Blood bubbled under the pressure of Emery's hand against her thigh. The faster she hobbled, the faster it came out, and she felt herself getting light-headed from the pain by the time Booling Hall came into view around the corner.
Like all the other dorms, it was empty. The lights were on, but no one was home.
"He's not going to be in there," Jacqueline said, striding ahead of Emery. "He's going to be up at the manor, with everyone else."
"No he's not. He wouldn't have gone there without me. He'll be...he'll be pouting in his room."
"You need a doctor." Wes's hand found Emery's shoulder. She shrugged him off. "You're bleeding out."
"I'm still walking."
She was damn near jogging, but if she lost too much blood, she wouldn't be able to do anything.
"She stabbed you with her fingers," Jacqueline snapped. "That's disgusting. And impossible, and—ugh."
Emery pushed her way into Booling. She hobbled to the elevator instead of the stairs and jammed her fist down on the button for the fourth floor. Wes and Jacqueline stood by the door, arms crossed. Jacqueline looked worried. Wes looked pissed. Emery wanted to shoot the elevator controls to make it stop pinging.
"I should have shot her," she said. "I should have shot her."
Neither of them said anything.
The fourth floor was quiet. Even the denmother was out. All the doors were shut and locked, all the lights off inside the rooms. Nothing had been disturbed, at least—there was no destruction. Emery jogged to Edgar's door and pounded on it.
"Edgar!"
"He's not in there," Jacqueline said.
"Edgar, open the door!"
Wes caught Emery's wrist. "He's not here."
Emery tore her arm away from him and shoved past him, back to the elevator. "Then he's at the manor."
"You need to tell the dean what's happening, and then you need to go to the clinic," Wes said. "We'll go to the manor to find Edgar."
"Do you really think a doppelgänger is going to make it past all those people at the party without them noticing her?" Jacqueline said. "With that hair? There'll be hysteria. She won't get anywhere near him."
Emery swallowed her panic and hit the first floor button on the elevator. Wes and Jacqueline piled in with her once again.
"What if he's not at the party, though?" she said. "What if he went somewhere else on campus? What if Morrigan finds him, and he's alone? She moved so fast, he'd never be able to run from her, and he doesn't even have a weapon to defend himself—"
"Em." Wes's voice was low and soothing; his eyes fixed on hers, hypnotic in their absolute blackness. "It's going to be okay. We'll find Edgar. We'll get the campus locked down. She was strong enough to get out, but she's not that strong yet. And we'll get your grandfather—he'll be able to help."
"We aren't supposed to tell him."
The doors slid open. Jacqueline made a small squeak and said, "I think it's too late for that."
Grandpa Al swept through Booling's front doors, followed closely by Ares Montgomery, Lewis, and Kris.
And, peeking out from behind Lewis's legs, Edgar.
"Edgar!" Emery collapsed to her knees in relief. Wes and Jacqueline both reached out for her at the same time, but she waved them off.
Grandpa Al strode forward, looked her over once, then swept a hand through the air. The ground beneath her bubbled upward, pushing her to her feet. Edgar moved out from behind Lewis and started toward her, but Grandpa Al held a hand out to stop him.
"Grandpa—"
"Enough, Emery," he said. "Can you walk?"
"I—yes—but—"
"Ares, take Ms. Fenhallow, please. She has violated State law."
"Wait, what?" Jacqueline did her best look of surprise, but it couldn't wipe the scent of the Dream off of her. "I didn't do anything!"
Grandpa Al's eyebrows rose. "Interesting. Your friends had quite the story about opening Dream gateways."
Lewis and Kris, faces bright red, shrank back into each other even before wrath swept through Jacqueline's features.
"We were worried!" Kris said. "You didn't tell us you were going to try tonight, and when you didn't show up at the manor, we thought—we thought you'd go in and something terrible would happen!"
"We were going to go in without you anyway!" Jacqueline snapped. Ares rounded her up and led her to the door. "Traitors! All you had to do was keep your mouths shut!"
Her yelling cut off as the doors shut behind them.
"Edgar also came and got me," Grandpa Al said. He came from your room not ten minutes ago and said you planned to go into the Dream to find your doppelgänger. On our way, we saw you heading in here."
Only ten minutes? It had seemed like so much longer inside the Dream. Emery glanced at Edgar. He stared at the floor.
He was okay. He was here.
"Grandpa, I can explain everything," Emery said. "We—I need help."
"Both of you will come with me back to the administration building." The thing that had formed behind Emery to push her up now pushed her toward the door, with Wes beside her.
"Mr. Kowalski, Ms. Arevalo, you can return to the party," Grandpa Al said. "And I would appreciate it if you don't speak of this to your classmates."
Lewis and Kris hurried away, pale-faced, into the night.
"Grandpa—" Emery said again.
Grandpa Al's eyes disappeared behind the light glaring off his glasses.
"Enough," he said again, and it felt like a hammerfall. "You and Wesley are suspended and under investigation for unsurpervised doppelgänger hunting activities. Starting now."
~
Grandpa Al left Edgar with David the Receptionist inside the administration building before he took Emery to a conference room in the back of the building, where a nurse already waited with antiseptics and bandages, and locked Emery inside. She got a final glimpse of Wes's face before the door closed; it was too quick a look to know if he was trying to tell her not to talk at all, or to tell them everything she knew.
Emery let her armor dissolve so the nurse could work on her leg. She hadn't dissolved her holsters, so her Peacemakers still rested at her hips, but she only had two shots left. Her head ached like she'd been knocked in the temple with a brick. What focus she had she kept on the window by the table, scanning the sports fields and the path up through Fenhallow Woods, expecting Morrigan to appear there in a cloud of black hair. The trees of the woods shivered in the wind, and it took Emery a moment to realize that she could see the outline of the tops of the trees against the sky. The sky—which had previously been pitch black—had lightened enough to make out the shape of the woods.
"What time is it?" Emery asked.
The nurse looked at her watch. "Almost nine PM."
Fenhalloween was just starting. They were nowhere near morning.
The nurse left when Ares arrived. He shouldered his way into the room, locking the door behind him, and sat down next to Emery at the long conference table.
He sighed, motioned to her leg, and said, "Bet it hurt when she did that."
Emery remained very still. "No one did this to me. In Klaus's dream, there was a nightmare that destroyed a staircase. Lots of debris."
"A staircase was destroyed and you received only one small puncture wound, and nothing else?"
"It was a dream staircase," Emery said. "It was weird."
Ares made a noise and folded his arms across his chest. He'd been in Klaus's dream—at least, he had if Morrigan had told the truth—he would know the staircase wasn't like that. His tattoos rippled across his muscles. "Interesting. Emery, I'd like you to tell me your story again. From the beginning, starting from when you were assigned to search for the Sandman. Leave no details out, please."
She did, but slowly, carefully, trying to remember exactly how she'd told him the story the first time he'd asked. He had to remember it; making her tell it again would reveal the chinks in her armor. And if he found any while he listened, she couldn't read them on his face. He looked only politely interested, her sentences punctuated by his noises of encouragement.
"We went back to Klaus's dream to find out more. We told the dean we wanted to. We were given a mission and we wanted to complete it."
"Your mission was to find the Sandman, not to discover his intentions," Ares said. "And besides that, you employed a non-dreamhunter to assist you on a mission into the Dream. Not only is that against State law, you also enabled a dreamseeker to exercise their power. Are you aware that that is also against the law?"
Emery felt the back of her neck heat up. "Why, though? She can open gateways and she's not affected by the Dream's pressure—why wouldn't you want to use that asset?"
"There's a long history between dreamhunters and dreamseekers. All you need to know right now is that those who do not fear the Dream will use it to their advantage. Our lives are given in service to others—we protect ourselves where and when we can.
"Your friends—and Edgar—seemed utterly convinced you were going after your doppelgänger. They said you'd been practicing opening gateways. Why would the three of them be so utterly convinced of what you'd done if you were only continuing reconnaissance on the Sandman?"
"They misheard us. We were speaking in hypotheticals—what we would do if our doppelgängers showed up. None of us are in our Insanity Primes yet—we're too young to have doppelgängers."
"I've seen younger," Ares said. "And I've seen headstrong students like yourself dive into the Dream headfirst to kill their doppelgängers before they're strong enough to really fight back. They think it'll be easier. They think they'll have an advantage. But the reality is that when we come face-to-face with ourselves, there is no advantage that makes it easy to kill. The most you can hope for is that they attack you, viciously and without mercy, so you have no choice but to fight back."
Emery met his stare with her own. She said, "I don't have a doppelgänger."
A knock came at the door. Ares answered it. Grandpa Al waited on the other side. Something unspoken passed between them, and Grandpa Al said, "May I have a moment with Emery, please?"
Ares stepped out of the room. Grandpa Al stepped in. He locked the door again.
Emery was already out of her chair, the blood pounding in her ears and in her leg. "Grandpa. Where's Edgar? Is he still with David?"
"Edgar is fine."
"No, he's—" She glanced at the door and lowered her voice. "I think he's in danger."
"In danger from what?"
"My—my, uh—" She couldn't even force the word out. Not when it meant Morrigan, not when it was a direct admission. Tears prickled the corners of her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. "Grandpa, I think something has been wrong for a long time. I—I lied to you. While we were looking for the Sandman—for Klaus—I found out that he was following us. Following me. There was a picture of my—my doppelgänger in his dream. He'd been following me because he saw her and didn't know why she was active so early. Then we found her, and she said we were supposed to be together, as a whole, that to kill her wasn't the best way, and she wanted us to bring her Edgar so that she could merge him with his doppelgänger, and then she stabbed me so she could escape the Dream, and—"
Grandpa Al held up a hand. Emery cut off, breath held, unsure why such a common gesture from him felt like such a punch to the gut. Then, a moment later, she realized the reason:
He wasn't surprised.
Nothing had changed when she'd said the word. He didn't look shocked, or scared, or upset. He lowered his hand and removed his glasses to clean them with the small cloth he kept in his pocket. When he put them back on, the reflection of the fluorescent lights hid his eyes.
"You knew," Emery breathed. "You knew my doppelgänger was active."
Another long pause. No denial. Disbelief hollowed Emery's stomach.
"We knew Mr. Warwick was looking into the overthrow of the previous dreamseeker administration of the Hypnos State. We knew he was trying to track down doppelgängers to better understand what the dreamseekers had allegedly discovered about them." Grandpa Al paused once more. "We knew he'd seen your doppelgänger, and was following you.
"You and Wesley were assigned to find the Sandman because we knew he would come to you. While the two of you looked around the city, we had several teams following in your wake, hoping to catch him in the act."
"You—you used me as bait?"
"The State does what it must to neutralize threats."
"You knew my doppelgänger was active and you used me as bait to catch the guy trying to save me."
"He wasn't trying to save you, Emery. His only interest is in a utopian dream where we can live without fear. Dreams like that can be more dangerous than any nightmare, because they can't come true. Believing they can makes us lower our guards."
Emery felt like her insides were shaking apart one piece at a time. "You're so sure? Records have been wiped out because the entire Hypnos State believes the dreamseekers were lying about there being a better way to deal with doppelgängers? What they proposed would have saved more of us, and no one even wants to look into it?"
Grandpa Al's eyebrows twitched, forrowing into a frown for only a second before smoothing back out again. "We are looking into it, Em. But I don't think you understand how vicious doppelgängers can be."
"What?" Emery jabbed a finger at her leg. "I don't understand? I get it, Grandpa, cause that's all I've ever heard. 'Doppelgängers are vicious, doppelgängers will do whatever they have to do to stay alive'—that was all anyone ever taught us! And then you think it's okay to use me as bait—" Her voice caught in her throat. "Why didn't you tell me? Why would you let me run around the city thinking I was okay when I wasn't? Do you know why it's active so early?"
"No, I don't."
"Are you trying to figure it out?"
Pause.
Anger rushed in Emery's ears.
"Well, now you know she's coming after Edgar!" She bit back on the words, stopping herself from all-out yelling. "So serve me my termination papers or whatever so I can kill her before she gets to him!"
Grandpa Al's voice didn't raise at all. "You'll stay here for now, Em. Edgar will be fine. I'll send Ares back up."
Back up? They were on the first floor—the only place to come up from was—
"Did—did you take Wes to the Underground?" If Emery's stomach could have sunk any lower, it would have. Grandpa Al was already striding out the door, closing and locking it before she could reach him. "You took Wes to the Underground? Did you take Jacqueline there, too? Because we tried to do the right thing?" She beat on the door, yelling now, not caring who was listening.
They'd all known this whole time. It wasn't any kind of stealth that had kept her from being served her termination papers.
Emery screamed at the door and kicked it with her bad leg, which sent a shock of pain racing up her spine. She didn't care what he said about Edgar being fine—she had to find a way out of here. She had to get Wes and get Edgar—though she wasn't sure yet in what order—then find Morrigan. She hurried to the window, throwing open the latch and peering outside. The bushes below were thick, but she could climb out. The problem would be avoiding Grandpa Al so he didn't just grab her and put her back inside again.
Lightning flashed. Emery looked up.
A thick and rolling layer of clouds blanketed the sky above Fenhallow Academy, turning slowly in a wide arc. A sickly green light washed over the sports fields and the woods, and a sense settled over Emery like ozone before a storm, raising the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck.
It wasn't ozone. Far away, past the edge of the clouds over Fenhallow woods, was the small white sliver of the waning moon. And when gap appeared in the middle of the clouds, there loomed a second moon over the campus, huge and green and bathing the grounds in its light.
The Dream crept over Fenhallow Academy.
"Klaus," Emery breathed, and lunged for the window.
(Next time on The Children of Hypnos -------> !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SANDMAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)