Disciple: DreamWalkers, Book 2

by Jody Wallace

  “No.”

  Her hand clutched his harder. “What?”

  “You can get yourself there.” Zeke stared at the ceiling instead of her, though he wanted to memorize her profile, her lips, her eyelashes. “You’re close. I don’t know if I’ve been teaching you so much as watching you teach yourself.”

  “Huh?”

  She sounded mostly asleep. He wanted to pull her into his arms and comfort her. Or did he want to comfort himself? Tomorrow he had to allow Karen into his life and his dreams. He had to be around her. Touch her. The woman he’d discovered in the dreamsphere had been weak, frightened and twitchy, the opposite of the old Karen. But she was still manipulating the situation—whether to ditch the monsters she claimed were intelligent or achieve some other goal, he didn’t know.

  He wanted nothing to do with her. As shitty as it was, he wished she was dead. “Maggie, I’m not happy about tomorrow.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.” She released a long sigh. Her grip went limp.

  Zeke swallowed hard. “I want to keep sharing my bed with you. Not her. I think you can hit phase two, but I’ll miss this.”

  She didn’t respond. Already asleep, as he should be. Every minute he spent awake was a minute he wasn’t with Maggie.

  The dreamsphere, as far as Zeke knew, didn’t heal wounds, but one’s physical condition didn’t necessarily transfer over.

  Maggie latched on to him as soon as he entered the sphere. The dreamsphere had revitalized her. She was no longer worn out and distracted. Despite the smoky grayness of the sleep sphere, her eyes were as bright as he’d ever seen them, and she crackled with restrained energy.

  She’d beaten him here. Wraiths gathered, a pool of black. She shoved her arm through his and bumped him with her shoulder. “Raise your shield, pokey.”

  “You do it. You shielded for over an hour the last time we slept. Longer if you count the time before you kicked me out.”

  Cross, she threw up a wobbly barrier. It would suffice—here. She wouldn’t be able to protect herself in the trance sphere with it. If it turned out Maggie’s shield duration didn’t last the regulation six hours, Lill could hopefully orate with her. Offer moral support. Pop out and wake her if Karen so much as looked at her in the sphere.

  He wasn’t abandoning Maggie.

  He was following orders.

  He was going to wrap up Karen’s situation as fast as he could.

  “I’ll shield for now, but we need to talk.” She speared him with those bright eyes. They were dressed in the exact clothing they’d worn to bed. Her in an old flannel gown and him in boxers.

  He was so used to wearing imaginary clothing in dreamspace, he felt exposed.

  “Yes, we do need to talk. About how you’re going to shield us the whole time we’re training so I won’t worry…” He slid free of her arm. He needed to maintain distance between them since he wouldn’t be here to supplement her tomorrow. She had to ace this. “I don’t want you to screw up.”

  “Forget that.” Maggie grabbed him again, but she didn’t seem to be exploiting their tangible to enhance a shield. She had both hands on his arms, staring up at him. “I saw you and Karen in the sphere.”

  He knew she’d attempted to access the sphere, as Adi had ordered, and had no reason to distrust her. “Why didn’t you respond when I called you?”

  “I did. I was standing beside your shield, yelling like an idiot. I could hear all three of you, Adi included, so as a side note—my oration abilities have improved.”

  “Any idea why we couldn’t sense you?” Zeke asked, though it was a stupid question. Maggie was no curator, capable of camouflaging herself in the sphere, and she’d had no reason to do so anyway.

  “None. Trust me, it was frustrating.”

  “Karen said the wraiths were hiding you.” There was no doubt something unusual had happened. Not that he wanted to believe Karen, but if the wraiths had been hiding Maggie’s signature, they could have hidden her conduit. In fact, they could have hidden Karen’s conduit—the conduit that would have allowed her to launch the wraith attack.

  But if Karen had possessed a conduit, she wouldn’t have remained quietly in a coma for over a year.

  “Karen also said wraiths have high IQs and a leader who wanted to kidnap me. Yet here I am.”

  “If you heard that, I guess you weren’t in and out really fast and that’s why we didn’t notice you?” he asked hopefully.

  “I was there fifteen to twenty minutes, dreamsphere time. Until Karen told you I was lost and to pray I was dead. Remember that?”

  “I knew she was lying.” While Karen had seemed desperate enough to be honest, he had to wonder whether anything Karen said was worth shit.

  “Lying or mistaken. I’d go with lying, all things considered.” Maggie pulled a face. “After she said that, I fumbled my shield and had to evacuate. I guess her prayer didn’t come true. I’m not dead.”

  Maggie, now that she had his full attention, dropped her hands from his arms. Her shield quivered as the wraiths’ inky blackness pressed the walls.

  “Careful.” He raised a second barrier to bolster her. Training could wait while they discussed this.

  Maggie heaved a sigh. “Thanks.”

  Zeke thought about all the things Karen had said about Maggie. When Karen had provided him with details she shouldn’t have known, like about Hayden, he’d begun to worry. He’d faltered. And he’d awoken to a code one.

  A code one Karen had warned them Maggie was responsible for.

  “At any point while you were tranced in, did you scream for your brother?” he asked her.

  “Why would I yell for him? He’s in Virginia.” Maggie shook her head slowly, like she couldn’t believe he’d ask another stupid question. “Believe it or not, I yelled for you. Fat lot of good that did me.”

  “She said you called for Hayden.”

  “Zeke, come on.” Maggie crossed her arms. “She knew I was there. Looked right at me. How much of her crap are you going to swallow? You think the wraiths were using me or hiding me? You think she’s a poor, sick alucinator, a victim of the wraiths’ evil plans? You think I’m the next weakling on their agenda?”

  Zeke studied Maggie. No, he’d never call her weak. Stubborn, sometimes irritable, and a touch bigheaded—but not to the point of weakness. Shield excepted. “I don’t trust Karen, and I don’t think you’re weak.”

  “That’s a start.” Maggie scratched the back of her head for a minute, her body language awkward. She stared at an area near his bare knees. “The way you were hugging her, it looked like you trusted her. Is your tangible so strong you couldn’t resist? Might I point out, you have no trouble resisting me.”

  Maggie had no idea how hard it was to resist her—or why he’d been forced to touch Karen. The woman had flung herself at him as soon as he’d located her. Every time he tried to extract himself from the sobbing octopus, she’d collapsed. He hadn’t been able to get any coherent explanations out of her until he’d held her upright and waited for her to calm the hell down. The tangible had been intact, but it hadn’t felt like his connection with Maggie.

  It had been more like a boathook in his gut than his magnets attracted to her magnets. Karen made him feel queasy and unsettled.

  “You sound jealous,” he told Maggie. She’d kissed him in the SUV. She’d wanted him for the space of five minutes. Momentary lapse or true sentiment?

  Her lips tightened. “I’m uncomfortable at the thought of you exposing yourself to her. The tangible could influence you. You’ve lectured me on that for months. You and I have been careful, and you weren’t careful when you were training her the first time. I’m not criticizing or rehashing your past. It’s simply a fact.”

  “She’s a different person than you.” Zeke had fallen into a dumb, sexual relationship with Karen, but he hadn’t initiated it. He hadn’t eve
n been that attracted to her at first. Maggie, on the other hand, had turned his crank since the moment he’d met her.

  That, however, was “simply a fact” he’d be keeping to himself.

  He continued. “She’s completely nuts, and you’re not.”

  Maggie didn’t appear mollified. “That only makes it worse for you to be involved with her again. What if she gets you alone and traps you again? Look at it from my perspective.”

  “I am, and you sound jealous.” Which was okay by him. The fear that he might be losing her to a curator had forced him to confront his desires. They’d bubbled over and he’d kissed her. Now that the situation was possibly worse than a curator taking over her training, he thoroughly regretted the fact he’d been such an asshole to her for months.

  That wasn’t how he wanted to treat her. She deserved his best—anyone’s best. He’d given her his worst. Was it any wonder she’d pushed him away in SUV?

  “I’m not jealous in the commonly accepted sense.” Maggie held up her hands. “I’m having to postpone my training because of Karen. It endangers me and others since it’s possible, once I’m prematurely booted to phase two, I could mess up. What’s worse, if something happens to you, I’ll definitely get sent to a curator.”

  He didn’t buy that Maggie’s response was so selfish. That wasn’t the woman he’d come to know. And because he’d come to know her, he saw what she was doing. He himself did it all the time. She was acting like a butthead to stave off touchy-feely, emotional shit.

  The problem was that he was itching for some emotional shit. He—Zeke Garrett. It was so unlike him, but it was that “something more” gnawing at him, driving him to make a commitment, a promise. This might be their last night in the same bed, and he had no idea what the future might hold now that Karen Kingsbury was a part of it.

  He went with a statement that was a sort of promise, since mentors and disciples were already pretty fucking committed. “You’re not going to lose me, and I already told you I won’t let a curator take you. This is temporary.”

  He didn’t feel anything positive toward Karen anymore. He could barely remember whether he’d enjoyed the sex. All his former liaisons paled in comparison to how much he wanted Maggie.

  Maggie fingered a button on her nightgown. “It feels like everything is changing. I’m not sure Adi’s making smart decisions. It’s happening too fast.”

  “I do think you can swing a scaled-back phase two.” Zeke clumsily patted her shoulder. He wasn’t one to seek out physical contact unless it involved fighting, training or sex. “Adi’s going to fly Lill in, and you said your oration has improved. Hell, maybe Lill can link with you now. You’ve practically matriculated yourself. It’ll only be a few days before we can get the hell out of here.”

  “I don’t question Adi’s decision with me. I question her decision with Karen. Is finding out about dream healing worth exposing everyone to a murderer?” Maggie half-turned from him and refocused on her shield. It widened, giving them more light from the grayish ground. He dropped his shield layer, and hers remained steady. “After what Karen did to you…to so many people…is this a deal with the devil?”

  “I don’t know.” Recovering from broken bones in three days—it was worth some degree of risk. He’d been so caught up in his colossal discomfort at seeing Karen again that he hadn’t stopped to think about that particular ramification. “The healing thing could help a lot of people. Some of our alucinators tonight, for example. What if we could have saved them?”

  “If the dreamsphere could heal, alucinators wouldn’t get sick and wouldn’t stay injured longer than a few days. We’d already know about it. But we do get hurt. We die. This facility has a whole morgue full of proof.”

  Less proof than it had had before the code one. “We’re unusually healthy. I’m almost forty, and I look twenty-eight. Did you know Lill’s fifty-two?”

  “No.” Maggie seemed thoughtful. “I look my age.”

  “You’ve only just become an alucinator.” Zeke warmed to the topic. “What if the healing skill is dormant unless you consciously use it? What if it’s like confounding or sleep barricades and has to be taught?”

  “Like an ability.” She chewed her bottom lip. “I actually need to tell you something else weird that happened while we were in trance.”

  “Weirder than you being right there and me not being able to sense you through our tangible? I can find you anywhere in the sphere, Maggie. I can feel you in every inch of my skin when you’re as close as you are now.” Her eyebrows flickered briefly, as if she were surprised he’d describe it that way. “The tangible—”

  She nodded. “I know. And I could, I can, feel you. Like you can feel her again, and she was first. Maybe there’s only room for one tangible and she eclipsed me.”

  “No, ’cause I had a tangible with a student about ten years ago. Guy named Chao Tang. Works out of Cali now. I can tell when he’s in the sphere if I focus on it.” He hadn’t wanted to have sex with Chao, nor Chao with him. Not all tangibles made people horny.

  “Is Karen in the sphere?” Maggie asked.

  “She’s barricaded. Relax.” He didn’t even want to mention her by name. It took too much time and energy, when his time with Maggie was short and growing shorter. He wished she’d grab him again. Touch him. Hell, maybe he was the one who needed reassurance everything would be all right. “What’s the weird thing you want to tell me?”

  “I think I…” She nodded her head several times, as if agreeing with whatever she was about to say. “When I lost my shielding, the wraiths attacked me.”

  “I bet they did.” He glanced at her hand, unbandaged and wound-free in the dreamsphere. “Your finger.”

  “I attacked them back.”

  “It’s instinctive to fight, but I taught you better than that. Don’t expend energy on the monsters—you can’t hurt them. Your job is getting yourself protected or out of the sphere.”

  “I know the philosophy.” Maggie rubbed her hand. “I also know what happened to me. I think I’m the reason there were physical carcasses. The two dead wraith bodies? One had a caved-in skull. I did that, Zeke. With my foot. My foot was inside that monster’s head.”

  “I know they had form this time, probably some psych-out tactic of Karen’s, but their bodies are like vapor in the sphere, Maggie. Your foot may have been in the area of its head, but it wouldn’t have affected it.”

  “But it did. I struck out and it was solid. It crunched,” she said, with emphasis. “The scream it made was incredible. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  That reminded Zeke of the shriek he’d heard—the disturbance Adi hadn’t been able to locate. He had great faith in Maggie’s honesty and powers of observation. “Adi and I did hear something screechy. She couldn’t pinpoint it.”

  Maggie had no reason to lie about her dreamsphere experiences. There were too many mysteries, too much at stake, and if he trusted anybody in this mess, it was Maggie. If she said her foot was in that monster’s head and it had crunched, her foot had been in that monster’s head and it had crunched.

  Wraiths weren’t supposed to crunch unless they were in the terra firma. And dead wraiths were supposed to turn to dust in the terra firma. What did this mean?

  “That scream, Zeke, might have been the sound of a wraith dying in the dreamsphere.” Her eyes, huge now, stared up at him. “I’m some kind of dream killer. A bellatorix.”

  Chapter Ten

  They both charged out of the sphere in a rush and sat bolt upright in bed. Zeke glanced at the clock. Five hours had passed like a snap, the time too warped to judge from inside. They had another hour before their rest period ended.

  “You’re kidding me,” Zeke whispered. Bunk rooms had no cameras or audio sensors, but there were guards outside the door. “Bellatorix?”

  Maggie looked just as alert and energized as she’d b
een in dreamspace though she hadn’t had coffee yet. “What else do you know about the Antipodes scroll?”

  “Not much.” He’d mentioned it to her the other night in hopes of distracting her from his preoccupation with sex. “They keep the oldest documents at the Orbis.”

  “Which is on another continent and invitation-only.” She turned toward him. “Has a bellatorix ever been cross-referenced? Mentioned elsewhere? In, I don’t know, hieroglyphs or cave drawings or something?”

  “Not that I know of.” He was no Somnium scholar. But something like this, something supposedly a myth—how could he or Maggie justify pursuing it without raising suspicion? What could they say had piqued their interest?

  “If I get banished to a curator, I can ask them to show me the scroll,” she quipped. “I don’t suppose they have interlibrary loan?”

  “We’ll ask Adi. Vigils have access to the Orbis and the curators that the rest of us don’t.” After Maggie’s revelation, exiting the dreamsphere had seemed like the thing to do, but now that they were out, he questioned the wisdom of it. They could be overheard more easily here. And certain physical sensations were more pronounced in the terra firma—the tangible, Maggie’s scent, and his awareness of her body.

  “I don’t think we should tell Adi.” Maggie nibbled her bottom lip. “We need to find out if it’s real and how it works.”

  His gaze dropped to her mouth. “I’m not sure we can hide it. Everyone’s going to want to question you about the carcasses.”

  “Like the curators.” She rubbed her forehead. “Adi told us not to discuss it outside the facility. Think the curators will find out anyway?”

  “It’s possible.” Probable. “Unless wraith carcasses aren’t as unusual as we assume and the whole thing gets covered up as a matter of course. After all, Adi said they’d logged other instances of wraiths eating dead bodies, and we’d never heard of that.”

  Some of the sparkle and energy drained from Maggie, replaced by worry and fear. “That means I might get covered up.”