Grave Peril

"I realize that, Bob," I said, and mopped at my face with one hand.

"You any steadier?"

"I … I guess."

"I think you got torn up pretty good, spirit-wise. It’s lucky you started screaming. I came as quick as I could, but you didn’t want to wake up. The poison, I think."

I sat up, cross-legged, staying inside the circle. "I remember that I had a dream. God, it was a terrible dream." I felt my guts turn to water, and I started shaking again. "I tried to change it, but I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t."

"A dream," Bob said. "Yeah, that figures."

"Figures?" I asked.

"Sure," Bob said.

I shook my head, rested my elbows on my knees, and put my face in my hands. I did not want to be doing this. Someone else could do it. I should go, leave town. "It was a spirit that jumped me?"

"Yeah."

I shook my head. "That doesn’t make any sense. How did it get past the threshold?"

"Your threshold isn’t so hot to begin with, Bachelor Man."

I worked up enough courage to scowl at Bob. "The wards, then. I’ve got all the doors and windows warded. And I don’t have any mirrors it could have used."

If Bob had any hands, he would have been rubbing them together. "Exactly," he said. "Yes, exactly."

My stomach quailed again, and a fresh burst of shuddering made me put my hands in my lap. I felt like sprawling somewhere, crying my eyes out, puking up whatever shreds of dignity remained in my stomach, and then crawling into a hole and pulling it in after me. I swallowed. "It … it never came in to me, then, is what you’re saying. It never had to cross those boundaries."

Bob nodded, eyes burning brightly. "Exactly. You went out to it."

"When I was dreaming?"

"Yes, yes, yes," Bob bubbled. "It makes sense now – don’t you see?"

"Not really."

"Dreams," the skull said. "When a mortal dreams, all kinds of strange things can happen. When a wizard dreams, it can be even weirder. Sometimes, dreams can be intense enough to create a little, temporary world of their own. Kind of a bubble in the Nevernever. Remember how you told me Agatha Hagglethorn was a strong enough ghost to have had her own demesne in the Nevernever?"

"Yeah. It looked kind of like old Chicago."

"Well, people can do the same, at times."

"But I’m not a ghost, Bob."

"No," he said. "You’re not. But you’ve got everything it takes to make a ghost inside you except for the right set of circumstances. Ghosts are only frozen images of people, Harry, last impressions made by a personality." Bob paused, reflectively. "People are almost always more trouble than anything you run into on the Other Side."

"I hadn’t noticed," I said. "All right. So you’re saying that any time I dream, it creates my own little rent-by-the-hour demesne in the Nevernever."

"Not every time," Bob said. "In fact, not even most times. Only really intense dreams, I suspect, bring the necessary energy out of people. But, with the border being so turbulent and easy to get through …"

"More people’s dreams are making bubbles on the other side. That must have been how it got to poor Micky Malone, then. While he was sleeping. His wife said he’d had insomnia that night. So the thing hangs around outside his house waiting for him to fall asleep and starts killing fuzzy animals to fill up the time."

"Could be," Bob said. "Do you remember your dream?"

I shuddered. "Yeah. I … I remember it."

"The Nightmare must have got inside with you."

"While my spirit was in the Nevernever?" I asked. "It should have ripped me to shreds."

"Not so," Bob beamed. "Your spirit’s demesne, remember? Even if only a temporary one. Means you have the home field advantage. It didn’t help, since it got the drop on you, but you had it."

"Oh."

"Do you remember anything in particular, any figure or character in the dream that wouldn’t have been acting the way you thought it should have?"

"Yeah," I said. My shaking hands went to my belly, feeling for tooth marks. "Hell’s bells, yeah. I was dreaming of that bust a couple of months back. When we nailed Kravos."

"That sorcerer," Bob mused. "Okay. This could be important. What happened?"

I swallowed, trying not to throw up. "Um. Everything went wrong. That demon he’d called. It was stronger than it had been in life."

"The demon was?"

I blinked. "Bob. Is it possible for something like a demon to leave a ghost?"

"Oh, uh," Bob said, "I don’t think so – unless it had actually died there. Eternally perished, I mean, not just had its vessel dispersed."

"Michael killed it with Amoracchius," I said.

Bob’s skull shuddered. "Ow," he said. "Amoracchius. I’m not sure, then. I don’t know. That sword might be able to kill a demon, even through a physical shell. That whole faith-magic thing is awfully strong."

"Okay, so. We could be dealing with the ghost of a demon, here," I said. "A demon that died while it was all fired up for a fight. Maybe that’s what makes it so … so vicious."

"Could be," Bob agreed, cheerily.

I shook my head. "But that doesn’t explain the barbed-wire spells we’ve been finding on those ghosts and people." I grabbed onto the problem, the tangled facts, with a silent kind of desperation, like a man about to drown who has no breath to waste on screaming. It helped to keep me moving.

"Maybe the spells are someone else’s work," Bob offered.

"Bianca," I said, suddenly. "She and her lackeys are all messed up in this somehow – remember that they put the snatch on Lydia? And they were waiting for me, that first night, when I came back from being arrested."

"I didn’t think she was that big time a practitioner," Bob said.

I shrugged. "She’s not, horribly. But she just got promoted, too. Maybe she’s been studying up. She’s always had a little more than her share of freaky vampire tricks – and if she was over in the Nevernever when she did it, it would have made her stronger."

Bob whistled through his teeth. "Yeah, that could work. Bianca stirs things up by torturing a bunch of spirits, gets all the turbulence going so that she can prod this Nightmare toward you. Then she lets it loose, sits back, and enjoys the fun. She got a motive?"

"Regret," I said, remembering a note I’d read more than a year ago. "She blames me for the death of one of her people. Rachel. She wants to make me regret it."