“In a second,” I say and start searching the room again.
But no matter how hard I try, I find no sign of the strange drug described in the email.
“Why would he kill birds by making them dream?” Felix asks as I finish looking through a nearby desk.
“To enter the dream world without falling asleep.” I look behind yet another painting—to no avail. “I use Pom for that. I guess this Leal guy found his own method.”
“By killing the poor doves,” Felix says disapprovingly.
“Right.” I cast an uneasy glance at the cooing creatures. “They got their revenge in the end, didn’t they?”
“I guess. Sending you the other bit of text I found in the cache.”
I check behind the last painting. Nothing. Oh, well.
I open my email.
Another werewolf, another failure. The inner wolf and the man attacked me together yet again, and I found them too hard to fight off. Lost my powers for the day as a result. Werewolves are proving to be the most difficult of all Cognizant to dreamwalk in. Eduardo isn’t making it easy, either. He forbade his pack from allowing me to continue this research. The son of a bitch likes me powerless against him. I’ll have to master the multibody technique if I’m to succeed. That way, one of my consciousnesses can attack the wolf while the other deals with the man. Alas, I fail at this too. Maybe if—
Crap, cut short again. I tap the earpiece. “Hey, I want to read the rest of that.”
“Sorry, there’s only one more tidbit left, and it’s from a different part of the diary.”
“Send it to me.”
“One sec. I want to understand what he meant by what you just read.”
“Isn’t it obvious? Werewolves are a problem when it comes to dreamwalking. I’ve heard of this sort of thing with some other types of Cognizant. They say you can never sneak into the dreams of gnomes, for instance, not unless they let you in.”
“Right, that part was more or less clear,” Felix says. “But I don’t get the part about losing his powers and the multibody thing.”
I reread the message. “I think he meant that he had to use his dreamwalking power so much inside the werewolf’s dream that he ran out of juice. There’s a limit to how much dreamwalking one can do in a day. He must’ve reached that limit.”
“And the multibody bit?”
I read the text once more. “Sounds like he’s talking about having two bodies in the dream world that can simultaneously think and feel. If so, that’s very intriguing and not something I’ve ever tried to do. I can sort of leave my body and reenter it, but that’s not the same. I’m going to have to give this a shot one day.”
“How trippy,” Felix says. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in two places at once, even in a dream.”
“Logic takes a vacation in the dream world, that’s for sure. Now stop stalling and send me the next piece of this diary or whatever.”
He types something so loudly I can hear it. “Done.”
I pull up the email.
Any dream can be hidden behind the black window—my own, a dream of another subject, or the dream of the subject herself. The remarkable thing is that when a dream is a memory of the subject, the memory itself becomes deeply suppressed. She has no recollection of the events at all. More fascinating still is that the subject doesn’t recover her memory when I reenter the black window. The breaking of the black window is the only way the subject gets to experience the events locked behind it. If it’s her memory, she recovers them, but if it’s an implanted dream, she dismisses it as a figment of her—
It cuts off.
Disappointed, I reread what is there. “You sure there was nothing more about this?”
“No, why?” Felix asks. “Does it make sense to you?”
“Vaguely.” I greedily scan every sentence for clues. “Whatever this black window is, it seems to let you erase people’s painful memories. I’ve never heard of that.”
“That’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind kind of shit.” Felix’s voice is full of awe. “Makes sense, though—you do deal with the subconscious. Still, scary.”
“Yeah.” I pocket my phone. “And the bit about hiding his own or other people’s dreams inside someone else’s dreamscape—that’s just as crazy. It would give dreamwalkers a way to hide information so that only another dreamwalker could find it.”
“Not the best method,” Felix says. “What if the person who has information hidden inside their dreams dies?”
We both fall silent. It’s obvious he’s thinking what I’m thinking: Could Leal have hidden something inside the dreams of the other victims, something that someone killed them to hide? But if so, who?
I head for the door. “I think I’d better get more information to work with.” Another yawn threatens as I walk, and I instinctively pat the vial of vampire blood in my pocket.
Wait a second. It’s too soon for another hit, so why am I even thinking about this? Is this a craving? The start of an addiction?
I’d better keep a close eye on this.
Performing the bellows breath technique to wake myself a little, I reach for the door knob.
What the hell? It’s locked.
Did Kain do that?
That’s just great. Now I need to do the opposite of bellows breath to fight my panic.
“He said he’d be back in an hour,” Felix chimes in, as if reading my mind. “You don’t have to wait long.”
“Still.” I eye the cooing doves. “These cannibals have a taste for dreamwalker flesh. We’re probably delicious.”
“Cannibal doves would eat other doves, not people.”
“Thanks, Felix, that really puts my mind at ease.” Before he can reply, I say, “In any case, the good thing about having Pom on my wrist is that I’m always ready to go into the dream world. Since I’m stuck here, I’m going to test out some of the things the dead dreamwalker was talking about.”
Raising my hand so that Felix can see, I touch Pom’s fur and slip into a trance.
Chapter Fifteen
The yummy scent of manna fills my nostrils as I appear in the lobby of my dream palace.
Pom pops up next to me. “I’ve missed you.”
I grin at him. “We’re attached, you know. But yes, I’ve missed you too.”
Pom turns purple, and his ears flap in a sort of happy dance.
I tell him an edited version of the events that have transpired so far, which boils down to getting “hired” to solve a case for the New York Council.
When I get to the part about Valerian, he says, “I can tell if he really looks the way you think. I can see through any illusion.”
I look my furry friend up and down, which doesn’t take long, given his small stature. “How?”
He floats up to my eye level. “I see through your eyes when I’m awake. Pretty sure the illusionist would have to target me with his powers to make us both see the same thing.”
“See through my eyes, right. Perfectly normal behavior for a symbiont. Not something a parasite would do at all.”