Dream Snatcher Read online

  Checking the sidewalk one more time for nosy bystanders, Ella jimmies the slim jim down between the frame and the window of the van’s passenger door. She’s only practiced this on her dad’s old truck a couple times, but after less than a minute, she manages to pop the lock on the door. She slips the slim jim out, stows it away in her bag again, and yanks the door open to reveal the manila folder on the seat.

  Her heart skips a beat.

  Because her eyes are immediately drawn to the name stamped across the top edge of the manila folder: Abigail Dean. A low whine breaks through Ella’s clenched teeth as she snatches the folder and clutches it to her chest so tightly she must wrinkle every page inside. She doesn’t know if good fortune is smiling down on her today or what, but she’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. For the first time since Ella woke up in the hospital on a ventilator, burned and broken almost beyond repair, she’s finally, finally one step closer to finding the man who killed her mother.

  She relocks the door with her elbow then kicks it shut, almost vibrating with a rush of adrenaline as she bends down to retrieve her backpack. Using her knee as a makeshift table, she rearranges the contents of the bag to make a safe spot for the folder to sit until she reaches the library, where she can hang out for several hours and study the file without drawing attention. But just as she’s slipping the folder into the pack, between the slim jim and a one-subject notebook with a cardboard cover, she catches a flash of black in the corner of her eye.

  Ella looks to the left—to see the blond man, standing in front of a nail salon, half a block away, looking back at her.

  Uh oh.

  The blond man’s gaze drifts to the folder, sticking up out of the top of the backpack, to the closed door of the van, to Ella’s slack-jawed expression. His eyebrows arch like he can’t quite believe what he’s witnessing, a teenage girl stealing a file from an ominous black van that belongs to a group of equally ominous black-clad people who are more than likely government agents of the not-so-nice variety. Ella stands there frozen, a hundred alarm bells ringing in her head, her brain commanding her to Run, stupid, run! but her legs unwilling to follow commands.

  They have a staring contest. For thirty seconds. Forty-five. A minute.

  The blond man opens his mouth to speak, and it’s like a levy breaks inside of Ella.

  She turns on her toes and takes off down the street.

  “Hey!” the man shouts after her, and gives chase.

  Ella makes a hard right onto Belmont and races past pedestrians on the sidewalk, sideswiping a delivery man so hard that packages go flying, nearly mowing down a stroller with a toddler inside, and hopping over the legs of a middle-aged homeless man who appears to be napping against a tree. When the glass door of a shoe store swings open ahead of her, Ella glimpses a reflection of the blond man hot on her tail, closing the distance between them quickly. He’s taller than her, his stride much wider, and if she doesn’t think up a way to double her speed in the next few seconds, she’s going to lose her only lead on her mother’s murder.

  Ten feet ahead, past the shoe store, is a narrow alley. A very narrow alley.

  Hah!

  Ella skids to a stop in front of the lip of the alley, and launches herself into the shadowy space. There are trash bags strewn across the pavement, and she has to jump them like she’s playing hopscotch. As she dashes up to a wooden fence at the end of the alley, she peeks over her shoulder to see the man just entering the alley. It must’ve taken him too long to slow down—either that, or he fell trying to make the sharp turn. Ella hopes he fell.

  She clambers up a two-foot-tall pile of torn trash bags, jumps as high as she can, and grabs the top of the fence. With a grunt, she pulls herself up, then swings her leg around, hitching it over one of the splintery boards. She follows through, hoisting the rest of her body upward and perching on top of the fence like a petite bird. Taking one brief moment to catch her breath, she spies the blond man still struggling to navigate his way through the cramped disaster zone of an alley. They make eye contact for two-tenths of a second, and Ella drops over onto the other side of the fence.

  The blond man swears at her.

  She laughs.

  Then she runs out of the alley—and straight into the path of an oncoming bicycle.

  She can’t evade it.

  The front wheel glances off her left leg, the rubber ripping her skin wide open. She spirals out of control, slams her shoulder against the rough concrete, and rolls twice, stopping at the very edge of the sidewalk a split second before a dump truck speeds by. The truck’s tires come within a foot of her face.

  Aching and bloody, she lies there on the pavement, pulse racing a thousand miles a minute, breath coming in fits and bursts. She’s reminded, too much, far too much, of lying on the ground that day, in the aftermath of the crash.

  Somewhere behind her, boots thump on the ground.

  Shit.

  Ella scrambles to her feet, using the pole of a parking sign to pull herself up. She checks to make sure her backpack is still in place (it is) and that the cyclist didn’t crash and die (he didn’t; he’s just sitting on his ass in front of a pet store, bike overturned, wheels still spinning, his face turning red as his anger peaks, a spiel about reckless teenagers on his tongue), and then she tries to make a break for it.

  She gets two and a half steps before a black-clad form lunges out of the alley, and a fist like iron closes around her wrist. The blond man yanks her backward. A cry of panic escapes her throat. Thoughts gone haywire, mind in disarray, Ella does the only logical thing she can think of in the half a second she has before game over: she allows the tug to give her momentum, springs back like a rubber-band, and drives her comically small fist into the blond man’s nose.

  The man’s head snaps to the side, he staggers in shock, and his hand…loosens its grip.

  Ella pulls free, turns on a dime, and runs for dear life, leaving the stunned blond man and a very confused cyclist behind. She takes a left at the four-lane highway that leads to Waverly College, another left at the intersection of Morton and Bailer, and finally, a right onto Smithy, then she hightails it straight across downtown, pushing herself harder than she ever has before. She never participated in sports in high school, but she always nailed the mile in gym class, and in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, at the tail end of summer, had taken to jogging with a few of her friends on weekend mornings—when she wasn’t practicing for her Julliard audition.

  But even so, as she passes the two-mile mark, on the outskirts of downtown, her body begins to shut down. Her legs wobble. Her abdomen burns. Her neck and back sting each time her bag bounces off her muscles. The crash robbed Ella of her stamina, and the doctors warned her it’d be years before she got it all back with a regular workout regime; either that, or she’d have to enroll in some intensive boot-camp-like physical training class. Which she hasn’t done, because that costs money, and she doesn’t have enough.

  So her stamina is still shot to shit. And at two and a half miles, she finally drops, stumbling onto her knees next to a chain-link fence outside a construction site. Palms pressed to the hot pavement, she heaves in air until her lungs stop screaming, and then she glances over her shoulder for any sign of the blond man. But there’s no one dressed in black rushing down the sidewalk behind her. He hasn’t caught up—yet.

  Ella searches the Smithy neighborhood, dotted with small businesses and a few townhomes, for a good place to hide, but there’s no nearby restaurant or department store where she can lie low for any reasonable length of time. She stares through the chain-link fence, at the unfinished building on a dirt-filled plot of land. There’s not much to it: a foundation, some steel and concrete bones, blue tarps covering tools and fragile materials. But there are numerous nooks and crannies, she thinks, large enough for her to hide in. And, best of all, there’s no one at the site. The construction crew isn’t working today.

  Ella eyes the padlock on the gate to the chain-link fe
nce. Can’t break it, so…

  Her gaze travels up to the top of the fence. No razor wire.

  That’ll do.

  Forty-five seconds later, Ella is nestled in a shadowy corner, back against a partially built concrete pillar, bag by her side, manila folder in hand, curled up like she’s in the reading nook in her former bedroom. Once her pulse slows, and her heart beat stops stumbling over itself, and the cuts on her legs and arms no longer weep, and her mind kicks all its cogs back down to first gear, she slowly opens the case file filled with information about the death of Assistant District Attorney Abigail Dean.

  And if the blond man with a bloodied nose happens to run by the construction site three minutes into her reading session, huffing and puffing loud enough to blow the whole block down…well, Ella Dean certainly doesn’t notice him. Because she is engrossed by a tale beyond belief.

  Chapter Two

  His name is Abraham Sartell, and he is a wizard.

  Last October, he had a dispute with his neighbor, Ivan Jones, regarding Halloween decorations Jones had set up in his yard that were blown onto Sartell’s porch during a particularly windy autumn storm. For some reason, this dispute escalated beyond typical neighborly bickering and ended with Sartell burning down Jones’ house in the middle of the night, on Halloween, with Jones and his entire family trapped inside. According to the notes written in the margins of the case overview, Sartell used magic to keep all the doors and windows shut so that no one could escape the house alive. Jones had two children under the age of ten.

  Sartell fled the scene of the crime before the fire department arrived and led the police on a chase through the city, which came to a close when a team of DSI (Ella doesn’t know what that is) agents confronted Sartell and defeated him in an empty warehouse on Fourteenth Street. Sartell was first taken to the hospital for treatment of injuries sustained during the fight with the DSI agents, then he was carted off to the local jail for holding, with additional ICM (there’s another unknown acronym) attendants ensuring he didn’t attempt to break the “binds” on his magic.

  Everything was going swimmingly, claims the case file, until the day before Thanksgiving. The judge in charge of the trial ordered Sartell to be sent to Preston Super Max for the duration of the proceedings, because he was deemed a substantial risk after violently assaulting numerous law enforcement officials. But during his transport from the local lockup to Preston, something went horribly, horribly wrong. The words scribbled in a neat cursive hand on page two of the file lay it out:

  We discovered too late that one of the ICM guards assigned to watch Sartell at the county jail was one of his long-time associates, who was persuaded to repay an old favor by removing the binding spells keeping Sartell’s magic in check. When the transport truck reached Scarborough Street, Sartell made his move: he killed all four of his guards, including his associate, caused the truck to crash into the side of a restaurant that was (thankfully) closed for the holiday, and then ran off into the city. What happened next is, of course, detailed in the overview…

  Ella hesitates before turning to page three, a lump in her throat. But she forces her fingers to pinch the paper and flip it over, revealing the next sheet.

  The story that follows is what Ella remembers of the day her mother died, written from the neutral perspective of someone who wasn’t there until after the fact:

  Sartell, hell-bent on showing the city officials who dared to arrest him that he was the real boss, used a location spell to track down the assistant district attorney working as the lead prosecutor for his trial: Abigail Dean. While Charlotte Braun, the other assistant DA involved, warned Dean that Sartell might be on the warpath, Dean wasn’t able to drive to a safe location quickly enough to avoid him. She was caught by surprise on Cunningham Road, heading out of Aurora, where Sartell launched a fire spell at her compact car.

  The car was totaled by the blast, and Dean was killed instantly because the focal point of the fireball was her. Dean’s daughter, Ella, was flung from the car and landed at the bottom of an embankment off the right lane. Miraculously, Ella survived the ordeal, even after languishing with her injuries for over three hours, and was transported to St. Bartholomew’s hospital, where she spent weeks in the ICU and ultimately recovered.

  Ella’s hands tremble, half in fury, half in sorrow, as she turns to the next page in the folder, which contains a handwritten extension of the overview, with recent updates, in the same careful penmanship as the notes on the previous pages:

  After killing the assistant DA, Sartell dropped off the map. We’ve been chasing down every lead for the past six months, but most of them haven’t panned out. We do know for sure that Sartell is hanging around Aurora, probably looking for a hole in the personal guard details we’ve set up for the employees of the DA’s office, Judge Sutherland, and all the others involved directly in Sartell’s trial.

  * * *

  The only people we haven’t put guards on are ourselves, but Sartell isn’t stupid enough to attack DSI agents head on. We’ve had too much magic counter-training, and Sartell doesn’t wield enough raw power to overcome us easily. If he comes at us, it’ll be with a violent ambush—but we’re counting on him to make that move. Because the moment he shows himself, it’s over. It’s the end for Abraham Sartell. We won’t let him escape twice. Now, whether that end involves solitary confinement or a table at the morgue is up to him.

  The rest of the pages in the file consist of evidence inventory reports and witness statements, nothing that will add a great deal to Ella’s understanding of the part of the story she cares about, the part where Sartell shot a fireball from hell at her mother because she dared to try to punish him for being a murderous psychopath, because she…because she…she was just trying to do her job.

  Ella slams the folder shut and grips it so tightly that her thumbs leave indentations in the thick manila stock. I lay in a hospital bed and watched—on TV—Mom’s empty casket get lowered into the earth, watched people I couldn’t even name toss flowers in her grave, watched my drunken excuse for a father cry for a woman who divorced him, had my home stripped away, my life upended, my health nearly destroyed forever, my mother…my mother…my mother…All of that happened because this bastard killer couldn’t take a fucking hint and give up when he’d already lost the race.

  She throws the file on the dirt in front of her, rage on fire in her gut, burning through her veins. It almost—almost—hurts worse than the real burns did, because it hurts on a level that no physical flame can reach, the mind, the soul, the invisible heart that pumps hope beneath the one that pumps life. The rage hurts in a way Ella has not hurt since she hauled herself out of the bargaining stage of grief during her painful stint in physical therapy. It hurts so much—and she’s glad it does.

  It means she’s not dead inside. Not yet.

  She’s been wondering about that for a while.

  To vent the pressure out, just a little, Ella stomps on the file, again and again, kicking up dust into the air, smearing dirt across the manila stock and what had been the pristine papers within. She growls at the case file, spits on the case file, curses the case file with every nasty word she’s ever heard in her entire life, in every language she’s dabbled in, in every dialect she can remember. When she’s finished, she’s breathing hard, not from exertion this time but from mental fatigue, having run out of ideas for how to calm herself. So she paces, back and forth, back and forth, then circles the case file like she’s circling prey she doesn’t know how to kill.

  There are so many things to dissect inside that file.

  First and foremost, magic is real. Ella had guessed something of the sort, haunted by the memory of Sartell’s yellow aura, and the fireball he conjured up from nowhere. But honestly, she’d been thinking more along the lines of an X-Files episode rather than ye olde witches and wizards of European myth. But that’s exactly the profile Sartell fits: a middle-aged white man with a beard, calling forth the power of Satan to do his evil bi
dding.

  How the heck does this magic stuff work? she wonders. And how come the general public doesn’t know about it?

  Ella squats in front of the damaged file, staring at it intently, as if it might verbally blurt out the answers she needs. But it’s just a bunch of papers, lying in the dirt. The people who’d been in possession of the file, however…

  DSI, they must be. The law enforcement group tasked with catching Sartell. Who, logically, must be called to handle any incidents involving magic—

  Someone steps into the skeleton of the building, directly behind her.

  Ella snatches the file, stands up, and slowly turns around.

  Judging by the scowl on his face, the blond man is not amused.

  Chapter Three

  To Ella’s immense surprise, the blond man doesn’t drag her to jail. Instead, he holds her by the arm and leads her to a small, family-owned diner two blocks farther down Smithy. Once inside, he releases her and points with a demanding finger toward a corner booth. Ella has a split-second urge to hop the counter, race through the kitchen, and escape through a back door. But the blond man’s steely glare is hot enough to burn a hole in her skull, and she figures if she tries to flee, he might actually body slam her like a professional wrestler. And she doesn’t want to end up in the hospital again.

  She obediently slides into the booth.

  The man drops her backpack on the seat next to her, then sits down on the opposite side of the table, placing the damaged manila folder on the tabletop between them. A waitress comes to drop off two menus and tries her hardest not to stare at the man’s swollen nose or Ella’s array of cuts and forming bruises. She’s obviously concerned, but Ella can also tell she’s met the blond man before; there’s familiarity in the questioning glance she gives him before she pulls out her order pad and a ballpoint pen.