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  Dream Snatcher

  A City of Crows Novella

  Clara Coulson

  Dream Snatcher

  Copyright © 2017 by Clara Coulson

  Cover Design by Yoly Cortez at http://www.cormarcovers.com/

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  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

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  For more information:

  http://www.claracoulson.com/

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  To contact the author, email [email protected]

  Contents

  Books by Clara Coulson

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  Prologue

  Six Months Later

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  One Year Later

  Epilogue

  Enter the City of Crows!

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  About Clara Coulson

  Books by Clara Coulson

  CITY OF CROWS

  Soul Breaker

  Shade Chaser

  Wraith Hunter

  Doom Sayer

  Day Killer (upcoming)

  TALES FROM THE CITY OF CROWS

  Dream Snatcher

  LARK NATION

  Hunter of the Night

  Speaker of the Lost

  Watcher of the Dead (upcoming)

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  To all the people who hate Cal Kinsey, here’s a different protagonist.

  Prologue

  November 1994

  They say the crash is an accident. They lie.

  It’s eleven o’clock in the morning on a rainy Wednesday, and Ella is in the living room playing the piano. She’s been practicing the same pieces for months, in anticipation of her application to Julliard, and she’s still fine-tuning one of them, an etude by Chopin. As her fingers move across the keys, her feet across the pedals, she simultaneously concentrates on the rhythm of the song and the technical precision of her performance. There’s sweat on her forehead, on the back of her neck, under her arms; she’s been at this for hours, and her mom turned up the heat too high.

  Ella would be afraid of melting if she hadn’t already done so once before, at that godawful talent show she played in at the tail end of seventh grade. She vowed never to embarrass herself that way again, having a literal meltdown in the middle of Liszt, and she hasn’t thus far. But sixteen is a hard age to be, and Ella’s been struggling to stay on the honor roll, fit in enough practice, and hang out with her friends on the weekends. She got a C on a math test last month, and Mom reamed her out for it, so she decided to trim down time with friends instead of study hours.

  Cutting piano practice was never an option.

  Ella Dean simply loves music too much.

  So now it’s late November, and Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and Ella has fifteen minutes left before her mother returns from a meeting with her colleagues at the district attorney’s office and drags her daughter off the bench to the nearest grocery store. Ella’s mother has been busy lately, working on the prosecution of some awful man who killed his neighbors with arson, but she promised they’d be having a real family Thanksgiving, and invited every aunt, uncle, and cousin within eighty miles of Aurora, Michigan to prove it.

  Which means Ella has to spend the afternoon hauling turkeys around. Joy.

  The only beacon in this darkness, Ella thinks, is that her father will not be coming. The last time he showed up, for her sixteenth birthday, he had rank beer breath and was wobbling on his feet the second he stepped out of his truck. And then Mom started a screaming match with him, in plain sight of all of Ella’s friends, in the middle of a public picnic venue. And if that wasn’t the most humiliating moment in the last—

  Her fingers skip a key, and the etude cuts off abruptly.

  Ella jolts out of her thoughts and stares down at the piano. “Shit,” she mutters to herself, a word her mom would berate her for saying in good company. But there’s no one in the house except Ella, not even a dog or a cat (because Mom is allergic, what fun), so the violation goes unheard. She lifts her fingers from the keys and smacks her cheeks a couple times, trying to shake away the remnants of her nasty thoughts. She doesn’t have time to dwell on family drama. No. No. No.

  She has a Julliard application to finish, and a career to jumpstart. And she won’t let a deadbeat dad and an overworked mom get in her way.

  Ella rests her fingers on the keys in the starting position, and begins the etude again.

  Music fills the empty home for another fifteen minutes.

  When Mom barges through the front door, harried as always, Ella immediately stops playing and flips the keyboard cover down. She spins around on the bench as her mom flitters into the living room, and sits patiently with her hands in her lap, waiting for Abigail Dean to tear off her lawyer persona and replace it with the awkward maternal one she always wears in the house. Her mom doesn’t speak for a whole minute as she strips off her damp coat and hangs it on the rack, drops her black bag filled with files on the coffee table, and then plops down on the loveseat in front of the TV.

  Mom stares at the blank TV screen for a few seconds, then finally looks to her daughter. “Weren’t you there when I left? Have you moved at all?”

  Ella shrugs. “I’ve got a lot of practice to do. I only get one shot at this application, you know. If I screw up my audition, that’s the end of the road.”

  “God, child,” Mom groans, “some days I think you work harder than I do.” She points a finger Ella’s direction. “And no, that’s not a good thing. You should be out with your friends, at the mall or a movie or something.”

  “Mom, Thanksgiving is tomorrow. Everyone’s either traveling or getting ready for visitors. There’s no one to hang out with.” Ella raps her knuckles on the top of the wooden bench. “Plus, I can hang out with my friends after I get accepted to Julliard. I’ll still have spring and summer before I head to college.”

  “Oh, don’t remind me of that.” Mom tugs a few pins out of her curly brown hair, and it unravels from its complex bun, falling around her shoulders. “I don’t want to think about you, in New York, by yourself, for years.”

  Ella fights the urge to roll her eyes. They’ve had this discussion several times before, what she calls Mom’s “separation anxiety.” She rises from the bench, crosses the living room, and sinks onto the free side of the loveseat. “I promise I’ll come home for summer breaks, and holidays too, if that makes you feel better.”

  “It’s not about me, honey.” Her mom slings an arm around Ella’s shoulder. “New York’s a much bigger city than Aurora. There are so many people, so many crimes, so many opportunities for you to get hurt…”

  Ella removes her mother’s arm and pats the back of her hand. “I’m sorry you have to confront the reality that your little girl isn’t so little anymore, Mother, but your maternal fears are not
going to stop me from becoming a concert pianist.”

  Mom gives her a judgmental side-eye. “Are you sassing me, Ella Dean?”

  Ella stifles a smile. “No, ma’am.”

  She playfully swats the back of Ella’s head. “Well, don’t get too cocky yet. You still have to get into that fancy music school before you even think about moving out of this house.”

  “That’s what I was saying before, Mom. I need to practice and—”

  “Oh, I see,” she says, “you’re trying to get out of grocery duty. Should have known.”

  Ella grimaces. “Look, I really don’t want to stop when I’m so close to perfecting this etude, and…”

  Her mother doesn’t look impressed. “Tough, kid. Tough. I’ve got a huge Thanksgiving dinner to make, a dinner you badgered me into by repeatedly complaining that we don’t have enough family gatherings. So you’re going to suck it up and help me with the grocery shopping, and with the cooking, and with the cleanup. After the pack of wild animals known as my extended family have a run at the place, and we put the house back in working order, then you can resume practicing your piano music for hours on end. Understand?”

  Ella produces her best pout, but her mom doesn’t relent. So she slides off the loveseat, trudges to the stairs, and says glumly, “All right. I’ll get ready to go.”

  “That’s my girl.” Mom stifles a yawn. “And don’t forget your raincoat! It’s pretty nasty out there.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  The drive to Stein’s Market is slow and plodding, the roads jam-packed with holiday traffic. They get stuck for over fifteen minutes across the street from the Jameson Corner Bar & Grill because some idiot driver in a pickup truck T-boned a tractor-trailer turning at the light, and the whole intersection is swarming with cop cars. After they squeeze through that mess, only to get stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic one mile farther on, Ella tugs her CD player out of her big raincoat pocket and slips the headphones over her ears. She turns it on and plays Madonna’s Secret on repeat.

  They’re two miles out from Stein’s when her mother gets the call. As the car rolls to a stop in front of a red light, the shrill beeping of Mom’s cell phone cuts through Madonna’s voice, and Ella glances at the reflection in the window to watch her mother quickly dig the phone from her purse. Ella’s glad she’s on track to be a pianist and not some office-bound professional like her mom. The idea of carrying around an ugly black block of a phone, forced to answer calls from your employer all day long, sounds like one hell of a nightmare.

  Ella has never understood the appeal of law—she gravitated toward music at an early age—but despite looking exhausted five days out of every week, Abigail Dean has never made a comment that suggests she’d rather do any other job. To each her own, I guess, Ella thinks.

  Her mom hits the answer button on the cell phone and sticks it between her ear and shoulder so she can keep both hands on the wheel. Then the light turns green, her mother hits the accelerator, and the car rolls through the intersection as the person on the other end of the phone line begins a serious, very serious conversation. Ella can’t hear the person talking, mind you, but Mom’s warping expressions clue her in: a pensive scowl, to a confused frown, to eyes wide with unmistakable fear.

  A slow, rolling wave of nervousness washes through Ella’s stomach, and she yanks one speaker off her ear to listen in on the call. As she does this, she pretends to keep looking out the window, her loose, wavy hair long enough to hide the fact her ear is free. Ella’s mom has kept secrets from her before, secrets largely concerning active court cases. And while Ella understands the need for important case details to remain under wraps, she gets the distinct sense from her mother’s rapidly deteriorating composure that whatever news is coming through that phone is not the sort of information that should be kept quiet.

  She catches the last few words frantically shouted over the line: “And no one knows where he might have gone, or what he might do.”

  Ella’s mother gnaws on her bottom lip, hands gripping the wheel tightly. “For god’s sake, Charlotte. You can’t drop a bomb like that and not give me any reassurances. At least tell me the cops are out looking for him.” She speaks in low, soft tones, clearly trying to avoid alerting Ella to the problem. “At least tell me he escaped somewhere outside of town, and we have time to head to a safe house, or…”

  Charlotte cuts in. “He escaped on Scarborough, Abigail, en route to Preston Super Max. We’re talking a ten, maybe fifteen-minute walk from downtown. And that’s if he didn’t steal a car.”

  “Jesus.” Her mother makes a sudden U-turn, so sharp it throws Ella into the window. “I’m heading in the opposite direction of Scarborough then. I was on my way to Stein’s, and that’s close, too damn close. He could already be in the area.” She floors it, pushing Ella back against her seat. “I’ll go to Chesterfield, or Ashland, get a hotel room with cash. I’ll call you back later with the hotel name and room number. After the cops get their act together, tell them to send a protective detail for me and my daughter.”

  “Okay, I’ll do that,” says Charlotte, breathless, like she’s running for her life. “Everyone at the office is heading down to the safe room in the basement. There are already cops on the premises, so hopefully they’ll be able to hold the line if he shows up here.” A door opens then slams over the speaker. “Stay safe, Abby. You and Ella stay safe.”

  The phone call ends.

  Ella finally peels her gaze off the window and stares at her mother, terror growing cold in her twisted gut. “Mom,” she mutters, “what’s going on?”

  Her mother adjusts her posture, loosens her grip on the wheel, and stuffs her phone back into the purse like nothing is wrong. Like nothing is wrong. Ella is horrified, horrified and furious, because she knows, instinctively, that now is not the time for Mom to clam up. Something monumental has occurred, something life-changing, something life-threatening—and Ella deserves to know the truth. Ella deserves to know what target has been painted on her back.

  But Mom doesn’t answer the question. Mom doesn’t tell the truth.

  Abigail Dean says three words: “Thanksgiving is canceled.”

  And those are the last words she ever says.

  Ella doesn’t remember the crash—not really.

  She remembers sensations that make no sense, thoughts that have no order, sounds that hold no coherent meaning. She remembers pain, and pressure, and heat. She remembers rain, and roughness, and cold. She remembers droplets of water dripping from the tip of a leaf on a sapling sticking up a mere six inches from the soaked ground in front of her face. She remembers she cannot look away from this sapling, because her neck will not turn, and her eyes will not dart, and her limbs will not push her up from where she lies listless on her stomach.

  She remembers the after in bits and pieces.

  She remembers the during as darkness.

  And of the before, she remembers…

  The blue compact car rockets down a tree-lined road, downtown Aurora falling away, the business towers under construction cut off from view by the dense, wet foliage of tall pines. The farther they push into the suburbs, toward the stretches of nothing between Aurora and nearby towns, the more panicked Ella becomes. Mom refuses to answer her questions, no matter how loud she shouts, how much she pleads. The woman Ella has always known to speak her mind where it matters remains silent, and with each passing second, she presses the toe of her high-heeled shoe that much harder against the accelerator.

  The car is running eighty-seven. Its maximum speed is ninety.

  Ella picks at the hem of her raincoat and reviews her mother’s phone conversation. Charlotte must have been Charlotte Braun, one of the other three assistant district attorneys. If Ella remembers correctly, Mom’s been working with Charlotte on this new arsonist case. So when Charlotte called to say that someone escaped custody while being transported to a super max prison, she could have only been referring to the suspect in their joint arson homicide case,
right?

  Does that mean there’s a homicidal maniac roaming the streets of Aurora right now, hunting for Abigail Dean, the prosecutor who would have doomed him to life in prison? Is that why her mother is so scared? Because she’s on this guy’s hit list?

  As the car flies by endless rows of trees, speckled here and there with small houses, Ella focuses on Mom’s pale face, worried eyes, trembling bottom lip. She’s never seen her mother break down like this, and she’s pretty sure no one else has either. The newspapers always dub her mother “steel-hearted” or “cold as ice” or “unshakeable” when describing her demeanor in the courtroom. She’s a no-nonsense prosecutor who doesn’t care for excuses or sob stories, and she’s nailed a dozen criminals to the law books in the last year and a half alone. She’s the rising star at the DA’s office—the Unbeatable Abigail Dean.

  Or at least, she was unbeatable.

  The car takes a sharp turn too fast, and Ella smacks the door again, her head knocking hard against the window. She screws her eyes shut as she rights herself, rubbing what will surely be a swollen lump by tonight, and then turns to criticize her mother for being reckless, for losing her cool under pressure, for refusing to reassure her own daughter when Ella is most in need of reassurance. When Ella is confused. When Ella is frightened. She opens her mouth to complain—