Tangible (Dreamwalker) (13 page)

“Yes.” She reached up and touched his face. Her fingers tingled. “All through me.”

“Concentrate on it. Head to toes.”

She did. It made her pulse pound in a way that was inappropriate to the situation.

“Yeah. That’s it. It’s stronger than I...” His gaze fell to her lips and he caught his breath. “You smell nice.”

“You smell like my soap.”

“I used your soap.”

She had a good idea what he’d done with the soap. What she wished she could do with him. To him. It was as if a giant hand were pressing her into him, like clay into a mold. She didn’t want to stop him like earlier...not so quickly, anyway.

Couldn’t she have a taste? “This is a little intense.”

“Fixate on it. On what I feel like.” He cleared his throat. “My skin on yours.” His hands caressed her arms. “My touch. When you’re in the dreamsphere, if you follow this, you’ll find me.”

“Will you fixate on my skin?”

He half-laughed. “I already have.”

She licked her lips and braced her foot on the opposite arm of the loveseat. Her robe fell open. “What else are you imagining?”

His jaw flexed. His chest rose and fell. “Shit, Maggie. What do you think?”

She nudged herself an inch further up his body. Their breath mingled.

“That’s not your gun, is it?” she murmured.

Zeke caught her face in his hands. With a yank, he closed the distance between their mouths.

She met him with her lips already parted. His tongue stroked inside her, tangling with hers. She moaned. He caught her bottom lip with his teeth and his hand fisted in her hair. After several dizzying kisses, he pulled her hair, tilted her head back, and sucked her throat.

Maggie wished they weren’t in a warzone—wished they weren’t clothed. She wanted him so much it would be easy to convince herself Lillian’s warning about sex was wrong. His hand cupped her breast beneath the robe. His thumb slid across her nipple, which was covered by the satin pajama top. When she exhaled with pleasure, he caught her breath in his mouth, kissing her until her head started to swim.

She drank him in, memorizing his flavors.

“This is bad.” He nuzzled her cheek and throat. His hands fumbled with her top until his fingers found her skin. “What we feel. It’s not real.”

How could this not be real? How could the ache between her legs be fake, how could her longing to take him inside her be a sham? She found his erection, hard against his jeans, and squeezed. “You’re saying this isn’t real?”

“Oh, honey, that’s real enough.” He closed his beautiful grey eyes a moment, his dark lashes sweeping down. “But it’s not going anywhere. More’s the pity, ’cause it’s a damned distraction. And you and I—we have to go somewhere.”

He pulled her down, kissed her again, his tongue and lips swallowing whatever protest she might have uttered. He rubbed her bare breast, her nipple, and shivers of delight coursed through her. She melted. Whimpered. Wrapped her arms around his neck. His touch was more electric than any ECT.

“We gotta go,” he said. “Don’t forget to breathe.”

The world and Zeke blipped out of existence like the floor dropping out from under her. When she blinked, her eyes opened to blackness. At least she assumed her eyes opened. Maggie fluttered her lashes, felt her eyelids click. She knew this place. Zeke had piggybacked her through while he’d been kissing her. At least she hadn’t arrived terrified.

Now she had to find him before the wraiths found her. He’d said they could
hurt her and she had no idea how to shield
.

This was and wasn’t like the dreamsphere from her sleep. She floated. Was she floating? No, she was on the loveseat. Hints of her body bled through her consciousness. Something solid supported her hip, her leg, her chest. Flashes of Hayden’s room, only it wasn’t Hayden’s room, because it was grey and distorted. Lumps under her, bindings around her, a familiar tug on her skin, and...

She couldn’t hold onto it. The world slipped to blackness. She made herself breathe, thinking the words.
Inhale. Exhale.
What if she suffocated? She’d never know. Was this what death was like?

She began to panic, her heart racing. What if a wraith materialized before Lillian returned and slashed their throats? What if the monsters found her before she found Zeke? Her brain whirled with so many fears it made her dizzy.

Dizzy like Zeke’s kisses.

Focus on their tangible, he’d said. Focus on his touch.

She remembered the way his body called to hers. She thought about his untidy blond hair, his grey eyes. Pictured the white scar on his chin. Invoked his scent, the sound of his drawl, the way his hands had stroked her possessively, lips against her neck.

She began to grow warm as she wondered what it would be like to have him inside her, thrusting and withdrawing as he stared into her eyes.

Warmth—she felt warmth. Magnetism. Zeke.

Arms formed around her. Zeke formed against her. “
I’m here, Maggie.”

“I did it right?”

“You took your time,”
he joked. “
Had to wait two whole minutes to touch you again.”

The longer they held each other, the more the new dreamsphere swam into focus. Hayden’s room coalesced. Hayden wasn’t in it. The furniture was—the roof, the trash, the walls, the broken French door. Outside the room were flashes of black and grey wraiths, their hunger leaching into her safe space with Zeke.

Zeke bent and kissed her. His lips moved hotly across hers, the sensation vivid, reminding her she had a physical body to return to. “
Ignore everything but me.”

The wraiths wailed. The walls bulged, morphing colors, lurid faces yawning in the wooden panels. She stared at Zeke’s lips instead. “
Easier said than done. Maybe you should keep kissing me.”

“Can’t. We’re on real-time here.”
He stood and drew her up beside him. He’d lost his weaponry—this being her dream, she supposed. She wound her arms around his neck, enjoying his lean, muscled body without a sword jabbing her gut.

His eyes glazed as he stared at something beyond the room they were in. He frowned. “
I don’t understand. I can’t sense any conduits attached to you except the one we came through. It’s shut tight as a miser. Can you find it?”

She glanced at the loveseat where faint sparks blipped in one spot. “
Yes. Now what?”

He led her to the balcony. She had to command her legs instead of imagine herself walking. Her bare feet thudded on the chilly floor. The formless wraiths curved away from them as they approached, as if plastered against an invisible sphere. She and Zeke looked over the dream-street below. A nightmare version of the neighborhood slowly took shape.

Houses shimmered into tall, eerie silhouettes with busted windows, dull colors, skewed roofs. They loomed too high, their peaks and gables leaning together as if threatening to collapse. As far as she could see, the street continued until it disappeared in haze. Ice coated everything. Frozen daggers hung from balconies and trees and phone wires. Wraiths flickered in the corners of her eyes.

It was cold. Maggie’s breath crystallized in the air and turned black. Like a wraith.

Startled, she jerked away. Her feet slid on the icy balcony and Zeke caught her before she fell. He batted at the formation until it dissipated.

“Focus on me like we discussed,”
he told her. “
That’s all you gotta do. Breathe and focus.”

“I see wraiths everywhere.”

“My shield is up. You’re safe.”

“I couldn’t see them when your shield was up before.”

“No.”
He caught her chin and forced her face to his. “
No fear. Look at me. Me. When you graduate from training, do you know what I’m going to do to you?”

“Give me a diploma?”
Wraiths scented her, oozing from broken windows, out of the ragged cracks in the street. She tried to admire Zeke’s cheekbones and the tousle of his sun-tipped hair, but there were so many monsters. They could hurt her here. He’d said so.

“I’m going to undress you again, Maggie.”

That got her attention. “
Is that so?”

“When you graduate. I’m going to undress you, and I won’t stop at your nightgown.”
His hands slid along her body, over her satin-clad curves. Her pink robe hadn’t made it to the dreamsphere any more than his weapons.

He cupped her ass and pulled her against him, startling a gasp out of her. “
I’m going to kiss my way down you until I’m between your legs. I want to taste your pussy. I’m going to slide my tongue inside you, in and out of you, all around you until you scream. And I’m going to do it again with my fingers. A third time with my cock.”

Maggie swallowed, hard, her mouth suddenly as dry as other parts of her were wet.

“You think about that while I do my job, okay?”

“Okay,”
she managed, wondering if that was a standard tactic for teaching a disciple to focus—and not caring. It worked. She was now hyperfocused on Zeke’s mouth and fingers and, Lord help her, his cock.

“When I’m done with you the third time, I...”
He trailed off.
She strained to hear his mental whisper. “
Hold up. That can’t be right.”

What couldn’t be right? Their post-graduation plans? Sounded right to her.

Then she sensed something too. Holes. Rips. Growing lesions.

Down the street? Up? Trying to spot a lesion was like staring at a dust mote. Whenever she thought she saw one, it slipped to the corner of her consciousness. Zeke’s fingers bit into her arms as he turned, searching every direction.

The entire dreamsphere quivered. Vibrations surrounded her and quickened in another area. “
There
.”

Scarlet. Several rifts in her dreamsphere, several spots of redness and spark. Eating away at the houses which crumbled over the edge. They united into a yawning whirlpool. Wraiths hurtled around it like slingshot stones toward her and Zeke. They gained form and function—zombies, ogres, vampires, horrible demons and man-beasts.

“Isn’t your shield up?”
Maggie tried her best to imagine herself and Zeke behind a barrier, invisible, as the wraiths sought them. Nearer. Nearer.

“Perforations,”
he spat. “
They’re getting through to us. Shit, shit, shit.”

The sensation of the whirlpool overrode the sensation of the tangible bond. The vacuum was so strong it sucked the energy out of Maggie. The redness throbbed.

“Is that a conduit?”
She felt like she was being turned inside out.

“Well, it ain’t a disturbance in the Force,”
Zeke said grimly. “
We got wraith blotches everywhere. Conduits. Barrier’s riddled with ’em. My God. It’s like nothing I’ve ever sensed before.”

“What are we going to do?”

“If I disappear, wake yourself. I told you how. Push the sphere like it’s going to crush you. Then keep pushing. Otherwise somebody’ll have to ECT you.”

“You said you’d stay with me.”
His urgency chilled her. She panicked. Her emotion drew the wraiths. They whirled around her as if tasting her fear, brushing her like falling petals. “
The ECT could kill me.”

A wraith solidified and slammed into them. Black shards exploded around her and the world along with them. She lost track of Zeke. Was he gone? Dead? Was she?

Finally she sensed him, faint as an echo. “
There’s a second dreamer, Maggie. I don’t know the signature, and I’ve got to geolocate her. Goddamn. Get yourself out. Tell Rhys and Lill—”

And he was gone. Fireballs of chaotic energy, darker than the rest, swarmed her, cutting off her air. Cutting off her escape.

Wraiths squeezed her. Slime and salt in her mouth, on her cheeks, on all her exposed skin. She choked and gagged. What was happening? She was too weighed down to run. The sphere sucked at her until she felt like her skin was going to implode.

Goo slid under her clothing and crammed itself between her legs. Freezing cold. Icy hot.

Evil infiltrated her. She felt wraiths tear through her into the terra firma in three nauseating surges.

She wanted out. She wanted them out. She wanted to kill them all.

She pushed.

Chapter Eight

Razors tore Zeke’s flesh, ripping him from the dreamsphere before he could triangulate the second dreamer’s manifestations. The attack had come from the front. Zeke shoved blindly with legs and feet and connected with something solid.

He opened his eyes and took in the scene. Three vamps, Whedon-style, with human bodies and horribly wrinkled faces. Those would be from his failure to shield Maggie, and there could be more. One held her splayed on the floor, while one appeared to be feeding on her brother. The last advanced on Zeke, its fingers bloody from wounding him.

Maggie yelled at the wraith, kicking and struggling. That meant she’d made it out of the dreamsphere despite his deserting her there.

Thank God. Zeke bellowed for his team, praying the others weren’t swarmed, and smacked the alert button on his belt radio.