Delirium by Erin Kellison Page B

to be slightly effeminate but still rangy, with a stubborn chin.
    “There is no child up there,” Rook whispered low, with urgency. “It’s an illusion. A perverted one, yes, but it’s an adult. I swear it.”
    Harlen couldn’t sense if Rook was telling the truth in waters as murky as these.
    “It’s a child.” Sera was a woman who trusted her own senses. “I see a child. I’m not leaving him to…to…”
    Yeah, no one wanted to finish that sentence.
    “Look harder,” Rook told her. “He’s actually taller than the man next to him. And see his thinning hair, his missing teeth?”
    This whole place needed to be cleared out, Harlen thought. Shut down. Even if the child up there was a grown man, the illusion was sick. And whoever bought the kid was even sicker.
    Sera blinked, and for a second, yes, there was a man. Tall. Balding on top, with thin, stringy hair wisping down from the sides of his head.
    She blinked again. And then the man was standing there, inside the child. The auction was still extremely offensive, but at least— and how strange —Harlen could see through the illusion.
    “Holy shit,” Sera said.
    Darksight.
    Some people had it, and it seemed Sera was just discovering the ability, and through her, Harlen was, too. In fact, the illusion of a child was now mostly just a shimmer. The man was more real, projecting the form of a boy.
    “That’s just disgusting,” she said, shaking her head and ripping her gaze away.
    Her Darksight was revelatory. Sera’s gaze darted around the Underground—she had to be curious as to what else she could now see. He was powerfully curious himself.
    Mottled shadows dominated the space, filling in the pockets between revelers. Flickers of light were superimposed on people or objects here and there, thereby revealing both iterations—the true form and the dream-imagined one—at once. If business involved the illusions, then the merchants had to know what they were really selling. Which meant that at least a few others in the black market had to have Darksight, too.
    Her gaze scoured the crowd, quick and thorough, as if tearing off masks with her sight alone. She stopped on one figure, arms folded, head cocked, just long enough for the shimmer to fade and Harlen to see Chimera Marshal Taylor, the young woman he’d thought too young, too green, but too talented not to include in his new division. The expression beneath her unfamiliar facade was avid, excited, her gaze flicking among the crowd.
    And then Sera’s own gaze shifted.
    Wait. Go back. Marshal Taylor shouldn’t be here. Maybe a Darkside Rêve, if she had some fringe predilections, but not in what Rook was calling the Underground. Questions set Harlen on fire, just like his parents’ house. The odds were that at least one Oneiros would be among his division picks. Was Marshal Taylor the one? Because if she was, he wanted to shake answers out of her, make her teeth rattle.
    He strained to see her out of Sera’s peripheral vision, but Sera’s interest was trained elsewhere. And she couldn’t read his mind. Goddamn. Marshal Taylor. At least he had a lead. And he’d damn well follow up.
    Sera jerked as if stung. She folded her arms, and with a tremulous, small voice, very unlike her, she said to Rook, “Not freaking. But holy shit.”
    Harlen’s concentration shifted. Sera was peering into the mottled shadows between revelers.
    She cocked her head. “Okay, maybe freaking a little.”
    Then Harlen saw them, too. Or rather, he recognized the mottled shadows for what they were: nightmares. The place was teeming with them, like ants in a hive. The gray creatures moved unimpeded and undetected among the throng.
    “So many,” Sera breathed. “Does anyone else see them?”
    Maybe those who could see them had already bolted from the black market. Who in his or her right mind would stay?
    Harlen felt the emotion rattling her, which made it harder for him to hold on. But this was exactly what he’d come