The Children of Hypnos

[Vol. 2] Chapter 22: Escape

Draw no attention. Leave no witnesses.

Emery walked as fast as she dared back to Kirkland. Grandpa Al and Lana had let her leave Edgar's room without so much as a warning, and no one outside that room would have known anything was different, but Emery felt the word branded all over her.

Terminated.

There was dream death in her near future. Guaranteed.

The pounding of her pulse in her ears drowned out all other noise; her vision tunneled in to the sidewalk, Kirkland's front steps, the door handles, the lobby carpet, the stairs. Every hair stood on end, every nerve poised to flee.

Smart. Be smart.

As soon as her door was closed behind her, she gasped sharply and grabbed at her sternum. With her other hand she dug her phone out of her pocket and called Joel, only to get his voicemail.

"Hey, this is Joel, sorry I didn't pick up—"

She tore the phone from her ear and ended the call with a strangled moan. He was gone. Of course he was gone. She pressed her phone to her forehead, took one deep breath, a second, then dialed another number.

Wes picked up on the third ring. "What's wrong? You don't call me unless—"

"Where are you? Can you meet me at my room?"

He paused. She had done her best to keep her voice even, but it was on the verge of cracking, and she knew he could hear it. "I'll be there in two minutes. Are you okay?"

"No. I'll explain when you get here. Don't look rushed."

After she hung up, she wiped her face, let her hair completely loose, and went to sit outside her door in the hallway. For a minute and a half she thought of nothing but counting the lines in her knuckles, and the world slowed down enough for her to breathe. The moment Wes appeared at the end of the hall, she ushered him into her room, then closed and locked the door.

"I know where Morrigan is," she began, before he could say anything. She told him everything that had happened in the research center and in Edgar's dream. Wes listened until the very end, the only change in him the deepening of the fissure between his eyebrows. As Emery explained the story, her chest opened up again, and the bare bones of a terrible plan began to form in her head. With Wes around, it was so much easier to see what needed to be done next. To see that something had to be done next. The way he listened to her made it clear he wasn't expecting her to wallow. He was listening until the end to know what she was planning to do.

"I have to get out of here," she said. "They're done giving me chances, and I'm not going to hang out on campus until they decide to kill me." She moved past Wes, rooted around under her bed for her duffel bag, and opened it up in the middle of the floor and went to her dresser to start throwing clothes inside. Wes turned to watch her.

"I'll have to bring Coop," he said.

"What?"

"Coop. I'll have to bring him. If administration finds him, they may dreamkill him. Or worse. I don't know what all they can do with a dreamhunter's dreamforms, but I'm sure they have some other tricks. I don't want to dissolve him—he took me so long to make."

As he spoke, Emery ran through the list of protests she was supposed to make. You don't have to come. It's too dangerous. It's the wrong thing to do. She knew she wouldn't say any of them. She had known he would come with her; that was why she'd called him. Besides, if Morrigan was in that castle in Edgar's dream, and Morrigan was controlling the horsemen, then Wes's doppelgänger was in there, too.