by Rebecca York
When she screamed, he came back to the bed and tried to gather her close, but she kept screaming, kept trying to jerk herself out of his arms, her back arching in her struggle to get away.
Terrified, he tried to get through to her.
“Jamie. Sweetheart. Come back to me.”
She didn’t seem to hear. Didn’t seem to know he was even there.
“Jamie!”
She kept struggling, and when he pressed his hand to her chest, he could feel her heart beating wildly.
What should he do?
SCREAMING, SHE TRIED TO pull away, but the living wall held her in its grip.
She shouldn’t be here. Coming to this place had been a terrible mistake. If she could have clawed her way out, she would have fled the dream. But it continued to hold her fast.
And then something worse happened. To her right, she heard a noise. Jerking away from the wall, she turned to face the door. Not the one where she’d entered. Another door.
It opened to reveal the figure of a man.
She had seen him before. At least twice.
He was dressed all in black, with a cape flowing out behind him as though a strong breeze were blowing it. In place of a face, he had a death mask.
“You,” he whispered. “How did you get here?”
Her only answer was a scream.
She would have run, but her feet were rooted to the floor.
The figure came toward her. Far away, she heard someone calling her name. It was Mack.
“Jamie. Wake up, Jamie.”
“I can’t,” she whispered.
Mack spoke again, his voice urgent. “Yes, you can. Jamie, come back to me.”
She wanted to. She wanted to get out of this awful place. She wanted to come back to him.
“Keep talking to me,” she whispered because she knew that he was her link to sanity, and only he could drag her back to the real world.
“Jamie. Sweetheart. Please, Jamie.”
She felt Mack’s hand clamp around hers. Sensed his desperation.
Somehow she managed to turn her hand, knitting her fingers with his, clinging to his solid flesh and bone. He was real. The only thing that was real. The rest of it was only a nightmare.
“Yes! Wake up.”
She could hear him. Touch him. But she couldn’t see him. All she could see was the man in black with the death mask coming around the table, advancing on her step by step like the murderer in a horror movie. He was going to swoop down on her, and that would be the end.
She felt herself lifted, and she knew deep in her mind that it wasn’t the monster who had her. It was Mack. He was carrying her somewhere.
He shifted her weight, seemed to lower her, triggering a roaring noise in her ears. A confusion of impressions assaulted her. But one thing she knew above all others, the bad man was still in back of her. Coming. He was going to grab her the way he had grabbed the other women. And there was no escape. He would kill her, just the way he’d killed the rest of his victims.
Chapter Ten
The monster was almost there, reaching out his hands toward her. He was going to seize her.
Then something wet came pouring down on her, soaking her to the skin.
She started coughing, and sputtering. When she opened her eyes, she blinked in confusion. She was in the shower. With her clothes on. Mack was holding her in his arms. He was in the shower, too, standing there fully dressed with water pouring down on them.
“Thank God,” he muttered.
“What…what happened?” she choked out.
“You were screaming. I think he was coming at you, but you couldn’t wake up. I tried to make you hear me, but I couldn’t do it.”
“I did hear you. I knew you were there,” she whispered. “I could feel your hands on me, but I couldn’t get to you.”
“I thought if I got you wet, that would be enough of a shock to make you come back to the world.”
Water was still pouring out of the showerhead onto them.
She laughed. “I guess it worked.”
“Yeah.” He set her on her feet, made sure she was steady, then reached to turn off the water. “Sorry.”
“About what?”
“Dousing you.”
“It was the right thing to do.”
He pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her, swaying with her in the tub, saying her name over and over.
She heard him swallow. “I was scared. Scared you were stuck there.”
“I think I might have been, if you hadn’t pulled me out.”
He nodded against the top of her head.
“What happened, exactly?”
“I went to the funhouse. Like in my dreams. Only it was different.”
“Did you find out where the place was?”
“No. I was inside the whole time.” She gulped. “I was like the women he’d brought there. Only I had…abilities they didn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wished I had a flashlight, and then I was holding one. The way it can happen in a dream.” He nodded.
“First I was inside the main entrance to the house.” She thought for a moment. “I think he’d left it the way he found it, but he’d made a longer hallway beyond that. I went down it. There was a trapdoor in the floor. But I found it and kept going. Then I stepped into a…dining room.”
“Like a regular dining room?”
She shook her head. “There was a table and chairs, but it was set up like a spook show, and the door locked behind me. When it wouldn’t open again, I walked around the table.” She gulped. “Then all of the sudden he was there—coming through another doorway. He was coming toward me. You got me out of there just in time.”
Mack ran his fingers up and down her arm reassuringly. “It wasn’t real.”
“You can say that.” She shuddered. “I don’t know if it’s true. I mean, the rules aren’t like the real world—or like regular dreams.”
“Did you see his face?”
“He had on a mask.”
“The ski mask? Like when he pushed you into the car?”
“No. The death mask like when he went after the other women.” She made a strangled sound. “He looked like he did when he was with the women, telling them they could get away. Only we both know they couldn’t escape.”
“He wasn’t really there. How could he be, in your dream?”
She sucked in a breath. “He recognized me.”
His hands clenched on her shoulders. “How do you know?”
“He said…‘you’.”
“But not your name?”
“No.”
“Then he could have meant someone else.”
She knew there was no point in arguing with Mack about what was real and what was not. He hadn’t been there. He didn’t understand that what had happened to her in the funhouse had taken on a life of its own.
“I was so scared,” she murmured.
“So was I.”
She nodded. She’s known it even when she was dreaming. She knew it now.
Mack’s voice turned gentle. “We’d better get dry,” he said, leaning her shoulders against the tile wall and taking a step back. He was fumbling with the buttons on the front of her shirt, when his hands went still.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be undressing you,” he said in a thick voice.
When he met her gaze, she didn’t look away. “Maybe you should,” she said, her own voice equally thick.
“Why?”
“You saved me.”
His voice turned rough. “You don’t have to pay me back.”
“That’s not what I meant.” She swallowed hard. “I mean you were my lifeline—the reason I wanted to come back. You were the thing in this world I could cling to. Even when I was in that place, in some ways I knew I was here with you. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d tried to do it before you came back. I guess I realized it was too dangerous without you.”
She reached for him, th
e wet fabric of their clothing slapping together. After a long moment, she eased away and began working at her shirt buttons.
When she raised her head, the look in his eyes made her chest go tight with need.
“After what happened, you need to rest.”
She knew that he was saying it because he thought it was the right thing to do.
“I think I know what I need,” she answered. “You.”
She cupped her hand around the back of his head and brought his mouth down to hers, and when their lips touched, she knew that was the right move.
Her wet clothing had turned cold, chilling her to the bone. But when he moved his lips against hers, heat sizzled through her body.
She opened her mouth to give him better access, silently saying that she needed him.
“I was so scared when I couldn’t wake you,” he whispered against her mouth.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I had to do something. And the only thing I thought of was to carry you to the shower.”
“That was smart.”
“And now I’m taking advantage of you.”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Very.”
In answer his hand slid down to her hips, pressing her against the hard shaft of his erection.
“We’ve got to get out of these wet clothes,” he muttered.
Because she’d been in bed, she was wearing sweatpants. All he had to do was slip his hands inside the elastic and pull them down, along with her panties.
When they pooled around her feet, she stepped out of them, and he ran his hands over the curve of her bottom, then lower, to find her sex. She was already aroused, and he made a low sound in his throat as he stroked her there.
“I don’t think I can stand up much longer,” she whispered.
“I know the feeling. Give me a second.”
He pulled his dripping shirt over his head while she got rid of her bra, then reached for the snap at the top of his jeans.
When she had trouble lowering the zipper, he helped her, his erection bouncing out as he freed it.
Naked, they clung together, swaying in the tub.
“Bedroom,” she whispered.
They left a sodden mass of clothing in the tub as they staggered back to the bedroom, where they fell onto the bed together. He gathered her close, stroking his fingers over her back, down her flanks, pulling her against his body, making her feel like every tender part of her was going to ignite.
Easing away, he took her breasts in his hands, his thumbs stroking over the hardened tips, bringing a whimper to her lips.
He sucked one taut nipple into his mouth, while he slid his hand down her body into the folds of her sex, his fingers knowing and skillful. His hands and mouth sent pleasure roaring through her body.
“Now,” she whispered, closing her fist around him, making it impossible to deny what they both wanted.
When she rolled to her back, he followed, letting her guide him inside her.
They both exclaimed at the joining. Then he began to move, making her cry out again as she came undone for him.
He followed her over the edge, and she clasped her arms around his shoulders, hugging him to her. She had reached for him, and he had taken her in his arms and given her what she needed. She wanted him to know that it had been the right thing to do.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Thank you,” he answered, and she heard the emotion in his voice. It made her chest tighten. This meant a lot to him. More than she ever would have believed.
And what about her, she thought. Tomorrow would she regret what they had done?
FRED HYDE STOOD IN the dining room of his magnificent creation. He’d been sleeping upstairs when something had wakened him. It wasn’t his alarm going off. It was something else, something he couldn’t explain beyond a sudden sense of dread.
He’d jumped out of bed and inspected the system. It was functioning properly and showed no intrusions.
No one had gotten into the house. He was sure of that. Yet he was still feeling nervous, as though a presence that didn’t belong was here. After dressing quickly, he went down to walk around the first floor. Everything seemed to be in order, yet when he entered the dining room, a shivery feeling rippled over his skin. It was like that feeling they call “someone walking over your grave.” Ridiculous.
He had the house rigged so that you couldn’t turn on the lights in the normal way at the switches. You had to use his remote control, which he did before making sure nothing was out of place.
When he got to the dining room table, he stopped and stared. There was a mechanism in the floor that triggered a latch in the ceiling. When you stepped in the right place, a spider came down a thread of web and landed in the middle of the table where it jumped around like it was going to spring off the table and take a chomp out of your arm. Only it never left the horizontal surface.
There was no reason it should have fallen to the table now. Only here it was. And he’d have to put it back. Or get out one of the birds with the steel claws and knife-blade beaks.
There was something else that stopped him in his tracks. One of the chairs was standing away from the table. And he was sure he had pushed them all in.
What the hell was going on?
He stood very still, thinking. Trying to pick up vibrations, if one could do something like that. He didn’t believe in paranormal stuff, even though he’d made the funhouse into a place where otherworldly phenomena seemed to be part of the landscape. But it was all fake. All from his own imagination or stuff he’d seen in movies or read in books.
Once again he assured himself that nobody could have been here, yet it felt like someone had been in the house. Here in this room, messing with his creation.
Closing his eyes, he tried to conjure up an image of who it might have been…and lit on Jamie Shepherd.
Impossible. She didn’t even know where this place was. Still, another shiver went up his spine. He’d have to capture her before she wrecked all his plans.
Could she?
What if she and that detective started sharing information with the cops?
But what did they know, really? What could they know?
MACK WOKE AND CAUTIOUSLY turned his head. Jamie was lying next to him, staring at the ceiling.
“You okay?” he asked, hearing the catch in his voice.
“I’m not going to jump out of bed and run away from you,” she said.
“That’s something,” he managed to answer as he allowed himself to relax a little.
Under the covers, she found his hand and knit his fingers with hers. “But I do want you to understand something.”
He was immediately on edge again.
“About what happened to me last night. When I went to the funhouse.”
“Okay.”
“It was real, in a way that I can’t explain to you.”
“Okay,” he said again, wondering why she was insisting. Then it hit him. This could be a test. Maybe not a conscious one on her part, but a test nonetheless. They’d made love, and it had been wonderful, but there had to be more to their relationship than great sex. There had to be trust. He’d been a little in love with her since Craig first brought her back to Baltimore from Gaptown. Back then he’d seen her as a charming, desirable, funny, smart woman. He hadn’t known there was another dimension to her. Something that she’d kept hidden because she realized that it was hard for people to accept.
He knew she must have told Craig about her strange ability. Before or after he’d brought her to Baltimore, he wondered. At any rate, he was sure Craig had accepted it.
And he would have to do the same, if he wanted his relationship with Jamie to go anywhere.
“What are you thinking?”
He swallowed. “That I’d like to understand what the dream meant to you.”
Her face was so serious that he felt his stomach clench. “It was weird.”
; “I’ll bet.” He tightened his hold on her hand. “Tell me what you can about it.”
“Before, when I dreamed about something bad happening to another person, I was always that person, experiencing it through their senses. This time, it was just me, alone in the dream, and that somehow made it worse.” She tensed. “Well, I was alone until he came in at the end.”
She was silent for a moment, and he didn’t press her, just let her tell it the way she wanted to.
“The worst part was that I had the absolute feeling that I was really there. I mean, if I go to the house, it will be exactly like the dream. Unless he changes something around in the meantime.”
She sank back against the pillows, took a deep breath and let it out. “I said the worst part was feeling like it was so real, but maybe that’s not true. Maybe the worst part is that I put myself through hell, and I don’t have any better idea where to find the house than when I started.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not. I failed.”
“No. You thought it would work. It was a reasonable thing to try.”
“I thought maybe I’d get there and be outside. But I was in the entrance hall.”
“You still think the house is out in the country?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“What’s different?”
“I just have the feeling that I wasn’t all that far from here. And…” She huffed out a breath. “There’s the way he set up the area inside at the front door. If the house were in the country, maybe nobody would come around. But I think he decided he had to have the entry looking normal. I mean, if someone rang the bell, and he opened the door, they’d see a vestibule that looked like part of an ordinary house. So he was thinking that maybe somebody would come to the door. I know that’s kind of going in circles, but do you know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
She made a frustrated sound. “My clever idea of dreaming a visit there didn’t work. Let’s go back to plan A.”
Jamie waited for Mack to challenge her.
All he said was, “What’s plan A?”
She breathed out a little sigh. “Figuring out a link between the victims.”
“Okay. But first we need something to eat.”