"— me alone," Temm was saying. "I don’t want you near me."
The man lunged for her. Temm gave a scream and ran. Ara and Tan turned as one to follow her. Then both of them halted and stared. The bare trees came to life. They lashed downward like stiff snakes, trapping Iris Temm in a mesh of branches and bark. The wind rose and howled like a cold living thing. Temm struggled and tore at the branches but she couldn’t get free. Ara’s stomach clenched in fear and she had to remind herself that this was nothing more than a recording, that the trees wouldn’t-couldn’t-attack her. Temm’s scream wailed on the wind as the man in the wide-brimmed hat drew close to her.
"You bitch!" he screeched, and smashed her across the face. She screamed again, and Ara noticed the branches had wrapped around her shins and forearms. "I want the flowers! Pretty flowers!"
The branches stiffened and Temm screamed again. Ara realized tears were running down her face. She wanted to run, leave the Dream, or even look away, but she found she couldn’t. Inspector Tan’s face remained completely impassive. Iris Temm’s scream went on and on, mingling with the wind and the growls of the dark man.
"I don’t want to do this," he cried to the skies. "Don’t make me do this!"
The cold air sliced through Ara’s clothes and made the tears on her face feel like rivers of ice. Temm screamed one last time like a banshee howl. With a horrible sound that Ara knew she would never forget, the branches tore the limbs from Iris Temm’s body.
The wind stopped. The branches snapped back upward with bony rattle, leaving the bloody pieces of Temm’s body behind. As Ara stared in horror, the dark man knelt beside the remains.
"Why did you make me do that?" he said in a calm, chill voice. "You make me do it every time. Every goddamned time."
He reached down and came up with a small, pink object. Ara’s gorge rose when she realized it was one of Temm’s fingers. A bit of yellow-gray bone poked out of the torn end. Temm’s sightless eyes gazed up at the black branches above them. Using the bloody end of the finger like a paintbrush, the man wrote something on Temm’s forehead.
Tan leaped forward to get a look. Ara stood frozen where she was. The man flung the finger away and put his hands over his face beneath the hat. Then he vanished like a burst soap bubble. A split-second later, so did the ghostly forest and the body of Iris Temm. Ara stood on the featureless plain alone with Tan. Whispers fluttered on the empty air all around them. It was as if the entire thing had never happened.
"Did …did you see what he wrote?" Ara asked finally. Her throat was dry and she wanted a drink with more than just water in it.
"Yes." Tan’s rich voice was flat. "It’s worse than I thought."
"Why? What did he write."
Tan looked at her. "The number twelve."
Grandfather Melthine ran a hand through his silvery hair as Ara finished the story. They were in his study, a busy-looking office lined with bookdisks and comfortable chairs. Holographic models of spaceships floated just below the ceiling. Outside, the sun was setting, and purple shadows gathered among the talltree branches. The office was a bit stuffy-Melthine preferred to keep the windows shut. Ara occupied a deep armchair, and an empty glass sat on a table at her elbow. Her hands had finally stopped shaking. Inspector Tan sat rigid in another chair while her partner Linus Gray leaned against one wall. He was a tall, spare man, with ash-blond hair that was receding from a high forehead. Around his neck he wore a medallion of worked silver instead of plain gold, a symbol of his position as Inspector with the Guardians of Irfan. Tan, presumably, wore hers underneath her shirt.
"This opens up a great many questions," Melthine said at last. "We need to discuss them."
"You and Mother Ara are both experts in Dream theory," Gray said. "Whatever information you can give us will help."
"The number twelve is significant," Tan said, voice raspy again. "Obviously."
"You think Iris was his twelfth victim?" Ara asked.
Tan shrugged. "Could be. Or he might write the number twelve on all his victims. No way to know yet. If we assume-" her emphasis on that word made it clear what she thought of the idea "-that the number twelve means he’s killed eleven other people, and if we assume he killed the other two finger victims, that would mean there are nine other corpses we don’t know about yet. I’ve already checked the databases. In the entire recorded history we have of Bellerophon, there isn’t a single incident in which a murder victim turned up with someone else’s finger sewn on."
She sat back in her chair, as if exhausted by the long speech.
"Which means the killer came to us from another planet," Melthine said.
"No," Tan groused. "It only means we’ve made a lot of assumptions. He might be a native and he hid the other bodies. Or he dropped them off a balcony, fed the dinosaurs. But it looks like we need to operate on the theory that the same person killed all three women and that he’s going to do it again."
"I’m not Silent," Gray said, "and I’m nowhere near an expert in Dream theory, but doesn’t a Silent’s landscape disappear when they leave the Dream or if they die while in it? Temm-and her forest-should have disappeared the moment she died. Why did her Dream body hang around after this hat guy killed her?"
Ara picked up the glass. She could still smell the scotch. "I imagine it did vanish. But he recreated her body and her turf long enough to …do what he did. That scares the hell out of me."
"Why?" Gray said intently.
"Because he did it without a noticeable break in the scenery. There should have been a flicker or something between the time Iris’s Dream ended and he took it over. There wasn’t. That means he’s highly skilled in the Dream, in addition to being frighteningly powerful."
"Powerful because he could kill her, you mean?" Gray said. "There’ve been other Dream murders over the centuries, and in all cases the killer had to be more powerful than the victim."
"It’s more than just the amount of power." Ara set the glass back down and turned her gaze to the darkening window. "First, he was able to wrench control of her own turf away from her and change it. That means his mind was stronger than Iris’s. Second, he was able to disrupt her concentration enough that she couldn’t leave the Dream to escape. That isn’t easy to do because every Silent knows that the Dream is just that-a dream. You can wake up whenever you want. He scared Iris so much that she forgot this fact. Third, he was powerful enough to convince Iris’s mind that she was being torn limb from limb. The human survival instinct is very strong, Inspector. It takes a lot of power to convince someone that they’re dead. This guy is both potent and skilled, and the idea that I myself might run across him in the Dream makes me shake."
"What’s the official cause of death?" Melthine asked.
"Mental trauma," Gray said. "The patterns of bruises on Temm’s body are consistent with being wrapped up and partially crushed by something with an irregular surface, such as a tree branch. Her body created the bruises in psychosomatic response to what happened to her mind in the Dream. Being torn to pieces, however, is more than your average human brain can pull off, so to speak."
Tan pursed her lips. "We need to discuss the finger angle." When the others didn’t respond, she continued. "Medical examiner confirmed that Temm’s finger was severed and replaced post mortem. Less than an hour after Temm died, in fact. Means that the killer murdered her in the Dream, came into her house afterward, cut the finger off, sewed Wren Hamil’s finger on, and left. We’ve interviewed the neighbors. None of them saw anyone."
"What about her boyfriend?" Melthine said. "Is he a suspect? The neighbors wouldn’t think anything of him going inside."
Linus Gray shook his head. "He’s not Silent. Genetic scan confirms. He couldn’t kill anyone in the Dream. And he has an iron-clad alibi for the time before and after she died. He’s a monorail engineer and he was driving one all day. Plenty of witnesses."