Secret Unleashed

Nothing moved or gave me any indication someone was with me, but still the voice said, “Stop looking.”

Shivers rocked me hard, like I’d been plunged into a vat of icy water and quickly removed. “Hello?” Holding my hand out in front of me, I hoped to feel something, but my fingers grasped at empty space.

“You won’t find what you’re after.” The voice was masculine, not a common thing for my dreams, unless you counted the ones where I was naked with Holden. But this wasn’t a fun dream. I wasn’t totally sure it was a dream.

Did I remember falling asleep? No. Nothing felt real here, and I struggled to keep one foot planted in reality.

“How do you know what I’m looking for?” My voice echoed back at me, though what it had hit to create the echo, I didn’t know. The air was so heavy I wanted to sit down, but I didn’t dare. I still didn’t know where I was or what was around me. Dream or not, I didn’t feel like plunging to my death.

“You want what I was looking for. Stop.”

That male voice was unfamiliar, yet somehow I knew it. “Sutherland?”

“I know what you’re doing. You have to stop.”

“I’m looking for you.”

“Stop.”

“No.” I shook my head in case he could see me. “I have to find you.”

“Because they want me back? It’s not worth it, girl. I’m not worth it. What you find…just stop looking.” His voice grew distant for a moment and then loud again, the way a phone with a bad connection might.

“I found the key.”

“It unlocks a cabinet of horrors.” Again his voice faded out, only now he sounded tired. “Don’t go.”

Was this my dream or his? We shared blood, so it was possible for us to communicate this way, but it hadn’t happened before. In all my twenty-three years he’d never slipped into my head, nor me into his. What had changed? Was it proximity, or desperation? And whose need had made it happen?

“Where are you?”

“I’m with The Doctor. Stop looking. Stop.”

“What doctor?”

“The Doctor. Don’t unlock the door. He knows you’re looking. You have to go home.”

I stood still, frozen in place. What was he talking about? What doctor? This dream infuriated me in new ways because it wasn’t similar to any I’d ever had. It wasn’t vague in a symbolic way; it was just vague enough to be annoying.

“Sutherland, I need to find you.”

The darkness flickered and was replaced with a dimly lit corridor. On either side, illuminated by individual yellow lights, was a series of doors. The layout was like the warehouse in the Tenderloin, except these doors all looked old and expensive.

The key was in my hand.

We were in his subconscious, not mine. I’d never seen these doors before. If only I could manipulate what he was dreaming, he might show me the right door in spite of himself.

“If I start at the window, where do I go?”

A dozen doors vanished, their lights going dark with the audible sound of a bulb burning out. I took a step forward, able to see a path through the murky darkness.

“Stop,” he protested.

“Show me the door.”

Another set of lights went out—pop, pop, pop—and I ran forward to keep from being consumed by the dark.

“You’ll regret it,” he promised.

“I regret a lot of things. I won’t regret this. I have the key, now show me the door.”

All the lights around me went out in a shower of sparks, leaving one door lit, seemingly miles away. I walked towards it, drawn like a moth to the flame, the key held outstretched in my trembling palm.

“Don’t,” he shouted.

“It’s okay,” I said.

Two feet from the door the ground gave way beneath me, a darkness unlike any I’d known before opening up. I was swallowed into the vast, cold nothing, all light gone, and I fell, fell, fell. I fell for an eternity, the chasm was so endless. The pitch-blackness stopped being a mere cloud around me, and it transformed into emotion. I was drowning in fear and sorrow and regret, and I knew everything I was feeling was what my father was feeling.

I couldn’t recall ever having woken screaming before, but I did that night.

Bathed in cold sweat and reeking of fear so thick I could smell it on myself, I was dragged from my nightmare by the sound of my own screams. Even when my eyes opened, my throat continued to make hoarse, rasping shrieks, like I couldn’t believe I was awake.

Surely this was some sort of mocking limbo. A temporary reprieve to make it that much worse when I was dragged back into the abyss again.

“Secret.” Strong hands held my shoulders, shaking me.

My screams tapered off into hiccups as I struggled to catch my breath. Holden was lying over me, his arms braced on either side of my shoulders, and he looked terrified. “What the hell happened?” he asked when I caught my breath.

“I found him,” I whispered, my throat too raw to speak any louder. “I went inside his dream.”

“Sutherland?”

“Yes.”

“Did he know who you were?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so, but he knew I was looking for him. He knew what we were trying to do. He told me to stop, told me I’d regret it.”

“A threat?”

“I think it was a warning.” I remembered the fear, the terrible, terrible fear. “Definitely a warning.”

“Why wouldn’t he want you to look for him, unless he was worried you’d find something he didn’t want you to?”

I put my hands on Holden’s forearms, running my hands up and down them, feeling the hairs prickle against my palms. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, so I trailed my fingers over his shoulders and down his chest, the smooth, hard muscles of his stomach begging to be traced. I needed to feel something good, and he felt like a warm Sunday morning to me.

“Hold me.” It wasn’t a request, it was a raspy command. I needed him to put his arms around me, lest I be torn back into that dark place. “Hold me.” My nails scraped the skin of his back, urging him closer.

For a moment he hesitated. Had I been thinking logically I’d have understood why. One second I was screaming my lungs out, the next I had my hands all over him. But he hadn’t been in this dream with me. He hadn’t been the one to go for a midnight swim in Sutherland’s terror. I had to feel loved right then, or I might not be able to feel anything warm and good ever again in my life.

“Hold me.” I was practically crying from the need for it.

He sat back on his knees and tugged me up off the bed, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me tight against him. He wasn’t warm, but he seemed to absorb the frantic heat of my body, taking on my temperature as his own. I clung to him like a piece of flotsam in the midst of a stormy sea, the last thing floating when everything else was going down with the ship.

Holden stroked my hair with slow, soothing motions, whispering nonsense words into my ears. “Hush, hush, baby, nothing to fear, no worries, shhh.” He couldn’t know what there was to fear. I had everything to fear.

And the worst part was, I’d still go after Sutherland.