She knew this place better than I did, and I was positively nightmarish in my knowledge of the streets. She ducked through a five-foot-high arch whose exit was stacked with boxes and crates, a way behind the Novier Building that I hadn’t known existed. From there, she made a dizzying array of right and left turns which, if placed on a map, would have resembled a confused millipede with its head cut off. We must have walked a mile like that, dipping between back alleys and side streets until we were almost on top of the ocean.

She knocked on the door—four times, hard and fast. Then she stopped abruptly. It was the same way I’d stopped a couple minutes ago, because she had my gun jabbed into her back. “I’m not so sympathetic as all that, Morés,” I said. “I just needed you to get me to your hideout.”

“B-but…you said…”

“And you were going to shoot me. I think I was allowed to say near about anything.” I spun Bella’s barrel just to let her hear the click. One of her arms jerked involuntarily and knocked against the door. “‘A reason not to earn that pay.’ Oh please. I’m shocked that line worked well enough to see the light of day. You killed Nicholson in cold blood and it’s barely crossed your mind since then. No more of that. You’re going to open that door and you’re going to give me that little notebook and then we’ll see how much sympathy you can wring out of anyone else.”

The door inched open, rust dripping from the hinges. She made it a foot in, enough for me to see the dim outlines of furniture pushed up against bare brick. Then she stopped. “I really sh-shouldn’t,” she muttered. “Quick. Quick, g-get away from here-”

“And just who are you trying to warn away?” I shoved past her.

I knew Bianca’s nightmare: the pursuing beast, who chases you, never flagging, always gaining, until the dream ends. I could handle it. But just inside that door was a monstrous aberration: bulging eyes that oozed with madness and visceral bloody hatred; thick furred legs rippled with muscle and capped with gleaming, scythe-like claws; and a face which flickered between forms, bones elongating and shrinking without any rhyme nor reason, a face which defied any shape I could hope to impose on it. Every thought I had fled in abject terror, and Bella slipped from fingers which didn’t care enough to keep clutching her. I had to run. I had to get away from this damned hellspawn—but, as happens so often in nightmares, I couldn’t move.

There was a clatter behind me. Bianca moved forward and caught the shoulder of the young, rail-thin man standing in front of me, he who shook and shivered like the monster he embodied. “It’s the D-Dragon,” she said. “I know it is. I told you to stay off of it until I came—came back.”

He stared at the ground. Even that tiny movement made me lurch back in fright. The aura he radiated had its claws deep into the vestigial, primal part of my brain, and I couldn’t dig them out. “I-” he started. “I—I—I—could—I tried. I wanted—I didn’t want.”

Bianca threw a glare towards me. She had Bella in her hand now—that was the sound I’d heard. “W-well, maybe it was for the best. Hell’s bells, Vincente, even I can feel it.” She began to nudge him towards a couch stained with sick. “I know, I know. That’s what f-feels good about it. It makes your nightmares stronger, it makes you feel stronger, but it’s destroying you, V-Vincente.”

The fear ebbed, just a little. I could drag one foot from the ground and start running. But I also couldn’t run away without the notebook—Bianca would certainly change hideouts, and I’d be down the same road as before. “Vincente?” I managed. “Who…?”

“My b-brother,” Bianca said coldly. “Not that you care.”

“Your brother?”

“By—blood.” It took a moment for my mind to sort through what she meant. Nightmares didn’t have family. Nightmares weren’t born like that. Siblings by blood, though—she and Vincente had made a pact, an agreement, mingling blood so that they could claim to share it. “And he’s hurt, detective. C-can’t you see that? Doesn’t that matter at all to you?”

I grit my teeth and took a step towards them. Bianca raised my own gun at me. “That doesn’t excuse murder.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Nicholson did this to him!” she shouted. “You know. You must know how they f-find more customers for Dragon. The dealers, the makers, they off-offer it to anybody they can lay their hands on, g-get them hooked on the power before they let it k-kill them. Nicholson was rich. He was charming. P-people liked him. But he f-found Vincente and a hundred others and offered them Dragon and now most of them are dead.” She clung to that rail-thin boy, who certainly didn’t have the strength to stand as a lifeline. “He would be too, if I didn’t…”

“If you didn’t get out,” I finished. “Yeah, yeah. But that’s only half the job, isn’t it? You need to go somewhere.”

“And there’s never anywhere to go after D-Drakon.” Bianca waved the gun at me. “He makes sure of that. Sends hound dogs like you after us. All I’ve done is make sure you can’t bark.”

“Always running. That’s what you’re good at, that’s what your nightmares build you to do.” Now that I knew it, it was easier to approach them. What sort of a terrifying beast is named Vincente, except those which aren’t worth fearing? “But it won’t get you far. Kill me, sure. Keep me quiet. But there will be others, and they’ll be a lot less nice than I was.”

“N-nice?”

“Yeah. I didn’t shoot you when I had the opportunity. I let you talk and you’re still talking.”

She spat on the floor. Then she towed Vincente with her to a drawer pushed up against the other wall, a bare-bulbed lamp providing little illumination. She pulled a green bottle from one of the bottom drawers and took a heavy swig of it. I could smell the paint thinner from twenty feet away. “What do you care for Drakon? Why do you play his little g-games? He doesn’t care for you any more than he does us—if you f-fail, you’ll be hunted down too.” Then the fight vanished. “But I did the s-same thing for, hah, for years. What can I say?”

Vincente clung to her. “Don’t—don’t be—you can’t be—sad, sister.”

She slammed the bottle down. “Never. Not when you’re here and alive, Vincente. And it seems I may be l-left with that.”

I blinked. In a roundabout way, the conversation might have been circling around to what I was here for. “The notebook.”

“The goddamn notebook!” It was in the left drawer, it turned out. Small and battered, something people would kill for. “It was supposed to be our insurance. Something to make Drakon think twice about coming after us cause he knew w-what we had. What we could expose. And th-then…” She seethed. “Then he came after us anyw-way! It didn’t matter!”

“You wanted to make a point,” I said. “But Drakon is also the kind of man to make points. The type…” I winced. “The type that tend to be pointed, and which tend to get made just once. Very graphically.”

“And he’s winning.”

“He was always going to win.”

“Of course. Of course he was.” She stared at the floor for a moment. She took Bella out and placed her on the counter along with the bottle and the notebook, and pushed them all around in a circle morosely. “We’re going to make a deal, detective,” she said.

“What if I don’t-”

“We’re going to make a deal, because I hold both of the guns. I’m going to g-give you the notebook. You’re going to walk out of here, very slowly, and after an hour you’re going to call Chesnes and give it to him. You w-won’t remember this p-place, and it won’t m-matter, because we’re going to be already gone. Right, Vincente?” He nodded, but he would have nodded at anything. “The notebook will be g-gone. All that trouble g-gone with it. And you’ll tell Drakon everything he needs not to chase us down ever again. O-okay?”

I looked down Bella’s barrel and decided I wasn’t going to get a better deal. Oh, I could talk to Bianca, yes, and I could talk as long as I wanted. But Bianca had the look of a hunted fox hanging onto something by the skin of her teeth, and that something happened to be a strung-out man named Vincente, and there was nothing I could say to make her give that up. The notebook was the best I was going to get. “Do you need more than my assurance?”

“If you go back on your deal, I’ll send Vincente after you. People who he’s been near like to run away very f-fast.” She drummed her fingers on the table. “Into the ocean. They d-don’t usually come back up, detective.”

And those were the nightmares. A human would fare much, much worse. “Understood,” I said. “And the notebook?”

She threw it at me. The pages fluttered in the air. I caught it by the edge, feeling the way the cover bent. Without looking to see how bad the damage was, I stuffed into my pocket. “And my gun?”

“Maybe I’ll mail it back to you.”

“It’s important to me.”

“If I never see you again…” The bullet made a small hole in the brick next to my head. I got the point. “That’d be too soon, d-detective. Get out.”

On that note, I left. The door slammed shut behind me. I let out a breath—it no longer felt like I was being chased within an inch of my life. Good luck to them both, I supposed, with whatever favors they’d begged off of me. I looked back at the darkened windows, then sighed, and began to pick my way back through the alleys. Probably take an hour just to find a phone booth and call Chesnes…

I’d made it only a few blocks before my footsteps began to echo. I adjusted my hat and tried to see anything behind me. No dice. I turned a corner and abruptly stopped, but my tail was smarter than that. My feet slipped backwards an inch, as if I were falling. “Sorry,” a voice said, “but there are orders.” Then there was a blinding tap on the back of my head and everything went dark.