The Children of Hypnos

Chapter 19: Fabian Fenhallow, Dolphin Lover

The Fenhallow day division soccer team competed against other high school soccer teams around the Sleeping City, though rarely on Fenhallow's campus. The soccer field was equipped with bleachers and a rarely-used concession stand, and it was in the biggest freezer in this concession stand that Joel had stashed his beloved sculpture.

The woods were quiet tonight. The only people around the sports fields were a small group of students huddled near the edge of the trees, giggling amongst themselves and peering through the trunks and underbrush as if they might get a glimpse of the Wilmark Fox. Joel and Emery crept to the concession stand without pulling any attention.

"So here's a problem," Joel said, tugging the lock on the concession stand door. "I don't have a key."

"How'd you put it in here if you don't have a key?"

"I borrowed it from maintenance. Turns out they'll give you pretty much anything if you promise to get those gut-buster burritos back in the cafeteria."

"They gave you keys just for promising that?"

"Oh, no, I already did it. The head of food services loves me."

"Why can't you just go get the keys from maintenance again?"

He shrugged. "I already used my favor to get the key the first time. And I thought you could, you know, do some dreamhunter magic on it." He tugged the lock again, smiling.

"I mean...technically, yeah." Emery took the lock from him. It was a normal Master lock, nothing particularly strange about it. She wouldn't be able to dreamform a specific key unless she knew what it looked like; the most she knew about padlocks was that something inside needed to line up correctly, and even if she just shoved an amorphous dreamform inside, she wouldn't be able to tell when that was.

"I'll have to break it," she said.

Joel shrugged. "It's a concession stand. They take all the money out after games, so it's just a bunch of frozen pretzels and bags of nacho cheese."

Emery thought of the chain link Wes had broken inside the Sandman's—inside Klaus's—nightmare. He'd wrapped his hand around it and pop. She hadn't been great at dreamforming so far, but she wasn't completely hopeless.

She closed her eyes, squeezed her hand tight, and imagined something small. Really small. Atom-small. She imagined a tiny purple-gray blob forming inside the lock's metal loop, then she imagined it growing, growing, filling any space it found, pushing the metal outward. She imagined the metal warping and breaking.

She opened her eyes and her hand. The padlock rested in her palm, whole and unblemished.

"Are you doing a dreamhunter thing right now?" Joel asked, looking between Emery and the lock. "Should I step back? Look for cover?"

"No, I'm trying to dreamform the lock apart. It's harder than I thought it would be. It's like...the more I want to dreamform something, the less it wants to be made." Her right temple throbbed the way it did when she was getting low on bullets. She rubbed it, growling. "Why can't I do this? Wes is amazing at it—ugh, don't—don't tell anyone I said that. I should be able to do this, it shouldn't be this difficult."

Her bullets also hadn't penetrated Marcia's armor in the Dream, and the Dream itself would have swallowed her if not for Grandpa Al coming to get her. What she'd said to Ridley was right; she hadn't done anything to get Wes out. When it had come time to actually do some work, she'd been all but useless.

"Em." Joel's knuckles brushed her bicep. "A lot of stuff has happened. You don't have to do this if you don't want to."

"I do want to, though," she said, doing her best to hold back tears of frustration. Now was not the time to start crying. "I can do it. Give me a second."