one another, shrieking as they fended off the nightmares. “Take them that way into the storm.” He pointed to where he felt Harlen’s group should be. “Safety
that way
!”

“What are those things?” an angry man shouted.

Didn’t matter what they were. “Run! That way! Safety!”