Free Bring Me A Dream: Reveler Series 5 by Erin Kellison

It only required patience.
    “Are you going to give me to Him?” Agatha finally asked in a timid, breathless voice. She snuck a glance at Vincent and said louder, “Or maybe Mr. Blackman?” Then she raised her gaze to meet Mirren’s. “Or someone else…?” The last bit trailed off as their eyes locked.
    Mirren held a shallow breath. Give her to the Sandman? Mirren knew her father had been using revelers, feeding them to nightmares. Did Agatha already know that giving and feeding might be the same thing?
    “Give me,” Vincent said, drawling. “It’d be my honor .”
    Seemed he understood just fine. But then he didn’t believe in the Sandman; he thought Lambert was the Sandman. The honor was a hoped-for second chance to kill him.
    “It’d be my honor, as well,” Agatha said softly, voice broken by emotion as if shamed into humility. “To go into the dark with Him is my greatest wish.”
    “Sorry. I called the wish first,” Vincent said. “The Sandman and I have business.”
    Agatha drew back slightly and looked to Mirren to decide the matter.
    Fact was, they needed Agatha to show them how it was done.
    “How about you both do it?” Mirren said. “Make Him come extra quick.”
    Her father was trapped in the Agora, so if Vincent was correct, the Sandman might not come at all.
    “Both of us?” Agatha asked, a tremulous quiver on her lips.
    Ugh. Drama. Mirren cut her a quick, “Yes.”
    Agatha’s presence was the point. Rook and Jordan were taking care of David pending the results of this expedition into the Scrape cosmology. The question was simple: is the Sandman a real person or a scary story? The answer would be simple as well. The former presumed an intelligence Darkside that was separate from humanity and its collective psyche. A god. The God.
    The latter possibility, that the Sandman was just a story, was more likely. It meant that the nightmares plaguing dreamers were not intelligent in their own right; they were merely malformed ghosts of fears that mirrored back what revelers themselves held within. Vincent had seen his father, for example. And Rook his dead little brother. And if those fears “consumed” them? Fears consumed people all the time. That was the dreamer’s fault, too.
    Agatha stood and Mirren could see tears on her cheeks. She looked a little lost in her thoughts, a little afraid. “Then I suppose we need to sleep. If you’ll come this way, I’ll get you settled for the revel.”
    Revel meant fun. Mirren wasn’t having any. Agatha’s meekness made Mirren feel very tall, exaggeratedly so. Like a freak.
    She sought Vincent’s gaze and found him looking at her already. The wolfish expression was back on his face, gaze calculating, something gaunt under the lines of his handsome features. He was probably contemplating murder again. It made her feel better about herself. Freaks together, then.
    Agatha led them into a room that was empty except for several ergonomically styled lounging chairs, which were arranged in a circle, the heads all pointed inward, as if intended to literally pool the dreamers’ thoughts.
    This was all new to Mirren. She’d never had to use equipment or go to a Rêve center, commercial or private, to share dreams or learn to become lucid within them. It had always been easy for her, literally second nature. But without her own dreamscape, she’d always wandered. Even now, in the waking world, she was a wanderer without a home.
    Maze City. The idea was growing on her, especially if it could keep David safe.
    Agatha held out a Rêve dreamjack to her, and Mirren waved it away. But Vincent made a face and took one from her. Mirren hesitated. She didn’t know how safe it was for him to be dependent on Agatha’s system, which had to have been set up and maintained by Mirren’s father. There was an alternative.
    “If you want,” Mirren told him, “I’ll take you into sleep with me.”
    She used to do it with David’s father when they were first