The Children of Hypnos

Chapter 5: The Wilmark Fox

Wes was already at the Fenhallow front gates, speaking to the gate guard, when Emery arrived at eight the next night. The gate guard was the first to go quiet when Emery approached.

"Checking out." Emery passed her cuff over the sensor on the gate guard desk. The scanner beeped. "We'll be back in the morning, Alice."

"I'm sure you will, Miss Ashworth," the guard replied. Emery politely ignored the glance Alice gave Wes when she thought Emery had turned away. "May Hypnos steady you, Miss Ashworth, Mr. Jager."

Fenhallow's great iron gates were already open. Wes and Emery followed two other dreamhunter pairs out. One pair was from an upper class, trained and tested, striding along easily to their mission destination. The other pair were two girls from Wes and Emery's class, recently assigned as partners, heads together to pore over mission details on one girl's cuff. Very aware of the thick silence between herself and Wes, Emery watched the girls until they reached the end of Fenhallow's long entrance drive and disappeared on an inner road of the Sleeping City. Cars zipped past, drivers heading home from late jobs or going in for graveyard shifts. The air was sharp with gasoline and fallen leaves.

Emery motioned for Wes to follow her to the sidewalk beneath a large beech tree. They were already dressed in their black dreamform armor, though neither of them had revealed their weapons. Passersby paid them no attention. Dreamhunters on the outskirts of the city were at least a little interesting. Dreamhunters standing right outside the dreamhunter school were routine.

"Okay." Emery stretched out her arms. "What have you got?"

Wes held up his cuff. "I marked a few places in the city that I've heard of strange activity recently. Aimless nightmares, or recurring nightmares despite dreamhunters cleaning them up night after night. We can search those areas to see if the locals have noticed anything suspicious."

"You really think non-dreamhunter locals would know what suspicious looks like?"

Wes ignored her. "That was the first idea, which I think is the best one. The second idea was to lay a trap for him."

"A trap?"

"Sure. You can lay a trap for anyone if you know what they want. We don't know that much about him yet. We know he went to Fenhallow, we know he's a dreamhunter on the verge of his Insanity Prime. He'll be powerful, and probably pretty smart, if the full-time hunters haven't found him yet."

"That still doesn't tell us what he wants."

"That's why the first idea was the best one."

Emery brought up her own cuff. "Tell me: what do you know about the Wilmark Fox?"

Wes paused. Frowned. "The urban legend? What does that have to do with this?"

"You mentioned recurring, aimless nightmares. I had the same thought, so I looked into a few of the cases, and it led me to other reports of strange sightings around the city. There were three—three—reports to the Wilmark Park security office of sightings of a young man wearing a fox mask."

"So there's a kid wearing a fox mask scaring people in Wilmark Park. That doesn't make the Wilmark Fox a nightmare."

"That's the kind of thinking that kept Fenhallow from investigating it. But listen to this." Emery pulled up the report on her cuff. "'We were halfway along the north trail when we saw him through the trees. He had a fox mask and a t-shirt and a coat. He followed us for ten minutes. We ignored him, hoping he would get bored and go away. When he didn't, my boyfriend called out to him. He screamed and ran at us. We tried to get away, and when we looked back, he was gone.' All three reports are just like that, down to the details. North trail, he follows two people—in all three cases, a couple on a nice stroll through the park—until they address him, then he screams bloody murder and charges at them. They run; a few minutes later they look back and he's gone."