by Jody Wallace
A deepened link meant increased physical contact. Bad idea. Even when he was all business, teaching her the ropes, he knew he could get distracted by her…
She slipped her hands inside his T-shirt and started tugging it over his head.
He batted at her. “Now wait a minute. Hey, Maggie, come on.”
“You’re like a rock. The dreamsphere flows around you instead of pushing you. I want to feel that secure. I need more skin contact.”
He should protest, but when her cool, soft hands reached his pecs, damned if he didn’t lift his arms over his head and help her. She caressed his chest and shoulders, a frown on her face, as if deciding the best place to touch him for enhanced linkage.
Oh, he could tell her, all right, and it wasn’t in her damn textbooks.
She pressed her forearms and palms against his skin, her fingers at his collarbone. The tangible susurrated between them. He’d gotten so used to it, he hadn’t noticed until it susurrated down his pants.
Ah, hell.
They were clothed below the belt, so an erection shouldn’t matter. For the link.
It would matter a lot for their professional relationship if she knew he still lusted after her.
Maggie licked her lips, staring at his chest, not his mouth. Thank God. She wasn’t thinking of kissing him. Probably. The contact helped her focus, like it would anyone. The wraith odor faded—proof it was working. The walls widened. Their safe zone buoyed as if it were on the gentle swells of the ocean.
“Good effort. Smells better.” Zeke started to relax. He clasped her upper arms with his bare hands, angling his wrists to increase the square inches of contact area.
Then she asked a bad, bad question.
“Remember the time you took my nightgown off me because you needed to touch more skin?”
“I remember it was stupid.” It had been their first night together—before he’d shut her out. They’d gotten overly friendly in the terra firma.
He recalled other things too. The taste of her lips. The feel of her heavy breasts in his hands. The sweetness of her skin.
“I didn’t understand about skin contact then. I do now.” Maggie inched closer. “This calms me. I don’t think I’ve ever held a shield this long.”
It wasn’t calming him. She was about six inches from getting her ass grabbed.
“Widen the shield,” he ordered. If he broke her concentration, it would disrupt what seemed to be rekindling between them. At certain levels of intimacy, because they had a tangible she’d be able to do more than hear his mindspeech.
“Not yet.” Her fingers toyed with the hair at the back of his neck.
Dammit. He loved it when a woman buried her fingers in his hair. Hated anybody else touching it, but a lover? Oh, yeah. Sparks of sensation prickled through his scalp.
“You get a B+,” he said. She wasn’t his lover. She was his student. “Go for extra credit. Widen it.”
“No, I want to see how long I can hold it.” She leaned her torso against him. Not hips, just torso. “We have, what, two more hours before wake-up?”
Fuck. Her nipples were hard. It wasn’t cold in here.
“I gave you an order.”
She smiled. “This isn’t a crisis situation. I’m not obligated to obey.”
He sensed a trace of her triumph. Was it because she was maintaining the shield so well? Because she was winning the argument?
Either way, he shouldn’t be this close to her. It was too personal. If he could read her triumph, she could read his emotions. She was going to sense how much he wanted to ditch their chaperone and have his dirty, dirty way with her.
“Did they tell you about the Antipodes scroll in history class yet?” he asked a little desperately. When in doubt, divert her with nerd trivia. “From 900 AD or something. It’s a moldy old book or paper or some crap that we think describes another kind of alucinator. A bellatorix. A warrior who could dispatch wraiths in the dreamsphere.”
“I didn’t see that on the list of known skills.” She snuggled. It had been so long since they’d been this close. He could barely keep his hands motionless. “I’m sure it’s something else I wouldn’t be able to do.”
“Some of our archivists insist it’s translated wrong. Ancient, uh, dialect, uh. Something. Fuck, I’m not a linguist. Doesn’t matter. It’s basically a fairy tale. In trance state, wraiths attack bodily and you have to be ready for…”
Shit, was he really going to do this just so she wouldn’t find out he had a hard-on?
She rubbed his neck with her thumbs. She didn’t need to rub him to keep their link strong. “Be ready for what?”
Yeah. He was going to do this.
Zeke shifted his weight and flung her sideways. She squealed. The shield wobbled and stretched to accommodate them both.
It held. Somehow. She skidded off nothing—mind over matter.
“Sudden shifts of momentum,” he mindspoke loudly over her cursing.
She bounced up and came after him. The shields widened so she’d have room—and she was doing it. She was shielding.
“And dodging,” he added. “Dodging is good.”
He evaded several physical attacks. While wraiths couldn’t affect dreamers in the sphere, dreamers could affect each other to some extent. When she missed an opportunity to sucker punch him, the shields vibrated. The wraiths outside started swirling like black vomit.
“Maintain the barrier, Mags.” He sparred with her like they did in hand-to-hand. Caught her fists against his palms. “Concentrate. Mind over…”
The bubble popped.
Wraiths swarmed him like giant, greasy locusts. The stench invaded Zeke’s pores. He bit back a heave. With their blackness engulfing him, he couldn’t see shit. Not a fucking thing. Where was Maggie? He sensed her far-off conduit—locked down—but didn’t have eyes on her. The monsters couldn’t hurt her, but she had to be panicking by now, and…
An invisible wall shoved him back. He ripped through the disgusting fabric of the wraiths and landed on his ass. No pain because there was nothing under him. He squinted into the sphere and realized it wasn’t as gloomy as it had been. He could make out a dark, swarming globule, wraiths darting and shoving and hissing and…leaving him alone.
Inside that globule? Through their tenuous link, he realized Maggie was maintaining her shield. Keeping herself safe.
She’d kicked his ass out of her shield on purpose.
Hot damn!
Chapter Three
Zeke woke to hands throttling him. Not hard enough to cut off his air, but hard enough that it annoyed him.
He reached up. A warm, soft body evaded his arms, and a knee threatened him between the legs. Forcing himself not to respond, he blinked until his vision cleared from sleep.
Maggie, her curly, dark hair springing all over her head like a Medusa, glared down at him.
“If you do that to me again, I swear, I’ll wake up before you and shave you bald,” she said.
“Jesus Christ, Maggie.” God, he hoped he didn’t pop a boner on her knee. Her body randomly had that effect on him no matter how mad she was. “This is not how I wanna start the day. Get off.”
His student didn’t seem as pleased as he’d been that she’d kicked him out of her shield, maintained it, and deserted him in the dreamsphere last night. Her anger or stubbornness or general Maggieness had motivated her to impressive levels of achievement.
Heather stretched in the office chair where she’d spend the past five point five hours. “Trouble in paradise?”
“This is nobody’s definition of paradise.” Maggie hopped out of bed. Her bare feet smacked the tiles.
Even when alucinators remained conscious in dreamspace, they received sufficient rest. Alucinators rebooted quicker, actually, than folks who didn’t enter the sphere. They tended to be healthier too. Even the couchers. I
t freed staff physicians to concentrate on coma, trauma and injuries, not shit like cancer and diabetes.
Zeke couldn’t complain. He never got sick, healed fast and didn’t scar easy. Then again, who was to say he’d have been different if he’d never turned dreamer?
Maggie opened the door to Zeke’s room and spoke to the guard. “I’m awake now. Thanks for your service.”
He heard the guard murmur something polite—people weren’t openly hostile to Maggie. She responded.
Heather removed her Kevlar, stood, and stretched again. Her breasts thrust out as she worked out the kinks. They weren’t real big, but it was obvious she had on no bra.
Maggie always wore a brassiere. Said she had to keep the “girls” in line. He’d overheard her bitching to Lillian the other day about having to double up on sports bras for combat training. That explained why she hadn’t been as…bouncy.
Hell, yeah, he’d looked.
“You missing that thirty minutes of sleep?” Heather asked him with a smile. She walked across the room toward his bed.
“I’m fine.” He stared at her face so he wouldn’t give her the wrong idea. He was a tits guy, but he was fixated on Maggie’s tits these days.
The air from the overhead vents chilled his bare shoulders and chest. Their base wasn’t state of the art, but it sufficed. It was defensible and well disguised. That was what really mattered.
“You look fine. In good shape, I mean.” Heather glanced down his torso, maybe admiring his body, maybe his ink. Alucinators weren’t restricted from sexual relationships once they graduated. It wasn’t as if they had the opportunity to meet anybody else, and they couldn’t confide in civilians what the hell they did for a living.
Heather was nice-looking and single, but he wasn’t interested.
Dismissing the guard, Maggie slammed the room door. Heather froze as if caught doing something she shouldn’t.
“I’m off to bed.” Heather cast him one last glance as if she couldn’t help herself. Shit. She was checking him out. “When do you, ah, get a free day, Zeke?”
“When my ball and chain advances from phase one,” he said jokingly. He’d found it easiest to sidestep dates by being an asshole. Surely no woman would want to get involved with a guy who referred to another female as a ball and chain?
Maggie’s cheeks reddened. “Go to hell.”
Crap. He might have pissed off the wrong woman. He had to sleep with Maggie, and she’d threatened to scalp him.
He revised his statement. “Maggie did good last night. I wouldn’t be surprised if she reaches phase two in the next week.”
“Really? That’s great.” Heather didn’t even glance at Maggie, just kept watching Zeke. “If you want to catch up on a TV program or something, Rhys said you watch that show about zombies. I do too, but I’m behind half a season.”
Somnium bases recorded huge numbers of television programs and movies for the couchers, who analyzed pop culture and searched for patterns. Neonati, when they first woke, tended to create whatever monsters they’d seen on the screen or read about. Maggie’s thing had been Whedon vamps before she’d learned what wraiths really were. Now the scariest things to her, as with all experienced alucinators, were simply wraiths.
Couchers aside, all Somnium employees were encouraged to brush up on pop culture between missions. Homework that didn’t suck.
“That show’s a gore-fest.” Zeke was careful not to tell Heather yes or no. “Maggie, you watch that one?”
She opened his closet door, where her practice gear hung alongside his. Neither one of them had much stuff, and half the space was empty. “I don’t like gore.”
“I do,” Heather assured him. “Sex, violence, and rock and roll.”
“I believe it’s sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” Maggie corrected, sounding like the professor she used to be.
“I don’t do drugs,” Heather said with a shrug. “Anyway, Zeke, I’d rather watch it with somebody than alone, so let me know.”
“You bet.” If pressed, he’d tell Heather he didn’t have time. As offers went, a TV date was easier to dodge than a woman simply asking if he wanted to fuck. That was hard to refuse.
After Heather left, Maggie slammed the closet door the same way she’d slammed the door to the room.
“What are your drawers in a wad about?” He specifically said drawers, not panties, so she wouldn’t yell at him for being sexist.
She kind of laughed. Truth was, he could think of a number of reasons for her to be pissed, but he wasn’t about to bring any of them up.
One thing for sure, she wasn’t jealous of Heather. Maggie might feel some pull toward him because of the tangible, but she didn’t like him anymore.
He’d made sure of it.
“As if you didn’t know,” she said.
“I don’t.”
“You’re a shitty teacher.”
So, this particular huff was directed at what he’d done in the dreamsphere. Maybe. Women—hell, humans—didn’t always say what they meant. “I wasn’t lying when I told Heather you improved. That makes me a good teacher.”
“That makes me a good student. You could still be shitty teacher.”
“You are a decent student,” he agreed, “except for the fact you’re slow as molasses. That thing you did with your shield? Pushing me out, walking away, locking me out of it? Smooth. But you should have been able to do it four weeks ago.”
She stared at the ceiling. “Lord grant me the strength not to strangle him.”
“Again,” he corrected. “Strangle me again. You already did once today.”
“I can’t possibly get my own bed too soon. Maybe you’re the one who needs to step up.”
“Maybe we both do.” He liked going to sleep beside her, waking up beside her. He liked the faint, sweet smell of her vanilla shampoo on his sheets and his spare pillow. He liked knowing it would be the two of them alone in the dreamsphere—harmonious in a way they weren’t in the terra firma. But he’d boost her to phase two and out of his bed in a heartbeat. He prayed it would ease his sexual frustration.
She draped plain blue sweats over her arm—the sweats that clung to her ass in a way he shouldn’t notice—and fetched her mesh bag of toiletries from the top of her hamper. Some employees wore standard issue gray for physical training, while some preferred their own clothes. When Maggie picked yoga pants and a tank top, it was hard to keep his brain above his belt.
“Would you rather share your bed with someone else?” she asked. “Someone in particular?”
“No, you’re more than…” Wait a minute. She was glaring at him. Was he wrong? Was she jealous? “What are you trying to say?”
She arched a brow. “You’ve told me a thousand times you don’t want to mentor anybody. Once I’m gone, you either have to take on students or lose the room. Bunk rooms make privacy iffy.” While some alucinators commuted, most opted for the convenience of living at the base or waystation where they worked.
“I won’t lose my room. I can pull rank over nearly everyone here.” They’d let him keep the room after the Karen fiasco—with the implicit understanding he’d one day return to training. If his lame-ass job on Maggie exempted him from taking students, he might indeed lose his space.
Well, shit. He liked this mattress.
“The room’s for mentoring, not for status.” Sometimes Maggie reminded Zeke of that brainy girl from the kid wizard movies. The know-it-all. “You’ll have to bunk with the rest of us chumps if you aren’t training neonati.”
“I train neos every day. I teach, what, five classes?” He was in charge of hand-to-hand groups at various levels and sometimes weaponry and field tactics. Not that he was the only trainer for those areas, but they were his specialties.
“Mentoring,” she said. “If you’re not bed-sharing with a phase one on a regular basis, you’ll
lose the room.”
“Maybe not. Nobody else needs a private room right now,” he said. “Only L4s and L5s can mentor, and they’re all set. I’m safe till your brother graduates. He could be ready for students in a few months. Unlike you.”
Her glare returned. They hadn’t even had breakfast, and she was attacking him…while he was responding as jerkily as he knew how. She was going to come after him hard in the four AM hand-to-hand class.
He’d need to be careful she didn’t strain something. Two months of PT had increased her stamina, strengthened her muscles and trimmed her down a little. Not too much, thank God. She was still soft and pretty. But she hit like a cat. Quick, all claws, surface damage only. She might never be a front line field agent.
Fine by him. He didn’t like to think of her facing monsters out on the streets. He just hoped she picked a job besides couch potato. They tended to ship couchers off to a couple facilities in California, and…
And Adi and the other vigils had already mentioned assigning Maggie to the opposite side of the country. It didn’t matter if she picked a job she could do from the East Coast base. He wasn’t going to be able to see her after he trained her.
She lifted her chin. Though it was approaching eleven PM, when most people were hitting the sack, she looked sharp, well rested, and full of piss and vinegar. That bruise from combat training barely showed on her arm. “I’m out of here.”
“Aren’t we going to discuss how you did what you did with your shield?” He clambered out of bed and grabbed a T-shirt off the floor. Sniffed it. Not too awful. He kept talking to her through the material as he slid it on. “Think you can repeat it? What’d you do different?”
When his head emerged through the neck, she was watching him with complete exasperation on her face.
“What?” he asked. “Those are legitimate questions.”
“I guess we’ll find out next sleep when I kick you out of my shield again,” she said before stalking out of his room.
Around five AM the next day, Sean, an L4 orator on loan from the Aussie division, motioned to Zeke from the doorway of the dojo. When Zeke joined him, he didn’t waste any time. As soon as they were out of earshot, he said, “Got a code three ping for you, mate.”
