"No," I stammered, and tried to struggle back from the thing. "No, this isn"t happening. This isn"t the way it happened!"
The demon"s red eyes glowed. I lifted my blasting rod toward it, pointed, and shouted, "Fuego!" "Fuego!"
There was no stirring of heat. No fitful crackling of energy. Nothing.
The demon laughed again, reaching down toward me, and I felt myself lifted into the air.
"This is a dream!" I shouted. With that awareness, I started struggling to reach out to the fabric of the dream, to alter it-but I"d made no preparations before I"d slept, and was already too panicked, too distracted to focus. "This is a dream! This isn"t the way it happened!"
"That was then," the demon purred, its voice silken. "This is now." Then its maw opened up and closed over my belly, horrible fangs sinking in, worrying me, stretching my guts. It shook its head, and I exploded, shreds of meat flying out of me, into it, my blood rushing out while I strained and struggled helplessly, screaming.
And then a grey tabby with a bobtail bounded out of nowhere and whipped one paw at me, lashing it across my nose, claws slashing like fire.
I screamed again and found myself in the far corner of my bedroom, back in my apartment, curled into a fetal ball. I had been puking my guts out. Mister hovered over me and then, almost judiciously, delivered another scratch to my cheek. I heard myself cry out and flinch from the blow.
Something rippled along my skin. Something cold and dark and nauseating. I sat up, blinking sleep from my eyes, struggling through the remnants of the vampire"s poison and sleep to focus on the presence-but it was gone.
I shook, violently. I was terrified. Not frightened, not apprehensive-viciously and unremittingly terrified. Mindless, brain-stem terror, the kind that quite simply bypa.s.ses rational thought and heads straight for your soul. I felt horribly violated, somehow, used. Helpless. Weak.
I crawled down to my lab, fumbling in the dark. Dimly, I was aware of Mister coming along behind me. It was dark down here, dark and cold. I stumbled across the room, knocking things down left and right, to the summoning circle built into the floor. I threw myself into it, sobbing, fumbled with tingling fingers at the floor until I located the ring. Then I willed the circle closed. It struggled, resisted, and I pushed harder, forced myself on it harder, until finally I felt it snap shut around me in an invisible wall.
I curled on my side, keeping every part of myself within that circle, and wept.
Mister prowled around the circle, a rumbling, rea.s.suring purr in his throat. Then I heard the big grey cat hop up onto the worktable, and over to one of the shelves. His dim shadow curled up by the pale bone of the skull. Orange light began to glide out of his mouth, into the skull"s eye sockets, until Bob"s candleflame eyes blinked, and the skull turned to focus on me.
"Harry," Bob said, his voice quiet, solemn. "Harry, can you hear me?"
Shaking, I looked up, desperately grateful to hear a familiar voice.
"Harry," Bob said gently. "I saw it, Harry. I think I know what went after Malone and the others. I think I know how it did it. I tried to help you, but you wouldn"t wake up."
My mind whirled, confused. "What?" I asked. My voice came out a whimper. "What are you talking about?"
"I"m sorry, Harry." The skull paused, and though its expression couldn"t really change, it somehow looked troubled. "I think I know what just tried to eat you."
Chapter Eighteen "Eat me," I whispered. "I don"t ... I don"t understand."
"This thing you"ve been chasing, I think. The Nightmare. I think it was here."
"Nightmare," I said. I lowered my head and closed my eyes. "Bob, I can"t ... I can"t think straight. What"s going on?"
"Well. You came in about five hours ago drugged to the gills on vampire spit, and muttering like a madman. I think you didn"t realize that I was inside Mister. Do you remember that part?"
"Yeah. Sort of."
"What happened?"
I relayed my experience with Kyle and Kelly Hamilton to Bob. Speaking seemed to help things stop spinning, my guts to settle. My heartbeat slowly eased down to something less than that of a terrified rabbit.
"Sounds weird," Bob said. "Got to be something important to make them risk going out in daylight like that. Even in a specially equipped van."
"I realize that, Bob," I said, and mopped at my face with one hand.
"You any steadier?"
"I ... I guess."
"I think you got torn up pretty good, spirit-wise. It"s lucky you started screaming. I came as quick as I could, but you didn"t want to wake up. The poison, I think."
I sat up, cross-legged, staying inside the circle. "I remember that I had a dream. G.o.d, it was a terrible dream." I felt my guts turn to water, and I started shaking again. "I tried to change it, but I wasn"t ready. I couldn"t."
"A dream," Bob said. "Yeah, that figures."
"Figures?" I asked.
"Sure," Bob said.
I shook my head, rested my elbows on my knees, and put my face in my hands. I did not want to be doing this. Someone else could do it. I should go, leave town. "It was a spirit that jumped me?"
"Yeah."
I shook my head. "That doesn"t make any sense. How did it get past the threshold?"
"Your threshold isn"t so hot to begin with, Bachelor Man."
I worked up enough courage to scowl at Bob. "The wards, then. I"ve got all the doors and windows warded. And I don"t have any mirrors it could have used."
If Bob had any hands, he would have been rubbing them together. "Exactly," he said. "Yes, exactly."
My stomach quailed again, and a fresh burst of shuddering made me put my hands in my lap. I felt like sprawling somewhere, crying my eyes out, puking up whatever shreds of dignity remained in my stomach, and then crawling into a hole and pulling it in after me. I swallowed. "It ... it never came in to me, then, is what you"re saying. It never had to cross those boundaries."
Bob nodded, eyes burning brightly. "Exactly. You went out to it."
"When I was dreaming?"
"Yes, yes, yes," Bob bubbled. "It makes sense now-don"t you see?"
"Not really."
"Dreams," the skull said. "When a mortal dreams, all kinds of strange things can happen. When a wizard dreams, it can be even weirder. Sometimes, dreams can be intense enough to create a little, temporary world of their own. Kind of a bubble in the Nevernever. Remember how you told me Agatha Hagglethorn was a strong enough ghost to have had her own demesne in the Nevernever?"
"Yeah. It looked kind of like old Chicago."
"Well, people can do the same, at times."
"But I"m not a ghost, Bob."
"No," he said. "You"re not. But you"ve got everything it takes to make a ghost inside you except for the right set of circ.u.mstances. Ghosts are only frozen images of people, Harry, last impressions made by a personality." Bob paused, reflectively. "People are almost always more trouble than anything you run into on the Other Side."
"I hadn"t noticed," I said. "All right. So you"re saying that any time I dream, it creates my own little rent-by-the-hour demesne in the Nevernever."
"Not every time," Bob said. "In fact, not even most times. Only really intense dreams, I suspect, bring the necessary energy out of people. But, with the border being so turbulent and easy to get through ..."
"More people"s dreams are making bubbles on the other side. That must have been how it got to poor Micky Malone, then. While he was sleeping. His wife said he"d had insomnia that night. So the thing hangs around outside his house waiting for him to fall asleep and starts killing fuzzy animals to fill up the time."
"Could be," Bob said. "Do you remember your dream?"
I shuddered. "Yeah. I ... I remember it."
"The Nightmare must have got inside with you."
"While my spirit was in the Nevernever?" I asked. "It should have ripped me to shreds."
"Not so," Bob beamed. "Your spirit"s demesne, remember? Even if only a temporary one. Means you have the home field advantage. It didn"t help, since it got the drop on you, but you had it."
"Oh."
"Do you remember anything in particular, any figure or character in the dream that wouldn"t have been acting the way you thought it should have?"
"Yeah," I said. My shaking hands went to my belly, feeling for tooth marks. "h.e.l.l"s bells, yeah. I was dreaming of that bust a couple of months back. When we nailed Kravos."
"That sorcerer," Bob mused. "Okay. This could be important. What happened?"
I swallowed, trying not to throw up. "Um. Everything went wrong. That demon he"d called. It was stronger than it had been in life."
"The demon was?"
I blinked. "Bob. Is it possible for something like a demon to leave a ghost?"
"Oh, uh," Bob said, "I don"t think so-unless it had actually died there. Eternally perished, I mean, not just had its vessel dispersed."
"Michael killed it with Amoracchius, Amoracchius," I said.
Bob"s skull shuddered. "Ow," he said. "Amoracchius. I"m not sure, then. I don"t know. That sword might be able to kill a demon, even through a physical sh.e.l.l. That whole faith-magic thing is awfully strong." I"m not sure, then. I don"t know. That sword might be able to kill a demon, even through a physical sh.e.l.l. That whole faith-magic thing is awfully strong."
"Okay, so. We could be dealing with the ghost of a demon, here," I said. "A demon that died while it was all fired up for a fight. Maybe that"s what makes it so ... so vicious."
"Could be," Bob agreed, cheerily.
I shook my head. "But that doesn"t explain the barbed-wire spells we"ve been finding on those ghosts and people." I grabbed onto the problem, the tangled facts, with a silent kind of desperation, like a man about to drown who has no breath to waste on screaming. It helped to keep me moving.
"Maybe the spells are someone else"s work," Bob offered.
"Bianca," I said, suddenly. "She and her lackeys are all messed up in this somehow-remember that they put the s.n.a.t.c.h on Lydia? And they were waiting for me, that first night, when I came back from being arrested."
"I didn"t think she was that big time a pract.i.tioner," Bob said.
I shrugged. "She"s not, horribly. But she just got promoted, too. Maybe she"s been studying up. She"s always had a little more than her share of freaky vampire tricks-and if she was over in the Nevernever when she did it, it would have made her stronger."
Bob whistled through his teeth. "Yeah, that could work. Bianca stirs things up by torturing a bunch of spirits, gets all the turbulence going so that she can prod this Nightmare toward you. Then she lets it loose, sits back, and enjoys the fun. She got a motive?"
"Regret," I said, remembering a note I"d read more than a year ago. "She blames me for the death of one of her people. Rachel. She wants to make me regret it."
"Neat," Bob said. "And she could have been everywhere in question?"
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, she could have been."
"Means, opportunity, motive."
"d.a.m.n shaky logic, though. Nothing I could justify to the Council in order to get their backup, either. I don"t have any proof."
"So?" Bob said. "Hat up, go kill her. Problem solved."
"Bob," I said. "You can"t just go around killing people."
"I know. That"s why you should do it."
"No, no. I I can"t go around killing people, either." can"t go around killing people, either."
"Why not? You"ve done it before. And you"ve got a new gun and everything."
"I can"t arbitrarily end someone"s life because of something they may have done."
"Bianca"s a vampire," Bob pointed out cheerfully. "She"s not alive in the cla.s.sic sense. I"ll get Mister and go fetch the bullets and you-"
I sighed. "No, Bob. She"s got lots of people around her, too. I"d probably have to kill some of them to get to her."
"Oh. d.a.m.n. This is one of those right and wrong issues again, isn"t it."
"Yeah, one of those."
"I"m still confused about this whole morality thing, Harry."
"Join the club," I muttered. I took a shaking breath and leaned forward to put my hand over the circle, and will it broken. I almost cringed when its protective field faded from around me, but forced myself not to. I was as recovered as I was going to get. I needed to focus on work.
I stood up and walked to my worktable, my eyes by now adjusted to the dimness. I reached for the nearest candle, but there weren"t any matches handy. So, I pointed my finger at it, frowned, and muttered the words, "Flick.u.m bicus." "Flick.u.m bicus."
My spell, a tiny one I had used thousands of times, stuttered and coughed, the energy twitching instead of flowing. The candle"s wick smoked, but did not flicker to life.
I frowned, then closed my eyes, made a little bit of an effort, and repeated the spell. This time, I felt a little surge of dizziness, and the candle flickered to life. I braced one hand on the edge of the table.
"Bob," I asked. "Were you watching that?"