Copper Veins(52)

22


I woke up in a cell.

Again.

This was getting old.

This time around, the insides of my eyelids felt like they had been coated in sand, my head pounded, my left shoulder and hip were screaming with pain, and my mouth was full of cotton. I rubbed the hard lump where the needle had punctured my neck, wondering if it had been loaded with tequila.

Groggily, painfully, I pushed myself up on my elbows. Gravity, the bitch, shoved me right back down. The floor, gritty and smelly and blessedly cool, seemed to be where I’d be staying for a while.

I felt a hand settle between my shoulder blades. I peeked over my shoulder and felt a new wave of nausea. Jerome, the Peacekeeper of questionable intentions, was not only interred with me, but touching me.

“Max,” I croaked. “Sadie.”

“Max is still out,” Jerome murmured. “Sadie fell asleep a while ago.”

I nodded, my swollen brain not appreciating the movement. A moment later, Jerome pressed something cool into my hand.

“It’s not drugged, as far as I can tell,” Jerome explained, when I looked dubiously at the water. “It takes a long time to dissolve the dampeners. Time these guys didn’t have.”

Huh. So maybe we really had thrown the Peacekeepers for a loop. Maybe Jerome really was on our side. Maybe my head would just explode already and get me out of this nightmare.

I sipped the water, then pressed the plastic cup against my forehead. Why were they always chasing us, capturing us, drugging us? Were Peacekeepers really that terrified of Elemental abilities?

Wait—Sadie had fallen asleep?

“Sadie wasn’t drugged?” I looked around the cell and saw my brother lying on the floor against the opposite wall, Sadie slumped beside him.

“No. Only you and Max were injected.” My eyes swiveled back to Jerome, my mind reeling. Why would Max and I be drugged, but not the Inheritor?

I gulped the rest of the water, pleased that it was dissolving my mental fog. Jerome refilled my cup, then I dragged myself next to Max. I flicked water droplets onto his face until he sputtered awake. From the look of him, he’d gotten the killer dose.

“You and I were drugged,” I said, while he drank the water. “Not Sadie or Jerome.”

Max’s eyes lit up, but that was his only acknowledgement. He looked to Sadie, reassuring himself that she was safe, then he held the cup out to Jerome.

“Fill it,” Max growled, when Jerome only stared. Jerome grabbed the cup and stalked off to what I now saw was a bucket in the corner. As if this second imprisonment wasn’t bad enough, we were drinking standing water. While I willed my stomach to be calm, Max whispered, “The deadening drugs don’t last very long. If they don’t know we’ve woken up, we’re good.”

“Deadening?” I repeated.

“Sleep of the dead,” Max explained.

As creepy as the name was, it was appropriate. You see, the dead don’t dream, and that’s exactly what I needed to do now. If they were drugging us to keep us from dreaming, it meant that the cell we now occupied wasn’t warded against dreamwalking. Finally, I had a way to reach Micah.

“You ready?” I asked.

“You know it.” With that, Max grabbed my hand, and we fell into dreamland together.



While Peacekeepers and other government officials strut around implying that they’re the biggest and the baddest in Pacifica, there are quite a few things they don’t know about Elementals, specifically about Dreamwalkers like Max and myself. For instance, we can put ourselves to sleep at will.

At first blush, that doesn’t exactly sound like a super-power. I mean, everyone falls asleep, right? Even insomniacs succumb eventually. But, consider that when a Dreamwalker sleeps, they also shake off the ties that bind them to their body, and to their world.

When a Dreamwalker sleeps, no prison can hold them.

Moments after Max and I had closed our eyes, our dreamselves were standing over our bodies. The first thing I noticed was how incredibly beat up we both were.

“You look like hell,” I muttered.

“Right back at ya, sis.”

I glared at him, but he was right. The right side of my face was a mottled blue and purple, the cut on my cheek had scabbed over until it looked like some kind of miniature monster on my face, and my hands were badly scraped up. My clothes—gods, how many days had I been wearing those jeans?—were filthy, crusted in blood and dirt and who knows what else. What I really wanted to do was drag my body into a giant pot and boil away the grime.

“We need to get to the manor,” I said.

“But Dad—”

“Micah’s a Dreamwalker, Dad’s not,” I said over him. “Besides, we don’t even know where Dad is. He could be someplace warded, or shot up with dampeners or whatever else we can be drugged with, and we’d waste who knows how much time looking for him. If Jerome really is with the resistance, he’ll get us in touch with Dad.” Max nodded—he didn’t like it, but he didn’t have a better plan.