After the attack on Fenhallow, Emery & co. are still trying to get back on their feet. The Hypnos State is coming to investigate what happened, and Emery continues to fracture over the events of that night and the horrors still to come.
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The Children of Hypnos is a Young Adult urban fantasy series about Emery Ashworth, a girl raised in a society of nightmare hunters. It originally appeared in the novel Eliza and Her Monsters as a fictional story discussed between the characters. Every Wattpad chapter includes original header art drawn by the author.
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Volume 1 was simultaneously posted on Tumblr and Wattpad. Why is Volume 2 only being posted on Wattpad?
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The story won’t stop after Volume 4 like it did in Eliza and Her Monsters, right?
There are no plans to stop writing the series before it’s completed. In Eliza and Her Monsters, the fictional series The Children of Hypnos was a 5-book series. The author had previously stated this to be true for the real series The Children of Hypnos as well. However, the author was looking at the many plotlines she’d set up and is now considering the small possibility that she perhaps, possibly, maybe underestimated her own story.
When will Volume 3 come out?
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It would have been more merciful if she had. She had laid on the ground, staring up at the sky, until Wes had shambled over to her. There was yelling. She remembered moaning for Joel, for Wes to let her go so she could get Joel out of that horrible house on the hill. Then crying for Edgar until Wes told her that Edgar was okay, that he’d be okay, even though she knew he wasn’t okay at all.
Grandpa Al had shown up some time later, then Ares Montgomery, and they cleared off the other students.
Emery remembered being led back down the hill, stumbling through her headache and her throbbing leg. The brightness of Klaus’s storm had dimmed, the clouds dispersing, the night settled over Fenhallow once again. then she remembered sitting in Grandpa Al’s office staring at the edge of his desk. Wes sat in the chair beside her, his knee touching hers, neither of them saying anything. Grandpa Al on the phone, surveying the grounds outside the window. Grandpa Al hanging up and saying, “The police,” and “investigate” and “it won’t be a question—so much Dream activity tonight.”
Emery got the details from Wes later. The police came out, and so did several Hypnos cleanup crews. It was Stainer, the highest ranking of any of the cleanup crew members and now completely sober, who confirmed Joel’s death had been caused by a nightmare. Everyone in the city knew about the storm of nightmares that had cloaked the school for nearly half an hour, and news crews swarmed the campus like flies. All the students now knew most of the story. Queen Emery had a doppelgänger. Queen Emery couldn’t defeat it. Queen Emery, top of her class, had finally been knocked off her pedestal.
That such a large outbreak of nightmares had been allowed to form was a possible violation of several Hypnos State laws, but information had been kept under wraps.
“They’re calling in the head of the North American Ward,” Wes said later, when they sat together in the clinic. Emery was in her pajamas, curled against the headboard of the clinic bed. Wes had changed out of his clothes and showered, and his damp hair was curling around his head. Two nasty bruises formed around the bandage over his nose. The clinic windows were closed against the midmorning sun so that Emery could be knocked out and sleep in darkness. “Marcia thinks they’re going to try to pin it on Klaus.”
“They’re going to say he fell asleep on purpose?”
They both looked down the clinic, where Klaus lay cuffed to the last bed in the row, staring blankly at the ceiling. Marcia sat in the chair beside his bed, her back to Emery and Wes, quieter than she’d ever been.
“He knew how powerful his nightmares would be,” Emery said. “He wanted his water.”
“Hopefully enough people know that and can fight against the accusation when it comes up.”
“I will.”
“So will I. So will Marcia, and probably Lana, too.”
Emery rubbed her palms across her face. Her tears had dried, but her whole head felt like it was packed with cotton. Images of Joel spread-eagle on the ballroom floor had burned themselves into her mind. She could still hear the tearing of Morrigan’s hand through his abdomen. It had been hours ago, but it felt like seconds. It felt like she was still there, experiencing it for the first time. She stared at the empty bed across from hers, imagining Joel there. Bandaged up, only sleeping, and he’d wake up and she could curl up beside him and watch reruns of Golden Girls while he healed.
Her insides twisted horribly. She started to imagine Edgar in the bed, instead.
Edgar had not been on the news reports. Edgar had not been brought to the clinic. After Grandpa Al learned what had happened to him, he’d sent Edgar straight to the sleep research center. Emery had refused the nurse’s sleeping sand until they told her what had happened to him. The only update she received was from Grandpa Al via one of the clinic nurses: Edgar was alive, but comatose. He had killed his doppelgänger too early.
They weren’t sure if he’d wake up.
“I talked to Ares, too,” Wes said after a long moment. “I told him you shot her in the head, and she disappeared back into the Dream. He says you wouldn’t have killed her, but you probably weakened her enough to keep her away for a while.”
For a while. For a while until she was more prepared. Or for a while until she was still as weak as she was now. For a while, until Morrigan returned to kill more of the people she cared about.
Until then she would think about the fact that it was her hand, her arm, that had gutted Joel. She would think about the expression on her own face right before she did it.
When she felt herself about to cry again, she called the nurse over for her sleeping sand and left the waking world behind.
~
Her dream was white.
She stood on a snowy hill. Boots, leggings, a warm sweater, a scarf. Moscow in the distance. The air smelled like pine and gingerbread. Peace settled in her chest, still and silent. Snow began to fall from the milky white sky. She held her hands out to catch it.
“Em!”
She turned. A boy came up the hill to meet her. He had a bright-eyed smile and a bouquet of weedy red poppies. He kissed her hello, but somehow it also felt like goodbye. Snow caught in his hair. She reached up to brush it out.
He handed her the poppies. They were dead.
He coughed blood in her face.
~
Emery jerked awake, already crying. Even the clinic’s sleeping sand hadn’t been able to keep out the nightmares. The clock on the clinic wall said six hours had passed. Jacqueline, her arms primly folded beneath her head, lay asleep on the mattress, sitting in the chair by the bed. Emery half expected to see Lewis and Kris there, too, but they were nowhere in sight. Wes sat on the end of the bed, facing the room, leaning slightly on his hammer. Ridley sat on the floor beside his legs, her hair just poking up over the bedframe.
Wes had turned his head only slightly when Emery woke up.
She hid her face in her pillow and pulled the blanket over herself.
~
The outbreak and the ensuing death were news for a week. The story played on every local news channel and reporters lurked around campus, trying to interview students and staff. Apart from a few uncredited sources, no one leaked information. The Hypnos State issued an official statement saying that the storm was the result of a possible attack on the city that the dreamhunters of Fenhallow had contained to the school; the death of a Fenhallow student had occurred in the process of protecting another student from harm, a terrible tragedy that had saved lives.
Joel Cullweather was a hero.
Emery was glad that was what Joel’s parents heard, at least, when they visited the school after that night. She met them in Grandpa Al’s office, and she stood in the corner behind his desk while Grandpa Al explained what happened.
Joel’s father sobbed into his hand and his mother sat in shellshocked silence.
“Your son was a brave boy.” Grandpa Al used his warm voice, his soothing voice, the one he’d once used to get Emery to go to sleep when she’d first come to Fenhallow and was still scared of her own nightmares. He leaned on the edge of his desk, offering Joel’s father a box of tissues. Joel’s mother took one and nudged her husband until he took it. “He knew better than many of the students here what it means to be part of the Hypnos State, and he will be remembered. He saved lives. Not only that, I owe him a special debt, one that I can never repay. He died protecting my grandson.”
Joel had died protecting Emery, too, but no one could say that. If a non-dreamhunter died protecting a dreamhunter from a nightmare, then she was a terrible excuse for a dreamhunter, and should be stripped of everything she had. His death had violated everything she was supposed to stand for, everything she’d been made to uphold. But if Joel died protecting a child…
Grandpa Al said some more, but Emery had stopped listening. Joel’s mother had started staring at her. Stare at her hard, like someone who knew the unspoken truth, the secret to be hidden forever. The guilt ripped at Emery’s stomach. It had to be written on her face, as well.
When Joel’s parents left, led out by a Hypnos State counselor, Grandpa Al said, “Stay here for a moment, Em. I need to talk to you.”
She stood in the center of the room, waiting, wishing numbness could overtake her so she didn’t have to feel anymore. Grandpa Al took her face in his hands. They were rough and hot and made her flush with anger. He smelled like spiced tea.
“Your month is almost up.”
“What?”
“Our deal. A month’s worth of missions and then you can decide if you want a new partner.”
She pulled her head away from him. “Of course I want to keep Wes as a partner. He helped me when everyone else was lying and using me as bait.”
Grandpa Al flinched at that. If she had blinked, she would have missed it. He seemed to gather his thoughts, then said, “When the director of the Ward arrives, she’s going to investigate what happened here. I will report to her the entire story. She will have your termination papers served to you, and your time will begin to hunt down your doppelgänger.”
“Morrigan.”
He frowned.
“Her name is Morrigan,” Emery said. “That’s what she calls herself.”
“Doppelgängers don’t have names,” he said.
“Just because you don’t want them to doesn’t mean they won’t.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled ahrd through his nose. For the first time, she realized how tense he was. “Emery. I tried to explain this before. You’re young. This is a security matter on a scale you can’t comprehend. I didn’t want to do what I did—”
“I don’t care!” She couldn’t breathe anymore, but she yelled anyway. “I don’t care if you didn’t want to! You did it, and now Joel is dead and Edgar is in a coma and how many more people could have died tonight? I could have died tonight! You would have let her kill me!”
He started toward her. “No, Em, I would never let anything—”
Emery didn’t let him finish. She fled the room and the building, making it halfway down the quote-engraved steps before realizing there was nowhere for her to go. It was still more dangerous off campus than on. She didn’t want to be alone, but Joel was gone, and Lewis and Kris had sold her out to her grandfather and Ares, and Jacqueline—even if she weren’t still being detained for using her dreamseeker abilities—would just remind her that Joel was gone.
Emery took out her phone.
Where are you?
Wes texted back a few minutes later.
Working out so I forget how much my face hurts. Why?
Let’s get food.
He met her at the atrium of the Crossing, wearing his ratty blue sweater and some old jeans. Emery ignored the looks they got as they went in and sat down with their food in a far corner, away from everyone else.
Not far away, Kris and Lewis sat together at a table. Kris looked up when they came in. Said something. Lewis glanced over his shoulder. Both of them had dark bags under their eyes. After a moment, Kris got up and shuffled over.
“Hi, Emery,” she said, voice small and meek. It had never seemed put-on, like she was using it to make herself look fragile, but it seemed like that now. “Lewis and I—we’re so sorry for telling your grandpa about everything. We were worried about you. We thought—we thought he would help.”
“Yeah,” Emery said, without looking up from her cottage cheese.
“We miss Joel too. We’re really, really sorry.”
Kris was crying now. Emery could hear it in her voice without looking up at her face.
“Yeah,” she said again.
Another long pause. Kris shuffled away.
Wes watched her go, but didn’t say anything. Emery knew it wasn’t her fault, or Lewis’s fault; Morrigan had always been a known variable to Grandpa Al and the Hypnos State. And not just a variable, but the goal. Kris and Lewis telling Grandpa Al had only lost them some time. Klaus still would have fallen asleep. Morrigan still would have used the storm as a distraction to grab Edgar. Emery still would’ve run out of bullets.
As soon as Kris was out of earshot, Emery said, “Wes. I have to tell you something.”
She explained, as quickly and with as little emotion as she could, how they had been used as bait.
It was a small consolation that the look of betrayal on his face matched what she felt inside.
~
Joel’s funeral took place the following Saturday. Fenhallow students, teachers, and staff packed the funeral home. Yael, the ice sculptor from the kitchens. The maintenance staff who’d lent Joel their keys. Alice, the front gate guard. All of them wore the gold-and-silver pin of the closed eye of Hypnos over their hearts, setting them apart from Joel’s family members.
Only the top half of the casket was open. Joel looked like wax. Emery forced herself to it on stiff legs so she could pin Hypnos’s eye onto his lapel. He didn’t look like he was sleeping. The awake lived in the waking world. The asleep lived in the Dream. He looked dead, and dead people didn’t live in either.
You were right, Jojo, she thought. We should have run away.
She wanted to lean down and kiss his forehead, but instead she stepped away, because Joel’s mother was standing there beside his head, and Emery had never felt so hated.
The burial took place that afternoon in Poppy Hill, the Sleeping City’s largest cemetery, where Fabian Fenhallow had been buried. Old trees and a tall stone wall bordered its rolling lawns. The beautiful October foliage had begun to fall in the face of November, and an early frost blanketed the grass and tombstones. The graveyard was mostly empty. After the casket was lowered, the Fenhallow crowd slipped off into the waning light.
Emery remained in the shadow of a nearby tree with Wes. Her coat came up high around her jaw and swept out around her knees. She had worn it to look imperious. If there was any way at all Morrigan was watching her, she would make it clear that she would not be so easy to defeat, limited number of bullets or not. Wes was just there, stoic and stony, like a cemetery statue. At the bottom of the hill, Grandpa Al waited by a black Fenhallow car. He looked strange without Edgar at his side. Edgar, who Emery still wasn’t allowed to see. Edgar, who had been locked away in the deepest recesses of the sleep research center until the Ward director arrived.
Emery kept her gaze away from Grandpa Al and the car. She watched the cemetery workers pile dirt into Joel’s grave. There was no creeping pressure of the Dream here. The dead did not sleep.
A deep furrow had formed between Wes’s eyebrows. His gaze fixed on the graves in the far distance, where a man in a hoodie and jacket was milling around the path.
“What’s wrong?” Emery said.
“I know what happens to people who can’t kill their doppelgängers,” he said. “The Ward throws you into a tiny, dark cell far underground, shoots you up with DreamLess, then cuts your connection to the Dream and lets your brain fracture into pieces. They say it’s humane because they’re not killing you, they’re just stopping your subconscious from forming anything dangerous. But you aren’t anything after that. Your body is alive but your brain is dead. You’re gone.
“My parents went through dream death three months apart. My dad went first, and I saw my mom once afterward. It’s the only memory I have of her—they took me to the hospital where she was and she held me and cried. It was more like screaming.” His stare never wavered. “They didn’t bring Ridley. I guess she was too young.”
“I’m sorry, Wes.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t want that to happen. To me. To Ridley. When I realized how dreamforming came easier to me than it did to the others, I knew I was in trouble. But I’ve looked through the records, and the dreamhunters whose partners helped them fight their doppelgängers had a higher rate of survival. Much higher. It seems obvious, but the State doesn’t like it. Just another chance to lose a hunter they’ve been training for two decades.”
He paused and looked at her. “We’re partners. We stick together.”
“I’ll do the fighting. You do the dreamforming. We’re like two halves of a whole hunter.”
“Morrigan isn’t going to beat us.”
But the Hypnos State might, Emery thought, then pushed the idea down. There would be time to worry about the State when the more immediate threat was handled.
“What brought this on?” she asked.
Wes nodded back toward the man in the hoodie in the distance. The man had paused on the path as they talked, but now turned smoothly and started walking away.
“That guy,” Wes said. “He was watching us.”
“For how long?”
“I noticed him when they started lowering the casket.”
“Did you sense the Dream on him?”
“He’s too far away.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was wearing a mask,” (Emery scoffed. Masks.) “under his hood. There were no eyeholes that I could see. No mouth. Just…dark. Nondescript clothes. No showing skin.”
Emery looked again. The man had disappeared.
“You think he’s…?”
“I don’t know,” Wes said, “but I’m not leaving anything up to chance anymore.”
A pause.
With a deep sigh, Emery straightened her back against the endless exhaustion of the past few weeks.
“Whatever,” she said. She flipped her collar up and scooped her hair over one shoulder so it cascaded past her face like a rolling black wave. “If any more doppelgängers want to screw with us, they’re welcome to try. Come on. We have training to do.”
She turned back for the car. Wes followed her, and they descended the hill together.
First he lays in the quad, staring at the green sky, and hangs in that strange space between awake and asleep when nothing quite seems real and thoughts and memories slip from his grasp before they’re fully formed.
Then he lays beneath the dim lights of the Fenhallow clinic. The scenery changes the way it does in a dream, without warning and without confusion. He wears paper clothing and feels the distant throb of an IV in his arm. People move around him. He knows them by their voices. Each time someone comes near, their presence is warm.
It doesn’t matter who it is. In this strange liminal space, the presence is always his mother. He knows it’s not possible—she’s been dead almost as long as he’s been alive—but he lets himself believe it because he is tired.
Then he lays beneath the dim lights of the Fenhallow clinic, but someone is above him, saying his name and putting drops in his eyes. Just a little bit of waking water. It draws him out of the liminal space. He blinks and groans against a throbbing headache.
Marcia leans over him, putting the drops on the bedside table. He jerks away, but his arms are strapped down and his body moves sluggishly. She hovers away from him, letting him relax.
“Is everyone okay?” he croaks.
“A few students got nipped by your bats,” she says, “but we tried the baby oil in the ear again, and that worked.”
He falls silent. Not because he wants to, but because it takes too much energy to speak. So soon after even a small dose of waking water, there’s no chance of falling asleep, so the Sandman closes his eyes and lets his mind drift off. All he sees are nightmares. Green fire. Scratches in a stone wall. Limbs hanging from the ceiling. Even awake he can’t escape them.
A light touch brushes along his temple, down his cheek. He stays very still, because for all his fears, he is not poisonous, and for all her posturing, Marcia is easy to spook. Her finger follows the same path again and again, and his heart flutters each time. He is easy to spook, too. He gathers up his courage and tilts his head into the touch.
Marcia pauses. Then pulls her hand away. The Sandman bites down on his whine, but still feels his expression crumple. He opens his eyes and finds Marcia still there, turned away, looking down the clinic.
“This was bad, Mar,” The Sandman says.
Marcia looks back at him. “We’ll deal with it.”
“There were a lot of them.”
“We’ll deal with it.”
There’s a hard look in her eyes. They both know this isn’t about Ares or Argos anymore. This isn’t about the State’s secrets. The storm was only the beginning of something much worse, and though the Sandman hasn’t seen it yet, he knows it exists.
Morrigan threw Wes off and ran to the ashes of her doppelgänger brother, now scattering into No Man’s Land. Emery ran to Edgar.
He lay sprawled on the cracked earth, eyes closed. Emery put her hand on his chest but was too panicked to feel a heartbeat. She put her cheek near his lips. Soft breath curled over her skin.
He was alive. But hunters weren’t supposed to collapse after they killed their doppelgängers.
“Edgar.” She brushed his hair back, tried to smooth the red blotches from his cheeks. His skin was still wet from his tears. “Edgar, wake up.”
He didn’t.
“Emery!” Wes came up behind her, blood streaming from his broken nose, his eyes on Morrigan. Emery scooped up the Peacemaker close to Edgar and swung around, but Morrigan was already disappearing into the waking world with another blood-curdling scream.
Emery lunged for her other gun, several feet away, and shoved both in their holsters. She grabbed Edgar and hoisted him into her arms. He felt too light, like his insides had been scooped out. Wes was already opening his gateway; those two huge black eyes formed and stared at them as they passed back into the waking world.
Screams bubbled into existence as they emerged. A hand grabbed Emery when she got to the other side. Wes fell to the ballroom floor beside her, but Joel helped Emery support Edgar’s weight. Students surged for the ballroom doors. Joel’s face was pale as he looked from her to Edgar to Wes and back again, his hair askew, a shallow cut in his temple leaking blood down the side of his face.
“Em, what happened? Are you okay? Is Edgar…?”
“Where is she, Joel? Did you see her come out?”
“Em, your throat. Your face. Did she do that?”
“Joel, you need to leave—”
“Hey, Jojo!”
Joel spun. His arms came out to barricade Emery and Edgar behind him. Morrigan stood on his other side, her hair swirling angrily around her, her profile turned green by the moonlight coming in through the windows. Emery felt Joel freeze, his muscles rigid and his breath caught. Morrigan grabbed his collar. Emery fumbled for her guns, but Edgar’s arms slipped free first, then his legs, and there was a tangle of limbs and Morrigan was close enough that her hair was curling around Joel’s face and she was whispering something to him and then she stared at Emery over his shoulder.
A wet, thick impact.
Joel’s soft wheeze.
The arch of his back.
Morrigan jerked, and something tore and ripped and blood gushed onto the floor between Joel’s feet, followed a moment later by a long rope of pale intestine. Morrigan stepped back. Blood coated her left arm just past the wrist. Joel’s arms fell and came together across his stomach. He began to turn, eyes searching until he found Emery. The front of his white shirt was stained crimson around the new hole in his abdomen.
“Em,” he said, and coughed. Blood splattered Emery’s face.
Joel fell as he turned, legs twisting, and collapsed in a pile of his own organs.
“Joel.” She felt like she must have screamed it, but there came no noise. She sank to her knees at his feet, laying Edgar out on the floor, reaching for Joel’s shiny prince charming boot. Blood spread around him. It reached his limp hand and pooled around his fingers.
Morrigan stood over them.
“I will kill everything you love—” she began.
Emery drew a revolver and fired. Morrigan cut off with a squeak, stumbling back; a perfect little hole appeared in the center of her chest, and Dream essence began pouring from it. Emery’s revolver turned warm with the firing of her final bullet, the one that drove a mental spike through her temple. Morrigan looked down at the hole in her chest. Looked at Emery as Emery stood on trembling legs.
With her lips curling back from her teeth, Morrigan said, “You’re supposed to aim for the head.”
She lunged.
“Emery, duck!”
Emery let her legs buckle. She fell beside Edgar and Joel just as Wes’s war hammer smashed into Morrigan, sending her sliding through the debris on the polished ballroom floor. She sailed through the remains of the refreshments table.
"Run!" Wes faced Morrigan and glanced back at Emery. Blood coated the lower half of his face from his broken nose. "I can hold her off for a little while."
How could she run, with Joel staring at the ceiling and his innards splayed across the floor? How could she, with Edgar alive but unreachable, nothing but a soft target on the ground to be trampled?
Wes restrained Morrigan under a series of dreamform chains that slithered out of the floor and held her thrashing form among bowls of overturned potato chips and a lake of punch.
“She’ll kill you to get out of here,” Emery said. “She’ll hurt you.”
“She’ll kill me if you’re still standing here, so it doesn’t matter! Run!”
The screams of the students still came from the entry hall, so Emery bolted the other direction, for the broken windows that led to Fenhallow Woods. Morrigan yelled somewhere behind her.
She leaped through the window and crashed into the overgrown bushes at the back of the manor. Burrs and brambles caught on her hair and armor, opening cuts on her face. Pain jarred up her leg. Emery scrambled to her feet. The sides of the manor seemed so far away. There were no more nightmares swooping through the air, but the clouds still swirled overhead and the eerie green moonlight glowed through the trees.
Grandpa.
He would help. He had to help. Even after everything, he wouldn’t let Morrigan take her over, and he’d know what to do about Edgar. But she had to get down to campus first.
A window shattered behind her.
“I’m really going to enjoy having our body!”
Footsteps cracked dried leaves and twigs behind her. She stumbled around the side of the manor and felt the graze of fingertips on the back of her neck. Emery jerked forward. The knee of her wounded leg buckled, and she toppled sideways down the slope at the side of the manor, into the woods, where she grabbed a fallen tree branch and yanked herself up and kept running.
The ground dipped and lurched. Emery’s vision swam. She ducked between trees, crashed through foliage, and tried to double back on her own path to find the lights of Fenhallow Academy, but Morrigan’s foosteps never faded. She wanted to reach for her guns, wanted to shoot with abandon into the darkness behind her, but to fire another bullet would be to start tearing into her own subconscious.
A shape flashed between the trees. The form of a boy with a furred hood and the face of a fox. He disappeared a second later, but Emery knew the downed tree he’d stood beside, and she jackknifed that direction, sending Morrigan skidding through the underbrush behind her.
The students of Fenhallow had fed the Wilmark Fox well. It had gotten faster and more vicious since its arrival on campus, and as Emery sprinted headlong for it, its human eyes fixed on her behind its mask.
“Hey!” she yelled.
The Fox screamed.
Emery braced herself, dropped, and slid beneath the propped-up trunk of the downed tree just as the Fox braced a foot atop it and vaulted over. Morrigan let out a startled yell. Bodies collided and crashed into the underbrush, and Emery, her leg screaming with pain, pulled herself up again and wheeled around to run back uphill, back toward the manor.
Morrigan and the Fox tore through the forest floor, tangled together, clawing at each other with nails that gleamed in the green light. Emery left them behind. The Fox’s shrieks carried through the night air, growing more distant. Then closer. It was moving. The forest quaked. Her head pounded and her sense of the Dream faded in and out with the rhythm. A gap formed in the trees. Something big loomed up behind her, then disappeared. She spilled out of the woods and into the wide drive in front of the manor, where most of the school now stood, staring up at the sky.
They turned to her.
Wes shoved his way through the crowd, hammer in one hand, rounding the base of Eamon Ashworth’s statue. “Emery!”
Something dark flashed past him. He hissed and dropped his hammer. Dark hair swirled around his neck and shoulders, and his arms were drawn back and locked behind him. A pale hand and two sharp fingers pressed to his throat. Everyone around them went still, unmoving.
Morrigan’s face rose behind Wes’s shoulder.
Emery had already drawn her gun.
“You’ve got nothing left.” The words echoed in Emery’s mind, as if Morrigan was speaking directly into her head. “You have nothing to fight me with. You are the product of the scourge that has plagued the dreamforms for centuries. You don’t deserve that body.”
You killed Joel.
You hurt Edgar.
Emery couldn’t get the words out. Pressure ballooned out through every part of her, filling her throat, her head, her chest. The end of the revolver was still. Morrigan’s nails pierced Wes’s throat.
Wes mouthed, “Shoot her.”
Shoot it, Edgar.
Shoot it.
Shoot it.
The man appears. She shoots him. She screams.
A neat round hole in the forehead.
She squeezed the trigger.
The bullet leaving the chamber was like a scalpel slicing off part of her brain. Purple light streaked across the clearing. Fire swept through Emery’s skull. Morrigan screamed. Wes broke free of her grip and flung himself sideways. The side of Morrigan’s face leaked clouds of purple and azure. She screamed, stumbling backward. Emery raised her gun to shoot again, but the gun was gone from her hand, it was on the ground in front of her, her vision was splitting and her hand touched stone instead of metal.
Morrigan didn’t collapse, or wither, or turn to ash and float away on the air.
She gave a final wail, dissolved into cloudy essence, and returned to the Dream.
(Next time on The Children of Hypnos -------> sandman)
Emery moved as fast as she could, but the explosion had torn away the last of her adrenline and her leg ached with every step. Emery pulled out her phone and called Joel.
“Em?” He said, breathless. “Where are you?”
“On our way up to the manor.”
“This is—um—shit—this is freaking me out a little, gotta be honest.” More voices swelled over Joel’s drowning him out for a moment.
“We’re almost there. Is Edgar around?”
“Yeah, I just saw him in the crowd, but—uh—where did you say you were again?”
“Coming up the path in the woods.”
“Uh.”
“What is it?”
“I thought I just saw you, but it’s chaos here—”
Emery hung up.
The path through Fenhallow Woods was lit by the same lanterns that had led the way from the dorms, and green light filtered in through the trees overhead. For a terrifying moment Emery felt like she was back in Klaus’s dream, and the trees swam around her. She reached out for Wes, who put a hand between her shoulders and helped push her forward.
“Only a little farther,” he said. She wanted to hug him for not telling her to stop. He wasn’t doing amazing himself: his steps had gotten sluggish, his hair was matted to his forehead, and bags of exhaustion had formed under his eyes. Though he kept a tight grip on his hammer, it hung lower than usual.
The top of the statue of Eamon Ashworth was the first thing to crest the hill against the green sky. The dark forms of little bats flitted around it. The ground in front of the manor house had been gouged by claw marks and pools of acid; the manor itself stood beyond, lights blazing in its windows like fires inside a face. At the foot of the Fenhallow Manor entrance stood Marcia, wearing full armor and in combat with several green-eyed dogs, swinging a battle axe bigger than she was. The axe swept through all three dogs, cutting clean through them and spilling green blood across the ground. As the axe came around, it shrank to the size of Wes’s hammer.
More dreamhunters fought around the perimeter of the house, fending off bats and dogs and quill-beasts. Veronica Lash speared a porcupine through the stomach with her naginata and chucked it at a tightly-packed group of bats. Isaiah Howard fended off a drooling dog with his sword and shield as his brother Samuel appeared out of the shadows of the house and leaped onto the creature’s back, pinning it to the ground and driving his daggers through the base of its skull. A dark form appeared on the roof, two wicked silvery hammers flashing in her hands, swiping through bat after bat. Wes looked up at her, growling: “Ridley!”
“Is he awake?” Marcia yelled when she saw them approaching. Her axe stilled in the air, covered in glowing green acid blood.
“Yes!” Emery charged past her, up the manor steps. Students in costumes packed the entry hall and the twisted staircases. Emery shoved her way through, yelling for Edgar, but everywhere she looked there were only frightened faces and confusion, jostling limbs and reaching hands. She and Wes shoved their way through the doors of the ballroom, where even more students were still packed. The refreshments table in the corner had been upended. Two of the ballroom windows had been shattered, the glass scattered across the floor The students lined the outside of the room, staring at Emery and Wes as they walked in. Then staring just at Emery.
In the center of the room, Joel stood alone, still wearing his prince outfit. He held his hands out in front of himself, like he’d just lost something.
“Em,” he said, face pale, voice shaky, “he was right here, Em. She took him. She looked like you, but her hair was—and she just came up and grabbed him from me.”
Emery spun to Wes. “Did they give you DreamLess when they took you to the cells?”
“No. Uncle Ares thinks I’m like him and Marcia—he thinks I can’t dreamform.”
“Make a gateway.”
The eyes of the room fixed on Wes as he stepped forward. Klaus’s storm had pulled the Dream so close to the waking world that its pressure coalesced quickly in front of Wes. He drove his hammer forward into it; the hammer head disappeared through a shimmering veil in the air. Then he ripped it sideways.
The gateway formed in the middle of the Fenhallow ballroom, a perfect black at its swirling center, and on either side of it opened two very real, very large eyes, standing upward on their corners. They swiveled in their nonexistent sockets; their irises and pupils were the same pure black as Wes’s eyes. Several people gasped and pressed themselves closer to the walls and the people around them. Emery, ready to spring through the portal, hesitated. The eyes swiveled different directions to fix on her. The pressure of the Dream followed them, like the Dream itself was using Wes’s gateway to look at her.
She snarled at it, grabbed Wes’s hand, and charged through the portal.
~
Her window waited for them inside the Dream. They stepped through. Emery ignored the view of Moscow, the gently falling snow, the hedges that now rose on all sides, twisted and dark, monsters with gaping maws. She ignored her parents in the ballroom and Wes smashed open the door to the courtyard with his hammer. The entire door exploded into a flurry of snow. Here, too, the shrubs curled upward in dark shapes, curling together in high arches to create a corridor down the pathway. At the end of the path was the gazebo, and inside the gazebo, Morrigan stood holding Edgar’s neck and bending him over the inert form of his doppelgänger, propped up once again against the bench.
Edgar, tears streaming down his blotchy cheeks, saw Emery and Wes approaching and cried out.
Emery whipped out a Peacemaker and fired.
The bullet sheared through Morrigan's jaw. At Edgar's cry, she'd jerked her head to the side. Dream essence spilled through the wound. Before Emery could fire again, Morrigan had dropped Edgar and darted forward. She moved so fast, Emery didn't shoot at her for fear she'd miss; Morrigan's hand wrapped around her wrist and wrenched the Peacemaker away, and Morrigan threw her full weight forward.
They toppled to the ground. Emery grabbed at Morrigan's hair, yanking her head back. Morrigan's screams rattled the Dream around them, throbbing through Emery's head.
Then gold glinted at the corner of Emery's eye. Wes's hammer swung into Morrigan's side with a thick crunch. Morrigan flew sideways, Emery still in her grips. The two of them rolled across the stones and snow.
“Emery!” Edgar’s voice seemed distant, broken.
"Stay back!" She yelled, just as Morrigan jammed several fingers into her mouth and grabbed her jaw. Emery bit down; Morrigan's fingers were like ice, tasteless and cold. Morrigan whipped them back. Wes appeared over both of them, locking his arms around Morrigan's and heaving her up, giving Emery enough room to reach for her second Peacemaker.
They were too close together, and Wes was right above her. She couldn't angle the gun to shoot Morrigan without a good chance she'd shoot Wes, too.
But Edgar—Edgar stood in the gazebo. Watching. Scared. Edgar was free.
With as much movement as she could manage, Emery flung her gun up into the gazebo. It clattered at Edgar’s feet.
“Shoot it, Edgar!”
He picked up the revolver. Morrigan’s hands came down on Emery’s throat, squeezing. Emery latched onto her wrists and pulled her away.
“Edgar! Shoot yours! Shoot it!”
Edgar's doppelgänger slumped where it was, immobile. Morrigan threw herself back against Wes's hold, slamming her head into his nose. Blood spurted. His grip went slack enough that she ripped one of her arms free and slammed a right hook into Emery's jaw. Emery's head snapped sideways, the world turning white. When her vision returned, Wes had his arms around Morrigan once again, and had pulled her up enough that Emery could scramble out from under her. Morrigan kicked and screamed into the night.
“You’re killing yourself!” She screamed. “You’re killing yourself, you stupid little boy!”
Emery reared back and kicked Morrigan in the jaw, sending a lance of pain up her own thigh, but shutting Morrigan up long enough to yell again, “Do it, Edgar!”
A flash of blue light filled the air, but no sound to accompany it. The struggle stopped as they twisted toward the gazebo. Edgar stood with the Peacemaker raised toward his doppelgänger.
In the doppelgänger’s sandy forehead was a hole leaking Dream essence. As they watched, a darkness spread outward from the hole, blackening the body, causing it to shrivel and decay the way the Frankenstein nightmare had decayed when Grandpa Al killed it. Edgar’s doppelgänger shrank and shrank until it was nothing but black ash, and the breeze dusted it up into the air, swirling with the snow, off into the night.
The Peacemaker clattered to the floor of the gazebo.
Edgar collapsed.
And Morrigan let out a scream so piercing it shattered the Dream around them.
(Next time on The Children of Hypnos -------> Chaos)
Emery knew before they reached ground level that the storm had just begun. David had disappeared, and green light washed the front lobby of the administration building. The wailing that had begun before Emery went downstairs was now a blanket of screams, screeches, howls, and roars.
Klaus was out the front door first. Emery and Wes followed.
Jacqueline stood by David’s desk, looking pale. “I’ll stay here. I--I don’t think I’m going to be much help out there.”
“Call Joel,” Emery said. “See what’s happening at the manor, make sure they’re all safe. And--and see if they’ve seen Edgar!”
She didn’t have the mental capacity to fight Klaus’s nightmares right now, not when she had to save all the bullets she could for Morrigan, but Emery took out her Peacemaker anyway. Because when they went outside, the screams, screeches, howls, and roars slammed into them in a pandemonium.
Nightmares flooded the Fenhallow campus. Dogs with matted fur and fangs as long as Emery’s fingers; strange porcupine creatures with quills that dripped acid; the dark shapes of little bats dive-bombing out of the swirling clouds above. Then, moving between the buildings around the quad, shambling villagers holding torches and pitchforks, folds of their skin stitched together. All of them moved toward the administration building, where Klaus stood on the top step. Three focused spots of light danced at the bottom of the steps, holding off the tide: Lana with her bow and arrow and four claylike dreamform copies of herself stationed around her like statue gaurdians, each with their own bow and arrow, picking off the little bats before they could reach their targets; Ares Montgomery, slicing through nightmare animals and undead villagers with his two axes like a Viking warrior, dreamformless but fast and strong enough to make up for it; and Grandpa Al, who had created a barricade around the administration building steps that folded over and crunched down like teeth on any nightmare that got too close. His longsword was out, but he swung it only when something got too close to him.
Klaus rushed down the steps and vaulted the barricade. The scene paused as he moved, the nightmares freezing in place as they recognized his presence. Three arrows flew rapid-fire from Lana’s bow, exploding Dream essence across the quad; Ares beheaded a row of frozen villagers with one swing. When Klaus’s feet hit the ground, and time seemed to rush to catch up. The nightmares swung around and pelted toward him, snarling, biting, snapping—but Klaus disappeared from their midst.
And then, one by one, they began exploding.
A black shadow shot between the nightmares, carving off limbs, bursting stitches, skewering bodies. Dream essence filled the quad, funneling back to the three dreamkillers still at work like smoke pulled through a fan. More nightmares came where they other ones disappeared; they came from the sky, from the entrance to Fenhallow, from the dorms, even from behind the administration building. Klaus was awake but the nightmares weren’t stopping.
Emery and Wes ducked against the side of the building to avoid the constant stream of nightmares moving past. Lana was yelling something to Grandpa Al, and Ares yelled something else; lightning flashed overhead, and the ground shook.
Then it shook again.
And again.
And there, moving out from the shadow of Hothram Hall, was one of Klaus’s Frankenstein nightmares. It batted villagers out of its way and uprooted a small tree to use as a club. Its tiny glowing eyes fixed on Klaus, who had stilled near the statue of Iltani and Fabian. An arrow streaked through the air and pierced the nightmare’s shoulder, straight through the skin, holding its shivering purple form until the monstrosity clapped a hand over it and it shattered.
“This one’s stronger!” Lana yelled, pulling back another shot. Her four copies continued volleying arrows at the little bats in the air.
Ares came next, swinging his axes at the stitches below the monster’s knee as he charged past. They popped open, the skin splitting, the monster howling as its leg unravled in folds of flesh and it crashed onto its side. As it did, it swung the tree around, braches scraping the ground and nearly taking Ares off his feet. He threw himself out of the way, springing up just in time to parry a pitchfork from a villager.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
A roar echoed over the grounds as a second monstrosity, as big and ugly as the first, lumbered out from around the Crossing. The first monster roared back, and the second one, with a piece of rubble from Klaus’s dream in hand, reeled back and pitched straight for Klaus. Klaus darted out of the way and the boulder gouged a path through the quad; in the next moment, Klaus was standing on the monster’s shoulders just as Morrigan had, and he jammed both his black claws into the glowing tube connected to its head.
The vile glowing liquid running through the tube spilled over Klaus and the villagers standing below. Klaus seemed to have no reaction to it, but the villagers let out pealing screams as their flesh melted away and their bodies collapsed. The monstrosity gurgled, acid dripping from its mouth and down the long strings of flesh that connected its teeth to its jaws. It fell slowly, but its massive body hit the ground with a violent rumble. Klaus remained perched atop it the whole time, stepping back along the thick mounds of its shoulders to stay upright.
The other monstrosity gave out a deep bellow and began to drag itself forward on its one good leg, but it came face-to-face with Grandpa Al. He’d cut his way through the throng, and as he drew level with the huge nightmare, the sword at his side began to glow with a blinding white light. The nightmare roared at him, but he continued forward, and as the creature raised the tree up over its head, Grandpa Al slid forward and thrust the sword up through its jaw in one smooth movement.
White light radiated from inside the nightmare’s head. Its body slumped, the tree falling from its hand. The light burned away the green inside its eye sockets, then the eye sockets themselves, then the gaping hole of its mouth. The skin peeled back and blackened, the green acid drying up, the limbs withering like an animal decaying in real time. The other nightmares around it spooked and scattered. Grandpa Al remained where he was, letting the monster fold in on itself until it was a husk on the ground, a carcass of a creature baked in the sun and picked at by scavengers. Only then did he tear his sword out through the front of its skull, and instead of bursting into a cloud of Dream essence, the nightmare collapsed into a cloud of ash and immediately scattered into the wind.
On the other side of the quad, Klaus stumbled, gripping his head. Several nightmares set upon him until Lana picked them off with arrows.
Emery had never seen a dream killed before. She knew in theory what it did, and she’d seen videos of it, but watching it in real life came with the added feeling of part of the Dream withering away with it. Then the aftereffect of the Dream recoiling in anger at having a piece of itself severed. The clouds churned overhead, thickening, covering the green moon until it became dusk on campus again. Lightning flashed deep in the cloud cover, coalescing in the center where the moon had once been. It arced out underneath, and the wind picked up, and the nightmares stilled once again, shivering, as if blasted by freezing air.
Long, ghost-white strands descended from the clouds. Emery felt the Dream grip her mind and rattle it, and for a moment she could do nothing but stare upward as a woman in a white dress floated down to the center of campus. She was huge, bigger than even the Frankenstein nightmares, and as ethereal as the moon. Pale hair floated with her dress, not like a doppelgänger’s, like she was underwater, but like a curtain in front of a window. Like she was insubstantial enough to blow away on a breeze. The Witch of the Wood turned her glowing eyes on Klaus, and her mouth opened and she spoke words without sound. Klaus looked up from where he kneeled, expression horrified.
Grandpa Al moved forward, his sword still shining with its killing light.
“No!” Klaus screamed, leaping to his feet and sprinting for the Witch, for Grandpa Al. “Not her! Don’t take her from me!”
Lana and Ares had already redirected their attentions; arrows pelted the Witch, turning her left side into a pincushion, and Ares’ axes sailed through the air, one burying itself in the Witch’s right hip, the other in her neck. Then they burst into Dream essence and shot back to Ares’s hands, where they reformed so he could throw them again. Before Grandpa Al could reach her, Klaus created a dreamform below himself, a clay block, to launch himself up into the folds of the Witch’s dress. He climbed up the fabric like a spider, a spot of black in the white. The Witch twisted, trying to find him and avoid the arrows and axes needling into her, but Klaus was too fast; he swung himself onto her shoulders and disappeared under her hair.
She twitched. Her body went rigid. Her head cricked sideways suddenly and with force, and she let out a long, low moan. The light in her eyes dimmed. She began to shrink, gliding like a feather to the ground; when she was too small, Klaus fell from her shoulders and landed, rolling to scoop her up in his arms. Her ethereal glow faded, her dress turning back to worn rags, her hair matted with dirt and grease. Klaus cradled her to his chest, hunched over her, his arms and shoulders and spine bursting with black quills. He let out a wrenching sob.
Then she exploded.
It was worse than the Frankenstein nightmares, worse than the whale. A detonation that exploded outward with such force Emery didn’t even have a chance to close her eyes. Dream-essence filled her ears, her mouth, even burrowed its way through her pores. Dream windows flipped by at an alarming speed as if she was flying through No Man’s Land. She felt a hand on hers, gripping hard. She squeezed back.
Gaps appeared in the rushing cloud. Stonework. A quote engraved in metal. A bush. Steps. The sky overhead, still roiling green. Emery gasped in air as her head surfaced. The remains of the Witch’s essence funneled into her and Wes, hands still clasped together, and into Lana and Ares and Grandpa Al. Into Klaus, too; the place where he’d been was a maelstrom of green and purple, flashing light and rushing air. It slowed and revealed him, sprawled on the ground.
There were still nightmares, but many of them tottered in place, dazed by the blast.
Emery squeezed Wes’s hand again. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, though he’d broken out in a sweat and panted for air.
“We have to move. We can’t stay here—once they clear out those nightmares, they’re going to lock us up again. I’ve only got two bullets, Morrigan is still out there, and Edgar’s at the manor. I think. I hope.”
“Then let’s go,” Wes said.
They stuck close to the side of the administration building as they made their way around. More nightmares passed by them, nightmares that had been drawn by the explosion but not affected by it, far enough away that Wes and Emery weren’t perceived as a threat. They rounded the building’s back corner and nearly tripped over the emaciated form of one of the nightmare dogs. It whipped around, snapping at Emery’s knees; Wes yanked her out of the way and brought his hammer down on the dog’s head. It exploded into a dream cloud before it could splatter across the ground, and their armor soaked it up.
The nightmares were fewer across the sports fields, but the green clouds still swirled overhead, flashing with lightning, and the dark forms of the little bats flitted around the tops of the trees in Fenhallow Woods. Distant screams came from the direction of the manor.
Emery started to run.
(Next time on The Children of Hypnos -------> Nothing Good)
A funnel cloud turned over Fenhallow Academy. Lightning flashed in its depths, bright but silent. The eye at its center sat directly above the statue of Iltani and Fabian Fenhallow, and through it the green moon looked down, casting a sickly spotlight on the quad.
Emery spilled out of the conference room window, tumbled through the bushes, and scrambled up to hobble around the building. The moonlight and the lightning had turned the campus nearly as bright as day, yet there was no one around; they were all at the manor for Fenhalloween. The Dream pressed down all around her, raising her hairs, but she couldn’t sense any nightmares.
Yet.
She needed to get to the Underground. That was where Wes was, that was probably where they’d taken Jacqueline, and Klaus was definitely still there, falling asleep. Morrigan would have to wait, and Emery would have to trust that Grandpa Al would keep Edgar safe. If Klaus’s nightmares broke out, the whole campus was in trouble.
She needed to warn someone who wouldn’t just lock her up again. She needed keys. And she needed waking water.
The answer, as always, was Lana. The Sleep Research Center, though mostly empty, was still open this time of night, the lights in the lobby on but the hallways mostly dark. Lana generally didn’t do Fenhalloween; she didn’t do anything unless it was research related. Emery hurried down to Lana’s office and pounded on the door.
“Whoa, whoa,” Lana’s voice, slower than normal, came from inside. “Come in, the door’s unlocked. Unless this is some kind of Halloween prank, and then go away, cretin.”
Emery threw the door open. Lana sat at her desk, cheeks red, cradling a tumbler. Sarah Stainer joined her, sprawled in one of Lana’s stiff office chairs, with another tumbler. An empty bottle of tequila and a half-full bottle of Goldschläger sat on the table between them.
“Hey, Emery Ashworth,” Stainer slurred, raising her glass. “Look, this stuff has little gold flakes. I mean, I knew it had little gold flakes, that’s the whole point, right, but I never actually drank it before. Love it. Amazing. Truly the drink of champions.”
Emery ignored her. “Lana, have you looked outside?”
Lana frowned into the vague distance. “No. Why?”
“I think Klaus is falling asleep.”
Stainer hiccupped. “Klaus? Like Klaus Warwick? I haven’t seen that guy in years—is he here? I thought he was dead.”
Lana focused on Emery. “Why do you say that?”
“Come outside with me.”
Lana and Stainer both followed her back outside. There were still no nightmares, but Lana’s face went paler than Emery had ever seen it.
“Hypnos, you evil bastard,” Stainer said, looking ill.
Lana turned around and went right back inside the research center.
Emery chased on her heels. “He is falling asleep, right? We need to go down to the Underground and wake him up.”
“He’s not falling asleep. He’s already there,” Lana said, voice back to its quick sober clip. “We need waking water. He’ll be asleep for a long time without it. When did this start? Did the clouds move in or did they form over the campus? Have you noticed any nightmares yet?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, and not that I’ve seen.” Emery ducked after Lana into one of the labs. “How did this happen? I thought he was being given waking water?”
Lana dialed open a lock on a safe inside one of the cabinets and removed Klaus’s own supplies; a small pouch of sand, a burner, a cup, and his vials and droppers. As she sorted through it, her expression twisted into disgust. “Ares Montgomery. He thought the best way to get Klaus to talk was to withhold his drugs for as long as possible. Well, guess what—when you wait till the last minute to do the thing, and something else comes up that you have to handle, you might forget to do the thing.” This time, instead of putting it in the dropper, she handed Emery the whole vial. Then she pulled the keys off the arm of her chair and shoved them at Emery. “Here. You can get down there faster than I can, and they’re going to need me up here for this nightmare-palooza that’s about to happen.”
Emery held the vial carefully so her own shaking wouldn’t make her drop it. If Lana thought something was imminent, it probably was.
They hurried back outside. Stainer was still staring up at the sky. She turned and saw them approaching.
“I puked in the bushes,” she called.
“Get inside!” Lana yelled back. “We don’t know when these nightmares are going to start showing up, and if you’re stumbling around drunk, you’re going to be—”
A dark shape darted out of the sky. Emery’s hand shot to her gun, Stainer’s name forming on her lips, when a streak of purple light shot past her. The beam streaked past Stainer’s head and speared the small form—one of Klaus’s poison bats—out of the air. It sailed a few feet before exploding back into Dream essence and swirling toward Lana. Stainer blinked, eyes wide; Lana, with a gold-and-silver bow in one hand, scanned the sky.
“Get inside, Sarah,” she said again, and Stainer hustled back into the research center.
Lana drew back the bowstring. As she did, a shivering arrow of purple light formed there, nocked and ready.
“They’re coming,” she said. “Wake Klaus up and alert as many of the hunters on campus as you can. The nightmares will focus on the center of campus because Klaus is in the Underground, but that doesn’t mean a few won’t straggle off.”
Emery was already running for the administration building. With the vial of waking water cupped carefully in one hand, she fished her phone out of her pocket with the other and found Joel in her contacts.
He picked up on the third ring.
“Em! Are you coming up? You seriously should, everyone is here. Well, not everyone—Jacqueline never came, and Lewis and Kris were here, but they left a while ago and I haven’t seen them since—”
“Is Marcia there?”
Joel paused. “Uh, yeah—yeah, she’s guarding the snack table. Why?”
“Something real bad is about to happen, Jojo, okay? Tell Marcia that Klaus fell asleep, and there’s a big-ass Dream cloud over the campus right now. Lana just shot one of his nightmares out of the air.”
“Oh—oh, damn, okay, I’m going now. I’m going.”
Emery heard him moving on the other end, the babble of voices surging around him. She glanced up at the sky as she hurried up the long, quote-etched steps of the administration building, her leg twinging all the way.
“Tell her I got water and keys from Lana and I’m going to the Underground right now.”
“Got it, got it—Ms. Montgomery! Emery’s on the phone and—”
Emery hung up and barreled through the front doors of the administration building, nearly flattening David the Receptionist, who was standing with his nose pressed to the doors, frowning outside.
“Tell everyone there’s a storm!” Emery said to him. “Does everyone here know? The campus is about to be swamped with nightmares!”
David’s mouth flopped open and closed. He said, “There’s really no one here right now—just the dean—”
“GRANDPA!” Emery yelled up the stairs. “KLAUS FELL ASLEEP, GRANDPA!”
Then she turned back to David. “Where’s Edgar?”
“He—he uh—I was watching him, but he kind of—”
“David, where the hell is my brother?”
“I think he went up to the party. He said, uh, he said Joel was there?”
Emery resisted the urge to throw one of her Peacemakers across the room. Trust Edgar to be unable to stay in one spot. Joel hadn’t mentioned him. He would have said something if Edgar had found him. He would have done something.
She looked at the vial. Then outside, where a strange and distant wailing had begun.
“Shit,” she said. “Shit, shit. Tell my grandpa to find Edgar!”
Then she jammed her hand on the down button for the elevator, praying to Hypnos she wasn’t making the wrong choice.
~
The Fenhallow Underground was as seemingly empty as before. Only adrenaline kept Emery moving as fast as she was, especially down the staircases, though by the time she reached the bottom near the cells, her thigh felt like a lump of twisted, throbbing muscle tissue. Lana’s keys got her through the door, but Marcia had let them into Klaus's cell before with a retinal scanner. As she stalked down the row of cells, she checked the doors. Each one had a retinal scanner and a keypad below it. And below that, a scanner like there had been on the doors, for the ID cards.
She tried every door. There were twenty-five in all, all the way down the straight white hallway, and every single on led to a small cell identical to Klaus's. The check was quick; scan the card, open, look inside. One after another they were empty, and she left the doors standing open.
In the fifteeth cell she found Jacqueline sitting on a cot, her back to the wall. In the rhythm, Emery almost left the door standing open and moved on. Jacqueline sprang off the bed. "Emery!"
“Really no time to talk,” Emery said, moving into the room to undo the latch on the Plexiglas door. It was a simple mechanism, but with no way to reach it from the other side, impossible to get past. “I can’t believe they put you down here.”
“I can,” Jacqueline snapped. “And look at this!” She pulled her hair back and pointed to a puncture on her neck. “DreamLess—so I can’t make gateways. Disgusting.”
“We’ll have to deal with this later. They have no proof that you actually made a gateway beyond what Kris and Lewis said. We’ll tell them Wes made it and you just came along, and then all the blame will be on us.” Emery was already walking back out the door. Jacqueline followed. “Do you know which one of these Wes is in?”
“They brought Wes down here?”
“My grandpa lost his damn mind.”
“I could have told you that.”
They kept checking cells. Empty, empty, empty, empty. They reached cell twenty-one and Emery kicked the door open in her frustration.
Ares filled most of the room. Wes filled the rest, on the opposite side of the Plexiglas. He saw them first. Ares turned.
“What—”
“Klaus fell asleep!” Emery said. “There’s a storm outside, and Lana needs help!”
Ares paused for only a second, his eyes trailing upward, like he was listening for a sound. He snarled when he felt it. The Dream pressing down on them, tangible even so far underground. He cursed.
“Wake up the Sandman and get him upstairs!” Ares was already past them and out the door, pulling the axes from the tattoos on his arms.
While Emery opened the Plexiglas door, Wes said, “He wouldn’t have left us alone if it wasn’t really an emergency.”
“Yeah,” Emery said.
They hurried to the farthest cell at the end. When Emery opened it, it was pitch black inside, and as they entered, the lights came up.
Klaus sprawled across the floor, dead asleep but not peaceful. His goggles dug into his jaw and his greasy hair fell across his face. His breathing was quick, shallow; his eyes darted beneath his eyelids.
“Get him onto his back so I can put this in his eyes,” Emery said. Wes and Jacqueline rolled Klaus over while Emery carefully unstoppered the vial. She kneeled by Klaus’s head, brushed the last strands of his hair back, and peeled open one of his eyes. His irises made a pale band of green around blown-out pupils.
Emery poured half the vial into one eye. As soon as the waking water spread, Klaus’s pupil constricted to a small black pinpoint. She did the same with the other eye.
Klaus didn’t move for several long moments, though his eyes didn’t close. He stared straight up into the light. His breathing slowed. His fingers twitched against the floor.
“Klaus?” Emery said. “Klaus, your nightmares are attacking the school.”
Klaus sat up all at once, forcing the three of them to fall backward. Black armor bubbled out over his clothes, over his skin, leaving only his head uncovered. His hands became black claws. Black quills formed up his arms and over his shoulders, across his shoulder blades and down his spine. He stared at the spot where the wall met the floor.
“Klaus?” Emery reached out for him.
“Don’t touch,” Klaus said, his voice low and rough.
Then he stood as if pulled by puppet strings, swinging upward by his heels and lighting on his feet. A deep breath straightened his shoulders and brought some of the life back to his eyes. He looked at his claws, at the door, at them. Worry creased his brows.
“Oh no,” he said.
(Next time on The Children of Hypnos -------> Straight-Up Fighting)
The Sandman repeats it aloud to keep himself awake. They haven’t brought him waking water in far too long. Only Ares comes to see him now, and Ares only brings pain. No more metal slivers shoved under his fingernails—he’s mentally unstable enough now that Ares can step into and out of his dream at will—but the pain of intruders in his head, tearing into parts of him. It hurts, it hurts.
Others have said sleeping stops the pain. He has heard it lets you drift off for a while, untethered. The Sandman has never been untethered. He had nightmares as a child that never really went away; they were only held off by his dreamhunter need to stay awake. And when he did have to sleep, the nurses had to give him twice the normal dose of sleeping sand, lest his nightmares claw their way out of him.
Maybe it will be different this time. Maybe this time he can meet sweet darkness and silence.
He forces his eyes open. He is still on the floor of his cell, cheek pressed to the stone no longer cool to the touch. He can’t stand. When he tries, his joints give out. There will be no darkness, no silence, if he falls asleep. There will be a mob of villagers, a castle on a hill, and the Witch of the Wood.
His eyelids begin to droop. Almost reflexively, his thumbnail digs into the side of his index finger until he breaks skin and bleeds. He snaps awake again.
It will not be restful. It will not be good.
They haven’t given him DreamLess in some time, either, but he can’t focus long enough now to create dreamforms. He would need his waking water for that. He thought he heard footsteps earlier; he thought they were bringing him some, to wake him up, to make sure the tide of his nightmares doesn’t come to campus. But the footsteps faded and then he wondered if, out of desperation, his mind hadn’t resorted to hallucinations in an attempt to keep him awake.
He can’t fall asleep. His nightmares are too dangerous and too many.
But three years of consciousness now seems like three centuries. The time stretches out behind him like an endless twisting road, and he’s finally reached the end.
He can stop now.
He can sleep.
You can’t, he reminds himself kindly. He always tries to be kind with himself; he’s one of the few people who is. You can’t fall asleep.
Blood bubbled under the pressure of Emery’s hand against her thigh. The faster she hobbled, the faster it came out, and she felt herself getting light-headed from the pain by the time Booling Hall came into view around the corner.
Like all the other dorms, it was empty. The lights were on, but no one was home.
“He’s not going to be in there,” Jacqueline said, striding ahead of Emery. “He’s going to be up at the manor, with everyone else.”
“No he’s not. He wouldn’t have gone there without me. He’ll be…he’ll be pouting in his room.”
“You need a doctor.” Wes’s hand found Emery’s shoulder. She shrugged him off. “You’re bleeding out.”
“I’m still walking.”
She was damn near jogging, but if she lost too much blood, she wouldn’t be able to do anything.
“She stabbed you with her fingers,” Jacqueline snapped. “That’s disgusting. And impossible, and—ugh.”
Emery pushed her way into Booling. She hobbled to the elevator instead of the stairs and jammed her fist down on the button for the fourth floor. Wes and Jacqueline stood by the door, arms crossed. Jacqueline looked worried. Wes looked pissed. Emery wanted to shoot the elevator controls to make it stop pinging.
“I should have shot her,” she said. “I should have shot her.”
Neither of them said anything.
The fourth floor was quiet. Even the denmother was out. All the doors were shut and locked, all the lights off inside the rooms. Nothing had been disturbed, at least—there was no destruction. Emery jogged to Edgar’s door and pounded on it.
“Edgar!”
“He’s not in there,” Jacqueline said.
“Edgar, open the door!”
Wes caught Emery’s wrist. “He’s not here.”
Emery tore her arm away from him and shoved past him, back to the elevator. “Then he’s at the manor.”
“You need to tell the dean what’s happening, and then you need to go to the clinic,” Wes said. “We’ll go to the manor to find Edgar.”
“Do you really think a doppelgänger is going to make it past all those people at the party without them noticing her?” Jacqueline said. “With that hair? There’ll be hysteria. She won’t get anywhere near him.”
Emery swallowed her panic and hit the first floor button on the elevator. Wes and Jacqueline piled in with her once again.
“What if he’s not at the party, though?” she said. “What if he went somewhere else on campus? What if Morrigan finds him, and he’s alone? She moved so fast, he’d never be able to run from her, and he doesn’t even have a weapon to defend himself—”
“Em.” Wes’s voice was low and soothing; his eyes fixed on hers, hypnotic in their absolute blackness. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll find Edgar. We’ll get the campus locked down. She was strong enough to get out, but she’s not that strong yet. And we’ll get your grandfather—he’ll be able to help.”
“We aren’t supposed to tell him.”
The doors slid open. Jacqueline made a small squeak and said, “I think it’s too late for that.”
Grandpa Al swept through Booling’s front doors, followed closely by Ares Montgomery, Lewis, and Kris.
And, peeking out from behind Lewis’s legs, Edgar.
“Edgar!” Emery collapsed to her knees in relief. Wes and Jacqueline both reached out for her at the same time, but she waved them off.
Grandpa Al strode forward, looked her over once, then swept a hand through the air. The ground beneath her bubbled upward, pushing her to her feet. Edgar moved out from behind Lewis and started toward her, but Grandpa Al held a hand out to stop him.
“Grandpa—”
“Enough, Emery,” he said. “Can you walk?”
“I—yes—but—”
“Ares, take Ms. Fenhallow, please. She has violated State law.”
“Wait, what?” Jacqueline did her best look of surprise, but it couldn’t wipe the scent of the Dream off of her. “I didn’t do anything!”
Grandpa Al’s eyebrows rose. “Interesting. Your friends had quite the story about opening Dream gateways.”
Lewis and Kris, faces bright red, shrank back into each other even before wrath swept through Jacqueline’s features.
“We were worried!” Kris said. “You didn’t tell us you were going to try tonight, and when you didn’t show up at the manor, we thought—we thought you’d go in and something terrible would happen!”
“We were going to go in without you anyway!” Jacqueline snapped. Ares rounded her up and led her to the door. “Traitors! All you had to do was keep your mouths shut!”
Her yelling cut off as the doors shut behind them.
“Edgar also came and got me,” Grandpa Al said. He came from your room not ten minutes ago and said you planned to go into the Dream to find your doppelgänger. On our way, we saw you heading in here.”
Only ten minutes? It had seemed like so much longer inside the Dream. Emery glanced at Edgar. He stared at the floor.
He was okay. He was here.
“Grandpa, I can explain everything,” Emery said. “We—I need help.”
“Both of you will come with me back to the administration building.” The thing that had formed behind Emery to push her up now pushed her toward the door, with Wes beside her.
“Mr. Kowalski, Ms. Arevalo, you can return to the party,” Grandpa Al said. “And I would appreciate it if you don’t speak of this to your classmates.”
Lewis and Kris hurried away, pale-faced, into the night.
“Grandpa—” Emery said again.
Grandpa Al’s eyes disappeared behind the light glaring off his glasses.
“Enough,” he said again, and it felt like a hammerfall. “You and Wesley are suspended and under investigation for unsurpervised doppelgänger hunting activities. Starting now.”
~
Grandpa Al left Edgar with David the Receptionist inside the administration building before he took Emery to a conference room in the back of the building, where a nurse already waited with antiseptics and bandages, and locked Emery inside. She got a final glimpse of Wes’s face before the door closed; it was too quick a look to know if he was trying to tell her not to talk at all, or to tell them everything she knew.
Emery let her armor dissolve so the nurse could work on her leg. She hadn’t dissolved her holsters, so her Peacemakers still rested at her hips, but she only had two shots left. Her head ached like she’d been knocked in the temple with a brick. What focus she had she kept on the window by the table, scanning the sports fields and the path up through Fenhallow Woods, expecting Morrigan to appear there in a cloud of black hair. The trees of the woods shivered in the wind, and it took Emery a moment to realize that she could see the outline of the tops of the trees against the sky. The sky—which had previously been pitch black—had lightened enough to make out the shape of the woods.
“What time is it?” Emery asked.
The nurse looked at her watch. “Almost nine PM.”
Fenhalloween was just starting. They were nowhere near morning.
The nurse left when Ares arrived. He shouldered his way into the room, locking the door behind him, and sat down next to Emery at the long conference table.
He sighed, motioned to her leg, and said, “Bet it hurt when she did that.”
Emery remained very still. “No one did this to me. In Klaus’s dream, there was a nightmare that destroyed a staircase. Lots of debris.”
“A staircase was destroyed and you received only one small puncture wound, and nothing else?”
“It was a dream staircase,” Emery said. “It was weird.”
Ares made a noise and folded his arms across his chest. He’d been in Klaus’s dream—at least, he had if Morrigan had told the truth—he would know the staircase wasn’t like that. His tattoos rippled across his muscles. “Interesting. Emery, I’d like you to tell me your story again. From the beginning, starting from when you were assigned to search for the Sandman. Leave no details out, please.”
She did, but slowly, carefully, trying to remember exactly how she’d told him the story the first time he’d asked. He had to remember it; making her tell it again would reveal the chinks in her armor. And if he found any while he listened, she couldn’t read them on his face. He looked only politely interested, her sentences punctuated by his noises of encouragement.
“We went back to Klaus’s dream to find out more. We told the dean we wanted to. We were given a mission and we wanted to complete it.”
“Your mission was to find the Sandman, not to discover his intentions,” Ares said. “And besides that, you employed a non-dreamhunter to assist you on a mission into the Dream. Not only is that against State law, you also enabled a dreamseeker to exercise their power. Are you aware that that is also against the law?”
Emery felt the back of her neck heat up. “Why, though? She can open gateways and she’s not affected by the Dream’s pressure—why wouldn’t you want to use that asset?”
“There’s a long history between dreamhunters and dreamseekers. All you need to know right now is that those who do not fear the Dream will use it to their advantage. Our lives are given in service to others—we protect ourselves where and when we can.
“Your friends—and Edgar—seemed utterly convinced you were going after your doppelgänger. They said you’d been practicing opening gateways. Why would the three of them be so utterly convinced of what you’d done if you were only continuing reconnaissance on the Sandman?”
“They misheard us. We were speaking in hypotheticals—what we would do if our doppelgängers showed up. None of us are in our Insanity Primes yet—we’re too young to have doppelgängers.”
“I’ve seen younger,” Ares said. “And I’ve seen headstrong students like yourself dive into the Dream headfirst to kill their doppelgängers before they’re strong enough to really fight back. They think it’ll be easier. They think they’ll have an advantage. But the reality is that when we come face-to-face with ourselves, there is no advantage that makes it easy to kill. The most you can hope for is that they attack you, viciously and without mercy, so you have no choice but to fight back.”
Emery met his stare with her own. She said, “I don’t have a doppelgänger.”
A knock came at the door. Ares answered it. Grandpa Al waited on the other side. Something unspoken passed between them, and Grandpa Al said, “May I have a moment with Emery, please?”
Ares stepped out of the room. Grandpa Al stepped in. He locked the door again.
Emery was already out of her chair, the blood pounding in her ears and in her leg. “Grandpa. Where’s Edgar? Is he still with David?”
“Edgar is fine.”
“No, he’s—” She glanced at the door and lowered her voice. “I think he’s in danger.”
“In danger from what?”
“My—my, uh—” She couldn’t even force the word out. Not when it meant Morrigan, not when it was a direct admission. Tears prickled the corners of her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. “Grandpa, I think something has been wrong for a long time. I—I lied to you. While we were looking for the Sandman—for Klaus—I found out that he was following us. Following me. There was a picture of my—my doppelgänger in his dream. He’d been following me because he saw her and didn’t know why she was active so early. Then we found her, and she said we were supposed to be together, as a whole, that to kill her wasn’t the best way, and she wanted us to bring her Edgar so that she could merge him with his doppelgänger, and then she stabbed me so she could escape the Dream, and—”
Grandpa Al held up a hand. Emery cut off, breath held, unsure why such a common gesture from him felt like such a punch to the gut. Then, a moment later, she realized the reason:
He wasn’t surprised.
Nothing had changed when she’d said the word. He didn’t look shocked, or scared, or upset. He lowered his hand and removed his glasses to clean them with the small cloth he kept in his pocket. When he put them back on, the reflection of the fluorescent lights hid his eyes.
“You knew,” Emery breathed. “You knew my doppelgänger was active.”
Another long pause. No denial. Disbelief hollowed Emery’s stomach.
“We knew Mr. Warwick was looking into the overthrow of the previous dreamseeker administration of the Hypnos State. We knew he was trying to track down doppelgängers to better understand what the dreamseekers had allegedly discovered about them.” Grandpa Al paused once more. “We knew he’d seen your doppelgänger, and was following you.
“You and Wesley were assigned to find the Sandman because we knew he would come to you. While the two of you looked around the city, we had several teams following in your wake, hoping to catch him in the act.”
“You—you used me as bait?”
“The State does what it must to neutralize threats.”
“You knew my doppelgänger was active and you used me as bait to catch the guy trying to save me.”
“He wasn’t trying to save you, Emery. His only interest is in a utopian dream where we can live without fear. Dreams like that can be more dangerous than any nightmare, because they can’t come true. Believing they can makes us lower our guards.”
Emery felt like her insides were shaking apart one piece at a time. “You’re so sure? Records have been wiped out because the entire Hypnos State believes the dreamseekers were lying about there being a better way to deal with doppelgängers? What they proposed would have saved more of us, and no one even wants to look into it?”
Grandpa Al’s eyebrows twitched, forrowing into a frown for only a second before smoothing back out again. “We are looking into it, Em. But I don’t think you understand how vicious doppelgängers can be.”
“What?” Emery jabbed a finger at her leg. “I don’t understand? I get it, Grandpa, cause that’s all I’ve ever heard. ‘Doppelgängers are vicious, doppelgängers will do whatever they have to do to stay alive’—that was all anyone ever taught us! And then you think it’s okay to use me as bait—” Her voice caught in her throat. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why would you let me run around the city thinking I was okay when I wasn’t? Do you know why it’s active so early?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Are you trying to figure it out?”
Pause.
Anger rushed in Emery’s ears.
“Well, now you know she’s coming after Edgar!” She bit back on the words, stopping herself from all-out yelling. “So serve me my termination papers or whatever so I can kill her before she gets to him!”
Grandpa Al’s voice didn’t raise at all. “You’ll stay here for now, Em. Edgar will be fine. I’ll send Ares back up.”
Back up? They were on the first floor—the only place to come up from was—
“Did—did you take Wes to the Underground?” If Emery’s stomach could have sunk any lower, it would have. Grandpa Al was already striding out the door, closing and locking it before she could reach him. “You took Wes to the Underground? Did you take Jacqueline there, too? Because we tried to do the right thing?” She beat on the door, yelling now, not caring who was listening.
They’d all known this whole time. It wasn’t any kind of stealth that had kept her from being served her termination papers.
Emery screamed at the door and kicked it with her bad leg, which sent a shock of pain racing up her spine. She didn’t care what he said about Edgar being fine—she had to find a way out of here. She had to get Wes and get Edgar—though she wasn’t sure yet in what order—then find Morrigan. She hurried to the window, throwing open the latch and peering outside. The bushes below were thick, but she could climb out. The problem would be avoiding Grandpa Al so he didn’t just grab her and put her back inside again.
Lightning flashed. Emery looked up.
A thick and rolling layer of clouds blanketed the sky above Fenhallow Academy, turning slowly in a wide arc. A sickly green light washed over the sports fields and the woods, and a sense settled over Emery like ozone before a storm, raising the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck.
It wasn’t ozone. Far away, past the edge of the clouds over Fenhallow woods, was the small white sliver of the waning moon. And when gap appeared in the middle of the clouds, there loomed a second moon over the campus, huge and green and bathing the grounds in its light.
The Dream crept over Fenhallow Academy.
“Klaus,” Emery breathed, and lunged for the window.
(Next time on The Children of Hypnos -------> !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SANDMAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
Emery patted Wes’s chest and stomach, checking for holes in his armor. He frowned at her, then down at himself, then said, “No, I don’t feel anything anywhere. I should be fine.”
Emery spun him around to check his back. Clean, no punctures in the armor. Her heart thumped her ribs, the blood rushing through her ears. She kept one eye on Morrigan, who watched with impatience from afar.
“I don’t think we should go with her,” Wes whispered when he turned around again.
“Neither do I,” Emery said, “but I have to know what she means about Edgar.”
Jacqueline appeared beside them. “Can we go, please? Quickly? I’m over this place, and Emery, I am done with your freaky-haired doppelgänger.”
“I’ve only got two shots left,” Emery said. “So you both know.”
She’d already started focusing on her dream-window, pulling it close to her. It took longer this time, either because she was tired or because it had to reform after they’d gotten spit out of it before. Morrigan watched her closely. Emery reached out for Wes and Jacqueline when she felt the tickle of the window at her back, and she pulled both of them through it with her.
Once again they stood on the snow-covered field before the long grounds of the palace, Moscow twinkling in the night, too far to ever reach. Morrigan appeared behind them a moment later. The moment she stepped inside, Emery’s sense of her disappeared against the backdrop of the dream, like camouflage. Morrigan started toward the palace.
“If she attacks,” Emery said under her breath to Wes, “get out of the way.”
His hands choked up on his hammer.
Morrigan led them past the tall shrubs, between Grandpa Al and Edgar standing watch over the front doors, and into the entry hall. The pictures here were the same; seemingly endless portraits of Emery missing parts of her face. Morrigan didn’t stop to look. She walked fast enough that her hair trailed behind her in one long black smokelike stream. Emery kept her hand on her Peacemaker wondering if Morrigan knew how many times Edgar had made her practice the quick draw.
She probably did. Doppelgängers were supposed to have shared memories with their dreamhunters dating back until the time the doppelgänger became active, when it split from its hunter. Morrigan had only said she’d been active for a while—surely that couldn’t have meant years.
There was a wriggling voice in the back of Emery’s head that said to shoot Morrigan now. It would be easy; just aim at the center of all that hair and pull the trigger. Screw the war. Forget what Morrigan had said about talking to other doppelgängers, about both of them being able to live. Solving the mystery wasn’t worth the risk.
But Edgar was. Keeping Edgar safe was worth trouble with a doppelgänger.
It was worth a whole Insanity Prime.
Morrigan swept through the doors into the ballroom. The guns of the columns were raised to the ceiling, the chandelier hung back in place. Emery’s parents swayed beneath it again.
Morrigan didn’t go to them. She hugged the left hand wall and walked along the tall windows, stopping before one that turned out not to be a window at all, but a door. It led into the courtyard outside. Emery paused before following her through; she’d previously thought the courtyard to be an unreachable area of the dream, like Moscow. But there it was, large enough to be the back yard of a house in the suburbs of the Sleeping City, lined with more tall shrubs. A layer of snow coated everything. Morrigan was already starting down a stone path that wound through the greenery, her floating hair disappearing around the corner.
Emery took off after her. Morrigan kept a steady pace to the far end of the courtyard, where a white gazebo stood amidst a curving arm of bright red poppies. The poppies were the only things not covered by snow. They climbed the gazebo steps. A long wooden bench lined the interior, and shrouded in shadow at the far back was a small figure.
Emery froze.
“What the hell.”
Morrigan spun, hands up. “It’s not what you think. Just hold on.”
Emery already had her gun up, pointed at Morrigan’s head. Morrigan stepped backward toward the slumped figure on the bench, keeping her hands up. Then she swung the figure up into her arms and brought him forward.
It was Edgar.
Or…the suggestion of Edgar.
Its skin was made of sand, its hair like wiry tumbleweeds, its fingernails like iron. His—its—eyes were closed, and its head lolled back on its neck.
“He’s not fully formed yet,” Morrigan said. Again, all anger and frustration had left her; she held Edgar’s doppelgänger close to her chest, gazing down at him with the kind of worry Emery had felt deep in her stomach but never voiced to anyone. “He won’t wake up for a while, but I’m afraid—I’m afraid, with the way things have been, that they’ll start sending hunters after their doppelgängers earlier. Or what if they start rounding us up, keeping us in holding pens until our hunters are ready to kill us? I don’t expect you to understand that, but I—I hoped you could understand this.”
She looked only at Emery. Emery looked only at Edgar’s doppelgänger. She could feel him only faintly, but it was the same sensation as Morrigan in Klaus’s dream. Something wrong. Something off. Edgar was only eleven and here his doppelgänger already was.
“He’s all I have,” Morrigan said, and it felt like hearing herself in a memory. “He’s not even awake yet, he doesn’t know what kind of world he’ll have to live in, what he’ll have to go through—I don’t want that. I want him to be whole. Not to have Edgar’s body, but to be Edgar, to be both halves of him together. I would never do anything to hurt him. You know that. Please, you have to help me keep him safe. The Hypnos State will make him kill this half of himself the same way it wants you to kill me, and I can’t let that happen.” Morrigan returned Edgar’s doppelgänger to the bench, but this time she laid him on his side, so it looked like he was napping. When she straigthened, her expression and her voice had both gone hard. “If I have to die, that’s fine. But not him. I won’t let him be split that way. I can’t leave this place yet—soon, but your mental state isn’t disturbed enough yet—and what I can do is limited. But you could help.”
Emery could hear her heartbeat in her ears.
“You took him from Edgar’s dream,” she said.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I found him forming in the fabric of it and I pulled him out. Safer here, where no one will know to look for him.”
Emery swallowed thickly. “What do you expect me to do about it?”
Morrigan took a step closer. Wes and Jacqueline moved in on Emery’s sides. “Trust me,” she said. “Trust that what I’ve told you is true. That the State has lied to you, and that the two of us together as a whole is better than one of us alone. It’s hard, I know—I am you, I see what they’ve told you your whole life. What you’ve seen. But I am you. You can trust the State, or you can trust yourself.”
“Trust myself…and do what?”
She stared into her own face, a mirror behind a shifting black veil.
Morrigan said, “Bring Edgar here. Let him merge with his doppelgänger.”
Revulsion rose in Emery’s chest so suddenly she choked on it. Her gun came up, aimed at Morrigan’s head, the tip quivering in the air. Morrigan’s expression darkened. Jacqueline stiffened; Wes hefted the hammer.
Emery did her best to keep her voice even. “No. Not unless you can prove to me that both of us actually survive.”
“I can’t.” Morrigan’s jaw clenched. “All I have here is my word. But you wouldn’t know it’s true if we did it.”
“No. Don’t—don’t come near me.”
“Are you so indoctrinated you’d believe them over yourself? You’d believe there’s a part of yourself that wants to kill the rest? We don’t want to wipe out our hunters—we want to be whole again. But you give us no choice. You hunters decided on your own that we’re the ones who started this, and now you believe it so completely that you listen to everyone else before you listen to yourself.” Morrigan took another step, expression twisting. “This could be so much worse for you. For once the easy way is the right way. If you don’t accept this now, things will only go downhill. And they will go downhill quickly.”
“Shoot her, Emery,” Wes said. He kept his voice low, but Morrigan’s sharp gaze flicked to him, her expression turning livid.
“Yes, Emery, shoot me,” she mocked. “And see what happens to Edgar when he meets his Insanity Prime. Because you don’t know. And I don’t know. Grandpa Al doesn’t know, Mom and Dad don’t know, no one knows. But I know he has a doppelgänger, and he will have an Insanity Prime. We can stop it now, or you can spend years waiting to see how bad it gets.”
A single bead of sweat rolled between Emery’s shoulderblades beneath her armor. Her head throbbed. The Peacemaker rattled in her hand.
“Shoot her,” Wes said again.
“Shut up, Wesley!” Morrigan’s voice cracked like a whip, harsher than Emery’s had ever been. Her lips curled back from her teeth. “What’s it going to be, Emery? It’s the State or Edgar.”
Emery couldn’t breathe. “I need—I need more time to think.”
“You don’t have time. I saw that dreamkiller rooting around in Klaus’s nightmare. The one with the axes on his arms. He’s looking for us. He works for the State, and he doesn’t want you to know you can be saved. Choose now.”
“No. I won’t risk Edgar.”
“You’re already risking Edgar.”
“No.”
“Choose.”
“No.”
Morrigan’s expression flattened out. For a moment, she want still and silent, balancing gracefully in the center of the gazebo like a ballerina in a music box. Her hair still coiled around her head. After a moment, she said, “Do you know an easy way to cause mental turmoil?”
Emery, Wes, and Jacqueline stood quiet, confused.
Then Morrigan was gone from the center of the gazebo and standing in front of Emery, inside the reach of her arm and her gun, hair fanning forward to envelop both their heads.
Emery gasped.
Morrigan said, “Pain.”
Agony lanced up Emery’s leg. Morrigan’s index and middle finger were buried to the second knuckle in Emery’s thigh muscle, pierced straight through the armor, blood welling up around them. By the time Emery thought to move or scream or pull a trigger, Morrigan had torn her fingers out and tumbled backward. Wes’s hammer whistled through the space where Morrigan had been. Morrigan straightened and turned, and as she did, her body dissolved into bright, flashing clouds of the Dream that siphoned off into thin air.
Then she was gone.
“We have to go,” Emery gasped, clutching her leg in one hand and reaching for Jacqueline with the other, the Peacemaker dangling from her fingers. “She’s going after Edgar. We have to go now.”
“What about his doppelgänger?” Wes said.
“We can’t kill it. Just—just leave it here. Jackie, now.”
Jacqueline had already begun pulling the waking world close. She thrust her hands into the air and ripped her gateway open.
Emery took a step toward it and stumbled. Wes slung an arm around Emery’s waist to hold her up.
“I can walk, I can walk.”
“Yeah, well, maybe not after we land coming out,” Wes said.
They stepped through. Coming in had felt like falling, and going out felt like falling, too—but this time when they came out the other end, there was no soft landing. Their feet hit the ground hard. Emery’s leg buckled and she brought Wes down with her.
They spilled onto the grassy lawn outside Kirkland Hall, in the quiet and untroubled Halloween night.
(Next time on The Children of Hypnos -------> The Truth.)
The doppelgänger looked at Emery when Emery looked at it.
Her doppelgänger.
Her.
The doppelgänger’s eyes widened, bright smoky blue, and the journal fell from her hands. Emery had her gun raised but not pointed, her finger over the trigger but shaking too hard to squeeze. The strangeness of the doppelgänger’s existence—the feeling that it was not of this dream—coalesced in Emery’s senses into the obvious. It was not of this dream because it was of her dream. It was a piece of her. It was her.
“Emery!” Wes barked, at the same time the doppelgänger raised her hands and said, “No! Please, wait!”
She—it—she—backed up toward the wall that had once held the huge stitched body parts on chains. The chains hung empty now, the wall bare. The animal cages on the opposite side of the room were empty as well, their doors standing open. The whole lab looked ransacked. The doppelgänger kept her hands up, arms tight to her sides, and let her hair swim around her face like a veil.
“Please,” she said again, “please wait. I need to talk to you.”
“I’ve seen doppelgängers come for dreamhunters before,” Jacqueline said, looking between Emery and her double, “but this is still weird.”
“She’s got to be trying to trick you,” Wes said. “Shoot her now. We’ve got her cornered; this is the only way out of the lab.”
Emery couldn’t string two thoughts together; all she could think of was her own face, her eyes, her hair, her clothes. The doppelgänger was wearing her clothes. She brought both hands to her Peacemaker and took aim.
The doppelgänger dove behind the work table. Her legs were visible below the table’s top, her hair floating above.
“No! No, please, please listen to me! Just for a second! I’m not going to hurt you!”
Her voice rose and cracked. Like listening to a recording of herself in pain. In fear. It dug into a tight spot in Emery’s chest and lodged there. Emery lowered the gun.
“We wanted to know what happened with the dreamseekers and the doppelgängers, right?” Emery said, never taking her eyes off the table. Jacqueline and Wes were quiet for a second.
Jacqueline said, “Yes.”
“Maybe she knows something.”
“Emery—” Wes started, warning.
Emery held the Peacemaker at her side, breathing through that small relief, and said, “I’m not going to shoot you. Yet. What do you want?”
Another long pause, then a blue eye peeked up over the edge of the table. The doppelgänger’s hair shifted, the curls coiling and uncoiling around each other. She brushed them out of the way with one hand as she tentatively got to her feet.
“I want to help you stop this war,” she said.
Emery glanced at Wes, who frowned and shook his head.
“What war?” Emery asked.
“The—the war,” the doppelgänger repeated, “between us. You and me. And—and all of us. Dreamhunters and doppelgängers.”
She said it as if it was obvious. Hands spread, motioning to everything around them, like bodies were falling right before their eyes. An invisible war on a micro scale.
Emery raised the gun again. “I’m gonna need a better reason.”
“No no no! Please, just—give me a few minutes to explain. Ugh.” Emery had made that noise plenty of times herself, but had never heard it from herself; she knew it meant a frustration with the situation, but it sounded like disgust at the conversation, at her. Harsh and dismissive.
Emery had no clue how much time was actually passing while they stood there, but she said, “You have five minutes. Go.”
Her doppelgänger wasted no time. “I’ll start over. You know what I am, and you think you know what I want, but you don’t, not really. I’ve been around for a little while now—I have a name.”
Jacqueline’s brow arched. “Since when do doppelgängers have names?”
The doppelgänger’s pleading flew away at once, replaced with Emery’s own coolness. “Since we give ourselves them,” she snapped. “My name is Morrigan.”
Emery choked.
Wes said, “But that’s your—”
“It’s our middle name,” said the doppelgänger. “You took our first name, so I took the middle one. I like it better anyway.” Morrigan shut her mouth, then looked shocked for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice was smaller and softer. “I need your body because the longer we stay separate, the more unstable both of us get. The Insanity Prime affects both of us. We can’t both survive separately; there can only be one.”
“So either I kill you,” Emery said, “or you clear out my head and take up residence. Yeah, we know.”
“No—” Morrigan’s voice came out sharp; she caught herself and reeled it back. “It is true that we need our hunters’ bodies, but it is not true that we have to wipe you out to get it. Look—there’s only one way for each of us to survive on our own. Either you kill me, or I take you. But there’s a way for both of us to survive together.”
“How would you know that?”
“It’s the only thing I live for,” Morrigan said. She raised her arms again. “Look around. This is my world. Other peoples’ dreams. Constantly changing, no rhyme or reason. There is no order here. No government, no school, no concept of time and rarely a concept of space. We doppelgängers are a big roadblock for you, but you are all we have.” Her hands were out now, pleading. “I have talked to others. Our knowledge gets passed down slowly, in bits and pieces, but it does get passed down. I know that if you let me in willingly, we can both survive. It used to happen, long ago, before your superiors decided the only way was death.”
“You’ve talked to other doppelgängers? Whose?”
Morrigan’s expression flashed so quickly between appeasement and anger it was hard to catch the transition. “That’s what you focus on? I’m telling you we can both live right now, and we can handle a much bigger problem.”
Emery reset her grip on her Peacemaker, but still kept it at her side. “I’m not huge on trusting the Hypnos State right now, but every doppelgänger I’ve ever heard of has attacked their hunter right out of the gate. I’ve even heard of doppelgängers crippling their hunters when they know they won’t get their bodies. You aren’t the most trustworthy bunch.”
“You’ll trust me because of Edgar,” Morrigan said.
Jacqueline’s fingertips rested on Emery’s elbow. Wes stiffened beside her.
“What about Edgar?” Emery said, slowly.
Morrigan’s stare was bright behind the waving tendrils of black hair. “I can show you. But we have to return to our dream. The palace. You’ve been there—I can smell it on you.”
“We’re not going anywhere.” Wes’s voice rumbled deep in his chest. Emery could feel the heat radiating off him like a furnace; and when she glanced at him, his expression was set in stone and his black eyes were zeroed in on Morrigan, unmoving and unblinking.
“I need to show you that I’m doing this for a good reason,” Morrigan said slowly. “I’ll walk ahead of you, I’ll stay far away, you can keep your weapons pointed at me, whatever you want. And besides, we’ve already spent too much time in this place. The longer you stay here, the worse the nightmare will get, and we need to end it. Please.” She looked at Emery. “For Edgar.”
Emery said, “You can—”
Then the room quaked, the stones beneath Emery’s feet shuddering so hard she almost pitched headfirst off the landing and was only saved by Wes grabbing her collar and hauling her backward. A distant explosion went off over their heads, in the entry hall. Stones skittered down the spiral staircase behind them.
“The villagers?” Jacqueline said.
“Or the witch,” Wes replied darkly.
Jacqueline blanched. “There’s a witch?”
“It’s neither,” Morrigan said, and Emery felt her approaching the door before she turned to see her. “It’s one of the scientist’s monstrosities. He’s let them loose—we have to kill it to get out of here.”
“Or we stay down here,” Emery said, “and you tell us what’s got you so worried about Edgar.”
“Then the witch will show up,” Morrigan said, her upper lip slowly curling back to reveal the gleam of her teeth. “And she’s a dream you do not want to cross. Better to risk poison by monstrosity than decapitation by witch.”
Another explosion erupted overhead, and more pebbles rained down the stairs. Emery glanced again at the empty chains hanging from the wall, then at Morrigan. Very slowly, she started descending the stairs.
“What are you doing?” Wes hissed.
Emery motioned to him with the hand not holding the gun. Wes and Jacqueline both followed, looking disgruntled. Emery waggled the Peacemaker at Morrigan. “You go first. Move slow.”
To her credit, Morrigan did, and she even gave them more space than they needed as she passed by and climbed the stairs. Emery followed, gun pointed between Morrigan’s shoulder blades all the way back up, around the spiral staircase, until Morrigan stopped just before the bend that would take them to the entry hall. Morrigan peeked around the wall and up through the hole in the ruined staircase. Her hair fanned far out past her, reached the end of its length, and bounced back to nestle around her head.
“What is it?” Emery said.
Morrigan put a finger to her lips, then whispered, “It’s up there now. Can you hear it breathing?”
The only thing Emery heard was a long and low wind, like hot air through a vent.
“We’ll have to kill it,” Morrigan continued, “but the longer it goes without seeing us, the better. Aim for the head.”
“Why would I not?” Emery said, and Morrigan glared at her.
“What am I supposed to do?” Jacqueline hissed from the back. “No weapons, remember?”
“Stay down here until we come back for you,” Emery said. “Don’t get squished. And if something happens to us, you better damn well get us out of here.” She turned back to Morrigan. “Well? You first.”
With a dark look, Morrigan exited the stairwell, checked through the hole in the stairs above her. The actual hole in the stairs had widened, like the great hand that had destroyed it the first time had returned to finish the job. Morrigan climbed the rubble out of the hole like a cat, silent on her fingers and the balls of her feet. She disappeared off to the side. Emery and Wes followed. Wes pulled himself up first. As Emery climbed the rubble and stuck her head back into the entry hall, she was met with a putrid smell that invaded her nose and mouth. She clenched her teeth to hold in her gag. The floor vibrated slightly, then went still. Vibrated, then went still. She glanced toward the far end of the entry hall, where the tall doorway and the windows had once let in the green light of the moon.
There was no door and no windows anymore; there was only a gaping hole in the wall where the door and windows had once been, and the remains of stone scattered across the floor. Wan light flooded the center of the room, darkening the edges. The long low rush of air still filled the room, and at first Emery thought it was wind through the hole in the wall. But then the floor shook with the weight of an impact in the darkness.
A hulking form moved into the light. It was bigger and wider than the door had been, and where the light illuminated its rounded shoulders and dragging arms, it glinted off thick metal staples holding together patchy layers of flesh. It wore no clothing that Emery could see, and where the mismatched skin on its stomach had been fixed together, glowing green pus oozed out between the staples. Its knuckles dragged the floor, and in one hand it held a large piece of stone that looked like it might’ve come off the doorway. Its head was the size of a medicine ball, misshapen like it’d been hit several times with a sledgehammer, nestled between the two bubbling shoulders. When the head turned, the light caught teeth hanging by fleshy strands from the gaping jaw. Tubes connected from the back of its head into its wide shoulder blades, carrying the same glowing green pus. Then it turned back, hiding its face in shadow, and two little pinpricks of acid green flared to life deep in its eyesockets.
Emery and Wes kneeled behind a crumbled portion of the staircase. Morrigan had disappeared into the shadows against the wall, though Emery could still feel her there. Emery rested her hands on her guns in their holsters. Outside the Dream, enough time would’ve passed for her to have regenerated at least one of the three bullets she’d fired off earlier. The pressure of the Dream kept her from mentally recuperating. At best, she still had nine shots. At worst, the Dream would drain her faster, and she’d end up with less.
She leaned close to Wes and whispered, “Best guess says my bullets bounce off that thing’s skin. I’m going to try to aim for weak points, assuming it has any. Try not to get too close—it’s got to be as poisonous as anything else in here.”
“What about the doppelgänger?” Wes asked, eyes scanning the shadows.
“I’ll save a bullet for her. Keep your distance.”
He nodded. “Have a plan?”
“You distract it but don’t get too close. I’m going to start with the open parts of its stomach.”
“Aim for the tube instead.” Morrigan’s low whisper came from low in the shadows. “That ooze keeps it moving.”
Wes looked unhappy, but said, “I can try dreamforming around its legs to bring it down.”
“Alright. Do it. If it falls on its stomach, I’ll aim for that tube. If it falls on its back, I’ll aim for the stomach.”
They peered out around the rubble. The monstrosity was moving again, shifting one trashcan-sized foot forward and making the floor tremble. Barely audible over the sound of its breathing was the pull of the skin against the stitches that held the thing together, and the soft splatter of green ooze on the floor. Wes went very still as Emery took aim, and a moment later the floor around the monster’s left foot rippled upward in a wave. The monster’s eyes trailed downward slowly, very slowly, its breathing cutting off so that it could grunt hard at the dreamforms now reaching up for its foot. But the foot was already coming down, too big and too heavy to move out of the way. The dreamforms snared it around its fat fleshy ankle.
It fell with a bellow and a spray of bright green acid from its mouth. The acid sprayed across the floor, eating through green carpet and rubble and stone. Its dragging arms caught it before it hit the floor, and it hunkered like a gorilla. It roared; teeth came loose and clattered across the floor.
Its arms covered its stomach, but over its shoulder, part of the tube in its head glowed bright green. Emery took careful aim, breathed out, and fired. Purple met green; the monster roared as Emery’s fourth bullet ricocheted off the tube and the tube shook, but didn’t break.
Emery cursed.
The monster beat a hand against the dreamforms around its legs and destroyed them as another set came up to grab one of its wrists. These it swiped out of the way before they could latch on, and Wes grunted as they shattered across the floor as stone. He’d far outpaced Emery at dreamforming, but it didn’t make him a master at it, and even he had his limits. Emery put a hand on his shoulder.
The monster had turned toward them. Instead of dragging its arms on the floor behind it, it began using them to pull itself forward. Emery went for her first plan, and aimed for the stitches in its stomach. Squeezed the trigger. Five. The bullet disappeared into gap between stitches. The monster reared back, roaring in pain, but a moment later set on its course again. The second bullet—six—found one of the staples, and though the bullet ricocheted off, the staple snapped open and acid gushed out between the flaps of skin. As it splashed the floor between the thing’s feet, the stone hissed and melted.
It belched more acid at them. Emery and Wes ducked behind their wall of rubble. A long string of green landed across the stone near Emery’s head, more by her feet. Some landed on the head of Wes’s hammer, but it sizzled without affecting the silver and gold. Wes flicked it off with a look of disgust.
Then, from their side, Morrigan yelled, “IT’S THROWING!”
Emery stuck her head up. The monster’s arm—the one holding the huge piece of rubble—was behind it now, muscles bulging, staples straining.
“Wes, move!”
The monster threw. Wes and Emery tumbled out of the way as the stone crashed into their rubble, sending it scattering and destroying their hiding place. They sprang to their feet.
“Go go go!” Emery yelled. “Spread out!”
Wes went to the right. Emery went to the left, gun up. The monster followed Wes; he was the bigger target, and his hammer flashed in the light.
“Taking the shot!” Emery yelled. Wes put his hammer up as a shield. Emery fired at monster’s stomach. Seven. The bullet nicked the next staple, popping it open, and acid spurted out of the widened hole. The monster swiveled its head around, its tiny glowing eyes fixing on her.
Wes sprinted up from the side and swung at its misshapen elbow. The hammer head splintered bone, shoving the elbow forward. But the flesh was soft; the hammer sank into it, and when Wes tried to pull it out, his feet slid forward across the ground.
Emery shot at the staples on the creature’s shoulder. Eight. The ones there were tighter together than the ones on the stomach, and the bullet glanced off them and streaked over Wes’s head.
“Sorry!” Emery yelled.
But Wes had bigger problems. The monster swung its other arm around, and before Wes saw it coming, its thick fingers had wrapped around his middle. It lifted him off his feet and into the air.
“Wes!”
“Get me down!” He beat at the monster’s fingers first, then grabbed at the staples holding its wrist together. A horrible gurgling sound was coming from deep in its throat. Emery shot at its other elbow. Nine. A staple snapped and its arm dropped a couple inches, but Wes’s feet still kicked above the floor.
Emery’s head pulsed. Three shots left—if she was lucky—and the thing was about to vomit acid on Wes’s head.
Emery sprinted forward. The monstrosity’s head reared back, then came forward, and as its mouth opened, Emery fired.
Purple light filled its mouth. It stumbled backward; acid spilled from its jaws, now entirely toothless. Wes still dangled from its hand. Emery holstered the Peacemaker and jumped onto its arm.
“What are you doing?” Wes snapped. “Keep shooting at it!”
“Running out of bullets,” Emery hissed back, wrapping her legs around the arm and clawing with her fingers at the staples in the wrist.
“Emery. Get—” Wes cut off with a huff as the fingers squeezed around his middle.
Moonlight washed over them. The monster’s shoulders were bare and gleaming one moment, and a moment later they weren’t; a figure appeared there, black hair swimming in the light.
Morrigan ripped the tube from the back of the monster’s head. Acid bubbled out, down its back, onto the ground. The hand slackened and dropped Wes. Then the arm fell and Emery slid off. Staples popped all along the monster’s body as it fell backward and crashed into the ground, so hard, like it was made of cement instead of wasted body parts. Emery and Wes scrambled away from the glowing green pools on the floor, then Wes scrambled back to pull his hammer out of the monster’s lifeless arm. Jacqueline kneeled on the ruptured ground twenty feet behind them, blinking in surprise.
Morrigan stood in the hole in the wall, hair curling and uncurling like strands of smoke. As Emery watched her, the nightmare dissolved around them, and the ambient light of No Man’s Land brought Morrigan’s features back into view. Her stare was intent, her eyes clear.
“Well,” she said. “Will you see what I have to show you now?”
(Next time on The Children of Hypnos -------> The Truth?)
Emery’s headache got a little better after they left her dream, but not much.
Finding Klaus’s window was slightly more difficult than finding her own. They had no way of pulling it closer to themselves, though they knew it had to be close, since he was still on Fenhallow’s campus. But so were the dream windows of everyone else on campus, which meant they went stumbling through several run-of-the-mill dreams—falling, being chased, losing teeth—before finally getting spit out onto cracked earth at the foot of a writhing and dark window flanked by trees.
Of the three of them, Jacqueline was the only one with any composure left; not a hair sat out of place on her head, and when Emery said, “Feels like it’s been hours,” Jacqueline replied with, “It’s been forty minutes, tops.”
Emery found herself leaning heavily on Wes—and him leaning back on her—as they trudged through Klaus’s window.
Once again, they found themselves standing in the middle of a cobblestone road in the woods, and fog crept in tendrils around the lampposts that lined the road to the village nestled in the trees. It was nighttime yet again, the moon huge and sickly green against the black sky, and silhouetted against it were the turrets of the scientist’s castle.
“Is this supposed to be a fairytale or something?” Jacqueline asked.
“Yes,” Emery said. “The bloody stabby torture kind.”
She and Wes set off toward the village with Jacqueline trailing slightly behind, examining their surroundings. Klaus’s dream was as sharp and vivid as it had been before, but there was something more to it now, something off. Though sharp and vivid, it also had a wavering to it, a subtle flex to the trees and the road that made Emery feel off-balance if she concentrated on it too hard.
“It’s unstable now,” Wes said, his black eyes scanning the spaces between the trees. The insects that had chirped in the night the last time they had come here were quiet, as if they’d bedded down for the winter. They reached the first of the small cottages outside the village. Before, they’d been warm with firelight, their occupants settling down for the night. Now their doors stood open, the interiors cold and empty, footsteps pressed in the mud through the yards and footprints littering the path to the village.
“It’s a different dream,” Emery said. “It changed.” She looked at Wes. “And it’s stronger. Do you think…he can’t be falling asleep?”
Wes started walking faster.
The lights in the village were consolidated in the center, near the large stone well, previously watched over only by Daniel, the scythe-wielding Texan. The lights were torches, held aloft by a literal mob of villagers. They gathered around the stone well, eerily silent until Emery, Wes, and Jacqueline rounded the corner. Like a paused movie set to play, their fists lifted into the air and they yelled in uproar.
“No more!” cried one man close to the edge, with two small boys hugging his legs.
“Death to the Plaguebringer!” yelled a woman holding an actual pitchfork.
The crowd roared with them.
Standing on the lip of the well, Daniel raised his scythe. Sick moonlight gleamed off its edge and off the smooth curve of his hair. Like everything else here, there was something wrong about him, something off. As Emery drew closer to the edge of the crowd and closer to the well, she saw what it was.
Daniel’s skin had turned ashen white and an oily green substance oozed from his eyes like tears, glowing. The veins in his neck were ink black. When he opened his cracked lips, his teeth were stained with the same green oil.
“Enough!” He thrust the head of the scythe into the air. “Enough! We are not slaves to the monster in his castle! We have had enough, and tonight we end him!”
“What’s wrong with them?” Jacqueline pressed close to Emery, looking around at the other villagers with her lips curled back. The other villagers shared Daniel’s ruined complexion; ashen skin, green ooze, black veins. They looked sucked dry, like something was eating them from the inside. Diseased.
“This dream ends in the castle,” Emery said. “Let’s get up there.”
She started to pull Jacqueline and Wes away, and as she did, Daniel’s attention snapped to her.
“Returned!” His voice rang clear over the square; all heads turned their direction. “Accomplices of the Plaguebringer have returned!”
“They remember us?” Emery hissed.
All at once, the crowd surged toward them. Jacqueline screamed, and Emery grabbed her and shoved her away, toward the line of trees where the path to the castle began. Wes’s hammer flashed in the torchlight as he swung it in a wide arc, enough to keep a bubble of space between themselves and the villagers. He swung again, but on the third swing a man stepped into the path of the hammer head and grabbed it, stopping its arc by letting it crush the left side of his body. The crowd roared its approval and converged again. Emery pulled a Peacemaker out, but her hand already shook, and even raising it to fire straight up into the sky took all her willpower.
A burst of purple light. The bullet took off into the dark sky. The villagers recoiled, startled, scanning the sky, scanning Emery.
The head of the scythe split between their bodies like the prow of a ship through water; Daniel had left his perch atop the well and strode out to meet them, eyes dark and pulsing green oil down his face. Emery raised her gun to his chest. Held it in both hands, breathing slowly, steadily.
He’s a nightmare. He’s not real. He’s a nightmare.
Nightmares were real, though. They were real enough to harm their dreamers.
He’s not human. He’s not real.
He was part of a human. He was part of Klaus.
Daniel lifted the scythe.
He’s real enough to hurt.
She pulled the trigger.
The bullet ricocheted off Daniel’s chest and struck one of the nearby villagers. The woman crumpled. The scythe fell in a blinding arc and the head of Wes’s hammer appeared in the air to stop it.
Wes dropped to one knee, grunting under the weight. Daniel bore down on him.
Another man lunged for Emery; she shot before she could think, and the bullet cleaved half his head off. Instead of blood, that glowing green oil oozed from his skull, onto the cobblestones. She turned back to Daniel, aimed for the side of his head, and fired. Again the bullet ricocheted, but the angle sent it away from Wes, careening again into the nearby villagers.
“What are you doing?” Jacqueline yelled behind them. “Get out of there and let’s go!”
Wes released the pressure on his hammer at the same time a thin column of stone shot out of the street and wrapped around the scythe handle. Wes rolled foward, beneath the blade, then twisted and tackled Daniel’s legs. Daniel crashed to the street. The scythe fell from his hands, the stone column vanishing into a Dream cloud. Wes scrambled up.
They bolted for the trees. Jacqueline reached the path to the castle first, but Wes and Emery weren’t far behind. The villagers’ pounding footsteps made the ground tremble. The trees of the woods swallowed them, the branches literally reaching out and drawing them into the darkness beyond. This time they had no lantern to light their way, but the moon was so large, its light pierced the canopy above them and dappled the path. As the slowest runner of the three of them—and the only one with two-inch heels on her boots—Jacqueline began to fall behind, so Emery matched her strides.
“Please tell me the castle is better than this!” Jacqueline barked out.
“Uhhhh,” Emery said, checking over her shoulder. Torchlight flickered across the faces of the horde of villagers storming through the trees. They moved over and around each other like a rolling wave of bodies, their features shifting and changing, arms and legs molding together and coming apart. The only one of them who retained his own shape was Daniel; he loped ahead of the rest, spitting poison, scythe held low behind him and ready to swing. “Marcia’s up there, so that should be better!”
“Marcia?”
“Just go!”
They burst through the trees before the castle’s stone bridge. Where there had been a moat far below the bridge, now there was a deep drop into darkness.
“MARCIA!” Wes bellowed at they shot onto the bridge. His voice echoed into the canyon below. A shiver seemed to work its way through the landscape around them, shifting stones in the bridge and all up along the castle’s walls. The yell wasn’t necessary; when they passed the bridge’s halfway point, the knight slid into existence on the far end in a trail of fog, ghostly and silent, her battle axe at her side.
“Marcia!” Emery and Wes yelped at the same time, because it was her, and she was wearing no helmet this time, and in the dream she hadn’t been overly fond of Daniel. The opportunity put adrenline in Emery’s legs.
Then the opportunity curdled into fear.
Marcia’s eyes glowed green. A line of stitches was all that held on her sagging jaw, and another line of stitches ran along the left side of her head, along her ear, where her hair had been shaved away. Her skin had gone sallow.
“No, no! Nope!”
As soon as they reached the edge of the bridge, Emery grabbed Jacqueline and leaped to the right. Wes went to the left. Marcia let the axe slide into both her hands, hefting it up; Daniel and his writhing mass of villagers charged toward her. Marcia stepped, planted her feet, and swung. So did Daniel.
The clash of axe and scythe rang so loud in Emery’s ears she fell to the ground again as she tried to get up. Jacqueline was grabbing her, pulling her; then they were both up and pulling each other toward the castle wall. Then Wes was there, fending off the few melting villagers who swept past Marcia. The three of them stumbled into the courtyard and ran for the ruined front doors of the castle, still downed in the entryway. Daniel’s yells of “ACCOMPLICE!” and “TAKE OFF HER HEAD!” pierced the previous silence of the castle’s entry hall.
No one followed them inside. The villagers remained outside the courtyard’s walls, every few seconds letting out a grunt or scream after the thud of an axe head burying in flesh.
“This place got exciting.” Emery checked herself over for an holes in her armor. “Did either of you get cut or scratched by anything? Anything could be poisonous in here, so if we get a bite or cut, we have to leave right away, while we still can.”
“Wouldn’t that have been better to say before we came inside?” Jacqueline snapped, fixing her hair as she scanned the hall, eyes darting all directions.
“We should keep moving,” Emery said. “Wes—what’re you looking at?”
Wes was frowning at the ruined staircase at the far end of the hall. It looked as it had before, like a giant punched sideways through its middle, leaving a gaping hole behind that revealed the secret passage into the scientist’s lab. The rubble was still strewn across the floor, and the green carpet fell into the hole.
“Did you see that?” Wes asked.
“No. What was it?” Emery said, at the same time Jacqueline said, “See that? See what, Wesley?”
Wes shook his head. “I thought there was someone standing at the top of the stairs. A man. Above the hole. But it’s dark, I couldn’t tell for sure.”
Emery looked where he motioned, but couldn’t make out any shapes in the darkness. “Not taking any chances. If you thought you saw someone, we assume you saw someone. We’ll just have to be careful.”
Even as Wes followed her toward the hole in the stairs, he looked worried, and said, “It’s changed too much. The journal will be different.”
Emery didn’t really care if the journal was different—or even nonexistent—as long as there was something to find in Klaus’s nightmare lab. She’d take any shred of information or evidence, anything to say where her doppelgänger might be, or theories on why it had become active when she was not, not at all, not even a little bit, near her Insanity Prime.
They climbed into the secret passage beneath the stairs. The sounds from outside faded as they circled down the narrow passage. At the end was the wooden door. Its padlock, as big as Emery’s head, rested on the wall at their feet, partially corroded.
“More good signs,” Wes said flatly under his breath. He held his hammer a little closer to his chest.
Emery pushed the door open. It was like popping the windows in her palace; as soon as the opening was created, a feeling hit her, gripping the edges of her senses and tugging. The Dream pushed in all around them, but there was something here that didn’t belong. A body. A person. It was made of the Dream, but not of this dream. Emery paused, then crept inside. The landing in front of the door looked down on the lab, and Emery edged close to the side, both guns out, and peeked over.
Standing at the work table, flipping through Klaus’s journal with a frown on her face and tension in her shoulders, was herself. Wearing jeans and a purple sweater and even a charm bracelet around her left wrist.
And all of her heavy black hair floated around her head.
(Next time on The Children of Hypnos -------> Getting In Deep)
Stepping into Emery’s own dream did feel unsettlingly like stepping inside her head. As they moved through the window, there was a feeling in her mind like something had just been slotted into her head, not painful, just strange, like something stuck between her teeth.
The dream itself was crisp and well-formed, like Klaus’s had been, and like his, it was night. But unlike his, there was no forest to be seen. They stood on the sweeping lawns of an old palace beside a wide river, and on the other side of the river was Moscow.
The view took the breath from her lungs. Seeing the palace through the window had made her suspicious; it looked far too similar to the Grand Kremlin Palace to be coincidence, but she hadn’t expected to get here and for the city of her childhood to be waiting for her across the river. It sparkled in the night, skyscrapers and onion domes, pastels lit from below and glass reflecting the stars. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Federation Towers. The rounded top of Moscow’s own Hypnos State training center, the Cradle. Though there were no clouds overhead, snow fell on the city, dampening its sound to nothing.
Emery took a step toward it and knew immediately that she would not be allowed to cross the river, no matter how badly she wanted to. Her dream did not take place there; it happened here, in this imitation-palace, on this estate that existed nowhere in the waking world.
“Is that the Kremlin?” Wes asked, looking toward the horizon.
“It’s Moscow,” Emery said. “A little dream-warped, but that’s it.” She tried to keep the longing out of her voice as she tore herself away from the view, but both Jacqueline and Wes became strangely silent.
The lawns dipped down before them, giving them a top-down view of the mazelike hedges that framed the wide stone path to the palace. Ornate wrought-iron lampposts, crafted to look like sinewy arms spearing out of the ground and holding their lanterns aloft, lined the path, which had been cleared of snow. It looked like something more out of War and Peace than modern-day Moscow, and as Emery, Wes, and Jacqueline started down the path, the hedges and the lampposts rose up around them, much taller than they should have been. Thick flakes of snow fell from the cloudless sky, but the drifts on the ground never got any higher. None clung to their clothes or their hair. When Emery held out her hand to catch a flake, it touched her skin and popped like a soap bubble.
Closer to the palace, the hedge walls gave way to hedge sculptures. They were twenty feet tall, covered in snow, and more detailed than any hedge sculpture had a right to be. On their left: a rearing horse not unlike the horses that framed Jacqueline’s gateway. On their right: The symbol of the dreamhunters, a sword thrust upward behind the closed eye of Hypnos. They walked past, and the next set came up. The left: Clint Eastwood in a poncho and a cowboy hat. The right: Fabian Fenhallow waltzing with a dolphin. Jacqueline scowled at that one.
The final set of hedges came up, and these two flanked the staircase to the palace’s entrance like sentinels. One was Grandpa Al, one hand holding his cup of tea, the other hand resting on the pommel of his dreamform sword, the sword’s tip balanced on the ground. The other hedge was Edgar, arms at his sides, hands empty. There was no expression on his face, but as they climbed the steps into the palace, Emery had the distinct impression he was watching her.
Up close, the palace’s walls were eggshell blue, and the windows and doors trimmed in lavish gold. Russian words curled across the large front doors in gold script.
“What does it say?” Jacqueline asked.
“Find home here,” Emery replied, fighting her strongest urge to run back the way they’d come. It had been a mistake to bring others into her dream when she herself didn’t even know what was inside. No one was supposed to see these things but her. No one was supposed to know. Was this how Klaus felt when they’d been sneaking around in his dream? Was this how anyone felt when they thought about dreamhunters stepping into their heads whenever they visited the Dream?
It was too late now, anyway. There was probably a way for her to get them out of her own dream—or Jacqueline could make another gateway—but the only way Emery knew to escape it now was to finish out the dream itself.
Her fingertips brushed the words on the palace’s front doors, and the doors creaked open.
Candles blazed in every corner of the entry hall. The marble floors gleamed; the ceiling arched high overhead, covered in paintings of angels and demons clashing in flight; and like the hedge sculptures outside, large paintings stood guard every few feet on either wall.
Every painting was Emery. In each one, she sat in a wingback chair, wearing a deep purple gown hung with pearls and sapphires and crystal netting. And in each one, she was missing part of herself. Eyes. Nose. Mouth. A hand. An ear. In one she was bald. In another, skinless. Wes and Jacqueline said nothing as they went down the hall, though their expressions said enough: there was something wrong with her. There was something wrong with her if this was how her subconscious manifested.
Emery ignored the paintings, especially the skinless one, and forced herself forward. To find her doppelgänger, she’d have to stay sharp. There were sounds floating from the far end of the entry hall, through a tall set of oak doors; voices and feet and, faintly, music—a small orchestra. Emery pressed on, and just like the front doors before them, the oak doors opened at the slightest touch.
Inside was a ballroom. Fenhallow Manor paled in comparison; it could have fit inside here four times over with room left to spare, and where the Fenhallow ballroom had an old-world America beauty, this was grandeur on a scale of kings. The floor had been polished to a mirror shine, inlaid with designs of claymore swords laid in beds of bursting wildflowers, cannons wrapped with vines. Doors of frosted glass led the way to a dark courtyard outside where the snow still fell. Columns between each window appeared carved from gold, and each one was a woman with curling hair covering her like a dress, a waterfall cascading to her feet. In one upraised hand she held a revolver, and the guns of all the columns pointed to the grand chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The ceiling of the room had been painted to look like the roiling purple clouds of No Man’s Land.
An orchestra played softly, but there was no band in the room, and all the voices and footsteps Emery had heard in the entry hall outside were gone now. There were only two people in the ballroom, turning slowly together in the center of the room, like dancers inside a music box.
“Oh,” Jacqueline said.
It had been a year and a half since the last time Emery had seen her parents, and the punch of it left her breathless. Her father was the taller of the two of them, long and lanky, dull brown hair falling over his forehead and his glasses shining in the light so his eyes disappeared behind them. A sly smile and high cheekbones; thin hands with long fingers that Edgar would one day inherit. Clamped between his lips was the cigarette Emery remembered from her childhood, the end glowing orange but never growing shorter, and every few seconds he puffed out a cloud of purple smoke that flashed with Dream-lightning before disappearing in the air.
Her mother looked like her, only bigger. Stockier. Her hair fixed back in heavy braids instead of let loose. She had an arch to her eyebrows and a coldness to her eyes that Emery aspired to. That look said Challenge me. She always left her collar open to reveal the thick scar across her neck, and it was open now and she held her head high. Emery had once been small enough to hide behind her legs, though she could probably still do so if she curled up tightly enough. The only strange thing about her mother was that her mouth was closed; if she was awake—and she always was—she was talking.
Liam Ashworth and Zoya Volkova danced in their hunting armor. Both wore the long black coats of the dreamkillers, with the fan of swords and Hypnos’s closed eye on their backs.
Emery wanted to step closer to them, but didn’t. Not with Jacqueline and Wes so close. Not when her parents might turn to her and say something straight from her subconscious, something too personal to share, some deep-seated fear or desire. She was lucky enough already they’d gotten through the rest of her dream without some metaphorical representation of her questioning her own sexuality. She didn’t need them both to know how deep the cracks of the Insanity Prime ran.
“Do you have to talk to them to progress the dream?” Wes asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember having this dream.” But it did feel like what she had to do. Like in all the other dream-windows they’d gone through, the logic of the dream tugged at her, willing her to follow the path for which it had been made. Her dream wanted her to approach her parents. It wanted her to speak to them.
It wanted her to ask them if they would stay.
“We should look around before we try that,” Jacqueline said. “Doppelgängers live inside their dreamer’s subconscious before they become active. Maybe they leave behind an imprint, or a trail we can follow.”
As she’d torn herself away from the view of Moscow, Emery looked away from her parents and began scanning the room. Both with her eyes and with her sense of the Dream, though it didn’t seem to amount to much here. In the waking world, the Dream was like a thin layer of atmosphere, perceptible but easy to forget. Some places had a higher concentration than others—like Fenhallow Woods—and dreamhunters, dreamkillers, and nightmares gave off auras of it, almost like they were generating it themselves. But here in the Dream it was everywhere, highly concentrated, pressing down on her. She felt it in her temples, in her ears, even in her joints. If it was any thicker she’d be swimming in it.
The three of them split up. Wes walked one direction along the wall, Emery and Jacqueline walked the other. Emery brushed her hand along the hair of one of the columns along the wall and the gold flaked away under her hand, turning white and drifting to the floor.
“It’s made of snow,” Jacqueline said. “Did you know it was going to look like this?”
“No. I don’t remember this at all.” Emery looked up into the face of the long-haired woman. It was herself, again. Peacemaker raised. “I’ve only slept once a month for the past six years, and I don’t remember the dreams I have.”
“Is it strange not to sleep?”
“Haven’t you asked Veronica all of this before?”
Jacqueline shrugged. “We don’t really talk about it.”
“It just makes the days seem long, sometimes. Gives you lots of time to think. Probably too much time.”
“And is it weird to be in here now?”
“Mostly uncomfortable. The Dream feels like a blanket pressed over my face.”
Jacqueline made a noise and glanced out the darkened window into the courtyard. Snow blurred past.
“Do you feel it?” Emery asked.
Jacqueline shook her head. “It feels normal to me. It feels real. I can sense there are boundaries on this place, but it’s not uncomfortable or strange.”
“Do you ever think it’s weird,” Emery said, “that dreamseekers are born and dreamhunters are made, but dreamhunters can do more?”
“No.” Jacqueline reached out at the next window they passed and tapped a pane of glass. It burst into sparkling snow and fluttered inside, but the wind and snow from outside didn’t start coming in. “You can do more, but we don’t have Insanity Primes. We aren’t weak to the Dream. Hopefully I never get attacked by a nightmare, but that’s what you all are around for.”
Emery snorted.
Then something pinged on the edge of her senses. It was like sensing Klaus in the warehouses, where he was a spot of the Dream in the waking world, but this was an empty space in the Dream. Like Jacqueline drawing up her gateway in No Man’s Land, a space where pressure could escape. Had escaped. And Emery had only felt it after Jacqueline popped the window.
She stopped and brushed her hand over the window, popping the other panes of glass until she could look outside. There was nothing there—only a stone patio that stretched out into darkness and snow—but in the darkness the emptiness took a shape in her senses, like a hole cut in a piece of paper. A human-shaped hole.
An Emery-shaped hole.
Her stomach sank to her knees. She swallowed hard.
“Wes,” she called back across the room.
Wes was already at the far end of the ballroom and jogged along the wall until he reached them.
“Do you feel that hole?” she asked both of them.
They both stopped and turned to the window. Wes was the first to nod.
“It’s shaped,” he said.
“Klaus was telling the truth. It’s active. And it’s not here anymore.” Emery’s own voice rang hollowly in her ears. She’d believed Klaus and not believed him; known he was telling the truth but also clung to the hope that he’d been wrong, that he thought he’d seen something that hadn’t really been there.
Emery pushed her hair back, rubbing at her throbbing temple as she went. “We have to find it. I don’t think it’s in here—I would have felt it.”
“Where else do we look then?” Jacqueline asked.
“Klaus said he saw it in No Man’s Land,” said Wes. “But No Man’s Land is everywhere out there. It wouldn’t go far, not if it’s still so weak it can’t leave the Dream. If anything, it’d want to hide until it’s strong enough to leave. It’d want to stay close to you in case it got an opportunity to attack.”
“We might be able to find some clues,” Emery said. “Klaus’s notebook. In his nightmare. He had her drawn in there, it was because he saw her. Maybe he wrote down where he saw her, or under what circumstances. Hell, maybe there’s more in there since the last time we were there. If he can squirrel information away in his dreams like that, he might have put more in since he was captured.”
“Or taken more out,” Wes said, “or put in false information. To throw Ares off.”
“You think Ares was rooting around in his dream?”
Wes’s expression darkened. “I know he was.”
“Do we have a different plan?” Jacqueline asked. “Because if not, I say let’s go there. You both look sick, and we haven’t even been here that long. If we don’t find anything in his dream, we leave and come back another time.”
Wes didn’t look happy about it, but shrugged and said, “Fine.”
“We need to get out, then.” Emery turned to her dream-parents. They still turned slowly in the center of the room, looking unblinkingly at each other. Pulling herself together, she marched across the floor to them.
She had no idea if this was supposed to be a good dream or a nightmare, but she didn’t have the best feeling about it. They always had new scars when they came home, and Emery had grown up with the expectation that one day, one or both of them might not come home at all. Dreamkillers were powerful, but many of them were sent to fight powerful nightmares, and not all of them came back in one piece—or alive.
“Dad,” she said, calling to him first because he was the gentler of the two of them, the one less likely to spring to action just at the sound of her voice. “Mama.”
They separated and turned to her at the same time, like they’d been waiting. Emery stopped and looked at them for a long moment, taking in their faces, their expressions, every wrinkle and scar and freckle. On a good day she could describe in general what they looked like, but she had no idea she’d kept such a detailed memory of them inside her.
“What is it, my sun?” her mother said. It took Emery a moment to realize she’d said it in Russian, and when she did, the Dream slammed into Emery hard, wriggling in through the cracks of her mental armor. She gasped, clutching her head, forcing herself to remember—teacups, sweaters, Edgar firing the Peacemaker, Wes’s eyebrow furrow, the scent of Joel’s pillow—and when she caught her breath, Jacqueline and Wes stood on either side of her.
Wes’s fingertips brushed her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.”
“You shouldn’t stand there, biscuit,” her father said.
“What?”
His glasses still impossibly reflected the light, hiding his eyes, but both his eyebrows rose. His finger rose, pointing upward.
“You shouldn’t stand there,” he said.
The room groaned. All around them, the golden women with the cascading hair that formed the columns of the room shifted, stone features scraping, to shift their bodies sideways and extend their arms up, Their revolvers flashed in the light. Their golden fingers curled around the triggers.
Emery grabbed Wes and Jacqueline’s collars. “DOWN!”
The bang echoed in Emery’s ears as all twelve guns went off at once. From their barrels poured the purple clouds of the Dream, and their bullets ripped through the chandelier’s chains. It fell so slow, Emery had a moment to look up and see it dropping, crystals rising upward, the delicate metal singing in the air. Her parents stood exactly underneath it.
“No!” She scrambled forward, reaching for their boots.
A hand grabbed her belt and yanked her back. Wes. With a heave, he dragged her back across the polished floor just as the chandelier crashed, sending metal and crystal in all directions. Emery ducked her face into her arms, and when the chaos had stilled, she looked up again.
Her parents were gone. Not dead beneath the chandelier, but gone, as if they had never been there at all. The dream dissolved into the barren plain of No Man’s Land. Wes pulled her up under one arm, Jacqueline under the other, and though her legs were steady, her chest felt hollow.
She’d never get to see her parents dead. One day they just wouldn’t come home.
She would have preferred dead bodies beneath the chandelier.
(Next time on The Children of Hypnos -------> More Old School Horror)
I’d be able to sense a doppelgänger, Emery told herself. I would sense a doppelgänger.
She motioned to Wes to go around the left side of the staircases while she crept around the right. The dark figure straightened up and lashed out at something on the ground—the lamp that had fallen from the entryway table, now in pieces on the floor.
“Damn…lamp…boobytrap…”
Emery lowered her guns, though her heart still beat a million miles a minute. “Hypnos’s eyeballs, Marcia, how many times are you going to show up somewhere unannounced?”
Marcia froze with one leg in the air; Emery could just see the cord of the lamp wrapped around her foot. Her head turned to both of them, her expression hidden in shadow. “When have I shown up somewhere else unannounced? Ugh—nevermind. I didn’t think you’d actually be up here!”
“Why are you here? And why’d you set off the Fox?” Wes said. As he did, the Fox screamed again outside.
“I didn’t,” she sniped, tearing the cord off her foot. “My dad did. We were coming back from midnight dinner; he heard from some of the students in the Crossing that they saw you come up this way, so he followed. The Fox took him by surprise, so I came up here without him. The Fox won’t keep him busy for long. You need to leave. Now.”
“What’s going on?” Joel’s flashlight beam illuminated them through the twisting staircases.
“Your idea didn’t work, Jojo,” Emery said. “Coming up here was more suspicious. We have to go. Get all your stuff. Jackie! Kris, Lewis, Ridley! Let’s go!”
Sounds echoed out of the ballroom. The light inside the door went out. Kris, Lewis, Jacqueline, and Ridley hustled into the foyer.
“Go east,” Marcia said. “Don’t take the path back down. He might see you. Go east and come out near the dorms, then split up, go to your rooms for the night, and act like you’ve done nothing strange. I’ll stay here and keep him occupied.”
Marcia kicked the broken lamp off to the side and pushed them all out of the manor. Instead of going straight back down the path to the sports fields, Emery led the way east, into the thick crush of the Fenhallow Woods. The Fox’s screams still pierced the night, but they cut off every few seconds, like a strange stuttering siren. Faint shafts of moonlight crept through the canopy above to light their path. They prowled as quietly and quickly as they could through the underbrush, though Kris and Lewis weren’t known for their stealth, and the heels on Jacqueline’s boots had her stumbling every fifth step.
Emery allowed herself a breath when they emerged from the woods on the far east side of the administration building, closer to the upper-classmen dorms and the sleep research center. They sprinted the distance between the trees and the research center, hiding themselves in the long shadows it cast on the ground.
As soon as they were close enough to the roads between the dorms, Lewis didn’t need more prompting. He tugged on Kris’s sleeve and pulled her toward the sidewalk. Emery gave Joel a quick kiss and said to him and Jacqueline, “I’ll text you later. We can’t go back up there now, he’ll be suspicious. Keep your phones on and I’ll let you know.”
Then she grabbed Wes and started toward Kirkland. Ridley followed tight on Wes’s heels until she’d stepped on them enough time that Wes glared at her. She said a quick goodbye and skittered off.
“I didn’t think he’d find us so quickly,” Wes said, fists clenched and jaw tight. “If we’d had more time, we could have practiced more. Could have tried something else—maybe even gone inside, after a few nights of work.”
“We got somewhere, though, and I care more about that.” Emery checked the line of the trees over her shoulder. What leaves were left on the trees rustled gently in the night. “If even one of us can open a gateway, that’s enough. We’ll go through.”
“Whether or not it’s safe?” he said.
“Nothing’s safe if my doppelgänger is active,” she replied. “Fenhalloween is in two days. If Ares doesn’t come for us after he searches the manor, we go through and find this thing.” They reached the front doors of Kirkland. Emery pulled Wes to a stop.
“And screw waiting,” she said. “If we find her, I’m killing her. I don’t care how long it takes.”
~
Ares didn’t come for them that night or the next day. While the day and night division students both got caught up in costumes and creepy decorations, Emery texted Joel, Kris, and Lewis, and told them to lay low for a week and not to do anything suspicious—Wes had already said the same thing to Ridley. Then Emery texted Jacqueline and told her to come to Emery’s dorm on Fenhalloween night, half an hour before the festivities were supposed to start, when their classmates would be heading up to Fenhallow Manor.
Emery waited in her room, watching from her window as crowds started to funnel out of the dorms and make their way toward the path through the woods. The Fox was already screaming, and the sky was going dark. Purple lanterns had been set up on metal poles along campus roads to give the school an eerie glow. She’d spent the last two days convincing Joel she didn’t want to go out for Fenhalloween, and it was fine if he went with his soccer friends. She caught him walking down the sidwalk, dressed as a fairytale prince, with a crowd of other boys who looked more like fairytale pirates. Joel looked toward Kirkland as he passed by, but Emery sat behind her curtains and knew he couldn’t see her.
A knock came at her door. She checked the clock as she got up from her perch. “You’re like fifteen minutes early, Jackie, we need to wait until the building is emptier—”
But it wasn’t Jacqueline at the door.
It was Edgar.
“Joel said you weren’t coming to Fenhalloween.” Edgar was dressed like cowboy. Of course. “Do you feel okay? Is—um—is your—dop—”
“I have cramps,” Emery said.
Edgar’s flushed bright crimson from the collar of his shirt to the roots of his hair.
“Oh,” he said, but still didn’t move. “Um. Do you need anything? Grandpa says heating pads help. Or, um, medicine? And watching movies. We could watch a movie.”
Persistent, caring little monster. Emery tapped the brim of his cowboy hat. “No, but thank you. You should go with your friends.”
Edgar shifted on the spot, saying nothing. He picked at the hem of his shirt, which must have once been tucked into his pants but now hung loose. Emery realized what she’d said. They always went to Fenhalloween together, and Edgar had always followed her around all night, quiet and out of the way, a little shadow.
“Morris is going, isn’t he?” she said.
“Yes.”
“So go hang out with him.”
Edgar shrugged. Emery nudged him in the shoulder. “There must be someone you can hang out with there.”
Edgar looked up, eyes wide. “Is Wes going?”
“Uh…maybe. You should go find out.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t talk to him about everything.” Emery checked the clock again. She needed to get Edgar out before Jacqueline and Wes showed up.
“And…medicine won’t make it better?” Edgar said.
“What? Oh—no. Edgar, look. I’m not always going to be around for stuff like this. If you go out and talk to people, you’ll make more friends, and you won’t need me.” Even as she said it, she felt a sharp pain in her gut. She hadn’t thought about the words before she’d said them, and now they felt like she’d stabbed herself. Edgar’s face fell and his blush deepened.
“I didn’t mean it like—it’s just—” She couldn’t be sharp with Edgar. She couldn’t be dry. She couldn’t lie to him, and she couldn’t shut the door in his face.
“What’s Edgar doing here?”
Emery stiffened. Jacqueline came down the hallway, slipping her phone in her pocket and reaching up to tie her hair back. A moment later Wes appeared at the top of the stairs at the far end of the hallway. He paused, looking between Emery and Edgar; Emery tried to think of a hand motion that would mean Pretend you’re going to Fenhalloween and get out of here right now.
“Are you guys doing something?” Edgar asked.
“No,” Emery said before either Jacqueline or Wes could answer. It came out sharp. It was a lie.
Edgar turned to her and she watched both of those things register in his expression. For as strange as he was, and as worried as he could be, he had never taken long to put the pieces together.
“It’s your doppelgänger, right?” he said. “The picture. It wasn’t a picture. It was real.”
“No, Edgar—”
“That’s dangerous. You shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t fight for it. You shouldn’t fight it without Grandpa and Mom and Dad.” His thin shoulders heaved, his breaths drawing short and close together, his hands balling in the fabric of his jeans. His voice got louder. “It’ll hurt you. It’ll try to hurt you. You can’t go.”
Emery grabbed his head. “Edgar. Breathe. We’re not going after my doppelgänger. No one’s going to get hurt.”
“You’re lying.” His eyes glazed over, but he looked too petrified to cry. “You found out more from the Sandman and you didn’t tell me. You’re lying.”
Emery resisted the urge to squeeze him. “Because you would have told Grandpa.”
“So? It would have been better—”
“We can’t know that. I want to tell him, Edgar, I do, but he could tell the rest of the State. I could be served my termination papers. I don’t want to be on a deadline to kill this thing. I don’t want to have to train to fight it, because that’ll just make it stronger. I want to take it out on my own terms. Okay?” She held on to his face; his cheeks were hot, his eyes two blue skull-fires. “What I need you to do right now is go to Fenhallow Manor with everyone else and act like everything is normal. And don’t talk to Grandpa Al.”
“But you can’t go—”
“I can.” She said it with as much force as she could muster, and his eyes widened. She released him and moved back inside her room. “Go away.”
She may as well have slapped him; he reeled back, pulling the hat off his head, and shoved his way past Wes and Jacqueline to flee back to the staircase. The three of them stood motionless until he was gone.
Emery swore.
“I’m so glad I don’t have siblings,” Jacqueline said, fixing her hair and stepping into Emery’s room.
Wes followed after, frowning as always. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“I hope not,” Emery said, closing the door. “But let’s not push it. Jackie, open the gateway.”
Jacqueline cocked an eyebrow. “You waste all that time in student council meetings and now you want to cut to the chase?” But she rubbed her hands together and planted her feet apart on the floor, focusing on open air in the middle of Emery’s dorm room.
“Test run first,” Wes said. “I don’t want to get stuck inside. I’ve been practicing in my room—just a little at a time, enough that the denmother wouldn’t notice—and I should be able to open a gateway, too, if we need it.”
Where previously the room had been untouched by the Dream, now pressure began to creep in on the edges of Emery’s senses. She formed armor over her clothes and breathed evenly. The pressure gathered before Jacqueline, the size of a soccer ball, invisible but so absolutely there that Emery felt sure she would be able to kick it through the window. Emery pulled her Peacemakers off her bracelet and shoved them into their holsters. Wes took his hammer from its chain and enlarged it.
“Test run,” Jacqueline said, and shoved her hands into the air before her. She pulled her gateway open. Two great horse statues suddenly occupied Emery’s room, making her bedframe crack against the wall. Lightning crackled within the dark portal.
“What’s it like inside?” Jacqueline said.
“Weird,” Emery replied, holding out her hands. Jacqueline took one, Wes the other. “Hold on really tight. We have to end up in the same place. Ready?”
“Ready,” they both said.
Holding as tightly to them as she could, Emery pulled them through the gateway.
There was darkness, and the rush of falling, and Emery could still feel both Jacqueline’s and Wes’s hands in hers, though she also felt other fingers there, fingers trying to worm their way in and pry apart her grip. She gritted her teeth and held on tighter.
She landed on soft nothingness like she had last time, and the Dream reached for her mind as soon as it could, tearing at her memories. She held her grip and squeezed her eyes shut and thought about her father and his Irish mythology, her mother and her long black hair; she thought of the clock ticking behind Grandpa Al’s desk and the look on Edgar’s face before he had run from her.
“Emery. Emery, come on.”
Hands pulled at her. Wes and Jacqueline stood above her in No Man’s Land, the cracked and barren plain of the Dream, with dream windows forming and dissolving around them. Purple clouds roiled overhead.
Emery let go of their hands and sat up, rubbing the ache from her forehead. “That’s really the worst.”
Wes’s frown deepened. “Klaus was right. The Dream reacts differently to you.”
“What do you mean? What was that like for you?”
“It felt like we stepped through a gateway and now we’re here,” Jacqueline said.
“For me it felt like falling for a second or two, then landing here,” Wes said. “It’s disorienting—it doesn’t feel like the waking world, and the pressure is overwhelming for a second. But only for a second. You looked like someone was shoving an ice pick in your head.”
“Ugh. We’ll figure it out later. Jackie, open the gateway back.”
Jacqueline was already focusing. This time, instead of concentrated pressure of the Dream coalescing in front of her, it felt like a release, like a hole where the pressure could escape. It happened quicker than before, and Jacqueline opened the gateway with ease. Two large horse statues now stood in the middle of No Man’s Land, the portal between them a welcome way out.
“We can go out and you can deal with all that coming back in nonsense,” Jacqueline said, “or we can just stay in and do what we came to do.”
“Stay in,” Emery said, at the same time Wes said, “Go out.” She shot him a withering look.
“I don’t want to deal with that pressure again,” she said. “I’ve already got a headache. Let’s go find this thing.”
“And, um,” Jacqueline looked around. The windows were coming closer. “Where do you suggest we do that? There aren’t exactly any signs pointing us the right direction.”
“It’s my doppelgänger. My doppelgänger will be made from my dream. If we have to start anywhere, it should be there.”
“We don’t exactly get to choose which dream windows show up near us,” Wes said.
“Dream windows appear in similar locations as their dreamers,” Jacqueline said matter-of-factly. “Did neither of you read anything in the book I brought to the manor? This place might be cuckoo-bonkers nonsense, but the dream window of someone in China isn’t going to show up here. All these windows are of people who live nearby. Probably on campus, or in the city. So really, your dream window should be pretty close at all times, since you’re right here. Or at the very least, you should be able to summon it.”
“Summon it? Like a demon?”
“Just think about it real hard.”
“I don’t even know what it looks like.”
“What do you dream about?” Wes asked.
Emery eyed the approaching windows warily. The faster they could get inside her dream, the faster they could avoid going through hours of other people’s dreams and nightmares. “Like, once a month, what do I dream about? You really expect me to remember that?”
“It doesn’t have to be your exact dream that you think about,” Jacqueline said. “Think of yourself. Think of your own mind. Think of stepping inside it.”
“Is there like a dreamseeker gene for visualization or something? Is that why you’re all supposed to be good at this?”
“Shut up and do it.”
A window passed close to Wes’s right side. Emery fought the urge to grab both Wes and Jacqueline again. Instead, she thought about how she’d like not to move at all. Then she thought about retreating inside herself. Then she thought about how if retreating inside herself was the way to keep herself from moving, she would do it. She would crawl right into her own mind and stay there. She’d barricade herself in with memories of her family and her friends and she’d make herself safe.
She felt the brush of a window shudder at her back, like a friendly hand on her shoulder. When she turned, there it was: almost like a gateway in its unwavering solidarity, a lone opening in the great stretch of No Man’s Land. Visible through it were snow-swept lawns and the many burning lights of a faraway palace.
Emery knew it was hers like she knew her own hands, and she grabbed Wes and Jacqueline and took them inside.
There was no Grandpa Al waiting for them when they returned to the surface, and Lana let Emery go without any fuss, too busy muttering over the empty eyedropper and Klaus’s waking water.
Emery ran back to Kirkland, where lights burned in the tall gothic windows, and Wes, Ridley, and the class eighteen student council sat around the TV in the lobby. Kris and Lewis were doing homework; Jacqueline was flipping through something on her phone; Wes and Ridley were watching the news, Wes as still and silent as a statue and Ridley bouncing up and down on the couch cushion beside him; and Joel was busy tying orange and purple Fenhalloween decoration streamers together until he looked up and saw her there, and then he tossed them away with a big smile.
Emery sat herself on Ridley’s other side and explained quickly and quietly what had just happened.
“So Uncle Ares hasn’t gotten him to say anything yet,” Wes said.
Ridley looked worried. “Is he not trying? Or…does he not really want the information? Uncle Ares is supposed to be really good at finding things out.”
“I don’t know how Klaus resisted him, but we can’t assume he’s going to be able to do it for much longer,” Emery said. “We need to find my doppelgänger before this gets out of hand. Joel, what do you have?”
“The perfect place.” He pulled out a sheet of orange paper. One of the many fliers for Fenhalloween that had been tacked up on the Crossing’s main bulletin board. On it was a creepy low-angle shot of Fenhallow Manor, and the date and time—Halloween, 9 PM—that Fenhalloween would begin. In all caps at the bottom, it said, COSTUMES MANDATORY.
Emery frowned. “Fenhallow Manor?”
Joel leaned forward. “Yes! Think about it: the class sixteen council just finished cleaning and decorating it for Fenhalloween, so we know it’s in good shape. It’s off-limits because it’s just been decorated, so no one will go there at night unless student council members are there to fix decorations or anything. And you’re technically not leaving campus, but it’s far enough away that no one is likely to hear us or walk in on us.”
He paused, then said, “And, you know, it’s haunted and stuff. Which is cool.”
“I guess this works,” Emery said. “As long as the Wilmark Fox doesn’t try to attack us inside the house.”
“Ver did some experiments with the Fox. It only attacks you if you look at it,” Jacqueline said.
“Why would Ver do experiments with it?”
“Why wouldn’t she? You have to observe your enemies in order to learn how to defeat them. Just because the rest of you don’t think before you leap…”
Emery let out the longest, most exaggerated sigh she could manage. Jacqueline glanced up, glaring. A moment passed. Her lip curled up at the corner.
“Well,” Emery said, “are we going tonight or what? We know Ares isn’t around; we might as well go now, even if it’s just to check the place out.”
Joel was already out of his seat and bounding toward the door; Jacqueline, Kris, and Ridley went next, leaving just Lewis and Wes to glance uncertainly at each other, then at Emery.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Wes asked. “Open a gateway? Go into the Dream again? It wasn’t great for us last time, and what if opening a gateway from the inside is different than opening it from the outside? We could get stuck in there.”
“You don’t have to go in,” Emery said.
A vein stood out in Wes’s forehead. “We’re not having this argument again.”
Lewis, slinging his backpack over his shoulders, slipped between them muttering, “It just seems like a bad idea to me.” Emery followed him out, Wes close on her heels.
~
The nighttime bustle of the Sleeping City had settled over campus. The horns and squeals of cars on the streets, the ethereal rush from distant highways. Sounds echoed off the skyscrapers. Van der Gelt tower loomed above all the rest, the lights that veined along its black architechture lit up in purple and azure as a nod to the dreamhunters who protected the city.
Fenhallow Woods stood against the soft din of mankind, its face unblinking, its silence complete. The last of the crickets had gone for the season; the only thing that disturbed the woods now was the wind. The dirt trail that wound its way through the sports fields curved up into the woods, disappearing between the trees.
Emery had seen pictures of the time when the campus was founded, when it was Fabian Fenhallow’s manor house sitting high on a hill, surrounded by a smattering of trees and looking down on the small population that would become the Sleeping City. The same picture taken now would show only Fenhallow’s campus and the thick crush of the woods. The manor had been swallowed.
Emery marched in the front of the group, guns drawn; Wes and Ridley brought up the rear. Joel, the only one who had known where they were going, had brought a flashlight.
“No one look directly ahead of us,” Emery said. “The Fox could show up in the middle of the path, and I’m not in the mood to fight it off. Keep your eyes down.”
But the Fox didn’t make an appearance. At least, not that Emery saw. She never looked to the sides, and she never looked back. She felt a faint buzz of the Dream around them, but they were in the woods, where the veil between the Dream and the waking world grew thin. Ares Montgomery could’ve come charging up behind them, and she wouldn’t have felt his approach. For moments at a time, Emery felt they were back in Klaus’s nightmare, following the trail to the ruined castle, and that Marcia might slide out in front of them in full armor and a battle axe.
At the top of the hill, the path flattened out into a wide stone-paved circle, and the trees broke apart, their branches scraping a star-dotted sky. Another statue rose from the bushes and tangles of dead vines in the center of the circular drive, a man on rearing horseback with a sword raised to the sky. Overgrown underbrush covered what had once been a sprawling lawn, and in the middle of the mess stood Fenhallow Manor.
The Fenhallow grounds crew had kept most of the plant life off of the long porch and tall walls of the manor, and every few years the school paid to have another part of its crumbling structure repaired and fortified. The porch columns straightened; the shattered windows replaced; the roof reshingled and the ornamental brass poppy plucked from the wild shrubs in the lawn and reset atop the peak of the east tower, where it curled against the moon. Yet for all that work it still felt like an abandoned place, gaunt and silent and watching them approach. Fenhalloween was held inside every year, but the exterior was never decorated. It didn’t need to be.
Joel raised his flashlight to the statue of the horse and its rider.
“Great-great-great-grandpa is lookin’ good, Em,” he said.
“Add a couple more greats. Everyone in my family was like twenty when they had kids.” Emery looked up into the statue’s face as they passed by. Eamon Ashworth had died fighting Fabian Fenhallow’s nightmares. Some stories about them said they were best friends; others said mortal enemies. Emery wasn’t entirely convinced Fabian would have made a statue to Eamon he could see from his bedroom window if they were enemies, but Fenhallows were weird like that. Jacqueline flipped the statue the casual bird as she strode past.
Joel’s light rippled over the manor’s siding and flashed off the windows. According to campus legend, the manor was haunted—not by ghosts, but by nightmares. Nightmares of the students about what might live there, trapped inside the manor’s walls by the gravity of the Dream.
The only nightmare Emery knew of that lurked around this area was the Wilmark Fox. No one had ever proven that anything lived in Fenhallow Manor, but it wouldn’t come as a surprise if someday, something did.
The stained glass in the double front doors depicted the closed eye of Hypnos on a background of blood-red poppies. They weren’t locked—the doors to Fenhallow Manor were never locked, for fear that someone would try to smash the stained glass to get in—and they led into a wide foyer dominated by two sets of stairs twisted into a double helix. Both were made of wood and expertly crafted. Inlaid into one balustrade were designs of gold; into the other, whorls of silver. The floor was a checkerboard and archways led into different wings of the house.
Here, the decorations were subtle enough that Emery couldn’t tell if the cobwebs along the ceiling were real or fake. Extra furniture had been brought in to make the house seem truly abandoned, though every piece lacked the layer of dust that covered the floors and windowsills. On the far side of the foyer was the door to the ballroom, and above its closed doors hung a long purple-and-white banner that said Happy Fenhalloween.
Jacqueline slapped Lewis’s hand away from a lamp switch on a nearby table. “No lights in the entryway,” she said. “If anyone sees a light on through the front of the house, they’ll come to investigate.”
“Right,” Joel said, “Which is why we’re going to the ballroom.”
He led the way past the double staircase, through the unlocked ballroom doors, made of oak and carved with Hypnos’s eye. Renovations had begun, stopped, and begun again at least three times on the ballroom alone; the intricacy of the flooring, the long windows lined along the north wall, and the chandelier that hung from the ceiling had all caused problems for the contractors the administration brought in to restore it. Despite their apparent hatred of dreamseekers, the State had declared Fenhallow Manor a landmark to be restored to historical accuracy. And that meant the entire floor of the ballroom had to be torn out and replaced, piece by painstaking wooden piece, into a closed Hypnos eye so large it looked like an inverted sunrise, surrounded by wreaths of dark poppies. The windows glinted in the night, framed by heavy red curtains that draped from the ceiling. Joel turned his flashlight up so the beam would shatter through the crystals of the grand chandelier above their heads. More furniture and refreshment tables had been brought in and set up along the east wall, along with two sets of speakers and cleared area with an amplifier.
Joel paused on the amplifier. “Are we actually getting a live band this year?”
“Yes, and you’d know that if you paid attention in any meetings,” Jacqueline said. She grabbed Joel’s backpack and yanked him backward, unzipping the largest pocket to rummage through his things. “What else did you bring for light? We can’t turn on the whole ballroom.”
Joel had brought a small camping lantern that usually sat on top of the television in his room.They set it up in the middle of the floor and gathered around it. Jacqueline reached back into Joel’s bag and pulled out a library book and her purple notebook. She flipped through the pages until she found the one she wanted, and shoved it close to the light.
“Here’s everything I have so far about opening gateways. It’s not much, but I compared with Wes’s notes from your dream theory class, and it’s more than Lenton has been teaching you.”
“Are we sure this is safe?” Kris said, looking at Emery. “Are you sure this is what you want to do? What if you get inside and something goes wrong again? We can’t come after you,” she motions between herself, Lewis, and Joel, “and even if we could, we wouldn’t know something was wrong.”
“I don’t see many other options at this point,” Emery said. “If we even manage to open a gateway, we can do one quick in and out just to make sure we know how it works, so we don’t get stuck. Then it’s just a recon mission. We’re trying to find out if this thing even exists, and if it does, then I have to decide if I’m going to try to kill it there, or try to get a little stronger and do it later.”
She wanted to kill it as soon as she saw it. Shoot it clean through the head, though she had an inkling it wouldn’t be as simple as that. But when she thought of it, of her dead doppelgänger and her Insanity Prime cleared, it wasn’t herself she saw relieved. It was Edgar.
Edgar wouldn’t have to worry. He already had anxiety problems, not to mention anything else that might be going on in his head; the sooner she got all this taken care of, the sooner she could make sure Edgar’s world was as stable and safe as possible. Nothing to disrupt him; nothing to send him toward a fiery trainwreck of an Insanity Prime.
“Let’s go back,” Emery said. “We have work to do.”
~
“So, I think it’s different for dreamseekers, right?” Jacqueline stood in the middle of the ballroom floor, not far from the light, hands held up in front of her. “We don’t have weapons, so we open gateways with our hands.”
“Klaus opened his gateway with his hands,” Emery said.
“I think his hands are his weapons,” Wes said, making claws with his fingers.
“Right, so,” Jacqueline went on, “I only found resources for dreamhunters, obviously, because they hate me here. For you all, it says you have to sense the veil of the Dream laying over the waking world. Like a layer of smog. You have to block out other sensations and distractions so that you feel only that.” She pushed her flattened hand into the air before her. “Then you pierce the veil. All the imagining and visualizing before this is so that you can actually mentally bring the Dream and the waking world closer in that one spot, I guess sort of like making a dreamform. But instead of pulling a piece of the Dream into the waking world, you just reel it in close and pierce through it so that you can tear a hole open between the two. Make sense?”
Emery felt the beginnings of a headache taking shape in her left temple. “If this is like making a dreamform, I’m already screwed.”
“And you’re going to keep being screwed if you don’t get up and try,” Jacqueline snapped. She had both hands pressed together in front of her stomach now, and she focused on the empty space before her.
Emery and Wes, weapons out, took up positions on either side of her to attempt the same while Joel, Lewis, and Kris looked through the book Jacqueline had brought for helpful tips. After a few minutes of flitting around the room and inspecting all the decorations, Ridley joined them in trying to open a gateway, though where they were still focusing on concentrating the Dream in one spot, Ridley kept thrusting her double icepick hammers out in the air before her and saying, “Maybe this time.”
Emery could feel the Dream around them like a heavy layer of atmosphere, but when she tried to draw it toward herself, the way she would to make a dreamform, the headache grew worse, first a squeezing discomfort and then, as she tried harder, a sharp needling pain. She felt Joel’s eyes on her but didn’t turn to look; looking at him would make her want to stop trying. It would make her feel like she was good enough just as she was, and right now that wasn’t true.
“Oh!”
Jacqueline froze. She’d thrust her hands out into the air and stopped, and though they were still pressed tightly together, her fingers now seemed to wave in the air, as if distorted. She pushed them a little farther forward, and the distortion crept up to her wrists.
“Open it!” said Joel.
With a deep breath and a snap of her arms, Jacqueline turned her hands away from each other and tore the air apart. It was like she’d drawn the curtains open on one of the ballroom’s windows. Reality split and pulled back with her hands, and when her arms were fully apart, it hung open on its own. Darkness and the clawing pressure of the Dream emanated from the opening, and on either side stood statues of rearing horses with wreaths of poppies hanging from their necks.
Jacqueline stepped back. Joel, Kris, and Lewis hesitantly got to their feet. The inside of the gateway wasn’t completely dark; at its heart undulated a strange purple light, like lightning inside a storm cloud.
“Damn, Jackie,” Emery said, “and they didn’t even teach you that.”
“No, they didn’t.” Vicious pride took over Jacqueline’s face. “Now, to close it…it’s sort of like…” She reached her arms out again and touched both statues with the tips of her fingers. Then, concentrating, she brought her hands back together. With a clap, the statues vanished and the dark portal of the gateway rushed into a center point between Jacqueline’s hands, disappearing.
Ridley began applauding. Kris and Joel joined in a moment later.
“How do you close it once you go through, though?” Emery said. “When we went through Klaus’s, we fell through the darkness for a while before we ended up in the Dream.”
“The book says the gateways close themselves once the person who makes them goes through to the other side.” Lewis was bent over the textbook again, squinting close at the lettering under the camping light.
“We should keep practicing,” Wes said. “I think I was close, and even if we can open it on this side, we don’t know if the process feels the same on the Dream side.”
Emery rubbed her forehead. The headache faded to a dull throb. She hadn’t been at all close; the Dream resisted being pulled closer to her, though she had sensed it coalescing in front of Jacqueline and Wes. The entire school would howl with laughter if they saw her right now. She couldn’t shoot things, she couldn’t dreamform, she couldn’t open gateways. Queen Emery, outshined by a non-dreamhunter and the lowest-ranked member of Class Eighteen.
As soon as Emery had the thought, she bit down on it. Their abilities weren’t mutually exclusive; just because Wes and Jacqueline were good at things and worked hard didn’t mean she wasn’t, or didn’t. And the two of them didn’t deserve to have their skills taken away just because she didn’t possess them, too. She was supposed to be good at things, and the fact it wasn’t true wasn’t their faults.
“Wes is right,” she said. “Keep try—”
A scream ripped through the night. They all jumped at the same time, turning toward the manor’s foyer.
“Some asshole—” Joel started.
“—what if it’s not?” Kris said. “No one’s supposed to come into the woods this late at night now, because the Fox wakes up the day division students!”
They all stopped and listened. One scream died into silence, only to be replaced with another scream, closer. Something crashed to the ground outside the ballroom doors.
Guns out, hair raised, Emery hissed, “Stay here!” to the others and crept into the foyer. Only Wes didn’t listen; hammer out, he stuck close on her heels. Their armor formed over their clothes, and Emery thanksed Hypnos that the armor, at least, she had spent so much time learning to form that it came without a headache.
They peeked through the ballroom doors. On the far side of the foyer’s twisted staircases, a shadowed figure huddled near the entrance, hissing under their breath.
At least as tall as Emery.
Definitely female.
And reeking of the Dream.
(Next time on The Children of Hypnos —> Is That The Top Of The Rollercoaster I See?)
It now felt like days were passing instead of hours.
Ares followed Emery and Wes around for the rest of the day, asking them questions about their professors, the curriculum, what the campus looked like in the spring, and even how well the air conditioning worked when it got hot in the summer. Though he ate almost nothing, he’d seemed to come to a conclusion about the food quality himself (“excellent!”), and stopped random students and staff passing by to ask how they liked living there.
The hairs on Emery’s neck stood on end the entire time, the need to check over her shoulder so fierce it felt like her insides were on fire. It was only the outpouring of Dream pressure from Ares, not a result of any nightmare—or doppelgänger—coming closer to her, but rationality couldn’t pierce the paranoia. It didn’t help that she’d lost her edge around Ares. Anything smart or sarcastic she could’ve said died inside her with the worry that he’d glean some hidden information in it. He was a trained spy and interrogator. He could probably get information from anything she said. Hypnos’s balls, he could probably get information from anything she didn’t say.
Wes didn’t seem as perturbed, but then Wes never seemed perturbed. She couldn’t talk to him with Ares around, so she couldn’t ask what else he knew about his uncle that she didn’t. He must have known Ares worked in Argos, and that was why he hadn’t been thrilled to see Ares in Grandpa Al’s office. But if he had known, why hadn’t he said anything while they were fixing Ares’s room? Or on their way to weapons training? Did he think she wouldn’t give anything away without knowing where Ares was from?
Ares finally left them after dinner—he wanted to supervise some of the student hunter missions, and Wes and Emery weren’t allowed off-campus—and the first thing Emery did while they still sat at their table was pull out her phone and scroll through the texts from Joel and Jacqueline that she’d been ignoring all day.
From Jacqueline: What’s taking so long? I thought there was a rush on this thing—let’s go!
From Joel: operation gateway to heaven is a go, meet in kirk lobby
“Joel found a place we can practice,” Emery said. “We have to meet up in Kirkland.”
“Tonight?”
“If Ares is going to watch students on missions every night, when else would be a good time?”
“What if the mission ends early and he comes back?”
“Then we stop and take care of it.” Emery put her phone down. “Did you know that he was with Argos?”
“I—yeah, I knew, but I—I didn’t know if he was here for that or if he was really just here for the review.”
“Even if he was just here for the review, you didn’t think it would be prudent to tell me your uncle was a spy? And that he might, I don’t know, pick up on something? You cannot get on me for thinking my grandpa’s gonna be cool with knowing about my doppelgänger when you do stuff like this.”
Wes held his hands up and lowered his voice. “I get it. I’m sorry, you’re right.”
Emery narrowed her eyes at him until she felt he’d appropriately submitted. “Is there anything else I need to know about him?”
“He’s a huge softie.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“He knows how to torture people.”
“Got that too.”
“If he’s here for Klaus, we might be shorter on time than we thought.”
“Then we need to go right now and find Jacqueline and the others.”
As Emery stood from the table, a familiar hum roved up behind her.
“Emery Ashworth, just who I wanted to see.”
A new sort of unease tickled the back of Emery’s neck. She turned slowly to see Lana approaching through the atrium tables.
“You sound serious,” Emery said.
“I am serious.” Lana smiled.
“You’re smiling.”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“You wanted to see me and you’re smiling. Are you going to take out my kidneys or something? Lana. Do you run a black market for dreamhunter organs?”
Emery could practically hear Wes rolling his eyes.
Lana stopped close enough that no one at nearby tables would hear them, and said, “Marcia said you got Klaus to talk. If he’s got a soft spot for you, I need to exploit it.”
“For what? We’re kind of busy.”
“I need to know about this sleeping sand he makes. And I need to give him a little to keep him awake. If you come along, I don’t have to blackmail him into telling me what I want by threatening to withhold his drugs.”
“That’s dark,” Wes grunted.
“So you agree,” Lana said. “Wonderful. I’ll only need Emery for this one, Wes, I’m sorry. Though I do encourage you to try to break into my labs again and see who comes running this time.”
Wes stared at his plate, eyes wide.
“I’ll meet you back in Kirkland,” Emery said, and followed Lana out of the cafeteria.
~
This time, Emery entered the Fenhallow Underground without any sneaking around. She followed Lana into the elevator in the administration building, then through the bowels of the Underground. It was still empty, and as they passed through the main hub with the many hallways branching off, Emery said, “Is this place always so dead?”
“There are other entrances,” Lana said, “and many other sections that are fully staffed. Still, that may only mean two or three people in an area at a time, so yes, it’s usually fairly empty.
The staircases they had to descend to get to the cells had a track on either side that clamped onto the wheels of Lana’s chair and carried her to the bottom. Emery followed behind, and when they entered the hallway of cells, they found a new guard at the door, one of the full-time dreamhunters. He frowned at them.
“I don’t think she’s supposed to be down here,” he said, nodding at Emery.
“Calm down, Luke, she’s for leverage. There are cameras, they’re going to know she’s with me.” Lana waved him off. He stepped to the side and let them into the door.
The lights came up inside the cell. Klaus was slumped in the corner, one knee pulled up to his chest, hands limp on the ground, skin covered in sweat and his eyes glazed over. He looked even more thin and gaunt than before, like someone had started vacuuming out his insides, but stopped halfway through. His breathing was fast and shallow.
Lana paused at the door. Emery had never seen Lana shocked before, but she was now, and she hurried to pull an eyedropper of lavender liquid from a small box she’d been holding on her lap. She hurried to the Plexiglas wall, to where a tray had been installed to pass food and objects to the other side without opening the door. She pulled the tray out and held the eyedropper up.
“Klaus,” she said, firmly. His head didn’t move, but his eye turned upward, as if pulled to her face by a magnet. “You need this. We found it with your things. There’s only enough for three drops in each eye, so use it carefully.”
She put the eyedropper in the tray and slammed the tray back through the wall.
In the blink of an eye, Klaus was on his feet, fingers scrabbling against the metal for the eyedropper. His pupils were dilated, his cheeks and neck flushed. The hand holding the dropper shook so badly he had to cup his other hand around the tip, as if hoping to catch any liquid that leaked out. He tilted his head back, pulled down his right eyelid, and calmed the quaking of his limbs enough to squeeze the dropper above it. When the first drop hit his eye, he sighed and stood very very still for a long moment. He did the next two drops, then switched eyes and did the last three.
Afterward, he collapsed next to the empty bedframe. He still looked gaunt, but not quite so lifeless.
Had it been the three years on the run that had done this to him? Or the sleeplessness? Or the sand—the liquid—whatever it was he’d made to keep himself awake? Maybe it was some combination of all three. Emery pitied him. She didn’t want to, but there it was: regardless of whether he was telling them the truth, he didn’t deserve this. No one did. And instead of at least easing some of the pain, the Ward was letting him go into withdrawal and holding his drugs for leverage.
“You’re going to answer some questions for me, Klaus,” Lana said. “The more you answer, the sooner we’ll give you more of that stuff. The less you answer, the longer we’ll keep it away.”
Klaus let his head fall back as he looked up at them. His expression was smooth for a moment until his eyes focused, and then it crumpled in.
"Lana? Lana--what happened?"
Lana paused looking unsure, then seemed to register the question. "Oh--oh, I forgot, you weren't around." She patted the arm of her chair. "Doppelgänger. You think you have them pinned and then whoom--severed spinal cord. They don't normally hurt their hunters. I think she knew it was the end. Had a couple surgeries, doctors are still looking into options."
"They could dreamform you something."
"Fixing or replacing a spine with dreamforms is almost as difficult as fixing or replacing a brain. And I’d want to do it myself—I’m not having someone build me a new spine just to have it disappear when they die. But I don’t have the time, with all my research piled up like it is. Surgery and therapy will do for now.” Lana sighed, and smiled. “Still, I killed her. Killed her dead.”
Klaus smiled back. It filled out his face a little more, brightened his eyes. “Lana the Dreamkiller. What questions did you want to ask me?”
“You’ve been the one trying to break into my labs, yes?”
“Not trying,” Klaus said cheerfully, “I have broken in.”
Lana’s smile went rigid.
"Your alarm system is good, though; even I couldn't avoid tripping it a few times."
"It's a Van Der Gelt," Lana said. "We've found over half a pound of fine-grain, high-grade sand missing since your spree started. Half a pound, Klaus. That's enough to put a herd of elephants to sleep for a week. You can't be shocked that the Ward went after you. Dump that into the ventilation system of city hall and it'd be considered a terrorist attack. What were you possibly doing with it?"
Klaus motioned to Emery. "Are you okay discussing this in front of the students? I thought the Ward didn't want them to know about all the dirty parts of dreamhunting."
"I can handle it--" Emery started.
Lana held up a hand. "Enough with the jabs at the Ward. Why did you take the sand?"
Klaus sighed and grabbed the edge of the bedframe behind him. Pushing himself up seemed like an arduous endeavor; his arms still shook slightly, and when he finally got his feet beneath himself, he stood as if his bones were toothpicks. He approached the Plexiglas and leaned heavily against it, resting his temple near one of the small circular holes cut into it.
"I needed it for what you just gave to me. I needed sand to make it. I could have gotten the sand myself, but I didn't want to risk the dreamers by skinning their dreams, so I thought I'd skim it off a source that retrieved it with all the proper safety measures."
"You want to tell me how you altered the composition of sleeping sand to keep you reliably awake for so long?"
"You sound surprised. I thought you'd have figured it out by now."
"Humor me."
Klaus scratched at his scruff. "I'd rather not say, actually."
Lana just stared at him. She held up the empty eyedropper.
Klaus's expression turned wary. He said, "I steeped it. Like tea."
"Steeped it…in what?" Lana frowned. "Water? That does nothing. We both know this."
"Not water. Well, not water from the waking world. You've seen the lake, haven't you?"
"The lake. In No Man's Land? The Waking Lake?"
"Yes."
Emery looked between the two of them, nonplussed. "Are you talking about the lake in the Dream? Beneath that big snowcapped mountain?"
"That one," Klaus said. Then, when he noticed Emery's confusion, said, "They haven't taught you about that, have they? There's a reason that lake is the only body of water in the No Man's Land of the Dream. The No Man's Land represents the subconsciouses of all the people currently alive on Earth. That lake, then, is the conscious minds of all of humanity. The more people living on the planet, the bigger the lake gets. You sat there for a while when you were in the Dream, didn't you? It felt more peaceful than the rest of the Dream, right? Felt a little safer? The windows didn't come as close."
"Yeah, I guess."
"A lot of hunters who stumble into the Dream are too weary to notice by the time they reach it, if they ever do." Klaus looked back to Lana. "It was a simple equation. Waking Lake water keeps you safe from that digging at your mind that the Dream does--how it tries to get at your memories, to shove you so deep into your own subconscious you can't get out. Sleeping sand is purely a product of dreams and nightmares. When you soak it in water from the Waking Lake, the water absorbs those properties of the dream or nightmare, but cancels out that clawing effect that puts you to sleep. It clears your mind. Keeps you mentally springy. Like a dreamkiller; no sleep required. And that’s where I got the name: sleeping sand, waking water. Good, right?”
Lana rubbed her temple so hard it looked like she was trying to dig her brain out.
“Trust me, it took a lot of experimenting to figure out the right amount of water for the dose of sand. The two have to balance each other. Take too much pure water outside the Dream and you have visions like some kind of oracle."
Lana carefully tucked both sides of her hair behind her ears, breathing deep, gathering herself. "Klaus. Please tell me you didn't drink the water of the Waking Lake."
Emery froze. "Wes and I drank it," she blurted out. "When we were there--we'd been in the Dream for so long, we drank some of it. Is that bad? We didn't know."
Klaus shook his head. "You'll be fine. You'd been heavily battered by the Dream's influence before that, and you didn't gorge yourself. You had enough to get back to the right mental state." Then, to Lana: "Of course I didn't drink it, not unless I was already in the Dream. I put it in my eyes. But yes--sometimes we have to make do with the test subjects we have on hand."
Lana said nothing for several long moments, apparently lost in thought. In her silence, Klaus looked at Emery again and smiled. She expected a vapid, drug-haze smile, but he seemed lucid. Lucid, malnourished, and still in desperate need of a real shower.
"So the sand really was just for you, for the waking water,“ Emery said, "And that's why the State was after you? Because they thought you were going to use the sand to do something terrible."
"Yes, exactly," Klaus said, shaking his head no. Lana still hadn't looked up.
Lana didn't know. Lana wasn't supposed to know. Klaus held up his right hand. Blood was caked beneath the nail of his index finger, and the nail itself had turned purple and looked in the process of falling off. The shock of seeing it threw Emery off; it took her a moment too long to realize it was the result of torture.
Ares Montgomery had already been down here. He had already come to see Klaus, but judging by Klaus's calmness, he hadn't found anything out.
Yet.
(Next time on The Children of Hypnos —> Horror Movie Tropes!)
