Deadly Dreams

by Averi Hope

  It might hurt, but now I’m finally free.

  He stared down at his hands. Why does freedom feel so awful?

  His computer beeped impatiently. Sighing, he swept off his covers and padded across the room in bare feet. Briefly, he considered putting on a shirt, but then shrugged and sat down in his chair, touching the screen.

  Captain Vernan’s face filled the screen, deep lines forming at the corners of his stern mouth. “Commander Fallow, I’m glad you’re awake.”

  “Of course, sir. What do you need?”

  The man rolled his neck. It popped loud enough that Caleb flinched. “We’ve discovered some new information on Erin’s target. She’ll be Dream Jumping tonight, and she’ll need you there. Go right away. Understand? And help her anyway you can.”

  A sliver of ice sliced into his heart. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” The older man touched the screen, and his image disappeared.

  Caleb sat for a painfully long time. Of all the things he wanted to do, this was the last. At least I’ll get to see how she does it. How much she enjoys sticking her claws into the heads of others and pulling their greatest secrets out like a greasy-fingered robber.

  He clenched his jaw and rose. It took him only a moment to throw on a white T-shirt and slip into a pair of sandals. It wasn’t exactly what he wanted the crew to see him in, but Erin’s door was only a few down from his own.

  Striding down the hall, he tried not to think of what he might find when he opened her door. Would she be wearing some barely there negligee, her hard nipples pressing through the thin material, begging him to touch them? He groaned aloud and ran an angry hand through his unruly hair. Get a hold of yourself!

  He hit the button to her room and desperately tried to cloak himself in confidence and anger. It took her too long to answer the door, but when it finally opened she stood in the doorway looking small and confused.

  She was wearing an oversize Starflight Academy shirt, that stretched so wide it left one of her creamy shoulders bare. It ended at her mid thighs, leaving her long, perfect legs bare for his hot gaze. Gods, why does she have to be so beautiful?

  “Caleb?” Her voice was so soft, like a caress.

  His cock hardened even further, and he chided himself for wearing nothing but the long boxers. As if she could read his mind, she glanced down. Her pink tongue darted out and slid along her lower lip in a display that had his blood roaring in his ears.

  “Wh—why are you here?”

  Her question hit him like a bucket of cold water. To watch her work.

  “The captain ordered me to help you with your Dream Jump tonight.”

  Her big, green eyes widened. “No. No need. I can do it myself.”

  He gritted his teeth. Afraid I’ll learn all your secrets? “It was an order.”

  Striding past her, he entered her room, which was identical to his own. She came behind him more slowly.

  “So, what first?” he asked, turning to face her.

  She nibbled her bottom lip. “I have to lie down. In bed.”

  Shit. Geez. “All right. Then, let’s get this over with. Tomorrow, we’ll be arriving at Ortago, and I’d like to do so with at least a couple of hours of sleep.”

  Walking slowly, she reached her bed and sat down, wincing and breathing deeply for a moment before pulling her legs up. As she lay there, too still, he noticed for the first time the dark bruises and scrapes along her legs. More marks covered her wrists and the long scratch along her throat looked as if it’d been painful.

  “Were you hurt?” he asked, the words coming out softer than he’d intended.

  Her expressive eyes met his. “The last mission was a rough one.” Reaching across herself, she pulled the covers up to her chest and slid down slowly.

  He stared at her, not knowing what else to do.

  “This won’t work with you staring at me.”

  “Fine.” He turned and went to the couch, sitting down. But, he still looked over the back of it, watching her pale face, eyes still open. “Whose dream are you going into anyway?”

  She took too long to answer.

  “I’ve been given clearance to know about you and your missions, so I can either ask you or the captain—I don’t care who.”

  “Sorry,” she whispered. “I’m just not used to being able to talk to anyone about this. It’s been classified for so long.”

  He pushed down the whisper of guilt that slid through him. What must it be like to keep a secret like this?

  “There’s a criminal I’ve been tracking since my time at the academy. He slipped through my fingers then. I don’t want it to happen again. This is one of his lackeys. I’m hoping that by going into his dreams, we’ll finally be able to find out enough about his operation to catch him red-handed, once and for all.”

  “All right then.” Caleb could think of nothing else to say.

  Her eyes closed. His lonely gaze swept over her pale face. Did she look thinner?

  His stomach clutched in an unexpected way. He was here to watch her work and give her assistance if she needed it, not to feel sorry for her. She’d misused her abilities to pry into his most private thoughts, so she didn’t deserve his sympathy.

  Closing his eyes, he refused to look at her. Hours ticked by as he listened to her even breathing. He almost fell asleep himself when she made a small whimpering noise in her sleep. His eyes flew open. There! She moaned again, tossing in her sleep.

  He rose from the couch and padded over to her on bare feet. Her face was scrunched up as if in pain. What if she was? Damn it, why hadn’t he asked anything about his job? How did he know how to protect her?

  And then, she started to scream, thrashing wildly on the bed.

  “Erin? Erin?” Memories came back to him of years before at the academy when he’d struggled to wake her from a dream. Had she been Dream Jumping that night?

  “Wake up!” He shook her shoulders, then picked her up in his arms.

  Her entire body went rigid as she continued to struggle, screaming wildly. The shower! That’s what worked then!

  He entered the bathroom. “Computer, Erin’s setting three!” The shower poured down steaming water as the walls of the shower rose at the base, transforming into a bath, as well. He carried her beneath the waters.

  Her struggling grew more frantic. A bloodcurdling scream, filled with pain and terror, escaped her lips as her head jerked to the side. And then, her head lolled back. Her body went limp.

  “Erin?” He caressed the side of her face, heart pounding.

  Deep red blood leaked out the side of her mouth, and he suddenly became painfully aware that her frantic pulse had stopped. His gaze snapped to her chest. Which no longer rose and fell.

  This couldn’t be happening. She couldn’t possibly die in a dream.

  Could she?

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Where the hell am I?

  There was something terribly wrong. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t see. She couldn’t feel her body. Everything felt disjointed.

  Slowly a bright light seemed to grow larger and larger until it surrounded her. She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t.

  Minutes or seconds passed, she couldn’t be sure, as a scene appeared before her. It looked like a horror movie. There was blood everywhere, spatterings of it covered the walls and the floors of the tiny white room. A man stood in one corner staring with an annoyed expression at a body that lay beneath a white sheet on the floor.

  At least that’s what she assumed it was, based on the pale hand peeking out.

  Watching the white sheet, there wasn’t the slightest hint of movement. Whoever it is, it looks like they’re dead, she thought, a prickling climbing along her brain. But, she couldn’t quite place her unease. Just that same strange feeling of wrongness.

  The man shifted, reaching for a bloody knife at his side. Using a flawlessly white cloth, he cleaned the blade. Her attention jerked from him to the weapon. Something about this felt s
trangely familiar.

  He was half Vuret. His face was that of a bull, but his body looked oddly human, with nothing more than a dusting of longer and thicker-than-average blond hair.

  She shivered at the sight of him. Something about the man increased her unease.

  “This wasn’t how this was supposed to go,” he said, his dark gaze focusing on the white sheet. “You were supposed to tell me what I wanted to know, before it came to this.”

  So the victim had been tortured. Her gaze returned to the sheet. Blood had started to seep from beneath one side.

  She gasped as a horrible pain radiated through her, shaking her vision. What the hell had that been? It felt like a mini-explosion, but the man in the white room didn’t seem to notice.

  “It was your fault, you know,” the man continued, wiping at a dot of blood that had appeared on his green uniform pants, “you picked the wrong man to mess with. I know you thought you were so important. So powerful. But everyone eventually learns that Ahmed is more powerful.”

  Ahmed. The name hurt her mind. Where had she heard it before?

  Another explosion sent her heart racing and her lungs burning. If she could feel her hand, she would have clenched her chest. What is that?

  “And the best part of all of this is that you were so close to catching him. Do you have any idea?” He smiled at the sheet and set down his tools of torture in a neat row. “At Ortago, Ahmed will have the largest auction, of the rarest women this universe has ever seen, and then he’ll finally amass enough of a fortune to step out of the business forever. His men will keep running it, of course, but you’ll never have another chance to catch him.”

  She was on fire. Her chest was burning. Her vision was swaying as sweat oozed down her face. She blinked, trying to clear her vision, but all she could see was the man as he knelt down beside the sheet.

  “Such a waste,” he said. “Such a perfect specimen of a female.”

  He drew back the sheet.

  The explosion came again, ripping through her insides. She screamed as her vision sought the other woman’s face. Her mind froze. Her own face stared back at her. What—What am I looking at?

  Big green eyes stared at nothing. Her throat had been cut, along with thin lines along her arms, bare stomach, and legs. She was naked. A white, limp body lying in a scarlet pool.

  She had the urge to hurl, and then she felt herself being sucked toward the body. She fought. As much as someone without a body could fight. But then she went slamming back into the body.

  Pain beyond anything imaginable awoke inside her. The sound of her own screaming filled her ears, and then—

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Wake up, damn it!” Caleb screamed, pounding her chest, then leaning over to breathe into her mouth once more.

  This isn’t working. I need to get help!

  But if I stop, she’s going to die.

  One more time. Just one more time.

  Come back, baby.

  Maybe the medics can do more than I can. Pushing on her chest one more time and leaning down, he breathed into her mouth.

  “Come back, damn it!” he yelled at her. He’d never been more scared in his life.

  It seemed to work.

  She came back to him, screaming the most awful, pained scream into his mouth.

  “Erin!” He shook her, trying to bring her out of it. “Erin!”

  Her pupils were massive, darting all around. Moving, but not seeing.

  “Erin, it’s me!” He held her to his chest for a moment. “It’s Caleb. You’re safe. Safe.”

  She struggled like an exhausted child, her body twitching more than moving. He ran fingers through her soaking wet hair, murmuring comforting nonsense. The bath had filled up around them, while the shower still rained down warmth. But she was shivering, shaking like a leaf. Blood still smeared across one of her pale cheeks, despite the water.

  As he stroked her hand again, he saw that it was shaking, too. “It’s okay. You’re back. It was only a dream.”

  Tears filled her eyes, and her mouth moved.

  He leaned in, finally catching her choked words. “You should’ve…let me…die.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Erin lay in her bed. For two days, the only people she’d seen were her parents and the medic on her father’s team. But she hadn’t spoken. Not to any of them. She’d simply closed her eyes and wished them gone.

  And eventually, they’d all left.

  Her body still hummed with the pains of her Dream Jump. Even though her throat hadn’t actually been slit, when she tried to speak into the darkness, her voice came out raspy.

  She didn’t want to remember what happened to her. But she did. She remembered every second of the torture. And she’d never been more afraid in her life of what she’d learned. All logic told her she needed to speak, to tell the others what she knew, but terror held her in its claws.

  It held her prisoner in the room far more than her injuries had.

  She’d gotten up at night. Limped around the room wondering if she’d ever walk normally again. He’d broken so many bones. She shivered, the sound of the limbs cracking filling her ears like the shrieks of a ghost.

  A bottle of pills lay on her nightstand. She reached for them, then stopped herself. At a certain point, she would have to deal with the pain. She’d have to face reality.

  Was she ready for that now?

  I might be, if my brain wasn’t foggy.

  She let her hand drop.

  Because right now she was scared. Scared of everything. But with each passing hour, another desire was slowly rearing its head. A desire for revenge.

  And that’s what made her most afraid. If she told the others what she knew, they’d stop her from accomplishing her revenge. Something I can’t allow.

  Her door beeped. She looked away. If I ignore them long enough, they’ll go away.

  A minute later, the door to her room opened. She refused to look up. They could question her all they wanted. She wouldn’t tell them a damn thing. This was her secret. She could not risk the others carrying out her mission without her.

  “Erin?”

  Her head snapped to the male standing in her living area. Caleb. His dark hair looked wet. He’d let his beard grow a little longer than usual, and there was a wildness to his eyes that she couldn’t look away from.

  Anger?

  Desire?

  Does he feel what I feel?

  She took a ragged breath and let her gaze run over him. He wore a tight black shirt and jeans. It must be night, if he’s out of uniform. Her body responded to him in a way she never imagined it would again. It did more than notice the firm muscles that swelled his arms and chest. It brought to life a flicker of desire inside her.

  How can I want him, even now?

  Now that I’m broken in a way that can never be fixed.

  “May I come in?”

  For some reason, she felt a sob building in her chest. Turning away from him, she curled into a tight ball, pulling the cotton sheets more tightly around her shaking body. She couldn’t face all that was between them and find the strength to leave this bed and kill the men she needed to kill. There was no way to do both.

  A minute later, he sat at the foot of her bed, the motion shifting the mattress beneath her. “They said I shouldn’t come to see you. That it might remind you of when you woke up and send you into shock again.” His voice was ragged, hesitant.“Were they right? Was I wrong to come?”

  The hurt in his voice had her answering without thinking. “No.” The word sounded rough, like an animal learning to speak for the first time.

  “May I—May I hold you?”

  She stiffened, shocked by his question. She’d thought he was there to pry her dream from her, not to comfort her. He hates me. He’ll never forgive me for Dream Jumping into his mind. This is nothing more than pity.

  But for some reason, she nodded.

  His shoes hit the floor, and he slipped beneath
her sheets, curling around her from behind. The heat of his body seemed to wrap around her. She shuddered.

  “Cold?” he whispered into her ear.

  But before she could respond, he very gently wrapped his arms around her, drawing her even closer.

  “You don’t have to,” she rasped.

  It took him a moment to answer, but his words held a dangerous hint. “I want to.”

  She closed her eyes. Maybe for a moment she could pretend she was safe. Pretend that she hadn’t experienced death. Pretend that the man who broke her, who shredded her body, wasn’t walking freely around the ship.

  “You’re trembling,” he said, simply, drawing her back into the present. “Are you cold or afraid?”

  “Both.”

  He brushed her tangled hair back from her face. “I can fix both, if you let me.”

  If only. A hot tear rolled down her cheek. “You can’t.”

  “Let me try,” he said, his breath warm against the top of her head.

  There were so many things she suddenly wanted to say. Desperately. Everything she’d experienced, everything she knew, suddenly felt like poison flowing through her veins.

  “He broke my bones,” she whispered, clearing her throat. “He cut my body. I watched my blood decorating the walls. And then…then he slit my throat.”

  His breathing was fast. His heart seemed to pound against her back, matching her own. “And you remember it all.”

  She clenched her hands. “I felt it all.” Then, more softly. “I still feel all the wounds. But I’m getting better. Stronger.”

  He stroked her hair, slowly and softly. “I didn’t know how it worked. I didn’t know you could die in your dreams. I’m sorry. If I’d known—“

  “You couldn’t have stopped this. He was prepared for me.”

  “How is that possible? Only a handful of us know…”

  She was silent. Because he knows everything the captain knows.

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “Why?” he asked, his hand stilling.

  “Because I plan to kill him.”