“A likely story.” Her words were firm but her big eyes and pale face spoke of a woman who was completely shaken up.
Most dreamers manifested between one and four wraiths at first. Not fifteen. The only way she was getting through this alive was if she cooperated with everything he and his team required.
Hell. He’d never been good at the touchy-feely aspects of training, but when he’d reported the neonati last night—after he’d geotracked her odd composite signature in the dreamsphere—HQ had reiterated that his administrative leave from mentoring was over. They wanted him to take this one and his whole team knew it.
As he watched the woman assess him and, from her expression, find him wanting, inspiration struck him like an invisible wraith. If he could make her hate him so much she refused to associate with him, it would force someone else to step in.
Not a bad plan.
He stalked up to her, got in her face, and grunted with disgust.
“Lady, let’s get one thing straight,” he said. “This is life or death. Do everything I say when I say it, and then thank me for saving your ass. I told you not to interfere. The pepper spray was a stupid move. We were on top of things.” Zeke might have wound up with a few lacerations before Rhys dusted the wraith, but he’d had worse.
“The way it looked to me, the thing was on top of you.” Her words, firm and confident, belied the way she fiddled with her aerosol can. “You’re claiming those creatures were real?”
“Didn’t it feel real when it bit you?” He almost called her dumb, but if he went overboard his team might catch on. “This isn’t a joke.”
“If it is, you failed. I’m not amused.” She blinked rapidly, her fingertips brushing the cut on her neck. “I’m bleeding.”
“No shit. A monster fanged you. You put us both at risk from them when you incapacitated me.”
“I saved you.”
“No, you didn’t.” He snatched the pepper spray from her hand and shook it. “What if that hadn’t been the last vampire? What if Rhys hadn’t been here? Do you know how to kill a vampire? No. You don’t. Pepper spray doesn’t do squat to them after the first couple seconds. They’re not human.” Blades were the preferred weapon for almost all wraith types since they were silent, deadly and less traceable—what with bullet casings and the like.
She studied the aerosol can, its angle, and then him. Her face hardened. “Are you going to spray me now?”
Great. She was quarrelsome. Uncooperative too. It reinforced his decision to duck out of this particular responsibility. “Don’t tempt me, lady.”
She opened her mouth to tempt him but he wasn’t finished. “Don’t get any big ideas about screaming, either. I’ll stuff a sock in your yap.” He didn’t have time to be hassled by locals or the cops. He needed her cowed, quiet and hating his guts.
“You can try.” Her chin lifted. “I have an extra pepper spray.”
“Sure you do.” Spare him from civilians who wandered into dark alleys. Spare him from mentoring them. “You got no idea—”
Rhys inserted his large self between them—always the peacekeeper, the politician, except when there was ass to be kicked. He was a head taller than Zeke. He was a head taller than most people. “Now that this area is secure, we should move inside. Ma’am, if there are other wraiths they’ll be nearby, in or around your home.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t live here.” The woman, her expression distrustful, didn’t respond much better to Rhys than she had to Zeke. This said more about her than Rhys, because Rhys was smooth as butter and good at this courteous shit. “I’m from out of town.”
Unfortunately, dreamscanning only pinpointed a manifestation, not a neo’s level, identity or degree of pigheadedness. But Zeke knew what he’d read when he’d isolated her visions amidst the wisps and shadows of the dreamsphere.
She was no traveler. No out-of-towner. She’d been spending her nights in this area for some time, wrapped in horrors so intense they’d worn a crack in the barrier between the dreamsphere and terra firma and broken free. How could that be described as not living here?
She was a liar in addition to her other flaws. He was so not the right person for this job.
Zeke tilted his head toward the woman and tried the direct approach with Rhys. “You want? Bet there’ll be a big bonus.”
The big man held up his hands. “No can do. Vigils’ orders.”
“Excuse me,” the woman said. “Does he want what? Don’t ignore me. I’m right here.”
“I’ve got a tangible,” Zeke admitted. He wasn’t a great mentor. Never had been. He could have muddled through training an L3, but with this neo and a tangible he’d be courting disaster. A bonus would never be worth that. “It’s not looking good.”
Rhys studied the woman, who was watching them both suspiciously. If converted, she could be valuable for the Somnium. Rhys was no fool. He wouldn’t want to piss HQ off, but he knew what it meant that Zeke had a tangible. He also knew the rewards for bringing a high-level alucinator into the fold through mentorship and persuasion.
“I’ll consider it,” he said.
If Rhys said no, Zeke would enlist Lillian or Chang. Sean. Chloe, back at base. She could be here in under two hours. Until then, he’d keep doing what he could to ensure the dreamer hated him.
He turned to the woman and sneered. “If you don’t live here, why are you walking down this alley like mugger bait? Richmond might not be crime central, but it ain’t Candyland. Quit lying. You’re wasting our time. You live close enough to be familiar with this shortcut.”
She shrugged, her expression mulish. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“You been staying at a boyfriend’s? Girlfriend’s? Halfway house? I don’t give a crap. Just tell us.”
She hugged her purse and glowered. Zeke squinted at her fingers. No wedding band. He hoped that meant she lived alone. Fewer complications.
“Take us to the place you slept last night,” he demanded. “Now.”
“Thank you for the rescue,” she said, ignoring his order, and added, “if that’s what it was.”
Which part of them saving her neck had she missed? “It was.”
“Don’t you think we should let the professionals take over now?”
Zeke laughed. “We are the professionals.”
She pulled a face. “You’re the police?”
“No and we’re not the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines, either.”
“FBI,” she said. “CIA. Homeland Security.”
“Tell you what.” Zeke smacked snow and dirt off his jeans. “How about we leave you to it? Call the police, call the FBI. None of them will believe you. Trust me. We deal with this sort of thing on a regular basis. And while you’re waiting on your professionals, wraiths could murder anyone you live with and your neighbors.”
She drew in a quick breath. He’d struck home, all right.
“After that, they’ll circle around and find you. Only we won’t be here to help because you stupidly refused to cooperate.” Even as he tried to offend her, a horrifying thought crossed his mind. My God, if she had kids at home... “Come on, now. We don’t have time to debate whether this is reality TV. Where’s your house?”
She retrieved her cell phone from her pocketbook. Obviously he hadn’t struck home enough. “Why would the cops not believe me? Somebody tried to kill me. I don’t have to say it was vampires. Whose bodies disappeared.”
“Because bodies so often do that,” he said.
Her gaze skittered across the alley as if seeking a logical explanation. A poorly hidden corpse. A cameraman. She inched toward the street, tennis shoes scuffing the snow, and opened her phone. “Who are you people?”
“The people who saved your butt.” Zeke tossed her the pepper spray can, harder than necessary. She dropped her phone in the snow in her attempt to catch the can. “The people who’re gonna cure you of those bad dreams you’ve been having.”
She froze a moment bef
ore snatching her phone off the ground. He hoped it had broken so he wouldn’t have to confiscate it. The cops wouldn’t believe her, it was true, but the paperwork he’d have to file with HQ to eradicate police records was a pain in the ass.
“How do you know about my dreams?” Her eyes were wide beneath long lashes, but her expression was more suspicious than grateful to have been rescued from—literally—her worst nightmare. “Did you steal my files from my therapist?”
“No.” He lowered his chin and stared at her hard. “This is what we do. If you’d take us to your house, we can do the rest of what we do.”
“Not until you explain what’s going on.” She shoved her pepper spray into her handbag and inspected her phone. “If this is broken, you’re buying me a new one.”
“Your phone is the least of your worries. Do you live alone? Married? Kids?”
A shadow crossed her expression, but it wasn’t the shadow of a panicky parent. “That’s none of your business.”
She was going to be a hassle. She was already a hassle. He felt sorry for whoever ended up with her.
“Now that your dreams have materialized, it is our business, sweetheart.” As he’d intended, she bristled at the endearment. “You foresaw those vamps last night. We know it and you know it, so quit pussyfooting around. You have a lot of nightmares, and if you ask me, you watch too much TV.”
“I didn’t ask you.” But her face crumpled as she grasped the fact he was right about the vampires, and probably the other things.
“It’s going to be okay,” Rhys added, hopping in with an assist. His deep voice could soothe a crying infant despite his intimidating appearance—from his huge feet to his shiny brown skull. “We can explain everything and we can make it go away.”
Of course, it would go away at the expense of her naive beliefs that nightmares were imaginary. Nightmares were real. An untutored dreamer’s sleeping mind dragged wraiths out of the dreamsphere and loosed them in the physical realm to wreak havoc. That was why the Somnium existed, and had since ancient times.
They prevented the wraiths from overrunning the world. No matter how they had to do it.
“Maybe names would help. I’m Rhys Carr.” Rhys offered her a hand, which she shook. “The cranky one is Ezekiel Garrett. We call him Zeke.”
“Margaret. Maggie.” She didn’t offer a surname. Didn’t offer Zeke her hand, either.
“Now that we’ve gotten the introductions out of the way, can we go?” Zeke asked.
No amount of counselor training had drummed patience into Zeke, and right now he was torpedoing whatever manners he did possess. This woman had been attacked by the exact monsters she’d dreamed about and she couldn’t trust the people who’d saved her?
He gestured at the backs of the colorful old townhouses that lined the alley in this part of Richmond’s Fan district. “Which one is yours?”
Her hands shook as she flipped open her phone. Again. “We have to call the cops.”
The rest of the seven-member team returned, each one tough, athletic and bristling with weapons. They had to be in order to tackle the various forms wraiths assumed on terra firma.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” he asked harshly. “It’s your fault the monsters are here.” Not that a neo could have prevented it, but he had to jolt her out of her defensive cocoon.
The hand clutching her phone fell to her side. “My...my fault?”
“It’ll also be your fault when they come back. The next time you dream about monsters? They’ll be as real as these. But instead of having hours between dream and reality, they’ll be here as soon as you imagine them. Hey, if we let ’em eat you it would solve our problems.”
“Zeke’s giving you a hard time,” Lillian told a horrified Maggie. “We won’t let them eat you.”
When Lillian punctuated her statement by scraping wraith dust under her nails with a dagger, Maggie went from pale to pasty white. She snapped her phone shut and pressed her hand to her injured throat. “Oh God. It’s not going to stop, is it?”
To Zeke’s annoyance, her stunned expression woke his reluctant sympathies.
Yes, she’d been mouthy, ungrateful and uncooperative. He’d been right hateful, himself. But whatever had led her to this, whatever horrors she’d been experiencing on a nightly basis, would have twisted her existence into a living hell for weeks. Months. Living hells didn’t exactly inspire a person to behave with kindness and grace.
Nor did having one’s worldview shattered into a thousand unfixable shards.
“I did dream about this last night. Only I...I died.” Her volume increased as she stumbled unwillingly into the truth. “Vampires don’t exist. People in vampire masks don’t disintegrate into dust. This can’t be real. I’m asleep and this is another nightmare. I’m so tired of these nightmares.”
Hysteria colored her voice. Zeke didn’t like where this was headed. “You’re not asleep. Want me to pinch you?”
“I am asleep. I must be.” Panicked, she took off down the alley. His teammates looked to him expectantly.
“A runner. Fabulous. Guess I’ll handle it since you’re standing around like stumps.”
“She’s your neo, cowboy,” Lillian said. “Go fetch.”
With a grumble, Zeke went after Maggie. Because he’d endured rigorous physical conditioning and she presumably hadn’t, he reached her quickly. He grabbed her shoulder, yanked her around and kept her from falling when her momentum shifted.
“No.” She punched at him with the handbag, and something large and bulky inside whacked him in the nuts.
“Dammit.” Struggling to breathe through the pain, he held on tight. “Would you settle down? We ain’t the bad guys.”
“Let go of me.” Smacking, clawing, she landed several blows before he got her arms under control. Her knee flew toward his crotch and he blocked it with a thigh. The rest of the team wouldn’t interfere unless he asked them to.
He didn’t want to hurt her but he could use her reaction to his advantage.
Neo panic was tricky. Most mentors could calm them down with words, but not him. Once he’d pushed a neo into a lake to chill the guy’s hysteria. There was no lake in the alley and it was winter. Another time he’d shot a guy with a stun gun. Yeah, that wouldn’t play here. A third time he’d splatted a woman, Lillian, actually, in the face with a pie. She’d been working in a bakery; it had been handy.
So what about Maggie? What would get through to her while making her hate him more?
Something unexpected, something offensive, something that didn’t require any verbal prowess on his part.
He had the perfect solution.
He crowded her until their bodies bumped. He slid his hands to her bare neck, seeking skin contact to awaken the tie she wouldn’t understand yet. Slight pulsations from the tangible tickled his palms.
To her credit she didn’t scream or try to hit him, though her breathing accelerated. “What are you doing?”
“You’re under a shitload of stress,” he guessed. The tangible looped between them—back and forth, drawing them together like opposite poles of a magnet. “Bad dreams every night. Horrible things chasing you and everyone you know, with no way to escape. That right?”
“Yes,” she breathed. Her weight shifted out of attack mode.
“You’re low on sleep. You’re scared. I get it.” He licked his lips and her gaze dropped to his mouth. “If this was one of your nightmares, would this happen?”
He kissed her.
He wasn’t tentative and he wasn’t courteous. He immobilized her head, captured her lips, and swept his tongue into her mouth.
He’d expected resistance. He’d expected to go through the motions mechanically until her indignation overrode her panic.
What he got was heat.
Sexual awareness rose inside him like a flood. Part mystical bond, part untimely attraction—it reminded him how he’d already been inside her body, inside her mind. He tasted her sweetness and the bitter edge
of her fear. When she didn’t kick or bite, he deepened the kiss.
She responded with a tiny whimper, leaning into him. She sensed the connection too. How could she not? Its pull was hypnotic. She was high-level like he was. She had immense potential, which meant training her was critical. Dangerous.
As for him, this was the last time he’d ever touch her, so he made it worth his while.
Her body pressed against him and he grabbed her ass. Cold but cushy. God, she felt good. The tangible heightened everything. She’d notice his protective vest and the weapons stashed on his person through their coats.
He pulled her tighter, hoping she’d notice his growing erection too. That should really put her off.
Instead, she flicked his bottom lip with her tongue. Invited him to do more. Her hands crept up his shoulders to his neck. Her fingers were like ice but her mouth was hot and silky. He caressed the velvet of her cheeks and kissed her until she was limp and he was hard, and if he didn’t stop he wouldn’t be able to.
He wouldn’t be able to step away from the assignment.
He parted from her abruptly, leaving her lips swollen and her skin passion-flushed, visible even in the gloomy alley. The voltage of their contact ebbed.
His lust didn’t.
Shit.
None of his teammates commented. After the catastrophe in Harrisburg, Zeke hadn’t maintained his rank as sentry because he had great hair and uncanny aim. He was good. Lives depended on his experience. His instincts. Right now, lives depended on his convincing Maggie to cooperate.
Had he done it? Why hadn’t she smacked him? Good God, he ought to be smacked for groping her that way.
She raised a shaky hand to her mouth, touched her lips, and exhaled slowly. “That was rude. Zeke.”
The way she said his name did nothing to soften his cock. His erection chafed his jeans.
“Does that happen in your nightmares?” he repeated. It sure didn’t happen in his.
“No.” She couldn’t meet his stare. “Is everything I dream real?”
“Just the dreams that feel different.” A neo would understand that. “Like last night.”
Tangible (Dreamwalker) Page 2