Lay Me Down by Erin Kellison Page A

back to face Lambert, a chill raising the hairs at the nape of her neck.
    This was bad. Really bad. Lambert might be rich and famous, but he was also attached in some way to the evil dream. He wasn’t going to let her go and tell the world that their modern visionary was doing evil stuff Darkside.
    “Maze—” Lambert interrupted himself. “May I call you Maze?”
    “Sure. What do I call you?” Diddy came to mind.
    He smiled slightly. “You may call me Mr. Lambert. I’ve been following your work for Graeme, and I’ve heard you are aware that you’ve been shadowed Darkside by one of our own as well?”
    “Your driver guy?” Maisie asked. “Yeah, he’s followed me a couple of times.”
    “You cross dreams effortlessly?”
    Maisie shrugged. He knew she could.
    “And you’ve sneaked into the Agora once or twice.”
    She blinked at him. “Sometimes it’s unavoidable.”
    “And do you have any problem with la tempête de poussière ?”
    “The what?”
    “The great dust storm,” he said.
    “You mean the Scrape.”
    Lambert lifted an eyebrow.
    “Scrape,” Maisie repeated, louder. Maybe he was hard of hearing. “Wind blows. So what? If you want me to deliver your packages, my rates have gone up.” Way up. Not even the über wealthy Didier Lambert could afford her.
    “Oh, you’re worth too much to risk on deliveries.”
    She blinked at him again, taken aback. “Somebody’s got to take things from point A to point B.”
    That was the point of her coming back to Graeme, wasn’t it? Because she’d stopped delivering their all-important packages?
    “I have other people for that. I was hunting for talent before I published my first findings on shared dreaming.”
    That had been over fifteen years ago. “Okay?” If they had so much talent, why hadn’t Graeme just let her go? Why pursue her? Why the trouble?
    The more she looked at this guy, so suave and cultured, the more uneasy she felt.
    “I am, however, in the market for a little real estate,” he said.
    Maisie squinted at him. What had this to do with delivering William Kerry to that horribly bloody and evil dream? She hated when people made her feel stupid, as if she couldn’t follow a conversation.
    “I don’t know anything about real estate,” she said. “I’m a courier Darkside. An expensive one.”
    “You undervalue yourself.”
    She had just said expensive, right?
    “I want your city.”
    Oh. Maisie leaned back in her chair. “You’re the great Didier Lambert. Build your own.”
    “Hélas,” he said. “I cannot. I was born without my own dreamspace, cast adrift on the waters from my infancy.”
    He had no dreamspace? Impossible.
    Except, sitting before him, all her senses were jangling with warning. She’d known there was something wrong about him, though she never would’ve been able to guess that.
    “I need a place of my own from which to control my business Darkside,” he said.
    Hell if it was going to be her city.
    “I’ll pay you handsomely for it.”
    “You can’t buy my dreamscape. It can’t be sold. It’s part of me.”
    He made her skin crawl just talking to her about it. Her instincts were again screaming to run away. It was the same feeling she’d fought since first visiting the bad dream. Only Steve’s company, his absolute confidence, had managed to quell it.
    But the urgency was now alive and well. Run. Fucking fly if you have to.
    He opened his palms to her. “I’ll give you anything you want in the waking world.”
    She didn’t like the waking world very much. It was Darkside where she was alive, really alive.
    She had to get away from him and this house, but she had voluntarily trapped herself inside. Freedom was back two living rooms blocked by that nurse lady, then down a long driveway with armed guards. And a gate. There was no way out.
    “And where would I go to dream?” she demanded. “It’s not like I can move out.”
    “True. You’d still descend into the city during sleep, but it