Dream Wars_Domination

by Leia Stone

  I was the first one into the building and I flew through the doorway, flicking on the light scope at the end of my weapon. I did a quick five-second circle and determined the room we were in was clear—in every sense of the word. It was an open brick entry room with no furniture or anything decorating the walls, a hallway running behind it with two openings, one on each side.

  Nox and Brisk were next to enter. They had to tilt the stretcher to make Maxine fit, she nearly fell off. Her body jerked to the side as they rolled it, and I whimpered when I saw a few of her stiches rip and blood pool out of the wound. Ronnie and Mr. Hansen brought in the rear, dashing into the room huffing and puffing.

  “Did he see us?” I asked, still out of breath.

  Ronnie shook her head. “I don’t think so. He got distracted by a Galadria.”

  My eyes widened in terror.

  “Not Dawn,” Ronnie explained quickly. “It was green.”

  Relief poured through me at her words. I didn’t think I could handle losing Dawn. I didn’t know when I’d become so attached to that alien dragon, but what was done was done. She was my friend now. No going back.

  “Maxine’s stiches ripped,” I told her in a low voice. Though it clearly wasn’t low enough, Brisk and Nox swore at the same time.

  “We tried to be careful,” Brisk said, bending down to brush a lock of red hair away from Maxine’s forehead.

  “You did fine. It’s an easy fix,” Ronnie told him, opening her kit.

  The ground shook then and we all froze. He was back on the move.

  Stepping into the open doorway, I peeked out to see the giant running toward us. About a third of his arm had already grown back.

  Holy shit. What kind of nightmare creature can grow back an arm in an hour?

  One good thing was that he was too big to fit through the doorway, but he was definitely big enough to rip this building apart. Not such a good thing.

  I was just about to bark orders when I heard a hissing noise behind me.

  The hairs on my arms stood as I spun around with my light scope.

  Oh hell.

  Standing in the open doorway to the hallway was a female sentry, her belly swollen with undelivered eggs. Her lips peeled back and she launched herself forward before I could even blink. She was headed right for Maxine. Wanting to avoid making too much noise and luring the giant to us, I dropped my gun and pulled my glowing blue blades. Stepping in front of Ronnie and Maxine, I positioned myself to protect them. When the female got within two feet of me, the plasma cuff shot out, creating a shield.

  She slammed against it, knocking backward just as Brisk’s bullets tore into her.

  Grunts started to pour out of the hallway and into our room then. New spawn, freshly hatched and hungry. This was obviously a breeding home, containing probably multiple females and hundreds of eggs. It was the absolute worst place we could have sought shelter.

  Nox lit his blowtorch, spraying in a wide arc to keep the new grunts back.

  “Kit Steele,” the female on the ground said, grinning. Her teeth were dripping with saliva. Even as bullets tore into her, an honest-to-God grin still covered her heinous face.

  Then she put out her hand and made a fist, raising it into the air. A headache the size of Texas slammed into me and I collapsed to the ground breathless. My senses went crazy in that moment. I couldn’t see normally, my line of sight filled with what looked like only heat vision, and my nose was picking up a dozen scents, the most prominent of which was Maxine’s blood.

  Kill, kill, kill. The voice was my own, but the thoughts horrified me.

  “No!” I whimpered, curling in a ball on the ground. Knowledge slammed into me then, threatening to split my brain wide open. I knew things. Things I shouldn’t know. These females controlled everything. Not the male sentries. We were wrong. The women were in charge. They were the ones who retaliated and sent our bodies back to different beds and countries. They had… gifts. Mental telepathy and projection, heat vision, mass consciousness tampering, reality tampering—the list went on.

  I couldn’t breathe, both from the assault on my senses and from the sudden realization that we were so very misinformed.

  Opening my eyes, I saw my normal vision had returned. The female was staring wide-eyed at me, and everything became clear in that moment. She’d tried to hurt me, to mentally connect with me so she could make me do things against my will, like kill my friends. But she’d encountered my own gift and it had backfired. Now we were stuck, connected.

  Kill yourself, my own voice said inside my head, and I started to cry. I didn’t know how to make it stop.

  A smell hit me then, the familiar scent of sandalwood incense and lotus blossom tea.

  ‘Master Aki.’

  ‘Hello, Kit.’ His voice inside my head was like a balm, soothing the frayed edges of my insanity.

  ‘Help,’ I asked him. I didn’t know where he was or how this was happening, but I needed my master’s guidance.

  My mind was suddenly flooded with a bright white light, and Master Aki’s voice was so loud I thought he was there with me inside the room. ‘Your strongest ability is not your muscles or your guns. It’s your mind.’

  Cryptic bastard was going to get me killed.

  I grabbed the sides of my head and screamed, pushing all of that white light outward, into everything and everyone.

  The collective whining of aliens had my eyelids snapping open. Every single grunt was on the floor holding their heads, and my mind was amazingly clear. The headache was gone, along with the voice inside my head.

  “Kill her!” I shouted, and Nox lowered his torch to the injured female. A dull throbbing started at the base of my skull when she tried to fight back, but then it was gone as she burst into flames.

  “We need to get the hell out of here!” I told my team.

  I had no idea what the hell had just happened or how, but I was pretty sure I’d just jumped into that female’s mind, and knowing she could hurt me like that was terrifying.

  Nox sprayed down the rest of the grunts as well, but I knew there would be more elsewhere in the building. More females, their eggs, their spawn. It made me shiver.

  “What about them?” Ronnie asked, just as another female came into the hallway, toward the back of the room and hissed.

  Damn, we can’t catch a break!

  The ground shook then, and I knew the giant was near. “Leave them to be food for him.”

  Without waiting for confirmation, I grabbed the bottom of Maxine’s cot and started dragging her out the door, someone taking the other end and lightening the load, helping me move faster. Turning her slowly to fit through the doorway, we exited the building, and relief spread through me to see Damien shooting at the giant as he ran for us. Josephine was at his side with Jeremy handcuffed to her.

  Thank God.

  “Run!” I shouted to Damien for the umpteenth time that night. My legs were going to be so sore by the time this was over. He looked over at me and I could see the relief spread across his face.

  I pumped my legs, holding onto the edge of Maxine’s cot for dear life as we slid around to the side of the building. One peek over my shoulder and I could see Damien, Jeremy and Josephine right behind us. The giant was about a hundred feet away, which was probably two steps to him.

  I wound around the back of the building just as a loud smashing noise tore into the night. The giant stepped on the brick building as if it was a small rock simply in his way. In doing so, he disturbed the nests. Holy hell, it was like he’d stepped on an ant hill. Eggs popped open, grunts tumbled out, and three big females ran scary fast right for the mountainous creature. They had no fear of the enormous ghoul before them. They raised their fists in the air, and the giant grabbed his long ropy hair, ripping it out in chunks.

  Oh shit. Oh my God. Holy shit.

  I’d finally put a name to the breeders’ gifts: compulsion. They were like vampires capable of compulsion. The giant was tearing into his own face now,
ripping away chunks of flesh. The females were doing that—I knew it with every fiber of my being—standing like frontline soldiers with their fists raised in the air. It was the most terrifying thing I’d ever witnessed, and that was saying something because I’d seen a lot.

  Just then, Nox took Maxine’s cot from me and started running with Brisk as I stood there frozen and dumbfounded. A strong, warm hand grasped my arm, and then I was being pulled along, almost tripping over my own feet as I tried to keep up.

  “Come on, freckles.” Damien’s deep voice finally broke me out of my fear-laden trance.

  He dragged me across the dirty stretch of land, and then we were going down a hill and into another expanse of alien forest with weird plants and glowing trees.

  ‘Kit is in trouble?’ Dawn’s voice suddenly blazed inside my head.

  ‘Kind of. Yes. Kit could use some help,’ I told her. We could go a lot faster without Maxine in her stretcher. If Dawn could fly Ronnie and Maxine into the air, we could run faster and maybe avoid the giant who was on our ass. I didn’t want to trust that the breeders had killed him.

  ‘Dawn is coming. Bringing friends from sky home.’

  Dawn had told me about the tiny floating island in the sky where the Galadrias raised their young. They called it ‘sky home,’ but I had never been there. I assumed it was not a place any human or ghoul could go. It was a birthing and daycare center for baby Galadrias, and I wouldn’t let any foreign people with guns near my babies either.

  “Dawn’s coming! Bringing friends,” I shouted to the group.

  Ronnie nodded. “I’ll take to the sky with Maxine. You’ll be faster without us.”

  Sometimes it was like Ronnie and I shared a mind.

  “And if there’s room, Josephine can fly with Jeremy. He’ll calm down if he’s away from the danger, right?” I shouted to Josephine. She was dragging him kicking and screaming away from the danger. He was in full-blown panic attack mode, and it broke my heart.

  She just nodded and continued to pull on his arm.

  We jogged in relative silence for a few minutes. “What was that back there? With the females?” Brisk spoke next to me. He was out of breath and so was I. I couldn’t see the giant now, and I was betting he was either dead or had stopped to snack on that breeder den.

  I signaled for everyone to stop and rest. Most of the group rested their hands on their knees, trying to catch their breath.

  I flicked my eyes to Damien, who was looking curiously at us, clearly eavesdropping on what Brisk had said. Even Jeremy had stopped shrieking and seemed to be listening.

  “I don’t know,” I croaked nervously. “They… they have mind control, compulsion or something. They tried to control me and our minds… linked, maybe. My gift amplified, or swapped with the female. I honestly don’t know.”

  Jeremy was peering at me with wide eyes, staring straight at my forehead. The closest he’d ever been to looking me in the eyes. He reached out then and started tracing a pattern on my head, from my forehead through my hair and around to the back of my skull.

  “Jer, buddy, we don’t have time for this. Let’s go. We don’t want the bad man to catch us,” Damien told him in the calmest voice he could muster.

  Jeremy leaned over and whispered in his brother’s ear, and Damien’s brow furrowed.

  “Okay, buddy, we’ll talk about it when we wake up. Let’s run now,” Damien said just as the ground shook again.

  Jeremy took one more look at my forehead and then started running, dragging Josephine along with him.

  “What did he say?” I asked Damien.

  Brisk and Nox were still catching their breath, no doubt exhausted from running with Maxine’s weight. They both looked at Damien then, as if wondering the same thing.

  Damien scratched the back of his neck. “His mind is different. I’m sure he needs to rethink what he’s hypothesizing—”

  “Damien. What did he say?” Now I was scared. That kid might be a little jumbled in the mind, but he was freaking brilliant, and his thoughts were important to me.

  Damien sighed. “He said, ‘Kit is a weapon.’”

  Nothing could have prepared me for that.

  “Kit is a weapon.”

  I didn’t even know what that meant, but it was scary. I was a woman, a lover of eighties rock, an okay cook. I didn’t want to be a weapon.

  The ground shook again just as I looked up and saw the most beautiful sight—a dozen glowing Galadrias in every color of the rainbow.

  Help had arrived.

  Six

  We’d been able to fit everyone on the Galadrias and were circling the skies, buying time until we all woke up. Hopefully in pairs. Damien and I rode Dawn together, and watching the various mountains across the Dream Wars ‘wake’ was truly horrifying. It was more chaos than normal. Not just humans ran for their lives, but sentries and grunts as well. The only comfort we had was that the giants couldn’t fly.

  I pressed my fingers to my temple. Wake up, I told myself for the fifteenth time. I didn’t want to be there anymore. I didn’t want to deal with the madness, or think about what had happened with the females, and most importantly I wanted to forget what Jeremy said about me being a weapon.

  “You okay, freckles?” Damien reached out and rubbed my shoulders. He was straddling Dawn and facing me.

  “No, I’m not. I feel like this is day one all over again. A new enemy. A new terror. We were just getting the upper hand,” I said, defeated.

  “We still have the upper hand. We’re protected from the smaller ghouls.” He shrugged, trying and failing to sound optimistic.

  “Damien, there are giant ghouls who tuck back a hundred and fifty humans a night. The sentries called me by name, and your brother thinks I’m a weapon. Nothing about this is okay.”

  Damien nodded, looking off across the horizon. “You’re right. And being a billionaire can’t buy me safety. Not really. But it does afford me the ability to outfit my brother with anything he needs, and trust me when I say this, Kit, Jeremy will have ten ideas on how to bring those giants down by the time we wake up, so take comfort in that fact. My brother is special, and together we’re going to figure this out.”

  He believed in his brother so much that it brought tears to my eyes. He was special, and he’d gotten us this far. The plasma cuffs, dream bands, and every other innovative thing Striker Industries had thought up, that was mostly Jeremy.

  I looked over at his brother, rocking lightly on top of Roger, another Galadria, with Josephine massaging his back. I noticed that she was the only one he let touch him like that. Like a mother affectionately would.

  “He’s the most important one out of all of us,” I agreed. Now I understood why Damien’s contract had said to protect them before him. Not only because he loved them, but because Jeremy was our best chance at stopping this war.

  “You’re pretty important too.” He winked.

  I chuckled. “You’re such a smooth talker.”

  He grinned. “You have no idea. Just wait until our date.”

  “Hah! This elusive date.” I laughed. For a second, I could almost forget that we were in Hell, and just be a normal girl, flirting.

  Almost.

  He smiled, but then it turned into a frown.

  “What’s wrong?” I panicked.

  He shook his head. “Nothing. I’m waking up. I’ll wait for you.”

  Oh. I nodded, swallowing hard. Truth be told, I had a fear of being the last to wake, stuck in the Dream Wars, alone while all my friends woke up around me. It never ceased to amaze me, watching someone wake up. As our souls, astral bodies or whatever returned to our sleeping selves, the body the ghouls had constructed in this place fell apart. It separated into little pixels of flesh and blood, then disappeared until the next night. But instead of waking up in Bisbee as we normally would, the ghouls had changed things. The females had changed things.

  What else could they change? I shivered thinking about it.

  When Damien w
as gone, I stared out at the green hazy night sky. I was depressed to admit that I had completely forgotten what it was like before the Dream Wars. What it was like to just dream and wake up, and not even remember those dreams. To sleep in on a lazy Sunday. To crave sleep.

  I’d forgotten it all.

  “Waking up,” Nox announced.

  We all nodded as his body disappeared from the Galadria.

  “Us too,” Josephine said.

  I looked over to see her and Jeremy losing their forms.

  I prayed they woke up together. That Jeremy wasn’t alone in some foreign country, forced to talk to strangers in order to call his brother.

  “See you on the flip side,” Brisk said a moment later, and then he was gone.

  It was just me, Ronnie, Maxine, and Mr. Hansen left.

  Ronnie flew her Galadria closer to me, and when I looked up, I noticed panic in her eyes.

  “Kit,” she said, on the verge of tears. There was a knife in her hand, and she was fisting it like she was ready to stab Maxine.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, frightened, as Dawn veered closer to them.

  “I know the statistics. I know that if she doesn’t wake up tonight, she probably never will. Comas are a death sentence. We need to wake her. Now.” Her knife hand was shaking.

  I stepped up onto Dawn’s back, the wind whipping through my hair. “Ronnie, what are you doing?”

  Ronnie glanced down at Maxine. “I read a study that extreme and sudden pain can wake someone from a coma in the Dream Wars.”

  “Ronnie,” I growled. “She’s been shot. How much more pain does she need!”

  Ronnie looked me in the eye and I saw so much anguish there. She loved Maxine, that was clear, and this decision was killing her.

  She raised her hand. “If she doesn’t wake up, she’s dead anyway. She’ll be stuck here forever until she’s eaten or starves!” she yelled at me, then plunged the knife straight into Maxine’s thigh.

  The beauty queen’s eyes snapped open as a scream tore from her throat. Once it died, she glared down at the knife sticking out of her thigh and then up at Ronnie.