The Children of Hypnos

[Vol. 2] Chapter 12: When It's You

Emery fired. Only one streak of purple light hit the man square in the chest; the other two pierced the azure cloud that erupted when he escaped back into the Dream. The cloud funneled away into nothing, attaching itself to neither of them, and left Emery and Wes breathing hard.

Wes stared at the place the man had been standing, his hands loose on his hammer, his eyes wide.

"Wes," Emery said again, trying to keep her voice as low and as calm as she could. "Wes, he's gone. We're good. He's gone."

The floodlights still spilled across the yard. Wes's eyes looked blacker than usual, deep pits where nothing could survive.

Behind him, Trevor van der Gelt and Mr. Lowe burst out of Trevor's back door.

"What was that?" Trevor asked from a distance, robed and mussed from sleep, clearly not willing to come out in the snow. "Was that one of mine?"

"No," Emery called back, waving them inside. "Must've been a stray from nearby. It's nothing to worry about—all taken care of now. Try to get some rest."

Trevor surveyed the scene for another moment, until a phone began to ring somewhere inside the house. Lowe hurried to answer it, Trevor slinking back inside after him. Emery grabbed Wes's arm again.

"We have to move, Wes."

"But he just..." Wes raked his fingers through his hair, gripping it tight. "I just...that was me. My doppelgänger. Right? You saw him, too. But I'm not in the Insanity Prime. I'm not near it. Am I? Am I in it right now and I didn't even know? He was right there. He's active and he's already strong enough to come into the waking world. What does this...but I shouldn't...I thought I had more time..."

The floodlights shut off. The hair on the back of Emery's neck lifted as they were plunged into darkness, and she held tight to Wes's arm as her vision returned. She wished she could take him inside, but the walls of a house wouldn't stop a doppelgänger.

Emery pulled Wes to the patio outside Trevor's back door and sat him down on a stone bench. His hammer scraped against the paving stones; he hardly seemed able to lift it. Emery kept her senses open to catch any further signs of the Dream, but now the yard seemed eerily silent.

"We saw him before," Wes said. "At the cemetery."

"The guy down the path. The one who was too far away. The one watching us."

Wes nodded.

Emery ran through all the curses she knew and still didn't feel better when she got to the end. She felt ready to pull triggers, like Morrigan was already standing behind her, and she had no safe place to go.

"What's going on?" she asked. Quietly, because Trevor was still standing inside the back doors, and he didn't need to hear this. "It is too early for your doppelgänger. It was too early for mine. Why is this happening? Did he feel very strong, to you? He didn't to me."

Wes was now wringing the handle of the hammer. "No. But Morrigan was able to pull Edgar's doppelgänger out of his dream, and we didn't know they were capable of that. What if she helped mine, too? I'd be closer to Edgar, mine would at least be nearly ready to go, and if she was able to make him active—"

"But how?" Emery hoped focusing Wes on solving the problem at hand might help his leg stop jumping and his eyes from bugging out. It certainly wasn't helping Emery much. "And why was he wearing that mask? It didn't even have eyeholes."

"He wouldn't—I wouldn't need them," Wes said, glancing up at her. His eyes, black as oil, explained everything. He had not been born with those eyes. He was one of the rare few children born with a disorder called white sight; they were blind to the waking world, but could see into the Dream without being inside it. Wes's white eyes had been removed as a child and replaced as dreamforms made by Grandpa Al, when he was still part of the State's medical division. Doppelgängers did not share dreamformed pieces of their waking selves.