Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet Read Free Page A

Rose and Grace hid; they cowered as an enraged crowd beat on the bolted door. Then they heard police whistles.
    Rose tried to talk in stops and starts. She said to her mother, “Did you see it? What was it? Why did Laura want
that?
Why was she calling it to her?”
    And to these incoherent questions Grace could only reply, “It was a dream, darling, just a dream. It must have seemed like that to Laura too. Just a dream. She’s not like you and me.”
    When he was finally able to drag himself free from the nightmare, Sandy staggered out of bed and into his room’s cramped bathroom. He ran the cold tap and rinsed his mouth. Ribbons of blood spiraled down the drain in pink-tinged water. It was only once he’d stopped running the water that he became aware of the racket coming from the balcony beyond his door. He went out to look.
    The doors of rooms around the third tier were flung open. It seemed that many people had come out only in search of a less confined space. Near Sandy two women in torn silk pajamas were leaned over the balcony rail, one gasping for air, the other scrubbing her lacerated face with blood-slick palms.
    People were heading toward the stairs. Some wept and staggered as they went, others were more purposeful, pushing their way through, their faces injured and contorted, but wrathful too.
    Sandy looked at himself. There was blood under his fingernails. His pajama top was open, its buttons gone or dangling by threads.
    From below came sounds of a melee, crashes, shouting, and police whistles. Sandy went to the rail, leaned over, and saw his uncle. George Mason was at the top of the dreamer’s dais, facedown on churned-up bedding. Two men had hold of him by his legs and were trying to drag him into a crowd of enraged people who were fighting for space on the spiral stairs. Sandy saw a few members of the Opera’s fire watch among the crowd and, at the foot of the stairs, a bunch of police officers fighting their way up, swinging their truncheons.
    Sandy stood frozen, gripping the rail, till the police managed to reach his uncle and wrap both a quilt and their uniformed bodies around him.
    Another clutch of police came into sight in the main auditorium. They fought their way through the crowd toward themain exit. Grace Tiebold was in their midst, the train of her opulent gown in tatters, her cheeks and throat smeared with blood.
    Reinforcements arrived. Police poured onto the auditorium floor. Sandy heard a gunshot and saw glass rain down from a hole punched in the Opera’s stained-glass dome. He flinched back from the rail and joined the crowd pouring down the nearest staircase.
    There was a press of people on the stairs. Sandy was surrounded by the sound of weeping. For a brief moment he was snagged in a group of men in suits who seemed to be trying to decide whether to continue up or turn and follow the crowd back down. Sandy caught snatches of their talk.
    “The police have her already …”
    “But was it her? I think that nightmare was Hame’s Buried Alive …”
    Someone elbowed Sandy in the ribs, and the men slipped ahead of him. He followed, stumbling over a dropped bowler hat.
    Outside, in the Crescent Plaza, there were more bowler-hatted Regulatory Body officials. Most of them stood in little groups, turned away from the throngs of distressed people. There were ambulances and paddy wagons in the plaza, and a fire truck, the firemen passing out blankets.
    Suddenly Sandy spotted a head of unmistakable bright hair. He ran toward Rose Tiebold, calling her name. He couldn’t see Laura with her. Rose turned to him. Her face was pale but unmarked. Someone grabbed Sandy by the collar of his pajamas and held him. Sandy grappled with the hand but concentrated on Rose. “Where’s Laura?”
    Beside him a voice said, “This boy is a dreamhunter. You should make sure to catch any who were here.”
    Sandy looked around. The man who held him was a policecaptain. The other man, the one issuing