Dream Stalkers Read online

  I hadn’t managed to shout a warning, but Jinx had responded as if I had. I remembered Sanderson telling Jinx and me – during one of our numerous dressing-down sessions in his office – that as Ideator and Incubus, we should have a bond so strong it would be almost telepathic. Since that time, Jinx and I had worked out some, if not all, of our differences, and these days we did function better as a team, better than we ever had before, in fact. So maybe I had projected my thoughts to Jinx, at least on some basic level. Or maybe it was nothing more than a coincidence. Right then it didn’t matter. I had work to do.

  I may be an Ideator, but that doesn’t mean I have any special powers beyond having once dreamed an Incubus into existence. Unless you count having life-long insomnia as “special”. I ran after Jinx, but I was nowhere near as fast as he was, and I knew he would reach Melody, Trauma Doll, and the sand creature before I would. I briefly considered taking a shot at the shuteye dealer with my trancer. Maybe if Sandy didn’t see the energy blast coming, he wouldn’t be able to avoid it. But I suck at firing on the move, and I didn’t want to hit Melody or Trauma Doll by accident. So I concentrated on running faster and hoped I’d get there in time to do some good.

  Our trainees had been startled by the ease with which Sandy had shrugged off Melody’s trancer blast, but they recovered quickly. Trauma Doll retracted her coils and they wrapped tightly around her porcelain arm once more. She then thrust her hands toward Sandy, unleashing both her right and left coils. But instead of encircling Sandy, the coils straightened and she scissored her arms back and forth, causing the barbed wire to slash through the creature’s substance like a pair of metal whips. At the same time, Melody fired her trancer at Sandy, only this time, she’d flicked the selector switch to wide beam setting, and moved her trancer up and down, spraying Sandy from head to toe with M-energy.

  I was impressed. Melody and Trauma Doll were working together in an attempt to disrupt the cohesion of Sandy’s substance in order to weaken and perhaps even injure him. It was damned smart. Too bad it didn’t work.

  Sandy raised his own arms, as if in imitation of Trauma Doll, and he hit the two of them with twin blasts of sand to the face. Melody dropped her trancer, turned her back on Sandy, staggered forward several steps, and fell to her hands and knees. Her trancer’s beam winked out as it hit the sand, and it lay there for a split second before it sank into the sand and disappeared. Whatever kind of Incubus Sandy was, he was even more powerful than I’d thought. How much of the beach did the damned thing control? Could the very ground Jinx and I ran on be used against us as a weapon whenever Sandy felt like it? Talk about precarious footing.

  The sand-blast had a far more dramatic effect on Trauma Doll. The impact caused the left side of her head to shatter in an explosion of white porcelain shards. She didn’t go down, but her arms dropped to her sides and her barbed wire whips fell limp. I’d suspected that Trauma Doll was hollow, but this was the first time I’d had any confirmation. Incubi are tough and they can heal a lot of damage while in their Night Aspects, but they aren’t invulnerable. If their heads are cut off or destroyed, they die. Trauma Doll had only lost half of her head, but I feared she still might be dead – or whatever the equivalent is for a giant animated toy.

  I felt like I’d taken a blow to the sternum. My breath caught in my chest, and a cold pit yawned wide where my stomach had been. The thing I had feared the most had happened. Melody and Trauma Doll, rookies under my supervision, had gone down. And neither looked like she’d be getting up anytime soon. Shock gave way to anger – mostly at myself, but it provided the motive force to spur me on to greater speed.

  As I continued running toward Melody and Trauma Doll, Jinx let out a bellow of rage, reached inside his jacket, and withdrew a sledgehammer. Part of his clown abilities was being able to store an insane amount of bizarre weaponry on his person, regardless of the size. The sledge – which he called Cuthbert Junior – was his favorite, and without pausing in his run, he lifted the hammer back over his shoulder, then hurled it toward Sandy like it was a steroid-infused tomahawk. Cuthbert Junior was a blur as it spun through the air. As if sensing the sledge’s approach, Sandy started to turn to face the oncoming weapon, but, before the creature could do anything, Cuthbert Junior slammed into him with a loud chuff! Sand sprayed everywhere, and the sledge continued traveling a dozen more feet before it thunked to the ground, only a few inches from the water’s edge. Its head sank into the wet sand, its wooden handle pointing skyward. I thought Jinx would go to retrieve Cuthbert Junior, pulling it out of the sand with a moist sucking sound as he shouted something like, I am rightwise born King of England!

  But instead he ran to the spot where Sandy had been standing, unzipped his pants, pulled out a chalk-white portion of his anatomy I would’ve preferred not to see – ever – and unleashed a stream of urine. The sand sizzled and smoked as Jinx’s piss struck it.

  As I drew close, I called out, “I think you ought to give some serious thought to seeing a urologist!” Then I ran past him, giving him and his prodigious river of urine a wide berth. I saw the baggie of shuteye capsules lying on the sand. The sand creature must’ve dropped it when Trauma Doll first attacked. Or maybe it had gotten snagged on her barbed wire as he escaped her trap and was pulled from his hand. Whichever the case, there it was, and, despite my urgent need to check on Melody, I bent down, snatched up the baggie, and stuffed it in my pants pocket. We’d need it for evidence.

  I hurried to Melody, who was still on her hands and knees, and crouched next to her.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, knowing it was a stupid question but unable to think of anything else to say.

  That’s when I noticed that the sand directly beneath her face was wet. At first I thought the sand-blast had irritated her eyes and she’d been crying. But then I realized that what I was looking at wasn’t the result of shed tears, but rather shed blood.

  “I managed to avert my face in time to avoid the full impact.” Her voice was strained, and she spoke through pain-gritted teeth. “But a half-blast did enough damage. I can’t see out of my left eye.” She paused. “I’m not sure I have a left eye anymore.”

  My stomach did a flip at her words. I crouched lower to get a better look at the damage and immediately wished I hadn’t. The left side of her face was little more than a mass of blood and ravaged meat. I had no idea if Jinx had destroyed Sandy or if even now the Incubus was working on reconstituting his body, and I didn’t care. All that mattered was getting Melody to a hospital.

  For an instant, Melody’s face seemed to… shimmer is the best way I can describe it. Kind of like the way heat rising off hot asphalt can make the air seem to distort and ripple. It happened so quickly that I wasn’t sure if I’d really seen it, and then it was gone, and Melody looked normal again. Well, as normal as anyone can look with half of their face reduced to bloody, shredded meat. I told myself that what I’d seen was only a trick of the moonlight, most likely intensified by stress, and I thought no more of it.

  Jinx finished his vengeance-piss, shook the dew off the lily, zipped up, and then turned around. At that exact moment a breeze blew in off the lake, and Trauma Doll’s half-headless body wobbled, then fell over backwards.

  Jinx walked over to Trauma Doll and gazed down at her. Her body remained still, but the scattered shards of what had once been the left side of her head were already beginning to move of their own accord, sliding across the sand to rejoin the rest of her. They traveled slowly, with jerky, erratic motions, as if they were almost too weak to move. Jinx helped them along by moving them closer to Trauma Doll’s ragged-edged face and neck with gentle sweeps of his giant feet. The pieces began to adhere to the main body and to one another with soft clinking noises, and I began to hope that Trauma Doll was going to recover. Unfortunately, Ideators don’t heal any more swiftly than ordinary humans, and Melody’s bleeding wasn’t going to stop on its own.

  I tucked my trancer into the back of my pants – no way was I going
to put it on the sand after what had happened to Melody’s weapon. Then I pulled off my jacket, wadded it into a ball, and pressed it to Melody’s wound. I helped her shift to a sitting position, and then she took hold of the jacket and held it in place, freeing my hands.

  “Thanks,” she said, her voice shaky but calm enough, considering the circumstances.

  While I’d tended to Melody, Jinx had continued scooping pieces of Trauma Doll’s head closer to her body. The porcelain shards were coming together to form larger sections of her face, and a number had rejoined her body to the point where her chin and lower jaw were mostly restored.

  As if reading my thoughts, Melody said, “She’ll be okay. She may look fragile, but she’s one tough bitch.” Despite the intense pain she must’ve been in, Melody’s voice held unmistakable pride. I knew how she felt. Kind of.

  There was a time when I’d have been holding any number of drugs that I could’ve given Melody to ease her pain, but all I had was the bag of shuteye capsules.

  “How bad does it hurt?” I asked. “Bad enough to risk a shuteye?”

  “No!” She almost shouted the word and then, as if embarrassed, she smiled and added, “You don’t want me to have to report you for corrupting a rookie, do you?”

  I smiled. “Guess not.” I glanced over at Jinx. “How’s Trauma Doll doing?”

  “She’ll need another ten minutes or so to finish pulling herself together,” he said. Normally, he might’ve giggled at the bad pun, but he wasn’t in a laughing mood just then.

  One of Trauma Doll’s ears was restored, although none of her facial features had reattached to her body yet. Still, her hand raised and gave me a thumbs-up.

  I didn’t think it was a good idea for Melody to wait much longer to get medical attention, so I lifted my wisper to my face and spoke into it. The device doesn’t look like much, just a simple silver bracelet, but it can do anything a smart phone can, and more.

  “Call Connie,” I said.

  Whenever Jinx and I need a ride, we call Connie Desposito. Her Deathmobile might be one of the most unsafe vehicles I’ve ever ridden in, but it’s faster than ten kinds of lightning, and right now speed was what Melody needed most. But before the wisper could connect with Connie’s cell, the sand beneath us began to shudder, and I had a bad feeling that our granular drug dealer wasn’t quite finished with us. A large mass exploded out of the sand near Jinx’s feet. It slammed into him with a sound like two colliding semis, and the impact sent Jinx soaring into the air. He arced up and out over the lake, then fell toward the water. He landed so far from the beach that I couldn’t see where he hit, but I heard the splash. I looked back at the object that had struck him and saw it was a giant fist formed from sand. The fist raised a middle finger toward the lake, and then it shifted, reformed, and became a human figure, only this time it had facial features.

  “Nobody pisses on me!”

  The voice had a whispering quality, like sand sliding over sand, but it was unquestionably male. He turned toward me then, and his expression – already angry – became downright murderous. I still crouched next to Melody, but, as the sand Incubus started toward me, I stood, drew my trancer, and leveled it at him.

  “Do I really need to identify myself as a Shadow Watch officer?”

  His sandy mouth twisted into a smirk. “Your clumsy sting operation told me that. Did you seriously think I was going to be fooled by those two?” He nodded to Trauma Doll and Melody. “I could practically smell how green they are.”

  He stopped when he was within five feet of me. I kept my trancer aimed at him, but he seemed unconcerned. Trancer fire hadn’t been any kind of threat to him so far. I glanced at his feet, or rather where his feet should’ve been. His legs terminated at his ankles, as if his feet were buried in the sand. He was connected to the beach, was the beach. And that’s when I guessed his name.

  “Montrose,” I said.

  He smiled. “What else?”

  “So what’s your Day Aspect?” I asked, genuinely curious. “Do you become human or are you really the beach?”

  All Incubi have Day Aspects, but those aspects aren’t always human – or even made of organic material, for that matter.

  “Let’s just say that in the summertime I get pretty damned tired of people plunking their fat asses down on me.”

  “So your life sucked so much that you figured becoming a drug dealer would be a step up?”

  He shrugged, the motion causing bits of himself to slide off and fall to the ground.

  “It’s more interesting than lying around and doing nothing all night,” he said.

  “So why not go live in Nod?”

  Since there’s no day in Nod, Incubi never assume their Day Aspects. In Nod, Montrose would be free to walk around as a pile of ambulatory sand all he wanted.

  “That’s boring, too.” His voice turned wistful. “Besides, I’d miss the lake.”

  There wasn’t any point in trying to understand Montrose. Incubi don’t think like humans do, and we’re not always the most rational creatures ourselves. Besides, I didn’t have time to keep playing get-to-know-you with him. Melody needed medical attention.

  “I shouldn’t do this, but you seem like a nice enough guy, and you only tried to sell my colleague a few capsules. How about we go our separate ways and call it a night?”

  I kept my tone relaxed, but I didn’t lower my weapon.

  Montrose didn’t take any time to consider his reply.

  “Where’s the fun in that?”

  And that’s when I realized how much trouble we were really in. Montrose had swallowed Melody’s trancer. He could do the same to us any time he wanted. Hell, he could probably slide his sandy substance into our mouths, down our throats, and into our lungs, asphyxiating Melody and me, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing we could do about it. There could be only one reason why Montrose hadn’t killed us all by now. The only reason we were still alive was because he wasn’t done playing with us yet.

  Fabulous.

  I wanted to keep his attention off Melody and Trauma Doll, so I fired a quick blast of M-energy at him, and then I started running north along the beach. I knew my trancer blast wouldn’t do much more than slow him down a little, but I’d take however much of a head start I could get. I put all the energy I had into my run, hoping to put as much distance as possible between myself, Melody, and Trauma Doll. I had no idea how big Montrose really was, but Chicago has twenty-eight miles of public beaches, and there was no way he could be that big. I hoped.

  I have no idea how far I’d gotten before a wall of sand sprang up before me, but I was moving too fast to avoid it. I managed to angle my body so I hit the wall with my right shoulder. I expected the wall to be as solid as rock, but, while it provided some resistance, I plowed through it without much trouble. I was, however, off balance now, and I lost my footing and fell. A pit yawned open beneath me, and, as I tumbled into it, I almost screamed. But before I could do more than fall a few feet, sand rushed up to meet me, and my breath was driven from my lungs as it collided with me. The sand continued moving, taking me with it, and I realized I was being borne skyward by a pillar of sand. Montrose’s laughter seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once, and I had the impression that each individual grain of sand was laughing, their tiny voices merging into one eerie, omnipresent sound.

  I felt my stomach drop as the pillar – no, the tower – rose swiftly into the air. I tried to grab hold of the sand beneath me, to dig my fingers in and steady myself. But the sand that comprised the flat surface of the tower was packed tight, and I couldn’t get any purchase on it. I’d lost my trancer somewhere along the line – probably when I’d first fallen into the pit. If I’d had it, I might’ve been able to blast a handhold with a tight-beam setting. But then again, Montrose would likely just fill the area back in. The tower stopped rising so abruptly that momentum actually carried me several inches higher. Panic gripped me as I felt empty space between me and the top of the tower,
and my limbs flailed as my body desperately attempted to find something solid to grab hold of. My momentum gave out, I seemed to hang motionless in the air for an instant, and then I began to fall. I hit the top of the tower belly-first, and I released a most unladylike “Blarg!” It was a good thing I hadn’t eaten recently, or more than sound might’ve come out of me.

  I lay there for several seconds, shaking with fear, but I forced myself to calm down. It took every ounce of willpower I had, but I managed to move into a crouching position, and from there I stood. My legs were shaky, but they held me up. From this height, Melody and Trauma Doll looked like actual dolls, and I estimated I was a hundred feet off the ground, maybe more. On my left was the dark expanse of Lake Michigan, and on my right was the city. The buildings were lit up so brightly, they almost seemed to glow, and, even in this moment, when there was no guarantee I’d live through the next few moments, the sight took my breath away. What can I say? I’m a Chi-Town girl born and bred.

  Montrose’s laughter had faded into the background somewhat, but it hadn’t stopped. Now it became louder once more, and I understood why when the tower began to sway. It began gently enough, moving back and forth an inch or two at the most. But with each passing second the tower’s range of motion expanded. To make matters worse, instead of following a regular pattern, the tower moved in unpredictable ways: slow circles, fast figure eights… It would jerk to a halt and then start moving again just as abruptly. I spread my feet apart and stretched my arms out, almost as if I were surfing. In a way, I guess I was. Even with the extra attraction afforded by the corrugated soles of my boots, my feet would slide several inches in one direction, and then when the tower changed course, they’d slide in another. The trick was to maintain my balance and not panic. I reminded myself that Montrose wanted to play with me, and that, as long as I amused him, he’d keep me alive. More importantly, the longer I stayed alive, the longer his attention would be off Melody and Trauma Doll.