Hunted

by Dean Murray

  I almost lost my grip on it, but I managed to hold onto it by the slimmest of margins and then I pulled with every ounce of strength remaining to me. What I was doing was impossible and I could feel the universe itself fighting my efforts, but I'd done it once before and I refused to give up and accept the fate the wax lady had planned for me.

  The far end of my cable whipped through space at speeds I couldn't really comprehend, but the distance it had to cross was likewise immeasurable and the journey seemed to take hours inside of my own mind. Now that the cable was moving, its speed started to accelerate at an exponential rate as I greedily sucked the slack back into my center and reclaimed yet more of the strength that I'd expended to get this far.

  I'd built an incredible amount of momentum up by this point. It wasn't real momentum, but on the metaphysical realm it felt like a thousand-ton wrecking ball moving towards me at millions of miles per second. I would have said that nothing could stop my efforts now, but just before my cable had returned completely to me I felt it hit something that I couldn't explain.

  I'd just pulled the irresistible force into the immovable object and I knew in that instant that I'd failed, only somehow the object I'd captured and pulled all of this distance had just enough momentum. The immovable object lost.

  It seemed as though a bleeding hole was ripped into the universe. I tried to close my eyes against the sudden flare of light, but they were already closed, it was just so bright that the light was shining through my eyelids.

  Something ripped the wax lady off of my hips and I heard her hit the ground a dozen feet away.

  "It seems that you've decided to trust me."

  I was still blinking away spots from my vision. An odd, person-shaped cutout in my vision seemed to indicate that the wax lady's body had shielded me from the worst of the light, but I could see just well enough to make out the bestial wolf-man shape that Dream Stealer and Alec both shared.

  "I didn't have any choice. She figured out who I was and tracked me back to my home. She said that she's just outside of my window and that she has tendrils of thought inside of my mind."

  "Vampire."

  I'd never known that a single word could contain such loathing and menace, but this time the rage wasn't directed at me. Dream Stealer stalked towards the wax lady, towards the vampire, and I could feel the same invisible wind blowing towards her that he'd used to trap me inside of the dream the first time we'd run into each other.

  She couldn't leave, but that didn't mean that she couldn't fight. The vampire jumped at Dream Stealer in a blur of motion that I couldn't follow, but it seemed like he slid out of the way. One second they were each in their respective corners and in the next they'd swapped places and were both bleeding from slashes that hadn't been there before they'd started moving.

  The vampire attacked again and once more all I saw was an unidentifiable blur as the two of them clashed. I knew that there probably wasn't much I could do to help in this particular fight, but I'd never be sure given the fact that I was simply too slow to be able to even tell what was going on.

  I needed to be able to follow the fight, needed it in a way that I'd never needed anything else before. I looked around, hoping for some kind of inspiration, and realized that the ground had lost some of its definition. It was still an uneven plain of jagged black glass, but it no longer had loose slivers of glass scattered across everything.

  It was a definite sign that the wax lady was distracted and most of her concentration was being spent on the fight. It was still a long shot, but I fixed the idea of her being slower than me in my mind and threw in a healthy dose of just how superior that would make me feel before pushing to try and force my version of reality to manifest.

  I knew I needed confidence in my ability to make it happen if I was going to be successful, but I didn't actually expect it to work. I was weakest when trying to change another person. On some level I knew my efforts were doomed from the start, but as I pushed my version of reality I felt something catch and start pulling strength from me.

  I opened my eyes, expecting to find that the vampire was moving more slowly, but instead found myself face to face with her.

  "Nice try, Adri."

  Even as she said it her hand, claws already glistening with blood on them, shot towards my chest.

  I seemed to have forever in which to respond, but it wasn't that my efforts had worked, it was simply the natural side effect of so much adrenaline hitting my system.

  Dream Stealer was headed towards us in a desperate bid to save me, but she'd somehow managed to outmaneuver him enough that he was still a couple of seconds away. I tried to throw myself to one side, but I was moving even slower than she was.

  Without any other options, I grabbed hold of that strange catch I'd felt when trying to slow her down a second ago and pushed even harder. I would have said that I didn't have any significant reserves of strength left, but somehow I found an extra store that I hadn't known existed and poured it into my latest visualization.

  I'd never felt any kind of active resistance to this kind of thing before. Previously my efforts had either been enough to enforce my will or they hadn't been. There wasn't any middle ground and the threshold, even when I hadn't been able to sense it, had always seemed a fixed thing.

  That wasn't the case here. Instead I felt like I was pushing against a large pane of glass that had a vast body of water behind it, pushing from the other side to try and crush me. There wasn't any way I could defeat the vast pool of power I felt opposing me, but somehow most of its force was directed elsewhere.

  I hadn't closed my eyes. I wanted to, but I refused to give up while there was even the slightest chance that I might survive. Because my eyes were open I was able to see as the ground opened up in front of Dream Stealer in a clear bid to trap him in a dark chasm.

  Dream Stealer leaped into the air with a speed and grace that no normal person could have matched, but the chasm suddenly widened, growing at a rate that made it obvious to me that there wouldn't be any kind of safe landing for him by the time he landed. I felt what I could only call a ripple and suddenly the chasm stopped growing as quickly. It didn't stop, Dream Stealer apparently wasn't strong enough—at least not inside of the wax lady's dream—to stop the ground from moving altogether, but he'd slowed it enough that it seemed like he might have a chance of landing safely on the other side.

  It was going to be a close thing and for a split second I considered redirecting my efforts and trying to help slow the movement of the ground, but I was too selfish to throw away my own chance of survival. I pushed even harder, trying to slow the fist coming towards me down to something I could dodge.

  The force pushing against me trembled slightly and then the ground sped back up. It was obvious that Dream Stealer was going to die, but two things happened in that instant that changed everything.

  Dream Stealer's arms suddenly grew impossibly long, so long that he was able to reach down and stick his claws into crevices in the ground. I realized that it no longer mattered how fast the ground moved now because he'd be able to guide himself safely down, but only a fraction of my attention was on him because the force pressing down on me shattered.

  I wrapped my whole being into the push to create my own version of reality inside of the dream as I felt the catch tear. Earlier I'd torn a hole in the universe to bring Dream Stealer to me. This time it was my own mind that was tearing.

  A red-hot icepick of fire stabbed deep inside of my mind at the same time that the vampire screamed and grabbed her head with both hands. The tips of her claws sank into her skull, but she didn't seem to notice. I couldn't blame her. I shouldn't have been able to notice myself, but a tiny sliver of consciousness had torn itself free of the rest of my mind. Separate from the pain that had me on my knees with tears streaming down my face, it was able to dispassionately watch as the woman who had nearly killed me looked up with eyes that looked like something out of a horror movie.

  The whites of he
r eyes had gone a dark red, like she'd had massive hemorrhaging inside of her eyes, but it didn't seem to interfere with her vision. She lunged forward again with her claws extended in an attempt to rip my throat out, but I effortlessly sidestepped her and raked my fingernails across the side of her face.

  She wasn't any faster than me, but that didn't mean that she wasn't a better fighter. She spun around and sprang at me again, and this time as I dodged to the side I tripped and fell down. I tried to roll to the side, but I could tell I wasn't going to make it. Her claws slashed down towards my unprotected body, but a split second before they tore into me, Dream Stealer grabbed her from behind and whipped her through the air.

  "What did you do?"

  The pain had receded slightly and I found that I could talk.

  "I'm not sure. I was trying to slow her down so that I could help you, but I think maybe I pushed too hard. It feels like someone ripped my head open."

  "You didn't slow her down, you sped yourself up somehow. That shouldn't be possible."

  The wax lady was impaled on his claws, but that didn't stop her from thrashing about in an effort to get at him. Her claws had already torn nasty gashes all up and down his arms, but she couldn't reach his head and neck, so he was safe for the moment.

  "It's only a matter of time now before she gets away, at which point you'll be in danger once again. Based on your accent I relocated to Minnesota a couple of days ago. I only hope that I'm close enough to make it to you before she shakes off the effects of the dream and comes after you. Do you trust me enough to tell me where you live?"

  The old terror was back, but I managed a nod and then gave him my address. I was placing my life in his hands, but I didn't know what else to do. If the wax lady, if an honest-to-goodness vampire, was about to break into my house then I'd be dead without some kind of equally scary supernatural protector.

  "How far away is that from the St. Paul Hilton?"

  "Ah…I think only ten or fifteen minutes depending on traffic. At night maybe as little as eight or nine minutes."

  He grimaced. I wouldn't have thought his wolf-man face was capable of that kind of expression, but it apparently was.

  "It will be close. I've seen people take longer than that to regain their feet, but I've also seen some take less time."

  I started to tell him that I'd find a hiding place inside my house, but I stopped mid-sentence as I realized that the invisible wind he'd used previously to keep her inside of the dream was practically gone. I'd forgotten that he was capable of pinning her here like that and simply taken him at his word. It was a clear sign of treachery and I started backing away from him while I desperately tried to come up with a way out of the mess I'd just created by giving him my address.

  "What are you doing, Adri?"

  He'd seen my slow backwards motion, but his question didn't seem menacing so much as curious.

  "You're letting her go when you could keep her here. You were working with her the whole time, weren't you? This was all a ploy to get my address."

  "What…oh, I see what you mean. No, Adri, I'm not letting her go, I have no choice in the matter. I can pin someone here against their will when they are healthy, but at a certain point when they are injured their mind rips them away from me despite my best efforts. It's a kind of natural survival mechanism. Maybe if I could suck them into my dream like you do rather than always having to face them inside of their own dream things would be different, but only a very, very weak-minded individual could possibly be killed inside of their own dream. A child maybe, but not a vampire and especially not one old enough to have manifested the kind of mentalist abilities this one has shown so far."

  It was all just words without any proof and he knew it as well as I did. I'd been positive that I could be killed inside of the dream.

  After a second the unseen wind picked back up.

  "I shouldn't be doing this, Adri. It's burning up energy I'm going to need later, but for your sake, to keep your trust I'll actively try to pin her here as long as I can. You can feel my efforts, correct?"

  I nodded. I still didn't know enough about how dream walking worked to be absolutely sure that he couldn't let her go while still making me think he was holding her there, but I didn't have any way of staying away from him if he wanted to hurt me.

  "Maybe she was just bluffing about her powers. Maybe she's weaker than you think, maybe you'll actually be able to kill her here in the dream before she can get away."

  He shook his head. "Can't you see the tendrils of power linking the two of you?"

  I started to tell him that I couldn't, but it was like his mentioning them somehow made them easier to see. He was right, there were black threads running back and forth between us. I tried to break one of them, but I was just too tired and my head hurt too much to push very hard at all. I'd been too scared earlier to really think about the fact that she was inside of my mind, but I suddenly felt like throwing up.

  The wax lady had mostly gone still, but now she thrashed around again in an attempt to further shred Dream Stealer's arms. Apparently even his massive wolf-man body had its limits because he shifted her around, tearing new holes in her side and back as he got her repositioned to where she couldn't continue to hurt him. The new wounds drew a gasp of pain from her and I saw her flicker and start to go insubstantial.

  The wind doubled and then doubled again as Dream Stealer tried to keep her from fleeing to safety. She'd gone pale from blood loss, but I could tell that she was going to get away before she died. I'd always thought of myself as being fairly pacifist, but I suddenly wanted her dead and the desire was so strong that it pushed me to action despite the continuing pain in my head.

  I didn't know exactly what Dream Stealer was doing to keep her here, but I knew what had worked so far when it came to enforcing my will onto a dream. She was trying to flee the dream, trying to disappear, so I visualized the opposite. I imagined her here in the dream with us more fully. It was hard to describe what I was after, but it was a bit like the first time I'd increased the detail in the grass.

  I created a living, three-dimensional model of her, instilled it with all of the revulsion and hatred I felt for her, and then pushed my reality into existence.

  The pain was even more intense than before, but I couldn't tell if it was just the result of what I'd done earlier or if I'd torn something else inside of my mind. I was down on my knees again without any recollection of having fallen. Tears pooled in my eyes, but there was something wrong there, tears weren't supposed to make it this hard to see.

  I absently wiped the tears out of my eyes, and nearly threw up again when my hand came away red and bloody. I heard screaming and only then realized that it was me, but before I could shut my mouth the vampire dangling from Dream Stealer's claws flickered again and all hell seemed to break loose.

  She flickered, but this time she didn't become less substantial, she became more.

  Another crack opened up in the ground, pitching Dream Stealer forward as he jumped for safer ground. The earthquake that had accompanied the new rift knocked me down and I felt new slivers of glass digging into my palms. It took me a split second to understand why that surprised me. All of the loose glass had disappeared during the first part of the fight as Dream Stealer had forced the wax lady to focus on him more so than on maintaining our environment.

  She was practically bled out, nearing dream death if not real death. She shouldn't have been able to strengthen the detail inside the dream, but this was even worse than that. The razor-edged shards weren't just back, they'd multiplied a dozen times over.

  I tried to warn Dream Stealer that we were in trouble, but a hurricane whipped up between one heartbeat and the next. The winds would have been bad enough all by themselves, but they were sufficiently violent enough to pick up some of the black slivers and I whipped my arm up over my eyes as my clothes started to shred off of my body.

  It had to be my efforts at holding her here that had given her such power.
I started to let go, started to relax the corner of my mind that was screaming in pain, but a deep voice made it to me over the howl of the wind.

  "No, Adri. Push harder!"

  It went against every instinct I'd been born with, but it was too late to stop trusting Dream Stealer now. The world went white behind my eyelids as I threw everything I had left into making my vision of reality even more complete. I felt another micro-tear inside of my mind and for an instant it almost seemed like something was trying to claw its way inside of my skull with me.

  A second later, the wind died down as if it had never been. Dream Stealer pulled himself back up to his feet and crossed the distance between us in a halting limp. The vampire—the corpse—was still dangling from his claws, but now my eyes refused to focus on it. My mind was trying to protect me from seeing what he'd done by refusing to make sense of the glimpse I'd seen before turning away.

  "She's dead."

  I swallowed a couple of times. "I know. I guess this means she'll be coming for me."

  "No, Adri, she's truly dead. Look at the ground. It's disappearing."

  I carefully turned even further away from him and then opened my eyes. He was right, although I wouldn't have described it quite that way. The ground right where we were standing was losing its substantiality and the plain had already started shrinking. A minute ago it had stretched off farther than the eye could see; now it simply faded away to nothing less than a hundred yards away from us.

  "I don't understand."

  "It shouldn't do this. When someone leaves the dream they are the first thing to go. Usually I get kicked out of the dream so quickly that I don't even see them leave, but sometimes their mind leaves the dream up for a second or two without them in it. This is completely backwards. Her mind can't sustain the dream anymore. It's thrown everything into trying to keep her whole. She's dead, or at least dying. Once she's completely gone we'll probably still get snapped back to our bodies, but we won."