Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet Read Free

the nightmare was me.”
    Once she’d had this thought, another followed it: “If it wasn’t me, then who was it?”
    Then,
“Laura,”
Grace thought, though she couldn’t think where her niece might have gone to catch a nightmare like that. It was like something from the “shadow belt”—a region in Band X, four days’ walk into the lifeless desert of the Place. Grace knew that an eight-day walk In and out again was beyond Laura’s stamina, that her niece was simply too small and weak to carry enough water for a journey of that length. So where had the nightmare come from? How had Laura managed to catch it? And
why
would Laura bring a dreadful thing like that to the Rainbow Opera on St. Lazarus’s Eve?
    Grace collected herself and went on. She reached the top of the stairs and saw her daughter. Rose’s jaw went slack, and she took a step back, apparently appalled at her mother’s appearance. Grace ran to Rose, took her hands, and scanned her face. Rose was unhurt—her lips were mauve, but, Grace recalled, that was only the stain of the musk creams she had been nibbling since lunch.
    The terrible howling had stopped. Behind the Opera’s doors, people had begun to call out for help—a sane, human clamor. A few started to spill out onto the balconies.
    The door of the Hame Suite opened, and Laura emerged, her face white and mouth bloody. She was clumsily unwinding bandages from her hands.
    Grace called to her. Laura looked at her aunt, her expression closed and remote.
    There was a loud crash from the auditorium. Grace turned and saw that George Mason was in trouble. A group of men were making their way up the spiral stairs with murder in their eyes. Mason had hurled his own water jug at them. For a moment they fell back, shielding their faces with their hands, then they continued on up.
    The control room was dark, but the power board was cascading sparks, by the light of which Grace could see several men from the fire watch leaning across the sill of the window that looked out over the auditorium. They appeared stunned and battered.
    Grace ignored the sounds behind her—of breaking glass, and her niece calling to someone—and shouted across the auditorium to the fire watch. “Please help him!” She gestured toward Mason.
    A long moment went by. The Opera’s rooms disgorged retching, staggering people. Grace yelled some more. She still had hold of her daughter, who was trying to pull away from her. Grace hung on to Rose but kept her attention on the control room and the dithering fire watchmen. She urged them to do something. In another moment George Mason would be overwhelmed. The staircase was so packed now that Grace imagined she could see the dais swaying. Finally the fire watchmen seemed to see what she wanted, and, lit by blue flashes, they began to move and act.
    Grace turned back to her daughter as Rose broke away and rushed to the stairs that led to the dreamer’s door. Rose stopped, clinging to the doorframe, and peered down into the dark. The lights seemed to have failed in the stairwell. “Rose!” Grace called, and her daughter turned and came back. “Are those stairs clear?” Grace asked—she was thinking how they might avoid the angry crowd.
    “No. Laura went down there.
It
took her,” Rose said. She was stammering with shock. “Did you see it?”
    Grace frowned at Rose and touched her forehead, as though testing for a fever. “Darling, we have to hide,” Grace said gently. Then she grabbed Rose and propelled her toward the balcony of the Presidential Suite. These balconies were usually locked, but Grace was hoping that, since the President had been carried to safety, his bodyguards hadn’t bothered to close the door behind them when they fled.
    The first door was not only open but broken and hanging from one hinge. The balcony was empty except for an overturned chair. Grace hustled her daughter into the suite. She pulled the door closed and bolted it.
    For the next five minutes