Bring Me A Dream: Reveler Series 5 by Erin Kellison

assaulted by stimuli, the day a bright jangling in her head. Night was her time. She even occasionally felt a faint brush of the dreamwaters in the night air of the waking world.
    The decision made, the impenetrable Steve-caul rose to leave.
    “Do you feel it, too, then?” he asked her.
    “Yes, I feel it.” Dreamtime coming. So why again was she agreeing to fight it?
     
    ***
     
    Maisie Lane stood on a rooftop overlooking Maze City, a place more like home to her than any place in the waking world. An Escher-like trick of line and symmetry made the building beneath her appear shorter than the others surrounding it, but from here she could see everything.
    Her next project was to populate the city, but she hadn’t figured out how to have her dream people roam independent of her concentration.
    “Now, dear, practice makes perfect,” said a middle-aged woman.
    Maisie didn’t look over at her latest attempt. Hat Lady wore a straw hat with a single daisy growing off the top, a fifties-style housedress in blue, and sensible black sandals with dark nylon socks that went halfway up her calves. Sun spots dotted the skin on her arms and face.
    “I’ve been trying,” Maisie told her. “I need the distraction.”
    The loneliness and worry were going to kill her. She wasn’t used to staying in one place, waiting for word, for some indication that the people she loved were safe. Jordan wasn’t coming because she and Rook would have to bring Mirren Lambert’s spawn with them, and they didn’t want the nightmare kid to be able to find his way back to Maze City later, once he was back in his awful mother’s custody. The bitch had abducted Rook, and what had she gotten? Free babysitters.
    Without looking, Maisie gave Hat Lady a mustache.
    “Now, that’s not kind, dear.”
    She made Hat Lady disappear altogether.
    Waiting. Worrying. This vigil thing was total crap, and she was going to tell everyone she quit the next time they were together.
    Was Steve okay? Had the Mirren bitch tricked him? Was Lambert still trapped in dreamwater Jell-O?
    Maisie took a deep breath that might as well have lasted for eons. Fucking dinosaurs could’ve evolved and suffocated under comet dust in the time this was taking. Steve-o was taking his sweet damn time. She intended to rant until he made it up to her.
    She’d been a runner for a reason. She wasn’t made for the kind of stress this put her heart through. She was going to crumble. They’d find pieces of her. Eyeball here. Toe over there.
    Finally, a soft caress touched her mind—someone crossing into her city—and a minute later, strong hands went around her waist from behind.
    The worry fell away as her heart rose, new and shiny again. He was okay. He was here. She laid her head back on Steve’s chest. “So what was she like?”
    “Unpredictable.”
    It was the first time, aside from Didier, aka Diddy, that Steve had met a nightmare like himself. Met and had a convo with, that is, as opposed to fighting with.
    “Can you please answer my question with more than one word?”
    Steve was too used to being alone. Now he was not only sleeping beside her, he was sharing her dreams, too.
    “She said a lot of things I don’t like, especially the stuff that presumed the existence of the Sandman. She’d been raised on it. That, and a God complex.”
    Maisie laughed. “I hate her already. Did she get along with Blandman?” Vincent Blackman was so boring he was bland.
    “It appears he likes that kind of thing, but then, he’s seriously mentally compromised.”
    “And if the Sandman does exist?”
    A silence. Steve was brooding. She gritted her teeth to wait again. Pushing didn’t actually make him brood faster.
    Finally, he said, “I think he’s real. And I’d be interested to meet him.”

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
    “I’m not a fan of Demon Steve,” Vince said after the apartment door closed behind the Chimera marshal. Vince was trying to act normal, but dark waves of emotion