Night's Deep Hush: Reveler Series 4 Read Online Free

and finally came to a door. Beyond it, a sweaty young guy stood, barely twenty if that, in a T-shirt and tight red jeans. And too much jewelry.
    He looked the visitor up and down and said, “Hey, babe.”
    Oh God. A celebrity sex memory.
    The woman in agony was probably being paid big bucks to carry the memory into the Agora, where all the legal commercial dreams were located. There it would be taken up by someone else and then someone else until it got to its intended recipient, the trail obscured by secondary and tertiary memories like the high school scene. The money might finance her next five Rêve fixes, but there’d always be a fracture in her mind.
    Rook was in the black market. Had to be.
    The complex of illegal Rêves was not the bastion of light and security that the Agora was. There were no Chimera to police it, only the Darkside version of neighborhood thugs to bribe for a promise of safety. Please will you get me out if I scream? The Market was a collection of jacked systems banded together for frequency and coherence, a shantytown of cast-off dreams and experimental mindfucks geared to entertain even the most jaded. All the laws were broken here. Some systems were barely viable, leaving their revelers short a couple IQ points, while a few others had the slick trimmings of something the Agora might offer but still with the safeties off. What happened in an unregulated Rêve occurred at each reveler’s own risk.
    Rook strained against his bonds again, but they wouldn’t budge. He tried to force himself to wake up—a mental lift—but all he accomplished was a severe case of vertigo.
    Where was Jordan? Had they let her go?
    Finally, he began to perceive the manner in which he was held captive. A shiny ribbon of gold wound around his arms, which were folded at his chest. The ribbon circled down his hips and constrained his bent legs. The sinuous stuff ultimately disappeared into the sand at his knees. Scrape sand. The thick ribbon had been spun from the stuff like melted and stretched sugar.
    He’d never seen the sand like this before. Scrape sand originated from the vast, unending nothingness outside of dreamscapes where the great dust storm blew. That blond freak, the one with eyes like Coll’s, had to be responsible for manipulating the stuff. No one in the waking world even understood the sand’s properties, though there was plenty of theoretical mumbo jumbo: the sand was the windblown, leftover chaff of millennia’s worth of humanity’s dreams, or the sand was the discarded cells of the collective unconscious’s psyche. Blah, blah, blah. It was the kind of bullshit Didier Lambert published in long-ass, ponderous, paragraphs-for-sentences essays that didn’t translate well from his native French to English but were nevertheless quoted ad nauseam.
    A shadow of a man approached, but Rook recognized his height and proportions—Chuck.
    Rook inclined his head toward the memory transfer. “Please don’t make me have sex with that douchebag.” It was an attempt at a joke, but, seriously, having that first-person sex memory in his head would be the end of him.
    Chuck laughed. “That’s ZANE, all caps, no last name. Up-and-coming pop royalty, or so says his publicity team. 50K for five minutes with his perky cock.”
    “Just kill me now.”
    “No, no.” Chuck grinned. “I need you for something else. But get this: his manager actually set this up. The pop star gets black market cred, some idiot women get their fantasies, and the money is crazy. And it’s all almost legit. Win-win, man.”
    “You’ve got to get out of this business.”
    “Nah. This is the good stuff, the easy stuff.”
    Damaging that woman’s mind to carry that memory? No.
    Rook shrugged as much as his bonds would allow. “Why am I here?” And restrained on his knees by a ribbon of Scrape sand? Where was the white-haired freak girl? Did Jordan get away?
    “Wasn’t supposed to be this way,” Chuck said. “You were supposed