"I was going on stage. In a huge arena. The first time I thought maybe I was like a gladiator because it felt like some kind of contest and I was very nervous. I was afraid I might lose. But then I realized that I was alone, going out there alone in front of the crowd, and they were chanting but I couldn't hear anything. It's like I'm deaf in the dream."

"Any of your other dreams like that? Deaf I mean?" asked Ceese.

"Don't be such a cop and ask a lot of stupid questions," Yo Yo suggested.

"Don't be a fairy queen and boss people around," said Ceese.

"I can always hear in my dreams, and in this one I could hear too, just not the crowd. What I heard was the beating of wings."

"A bird?" asked Ceese.

"What's the wish?"

"I told you. It's hungry. I go out there and I'm so hungry and I see all these people shouting and chanting and waving only they don't make a sound and I can barely taste them, so they just make me hungrier. I hated this dream. I got out of it as fast as I could. Only this time when I tried, all I did was carry the dream with me. So it combined with my escape dream. It became the same dream. And when I looked out the window of the car in my dream, I saw the crowd from the other dream. So I hadn't gotten away like I usually can. And then I felt something slap the car away, just whooosh and it's gone, and there I am alone on the stage of that arena, and suddenly there's something under me.

Something like a motorcycle seat. Or a horse. It moved me forward and suddenly we were right out over the audience, swooping around them, their faces looking up and filled with love and madness and it was frightening, the way we flew. I could feel the wings beating now, and hear them of course—and that's when I first realized the sound was wings. I was riding something but I couldn't see what it was."

"It was a dragon," said Yo Yo quietly.

"I guess it was," said Mack, and the realization made him sad, because he knew he should be fighting the dragon, not riding on it.

"Go on," said Ceese.

"That's it," said Mack. "That was the dream. After that it just stopped making sense."

"Tell me anyway," said Yo Yo.

"Okay, but it don't mean a thing," said Mack. "I was soaring over the crowd and I looked down and I could feel their love. Their need. Like this woman with a baby. She looked at me and stuck her finger down her baby's throat and pulled out a grape. Then she held it up to me like an offering, like it was a jewel. And a man was reaching up to us and with one beat of a wing the... dragon, the thing I was riding, it blew him clear across the arena and landed him right on top of a woman who hugged him like he was her long-lost lover. Weird stuff. Not like cold dreams. So I thought the cold dream was over."

"It wasn't over," said Yo Yo. "Oberon came into your dream and took control. He's started using the power he put in you, Mack. The power you've gathered from all those dreams. He isn't letting you plug up the stream anymore. He wants the wishes to come true now. He's letting out the flood."

"I know," said Mack, and he started to cry as he remembered. "I tried to stop it. But dream after dream. I'd hear the beating of the wings but I was into an old dream, one I've known for years.

Sabrina Chum, that girl with the really big nose, in her dream she's always an elephant and comes up to a rhinoceros and it saws off her trunk. I hate that dream, the sawing-off part, and I always end the dream before we get there, but this time I saw her trunk lying on the ground. And then the beating of the wings and I was in Ophelia McCallister's dream, where she walks out onto the lawn of her house and there's her husband and he holds out his hand and hugs her and kisses her." Mack shuddered.

"Old man McCallister died a long time ago," said Ceese.

"I just know how these dreams come true," said Mack. "I can think of a lot of ways she could have her husband in her arms again but none of them is very nice."

"Any other dreams?"

"Sherita Banks," said Mack. "She just wants boys to think she's cute. She isn't. She's got a really big butt like her mother. Beyond what most guys would find attractive. Family curse, kind of. But she doesn't dream that the butt gets small, she dreams that boys come up and put their hands on her butt and tell her she's beautiful."

"Sounds kind of sweet," said Yo Yo.

"No," said Mack. "That dream could come true, all right, but it wouldn't be sweet. It could be a gang getting up a train on her."

Ceese nodded. "Anybody else?"

"I was just starting Professor Williams's dream. Not the one where he kills Bag Man. The one where he's listening while people recite his poems. Only this time of course I didn't hear the poems, I just heard the wings beating only that's when they stopped. That's when I woke up."

"So you think those wishes came true?" asked Ceese.

"They didn't always come true back when I didn't know how to stop them," said Mack. "But this time, when I didn't have any control, when I was flying on the back of that thing from dream to dream—I thought, They're coming true. I knew it. Like Yo Yo said. He wants the wishes to come true. He was going from dream to dream."

"And then he stopped when he got to Professor Williams."

Mack nodded. "Yes, but I don't care where he stopped, I care what he did. We got to get on the phone. We got to call people. Like when Tamika was inside the waterbed. If I'd known what was happening, I could have called Mr. Brown and woke him up and told him to look for Yolanda in the water."

"Right," said Ceese, "but then he might have run outside and headed for a pool and he would never have found her at all. I mean, what do we warn people of?"

"We got to try," said Mack. "We got to phone people. We got to go places and try to stop things."

"You got a phone here that works?" Ceese asked Yo Yo.

"No," said Ceese. "But my mom does. Look, I'll go home and we'll start calling. Find out about Sherita. Where she is. I can get a patrol car to go there and stop it if it's really happening like you think. A gang rape."

"What about Sabrina and her nose?" asked Mack.

"I'll call her family. Maybe she's cut herself. Maybe they can still get her to a hospital—reattach it."

"Then why you sitting here, boy?" asked Yo Yo.

"Mrs. McCallister won't answer the phone," said Mack. "She turns it off at night."

"Then you two go there while I go home. We had... who was it?... Sabrina, Mrs. McCallister, Sherita Banks, Professor Williams, and then you woke up. I'm calling everybody and you're going over to McCallisters' house."

By the time Mack got up from the couch and outside the house, he could see Ceese already going around the bend in the road on his way down the hill to home.

Then Yo Yo brought the motorcycle out of the garage and revved it up while Mack got on behind her.

Across the street, the back of the Joneses' house looked out over the street at the bottom of the hairpin—and Yo Yo's house. Now Moses Jones was out on the back deck stark naked yelling down at them. Mack couldn't hear what he was saying because the motorcycle was so loud. But he could see how he nearly had a fit, jumping up and down and screaming after Yo Yo raised one finger. It wasn't even the bad finger. But maybe in the dark old Moses Jones couldn't tell. He was still jumping up and down when they roared on up the hill to McCallisters'.

Ophelia McCallister lived in the house she had shared with her husband before he died. It was right at the top of Cloverdale, just a couple of houses from where the road dead-ended at the always-locked and often-climbed gateway leading into Hahn Park. Mack got off the bike before it even stopped, pushing himself up like in a game of leapfrog and hopping up so the bike kept going underneath him. But of course he still had a lot of momentum, so he staggered forward and since Yo Yo had just brought the bike to a stop, he crashed into her.