~
Seventeen
I don’t know when I fell asleep but I know that when I did my head was still swirling with thoughts about Wolfe and the fight, if you could call it that. I drifted into a darkness that had little to do with my physical surroundings. I felt myself swallowed in that surreal, faded world that had been present both times I had talked to Reed in my dreams. But this time, somehow, it was different.
The world around me swirled in a sort of rough clarity; as it came into view I recognized the surroundings. Little lights hanging above, soft blue mats on the ground below, and blurred concrete at the edges of my vision gave rise to the realization that I was in my basement. I looked into the corner and sure enough, there it was – the box – peeking out of the darkness, its flat edges visible in the low light of my dream.
“Little doll…” The growling voice sent an involuntary twitch through my body, stiffening my spine and causing me to raise my guard. It did not a whit of good. Wolfe sprung at me from out of the darkness by the box, bounding at me, leaping from all fours. I was paralyzed, unable to move as he crossed the divide between us. I blanched away from the impending hit, throwing all the training Mother had given me right out of the nearest window.
Wolfe sailed toward me, then passed through me as though I were as insubstantial as the air we were breathing. He came to rest without touching the wall, pivoted and came back at me, passing through once more. An angry, perplexed expression darkened his already vicious features, and he bore the look of a man denied his fondest wish. He drew once more to his full height and looked at me with suspicion, keeping his distance and watching me, eyes wary and calculating.
“A dream walker…this is not real…” His voice was low and gravelly, and even though he couldn’t touch or hurt me, his words sent a very real chill of fear through my guts in the same place where his finger had ripped into my abdomen.
“What’s a dream walker? Is that what this is? What I am?” I put aside my fear, desperate for answers.
He ignored me. “You caught the Wolfe while he’s sleeping. Very tricky. You’re hiding, sneaking around behind the Directorate’s walls, counting on the Jotun to protect you from Wolfe?” His feral smile returned. “Why don’t you come out and play? It could be so fun.”
“Gee, I wonder why I don’t want to face a psychopathic lunatic like you,” I snapped at him. Hot anger boiled in me. “You’re unhinged.”
“Come out and play, little doll.” The smile was worse, a nasty, stomach-turning reminder of what he’d tried to do with me; to me. “The Wolfe just wants to play.”
“Are you stupid? Or are you deaf from where I stabbed you in the ear?” He flinched. I saw it and it gave me a moment of hope. “I’m not coming out. I’m going to stay here, because I have zero desire to be your plaything and die a horrible death after you do God knows what to me.”
“You won’t die, little doll,” his voice rasped. “That wasn’t a nice way to play, stabbing Wolfe in the ear. It makes him think about you every time the pain flares. But Wolfe won’t kill you, oh no, not yet. Not until they say so, because they want the little doll oh-so-bad.”
“Who are they…and what do they want me for?” I looked down at him, on all fours, as though he were ready to spring at me again.
“Ah, ah, ah.” He shook his head. “I’ll tell you if you come out and play.”
“I’m not leaving this place,” I told him. “Not a chance.”
He sighed, a deep, throaty sound. “Wolfe knew you’d say that. But you don’t understand…see, Wolfe has to have the little doll. Not just for his…masters…but for himself.” His eyes looked at me suggestively, leering in a way that would have induced more nausea if I hadn’t been transfixed with fear at his words. “So now Wolfe has to be persuasive. Now Wolfe has to convince the little doll to come out of her dollhouse.”
My voice cracked. “What…what are you going to do?”
“If Wolfe didn’t know better, he would guess that you don’t care about people, since you let all those little toy agents get slaughtered at your house.” He ran his tongue over his incisors. “But Wolfe thinks maybe you just wanted to play so bad that you didn’t think about what would happen to them. But what if Wolfe started playing with others? Would you like that? Would it make you happy or sad to know that other people were getting played with…because of you?” The last bit crossed the realm from suggestive to disgusting as he stood upright and ran a hand down his own chest, raking himself with his claws.
When I said nothing, he continued. “Here’s what will happen. Wolfe is going to go out and find a nice family…and he’s going to play with them. Mommy, Daddy, little kids. And then he’s going to find another. And another. Until the little doll comes out. And if the police try and stop him, well…he’ll play with them too, won’t he? And we’ll just keep going…through this whole rotten city…” His tone turned predatory and savage. “…until the little doll comes out to play.”
His grin was surreal now, like the quality of everything else in the dream, but it was growing and expanding, taking over, and I realized I wanted to be away from it, away from him, away from myself. I snapped awake in the medical unit, not even fading back to consciousness like I had with Reed but experiencing a sudden, brutal awakening as though I had missed a step coming down the stairs and tumbled. My breaths were ragged.
I stared into the dark and thought about what Wolfe had said. It had been real, I was sure of it now. I talked to him in my dreams. I was sure of another thing too. His threat to kill others – he would carry it out. Carry it out – and love every minute of it. I looked around and saw the curtains still drawn, soft breathing of a few wounded agents coming from the other side of it. Wolfe was going to kill until I came out and faced him. He wouldn’t stop until he had me.
And there wasn’t a soul that could stop him.