Ambushed

by Dean Murray

  I opened my mouth wanting to say something comforting, but he cut me off.

  "That's not important other than making sure you know what you're getting into. I'll do my very best not to harm you, but I can't make any promises."

  I knew I should be scared, but somehow hearing the story of how he got like this, the reason he'd spent two hundred years alone and on the run, reinforced something I'd known all along. He wasn't going to hurt me. I needed to do my absolute best to make it easier for him, but when push came to shove, I knew he didn't want to hurt me. I'd seen him do incredible things inside of the dream, things that had taken an almost inconceivable force of will, and I refused to believe even his beast was stronger than the man I'd seen, the one who'd saved me and two of the most important people in my life.

  "I understand, but I want to continue training with you. I need to master my power or I'll end up dead anyways."

  Taggart sighed and then pulled out the two bags of fast food that we'd picked up right before stopping at the motel.

  "Okay, then you're going to need to eat up. We're still burning off the calories as fast as you're taking them in."

  I sighed as I accepted the two cheeseburgers he pulled out of the bag. I'd always assumed anyone who'd been alive for more than two hundred years would be rich, but apparently Taggart's resources weren't unlimited. I guess all of that running had precluded staying in one place long enough to earn any kind of substantial nest egg.

  He was too principled to turn to theft, although he'd been quick to liquidate everything he could get his hands on from the two vampires he'd killed in Minnesota, so he was very careful about how he spent his money. It took a lot of calories to stoke his shape shifter metabolism and my dream walking ability likewise consumed all of the energy I could feed it, so we tended towards greasy, fatty foods.

  I knew I couldn't survive on fast food forever, but this was only temporary. Besides, he was right, there was no way I could consume enough calories eating salad—my ability simply used up too much energy.

  Since Taggart had put me on a steady diet of cheeseburgers and fries, my weight had finally stabilized for the first time in months. I was still as skinny as any of the girls on my cheerleading squad back home, but at least I wasn't still losing weight.

  It was still light outside, but I stifled three separate yawns by the time I made it through the mountain of food in front of me. Dream walking was hard work and I never felt quite rested after the nights I spent in other people's dreams, which was nearly every night since I'd met Taggart.

  "Why is it that you don't seem to lose weight like I do as a result of dream walking?"

  Taggart pondered the question for nearly a full minute before shaking his head. "Honestly, I don't know, but it explains some things that I'd always wondered about."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You're not the first human I've run into who had an ability of some kind or another. It's rare, but it happens. Usually it's clairvoyance or some kind of precognition. Stuff that doesn't actually affect the material world."

  Taggart folded up the foil wrapper that had been around his second hamburger and shrugged.

  "Shape shifters, on the other hand, frequently have abilities that have physical manifestations of some kind or another. I always wondered at that, but now I'm pretty sure humans don't get that kind of gift because it takes a lot more energy to power something like that than dream walking or another similar ability. I think humans have to power their gifts out of the energy reserves they have physically present in their bodies."

  "But you don't?"

  "It doesn't appear like it. Even our ability to shift forms, instantly adding more than a hundred pounds of bone and muscle, would be impossible if we weren't getting fed from some kind of external power source."

  I thought about that for a couple of seconds before nodding. "That makes a lot of sense, I mean for something that I don't understand in the slightest. Part of me thinks I should feel ripped off because I didn't get a bigger, more powerful ability, but the truth is I'm already in over my head as it is."

  Taggart frowned at me. "Don't sell your gift short, Adriana. It's not as flashy or straightforward as being able to electrocute someone, but wars are usually won because of information and you and I are ideally placed to find out things that nobody else could learn. That's actually what I need to do tonight."

  I couldn't decide whether to be disappointed or relieved. Most nights Taggart trained me by either joining me inside of my dreams or having me join him inside of his, but occasionally he took the night off from training me so he could tend to the network of informants and spies he'd spent the last several decades putting together.

  Apparently my indecision made it onto my face. Taggart gave me a rare smile and then pointed to the bed on my side of the room. "This doesn't mean you get the night off. I want you to try and come with me to meet my informant tonight. You're getting good enough inside of the dream that I think it's time for you to start doing some of your learning on the job."

  I tried to look confident, but the last time I'd run into anyone other than Taggart in a dream I'd nearly died.

  Chapter 5

  Adriana Paige

  The Premier Pillow Motel

  North Platte, Nebraska

  Taggart always dropped off to sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, but it wasn't that easy for me this time. I was just as tired as always, but I was nervous enough that it took me a few minutes to finally transition to sleep.

  That meant that I had even more time than normal to worry. Before he'd gone to sleep, Taggart had shown me a picture of his informant, someone name Eric, and then rattled off a handful of facts about him like his date of birth and parents' names.

  That was how Taggart made his way into someone else's dream. Making the initial connection seemed pretty hit-and-miss, but once Taggart had visited someone else's dreams, he could almost always return to them. Whether it was the first trip or the hundredth, Taggart always accomplished it by visualizing his target and remembering some of the things that made them unique.

  I'd had his method of making first contact drilled into me a dozen times already, but each time I'd tried to make contact with one of his people I'd failed. The failure itself wasn't unusual, but I should have had a success by now. It rarely took Taggart more than a month to contact someone for the first time. I wasn't up to a month straight of trying yet, but I couldn't get away from the feeling that I wasn't getting any closer to success.

  Even as worried as I was, it only took another ten minutes before I nodded off. Apparently I was even more exhausted than I realized.

  I transitioned into my own dream after what felt like no time at all, and found myself inside of my bedroom back in Minnesota. I'd been dreaming about home a lot. I was getting better at remembering my dreams lately even after I woke up, so I had a unique view into what was going on inside of my subconscious.

  I was homesick. It wasn't like that was any kind of surprise or anything, but it didn't make being away from my family any easier. I hadn't even been able to call them. I understood why, but that also didn't make things any easier.

  Taggart was being hunted by the Coun'hij, the shape shifter ruling council, and I was probably being hunted by more of the vampires who had nearly killed me back in Minnesota. Illegal phone taps and traces were nothing to people like that. As long as I cut off all contact with my family they would probably be safe, but if I were stupid enough to call home it would put them, and me, in danger.

  I couldn't change the fact that I was homesick, but I could choose not to dwell on it. I changed the bedspread on the bottom bunk to a fluorescent orange that Cindi never would have chosen for her bed and some of the tension between my shoulder blades disappeared. It had been easy to make that small change to the dream, which meant that I really was inside of my own dream rather than having accidentally wandered into someone else's dream again. That meant I was safe, as long as I didn't pull someone else inside of
my dream with me.

  Well, that wasn't quite guaranteed either, but I was fairly sure that there weren't any powerful vampire mentalists crouched outside of our room. Vampires were a lot more common than I ever would have believed, but not as much so once you crossed the Mississippi. Apparently the shape shifters made it a point to try and keep the vampires confined to the more urbanized eastern section of the United States.

  Safe was good. Good except for the fact that I was supposed to be trying to get out of my dream and into someone else's. It was tempting just not to try. I was exhausted and scared, and it would probably be good for me to take a night off from dream walking, but if I was going to make that argument I probably should have made it before I went to sleep.

  I couldn't lie to Taggart. I'd tried a little white lie not long after we'd left Minnesota and he'd caught me instantly. Apparently being a shape shifter turned you into some kind of human lie detector. It was possible to lie to a shape shifter and get away with it, but I wasn't a complete psychopath, so I wasn't going to manage it anytime soon.

  All of which pretty much meant that I was going to have to try and make it into Eric's dream. I hadn't told Taggart beforehand that I needed the night off, so he was counting on me being there, or at least doing my best to be there at the meet. Besides, he was right. A certain amount of learning to dream walk was just going to come down to getting out and dream walking.

  To be fair though, I had expected things to be a lot less trial and error now that I was working with Taggart. It only made sense that one dream walker should be able to shorten the learning curve for another, but so far that hadn't really been the case. Taggart had warned me about that, but I hadn't realized until we'd been working together for a few days just how different our abilities were.

  We could both dream walk, but he seemed to be a lot stronger inside of the dream than I was. Even when we were in my dream sometimes I couldn't stop him from changing our environment. When we were inside of his dream I couldn't even come close to holding my own.

  I'd initially thought that had to do with the fact that he was a lot older and more experienced, but there were other differences, the biggest one being that I was able to pull other people into my dreams against their will.

  It sounded like a small thing, but Taggart, the infamous Dream Stealer, hadn't ever managed it. More amazingly, I was able to pull people into the dream strongly enough that they could even die there. That wasn't supposed to be possible. Dream walkers are vulnerable whether in their own dreams or in someone else's, but non-dream walkers are supposed to be safe.

  It was possible to torture someone and make the experience traumatic enough they would remember it when they woke up. It was even possible to cause them phantom pain the next day, but it wasn't possible to kill them. Except I could.

  That was how Taggart and I had killed one of the vampires who had been after me back home. Taggart was practically jumping up and down at the possibilities, but I wasn't so sure how I felt about being the perfect assassin.

  As a general rule I wasn't interested in killing anyone, but I'd had a rather pointed lesson in the fact that there were…well, I guess you still called them people…out there who were truly evil. I've never been a fan of those tricky philosophical questions, but if there was a modern-day Hitler out there killing a lot of innocent people and I had the ability to sneak into their dreams and kill them no matter how well-protected they might be in the real world, didn't I have a duty to prevent even more innocents from being killed?

  Luckily it wasn't something that I had to decide right away. Taggart might have some flaws, but he wasn't going to force me to kill people. For now I just needed to learn how to control my abilities enough that I wasn't always showing up inside of the dreams of every nearby shape shifter or vampire. That was a good way to draw the kind of unwanted attention that could end up with me being dead.

  I sighed and climbed up to the top bunk. If I was going to do this I figured I might as well get comfortable and I couldn't think of anything more comfortable than my old bed.

  For all that there were some serious differences in how our abilities worked, Taggart's description of making initial contact with someone matched up exactly with what I remembered from the time I'd pulled him into my dream. It was like your mind sent out thousands of tiny threads, racing away at incredible speeds.

  Once one of the threads found the person you were looking for, you reabsorbed all of the other threads and then strengthened the remaining thread enough that you could pull yourself to them. Or if you were me, you sometimes pulled them to you.

  I slowed down my breathing—apparently even in my dreams I still needed to breathe—and focused on the image Taggart had shown me. I cleared away all of the emotions that Taggart said were nothing more than a distraction and started pushing tendrils of energy out of myself. I was getting better at that part, but although they left, they didn't seem to really be going anywhere.

  It was frustrating, and not just because I couldn't explain it. I'd never realized before I started working with Taggart just how hard it was to describe a feeling. Sure, we talk about feelings all the time, especially us girls, but how do you really know that the feeling you're describing is the same feeling that someone else is experiencing?

  It didn't seem like what was going on now was the same as the time I'd consciously pulled Taggart into my dream, but the last time I'd tried to explain that, he'd told me that once the threads started spinning out of him that he either found his target or he didn't, there wasn't any way to mess things up once you got to that point.

  The surge of frustration triggered a reflexive effort to clear my mind once again, but I stopped before I even really got started. Taggart was big on being a blank slate when he was working, but nearly every single time I'd accomplished anything big strong emotions had been fueling me during the experience.

  Acting more on a hunch than anything else, I let the frustration stay and added in half a dozen other emotions. Respect, dependence, a slight dose of fear, all of the emotions that I'd come to associate with Taggart went into the mix and then rather than just letting the filaments spool out slowly on their own, I pushed in the odd way that I'd learned made things happen for me inside the dream.

  They shot away from me with exactly the speed and urgency that I'd been looking for, the speed that, up until now, had been missing. My strength poured out of me in step with the movement of the threads and I felt a familiar sense of worry at how quickly it was fading.

  Taggart was convinced that a failed attempt to find a specific individual was of no long-term consequence. He'd told me several times that the only result of a failure would be that I would exhaust my strength and then simply lapse back into a normal, dreamless sleep.

  I wanted to believe him. Certainly my limited experience so far had seemed to support that idea, but the sheer pace at which I was spending energy this time was alarming.

  A combination of worry and fear spiked inside of me. The rising tide of emotion threatened to destabilize the mixture I'd whipped up intentionally, the feelings that made me think of Taggart, but I managed to hold on for just long enough for one of the threads to connect with something that felt like what I was looking for.

  Just as I remembered happening before, the rest of the threads came whipping back towards me, melting back into my body and providing me with the strength I needed to thicken up the thread that had found Taggart.

  For a single heartbeat everything balanced on the edge of a knife. I didn't want to go forward, didn't want to take the risk that I hadn't actually found Taggart, but I knew I had to act right then or I would lose my chance.

  The thread reached some kind of critical mass and started to unravel, but I pushed off against my surroundings at the same time that I pulled on the line between the two of us. There was an odd catch, as if for a moment the universe wasn't sure whether to pull him towards me or send me hurtling towards him, but then I accelerated at an impossible speed.
r />   I couldn't have said whether the trip took hours or was over in an instant. My head felt full, like I'd had hours of thoughts impossibly compressed into a fraction of a second, and then I was there.

  I'd been moving faster than I'd ever moved before, but I arrived without stumbling, without even a whisper of sound to betray the fact that Taggart and Eric weren't alone anymore. We were standing in the middle of a featureless white plain. Eric was facing away from me, looking at Taggart, and didn't give any indication that he'd noticed any kind of change in his surroundings.

  I knew I was looking at Taggart because I could see a shimmer where he'd altered his features, but if not for that I'd never have recognized him. He looked like an eighth-century Irishman. He had red hair, a full beard and looked like he could crack rocks with his bare hands.

  Taggart hadn't given me any kind of instructions on what to do once I arrived—probably because he hadn't actually expected me to be successful—so I simply shifted my clothes and body, making them clear and thereby rendering myself invisible.

  It wasn't perfect. Looking down at myself I could see the same distortion in the air that had clued me in to the fact that Taggart had changed his appearance. Eric probably wouldn't be able to see the difference, but I knew that Taggart saw the same shimmer in the air as I did when someone changed their appearance.

  "What do you know, Eric?"

  "I told you—nothing is happening right now. No news is good news, right?"

  Taggart didn't look happy, in fact he looked like he was starting to lose the tiniest bit of control over his beast. I circled around, moving slowly so as not to make any sound. Even so, it only took me a couple of seconds to get far enough to the side to see that Eric understood just how thin the ice he was standing on was.