Hunted

by Dean Murray

  Chapter 8

  Between finding out that Cindi had the hots for Tristan, the stress of cheering at my first game, and the thrill of being saved by Jackson, I went to bed without even considering that I might have another of the crazy dreams that had been plaguing me lately.

  I was tired enough that I dropped off to sleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. My dreams started off normal. I was in the middle of finding out that I'd forgotten to study for a test in my history class when the classroom suddenly changed.

  It took me a second to figure out what was different. At first it was just a subtle change in the amount of light in the room, but it continued to grow as I tapped my pencil on my desk. It wasn't just that there was more light in the room, the light seemed to almost be coming out of the people.

  It was eerie enough that I looked around the room in an effort to see if anything else had changed. I almost missed it, but the corner furthest from the door was slightly blurry. It was like I was looking at it through a dirty pane of glass.

  That was one oddity too much and I realized that this had to be another dream. I pinched myself to try to confirm my suspicion, but contrary to what I was expecting the pinch hurt.

  I hadn't taken my eyes off of the corner for nearly a full minute now and I distantly heard my teacher asking me if everything was okay. I was desperately scouring my memories. I didn't think that I remembered getting ready for school that morning, but it was hard to be sure. Every morning at my house was pretty much identical to every other morning.

  "Adriana, is everything okay?"

  I looked away from the corner to answer my teacher and I realized that the desk was in a different place than it had been when I'd entered the class. It had to be a dream, but it felt too real. I needed more time; I needed a second to think without everyone badgering me.

  I opened my mouth to respond and realized that everyone had stopped moving. I'd wanted time, wanted people to stop and they had. I was surrounded by a classroom full of other kids, but it looked like a wax museum.

  The way that everyone had frozen in place was creepy, but the silence bothered me even more. It felt wrong to be in a classroom, surrounded by people, and not hear a single sound other than my own breathing.

  I looked back up to the corner of the room where I'd noticed the odd light distortion, but it was gone. The corner looked just like it should, but I could still feel a presence in the room that I couldn't explain. I turned in my chair, looking for the source of my unease.

  I found it in the empty desk two rows over from me. It was shaped differently now, more like a person, but still almost impossible to see. That wasn't the only change. It was less like a dirty pane of glass now and more like the disturbance in the air that you can see on a cold day when you look along a dark wall that the sun has been shining on for a few hours.

  The distortion moved slightly and I somehow knew it was staring at me.

  "I can see you. I know that you are there."

  The words came out evenly and with more confidence than I actually felt. I'd had scores of safe, normal dreams, but both times that I'd run into something odd like this before I'd been sure I was going to die. I had an uneasy feeling that this was going to be another one of the dangerous dreams.

  Nothing happened for a couple of seconds and then the air flickered and the tiny Native American man from my skyscraper dream came into view.

  "How did you pull me out of my rest?"

  It wasn't until I heard how tired his voice was that I realized how worn down he looked. The bags under his eyes and the odd color to his skin would have been concerning all by themselves, but there were bandages visible just past his sleeves and at his collar too. He'd obviously been in some kind of massive accident, or possibly a fight.

  Honestly he looked like he should still be in a hospital, but that wasn't the most unsettling thing of all. I could see some kind of golden light leaking out of him. It was pretty faint where he was uninjured and it was super strong in a couple of spots on his chest, which I was pretty sure meant that he'd taken some serious injuries there.

  "I don't know. Lately things just happen when I dream. I don't have any control over it."

  He frowned at me. "It's not safe for you to be doing this. These injuries weren't sustained in the real world; they were sustained in dreams just like this one. You can be killed in a dream just as easily as in the real world, more easily in some ways."

  I hadn't forgotten the way that he'd tried to kill me the last time I'd seen him. He didn't look particularly threatening now, but I knew that there was some kind of monster hiding inside of him.

  "It's not like I have a choice about this or anything. It just happens."

  His color looked like it was getting worse.

  "You're angry that I threw you into the wall the last time we spoke."

  "Yeah, that's a safe bet. Also I'm a little confused as to why you're all chummy this time around after being so scary the last time."

  "I wasn't trying to hurt you. It wasn't safe for you there; I was trying to send you back to your own mind."

  "By killing me?"

  "By shocking you, by weakening your grip on that reality in the hopes that you would naturally fall back into your own reality."

  There was something else there he wasn't telling me. "You weren't positive it was going to work, were you?"

  Was it my imagination or was his breathing becoming more shallow? I was almost positive that something had changed there.

  "No, I wasn't. It's become obvious to me that your gift works differently than mine. At the time it was only a suspicion, but I've been searching for you since our last encounter and haven't been able to sense even the slightest trace of your dreams. That's never happened before."

  "So you did something that you knew might kill me?"

  "I had no choice. If Kaleb had found you he would have killed you. I nearly didn't escape myself. You would have had no chance of staying out of his clutches."

  "So teach me. You say that our powers are different, but there must be some commonality between them."

  "You're wearing your own form, I can see that much, but that doesn't mean that you're as harmless as you appear."

  I looked down at myself. I'd never even considered that I might be able to look like someone else while I was dreaming.

  "I don't understand."

  The light leaking out of his chest seemed to be getting stronger. It was oddly beautiful, but I suspected that it meant he was getting weaker, that his real body had started bleeding again.

  "I can usually tell when someone is trying to project something other than their real form. There is a haziness about them."

  "That's how I knew you were there earlier. It looked like an empty corner, but there was a weird kind of distortion in the air."

  "Indeed. It's a sign that your gift is strong, potentially stronger even than mine. You need training. Tell me your name and where you live. I'll come to you as soon as I'm healed enough to travel."

  I shook my head. "I'm not telling you anything of the sort. You're some kind of monster and I'd be stupid to just blindly trust you. Teach me what you can now and the next time we meet you can teach me a little more."

  "I'd be just as much of a fool to teach you what I knew without first verifying that you are not more than you seem to be. There's not even any guarantee that we'll run into each other again."

  I wasn't normally very good about standing up for myself, but this was different. The stakes this time were huge.

  "I'm not telling you where I live."

  "Give me a name then. Trust is a two-way street. We both must risk at least a little if we're going to start earning each other's trust."

  "Fine, my name is Adri. It's your turn now—teach me something useful, something that will keep me alive."

  He didn't look happy. Actually it was worse than that, it was like he didn't appreciate being told what to do and was having to bite back a response that would have esca
lated things.

  "Very well. Escaping a dream is all about letting go of the alternate version of reality that you or someone else has created. To leave you need to focus on the real world and let what you're seeing in the dream become less real. For me this takes the form of a kind of misty impermanence. It may be different for you."

  He paused for a moment before asking his follow-up question. "What state do you live in?"

  My insides tightened up. Every piece of information I gave out put him that much closer to finding me. How many Adri's were there in the United States? A thousand? Ten thousand maybe? Of those, how many were my age and blonde? If I told him that I lived in Minnesota that would drop the number down into the hundreds or maybe even a few dozen. He probably didn't have access to any government databases. That would make things harder for him, but still it seemed like too big of a concession on my part.

  "No, that's too much. Ask me something else."

  I was sure it wasn't my imagination this time. His fists clenched hard enough they turned white and it almost looked like he was shaking. I needed to be more careful how I responded to him from here on out. I didn't want to push him over the edge.

  "Fine. Have you run into anyone else in your dreams since your power awakened who was like you or me, someone who seemed in control of their environment? Someone who noticed you, interacted with you in a way that indicated that they knew you were more than just part of the scenery of their dream?"

  "Is that important?"

  "Answer the question or we're done here."

  His voice came out low, lower than mere anger could account for. It had an almost bestial edge to it.

  "Yes. There was someone—a woman, I think. I mean she was a woman, but she might have been projecting a different appearance and I just didn't know. She was fast, really, really fast. She wanted to know who I was and when I didn't tell her she started choking me. The weirdest thing was that just before I passed out she sent these odd tendrils towards my face."

  "You're going to need to be careful. Supernatural creatures are going to be drawn to you, or maybe you to them, I'm not sure which. It will start out as just dream encounters, but some of them will come hunting you if you give them enough information to track you down."

  It took me a couple of tries to get my voice to work. "If that's true then I don't have much of a chance. I don't even know enough to figure out which parts of my dreams are just normal dreams and which parts are something else. Something nasty could just pretend to be part of my dream, blending in until I let something important slip."

  "Exactly, that's why I'm trying to convince you to let me come teach you. The safest thing right now is for you to be moving around. If you don't spend more than a day or two in any one part of the country then even creatures that learn more about you than you'd like won't have a chance to act on their knowledge before you've relocated."

  I shook my head. "I'm sorry, I want to trust you, I really do, but I'm not going to take that risk. Is there a way to detect other people inside of my dreams?"

  He frowned but nodded. "You control your own dreams which means that you can flush people out fairly easily. Change something big about your surroundings and you'll usually notice any intruders. Freezing everyone suddenly like you did earlier works, as does changing your environment. If you go from outside to inside or inside to outside, often times you'll see someone stumble as the ground underneath them literally moves. The same strategy works to a lesser extent inside of someone else's dreams."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You can't control the whole dream like you can your own, but if your will is strong enough then you can change some aspects of it. If you find yourself in a dream and are unable to make a large global change to it then you know you're in someone else's dream and you must be careful. Leave if you can, or if that isn't a possibility then you need to try to blend in as much as possible."

  His shake had pretty much disappeared, but he was looking weaker by the second. He coughed and I got the feeling that it wasn't something that had happened here in the dream, or rather not just here in the dream. He'd coughed because his dream body had been forced to mirror his physical body.

  "I don't have very much longer. Being in the dream burns up energy that I can't spare, at least not right now, not with my current injuries. If you're going to tell me how to find you then now is the time to do so, otherwise I'll let you ask one more question as a show of good faith in case we do ever meet up again."

  There wasn't any two ways about it. I panicked. I knew so little about this business of sharing people's dreams that I didn't even know what I didn't know, didn't have any idea of what I should be asking. The sheer importance of the next few seconds threw me into a kind of paralysis and I couldn't think of a single question about the dream that I thought might keep me alive if I ran into something as dangerous as he'd indicated I would.

  "I want to know about that guy you were spying on. Kaleb. I want to know about him."

  The question had just kind of tumbled out of my mouth. It had been driven by nothing more sinister than the feeling I'd had back when I'd first seen Kaleb, the impression that he looked familiar. Not like I'd ever seen him or anything, but he was related to someone who was somehow important to me, someone who had been missing from my life.

  I'd thought the question a pretty harmless one, but he lunged to his feet. Pieces of the desk he'd been sitting in went flying across the room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a couple of my classmates disappear as shrapnel tore through them, but most of my attention was focused on the massive creature that had replaced the Native American between one heartbeat and the next.

  "Did he send you? Did Kaleb put you up to this in an attempt to find out what I've learned?"

  I fell out of my desk, scrambling backwards on all fours as he stalked towards me.

  "I don't know Kaleb. I just asked because he reminds me of someone else!"

  The creature's wickedly long claws were fully extended now and he sliced through desks and people with equal abandon as he crossed the last few feet towards me. My back hit the wall and I suddenly realized that I didn't have anywhere else to go. I tried to make the wall disappear—it was my dream and he'd just finished telling me that I should be able to control my surroundings, but it was almost like there was an unseen pressure holding the wall in place.

  He took one final step forward and picked me up by the throat again. With the transformation to his beast form the bandages had disappeared, but the glowing slashes across his chest hadn't gone anywhere. In this form they were actually bigger and bleeding more light than they had before.

  As the pressure around my neck grew to the point where I couldn't breathe I did the only thing I could think of. I tried to focus on the real world, tried to push the dream away, but it was like there was something holding me there, some unseen wind that pressed me back against the wall.

  I pushed harder with my mind and then suddenly the wind stuttered and the Native American started to disappear. That was all I needed to tear myself free of the dream, but I was pretty sure that he hadn't let me go voluntarily. The wounds and the energy he'd expended in an effort to keep me there had simply been too much for him to sustain.

  I was pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to escape if his concentration hadn't wavered there at the end.

  Chapter 9

  I was undeniably jumpy the next morning. I didn't seem to have any of the physical signs of nearly dying for the third time while dreaming. My neck wasn't bruised or anything, but when I climbed out of bed my gray pajama pants slid down off of my hips as soon as my feet touched the floor.

  I grabbed my pants, pulling them back up before they hit the floor and then went to retie the drawstring, but it turned out that it hadn't ever come undone. I always tied my bottoms so they were pretty loose, but I was sure that when I'd gone to bed that the pants had been plenty tight enough not to fall down on me like that.

  I crept into the bathroom and loo
ked at myself in the full-length mirror on the door. Cindi had been going on about the fact that I'd been losing weight for long enough that I'd finally started to believe her, but I was still shocked by what I saw in the mirror.

  Cindi was right, I'd been losing weight for a few weeks now, but the process had accelerated. When I'd looked down at myself during the dream with the Native American I'd seen a body that was still a little on the plump side, but the reality was that I'd lost nearly all of the baby fat that had hounded me for so many years. I was as skinny as any of the other cheerleaders, as skinny as Cindi even. I wanted to say that it was inexplicable, but I knew that wasn't the case.

  The Native American had given me the answer, probably without even realizing that he was doing so. Being in other people's dreams was burning up so much energy that the calories taken in during the course of the day weren't keeping up. It was incredible, but no more so than the fact that I was sharing dreams with people I'd never met in real life.

  I untied my pants and then retied them again, tightly enough this time that they wouldn't fall off my ever skinnier hips. Having the drawstring that tight bunched the fabric around my waist up, which made me frown. These pants were one of the newest articles of clothing I owned. I'd purchased them a few weeks ago after I started slimming down. If they now fit this badly then I was in trouble. The rest of my clothes were going to be even worse.

  My fears were proved out when I started getting dressed half an hour later. My 'skinny' jeans were in the dirty clothes hamper and I had to hold up the next best option, a pair of shorts, with one hand to keep them from sliding down while I hunted through my half of the closet for a belt.

  By the time Cindi came out of the shower I was on my third belt and I was starting to lose hope. None of my belts were small enough. So far all of the ones that I'd tried, even on their tightest hole, were too big to keep my pants from falling down.

  "Can I borrow a belt, Cindi?"