The Children of Hypnos

Chapter 7: Investigations

It took six hours for the students of Fenhallow to discover the source of the screaming that night, and after that, the screams came again at least once a day with students venturing into woods beyond the sports fields to see the Fox.

Emery no longer jumped when she heard it. The next Wednesday, Joel, sitting opposite her in the window seat of the student council room, startled so badly he almost fell through the window. Lewis actually did fall out of his chair. Kris squeaked. Jacqueline slammed a hand down on the polished surface of the table, rattling her neat array of color-coded pens.

"Hypnos's sweet left buttcheek, Emery, did you have to bring that thing back here?"

"It was a present for you, Jackie."

In honesty, it was a pain in Emery's ass. Half the students thought the Fox was the new best thing on campus, and gave Emery a big smile and thumbs up whenever they saw her. The other half—like Jacqueline—thought it was a destruction of campus atmosphere and a distraction from their studies, and got royally pissed off whenever the happy half of the student body praised her for it.

As far as she could tell, Wes only got the same treatment when he stood near her; when they were together seemed to be the only time anyone remembered that they were partners, and that Emery was no longer going out on missions alone. ("Once!" she snapped. "I went out alone once!")

The worst part about the Fox, really, was having to remember how badly she'd failed every time she heard it scream.

Since then, their nightly missions had toned down a notch or six. Wes had a bullet list of locations around the Sleeping City exhibiting irregular Dream activity. It had been longer than Emery had feared. Painstakingly, they went through each location, speaking to anyone living nearby who would talk to them. Emery had known it would be a disaster before they began. Most people didn't know anything. Some pretended they did. Others hurried Emery and Wes away, afraid what the neighbors would think of dreamhunters on the front step. Some didn't know anything, but held them up with questions like, "I have this dream about my teeth falling out every night—does that mean a pair of dentures is going to manifest and come after me?" to which Emery replied, "No, it means you should see a shrink."

She didn't hate talking to people. She just hated talking to people who didn't know anything.

Wes, on the other hand, had the patience of a saint. He continued talking long after useful information ceased, listened to stories that had nothing to do with nightmares, even helped one woman with a walker bring in her groceries. After a week of watching him, Emery could pinpoint the exact spot in each conversation where she would begin ripping her hair out.

"I don't know how you do that," she said after one foray into the suburbs on the west side of the city. "We have a mission. Shouldn't we be trying to keep on track instead of rescuing kittens from trees?"

"Most of them don't know what information they're supposed to give us. I thought maybe, if they're just telling us stories about their day-to-day life, they might reveal something we can use."

"And that could take the next thirty years."

"I never said it was going to be fast."

School during the day was a reprieve from the new mundanity of the mission, and the hours between classes were a reprieve from the new insufferability of Emery's classmates. She ate meals with Edgar and sometimes Joel, when their schedules matched up. Joel was always welcome because he didn't talk about class or student council or anything dreamhunter-related; he was perfectly okay listening to Edgar ramble about Westerns and late-night television, and when Edgar had to leave for class, Joel walked across campus with Emery. Sometimes to her next class or back to Kirkland. Sometimes in circles around the grounds until they found a good spot to make out.