Tangible (Dreamwalker) (2 page)

“Excuse me, ma’am!” Rhys thundered up, huge feet kicking snow and gravel every direction, and pounced on the vamp. Zeke heard growls, curses. Over the sound of his own hacking, he detected the telltale
whoomp
of a monster getting dusted.

The dreamer, her voice anxious, blurted out, “Are you okay, sir?”

No thanks to you.
Zeke blinked, coughed and scooped up snow to hold against his face. The icy wetness relieved the burn somewhat. Thank God he’d missed most of the spray or he’d be out of commission. He dabbed his eyes on his jacket sleeve, careful not to smear the residue. With blurred vision, he glanced up to see his target extend her hand to him.

After a long hesitation he accepted, though she’d been more than enough help already. Right before their skin touched, his palm warmed. A whisper of sensation, a magnetic pull, shivered up his arm.

He bit back a curse. A tangible bond—and he’d only been in her head once.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was supposed to get saddled with an L2 at most. Fuck Sean and his statistics.

The woman tensed, perhaps feeling the faint
zing
, perhaps sensing his hostility. She hauled him to his feet anyway. The process was complicated by the fact his lungs burned, the ground was slick and he couldn’t see straight. Once he was upright, she sidled away, rubbing her hand on her pants.

He copied her gesture, trying to wipe away the sensation of her cold, slender fingers and the potency of their connection. For high-level alucinators, walking someone else’s dreams occasionally forged a spontaneous link that could mean a number of things.

Most were undesirable. None could be addressed in an icy, dark alley with corporeal wraiths on the loose.

“Who were those guys?” Her chest rose and fell rapidly, and she clutched the pepper spray in a defensive position. “They looked like... I’m not crazy, but they looked like vampires. How did you make the bodies disappear?”

He was thankful she didn’t carry a gun. A lot of new dreamers did, their unsettling nightmares driving them to protect themselves from horrors they couldn’t yet name.

Since Zeke was still coughing, Rhys answered for him. “Ma’am, we’ll explain everything as soon as we can, but first we have to take care of stragglers.” And onlookers or witnesses, but so far nobody had come to check out the screams.

“Is this a setup?” The woman confronted them, angry and scared. “Reality TV? I signed no contract, gentlemen, and you will be hearing from my lawyer.”

“Do you see any cameras?” Zeke managed, his breathing normalizing. The deserted alley where she’d been attacked was a long, narrow lane separating rows of historic buildings with tiny back yards. Snow coated most exposed surfaces in a pale gleam of winter.

“You could have concealed them.”

Open concrete carports and trash cans bordered the track, providing lots of places for cameramen...or wraiths. Though lurking wasn’t really the monsters’ style.

“It’s not a setup, ma’am,” Rhys assured her. He clapped Zeke on the back. “Will you live?”

“Yeah. Just caught a whiff.” He flicked on his walkie-talkie, stifling another cough. The device crackled, static-riddled. He smacked it until it worked. What he wouldn’t give for earbuds. “Secure the area. We’ve got the neo. Have Lillian confound any witnesses.”

Though he couldn’t see them from his position, his other teammates would fan out, casing the intersecting streets for more wraiths. The creatures were attracted to the dreamers who’d produced them, but that never stopped them from assaulting passersby. When everyone reported the area complication-free, Zeke coughed one last time and turned to the reason for his current suffering.

Enough light filtered in that he could distinguish the woman’s features and form. Not a kid, thank God. Past her twenties—the most common age for neonati. The cut on her throat looked like a failed bite. It would sting but wasn’t dangerous. Caucasian, US citizen from the accent, with long disheveled hair, dark eyes with circles under them, and a round, cold-reddened face. Five-foot-five or six. She boasted what seemed to be generous curves under her heavy coat and fuzzy pants.

She was on the pretty side of ordinary, with intelligence in her sharp gaze and alertness in her body language.

The problem was she wasn’t even slightly ordinary. She was an alucinator. A person whose mind could access the dreamsphere and drag monsters into the terra firma. Untrained and powerful, she was more dangerous than his whole team combined.

How strong was she? Her initial manifestation and their tangible suggested L4. Not L5—since L5s were extremely rare—but his comfort level extended only to L3, no matter what the vigils and Lillian had insisted.

Someone on his team was going to have to take this dreamer off his hands. He’d mentor the next one.

“Who are you talking to on your radio, your cameramen?” She gestured at the walkie. “Can you prove this isn’t a setup?”

Zeke clipped the walkie to his belt. The old-timers in the organization claimed the first-meet between dreamer and field team had been easier before Candid Camera. Reality television had increased humanity’s disbelief threshold tenfold.

“Vamps turning into dust before your eyes not convincing enough for you?” he asked her.

Predictably, it was not. “Special effects. Projection cameras. How many more fake vampires are there?”

As if they could afford special effects and high tech cameras. “They’re not fake and we don’t know yet.”

“A likely story.” Her words were firm but her big eyes and pale face spoke of a woman who was completely shaken up.

Most dreamers manifested between one and four wraiths at first. Not fifteen. The only way she was getting through this alive was if she cooperated with everything he and his team required.

Hell. He’d never been good at the touchy-feely aspects of training, but when he’d reported the neonati last night—after he’d geotracked her odd composite signature in the dreamsphere—HQ had reiterated that his administrative leave from mentoring was over. They wanted him to take this one and his whole team knew it.

As he watched the woman assess him and, from her expression, find him wanting, inspiration struck him like an invisible wraith. If he could make her hate him so much she refused to associate with him, it would force someone else to step in.

Not a bad plan.

He stalked up to her, got in her face, and grunted with disgust.

“Lady, let’s get one thing straight,” he said. “This is life or death. Do everything I say when I say it, and then thank me for saving your ass. I told you not to interfere. The pepper spray was a stupid move. We were on top of things.” Zeke might have wound up with a few lacerations before Rhys dusted the wraith, but he’d had worse.

“The way it looked to me, the thing was on top of you.” Her words, firm and confident, belied the way she fiddled with her aerosol can. “You’re claiming those creatures were real?”

“Didn’t it feel real when it bit you?” He almost called her dumb, but if he went overboard his team might catch on. “This isn’t a joke.”

“If it is, you failed. I’m not amused.” She blinked rapidly, her fingertips brushing the cut on her neck. “I’m bleeding.”

“No shit. A monster fanged you. You put us both at risk from them when you incapacitated me.”

“I saved you.”

“No, you didn’t.” He snatched the pepper spray from her hand and shook it. “What if that hadn’t been the last vampire? What if Rhys hadn’t been here? Do you know how to kill a vampire? No. You don’t. Pepper spray doesn’t do squat to them after the first couple seconds. They’re not human.” Blades were the preferred weapon for almost all wraith types since they were silent, deadly and less traceable—what with bullet casings and the like.

She studied the aerosol can, its angle, and then him. Her face hardened. “Are you going to spray me now?”

Great. She was quarrelsome. Uncooperative too. It reinforced his decision to duck out of this particular responsibility. “Don’t tempt me, lady.”

She opened her mouth to tempt him but he wasn’t finished. “Don’t get any big ideas about screaming, either. I’ll stuff a sock in your yap.” He didn’t have time to be hassled by locals or the cops. He needed her cowed, quiet and hating his guts.

“You can try.” Her chin lifted. “I have an extra pepper spray.”

“Sure you do.” Spare him from civilians who wandered into dark alleys. Spare him from mentoring them. “You got no idea—”

Rhys inserted his large self between them—always the peacekeeper, the politician, except when there was ass to be kicked. He was a head taller than Zeke. He was a head taller than most people. “Now that this area is secure, we should move inside. Ma’am, if there are other wraiths they’ll be nearby, in or around your home.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t live here.” The woman, her expression distrustful, didn’t respond much better to Rhys than she had to Zeke. This said more about her than Rhys, because Rhys was smooth as butter and good at this courteous shit. “I’m from out of town.”

Unfortunately, dreamscanning only pinpointed a manifestation, not a neo’s level, identity or degree of pigheadedness. But Zeke knew what he’d read when he’d isolated her visions amidst the wisps and shadows of the dreamsphere.

She was no traveler. No out-of-towner. She’d been spending her nights in this area for some time, wrapped in horrors so intense they’d worn a crack in the barrier between the dreamsphere and terra firma and broken free. How could that be described as not living here?

She was a liar in addition to her other flaws. He was so not the right person for this job.

Zeke tilted his head toward the woman and tried the direct approach with Rhys. “You want? Bet there’ll be a big bonus.”

The big man held up his hands. “No can do. Vigils’ orders.”

“Excuse me,” the woman said. “Does he want what? Don’t ignore me. I’m right here.”

“I’ve got a tangible,” Zeke admitted. He wasn’t a great mentor. Never had been. He could have muddled through training an L3, but with this neo and a tangible he’d be courting disaster. A bonus would never be worth that. “It’s not looking good.”

Rhys studied the woman, who was watching them both suspiciously. If converted, she could be valuable for the Somnium. Rhys was no fool. He wouldn’t want to piss HQ off, but he knew what it meant that Zeke had a tangible. He also knew the rewards for bringing a high-level alucinator into the fold through mentorship and persuasion.

“I’ll consider it,” he said.

If Rhys said no, Zeke would enlist Lillian or Chang. Sean. Chloe, back at base. She could be here in under two hours. Until then, he’d keep doing what he could to ensure the dreamer hated him.

He turned to the woman and sneered. “If you don’t live here, why are you walking down this alley like mugger bait? Richmond might not be crime central, but it ain’t Candyland. Quit lying. You’re wasting our time. You live close enough to be familiar with this shortcut.”

She shrugged, her expression mulish. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“You been staying at a boyfriend’s? Girlfriend’s? Halfway house? I don’t give a crap. Just tell us.”

She hugged her purse and glowered. Zeke squinted at her fingers. No wedding band. He hoped that meant she lived alone. Fewer complications.

“Take us to the place you slept last night,” he demanded. “Now.”

“Thank you for the rescue,” she said, ignoring his order, and added, “if that’s what it was.”

Which part of them saving her neck had she missed? “It was.”

“Don’t you think we should let the professionals take over now?”

Zeke laughed. “We are the professionals.”

She pulled a face. “You’re the police?”

“No and we’re not the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines, either.”

“FBI,” she said. “CIA. Homeland Security.”

“Tell you what.” Zeke smacked snow and dirt off his jeans. “How about we leave you to it? Call the police, call the FBI. None of them will believe you. Trust me. We deal with this sort of thing on a regular basis. And while you’re waiting on your professionals, wraiths could murder anyone you live with and your neighbors.”

She drew in a quick breath. He’d struck home, all right.

“After that, they’ll circle around and find you. Only we won’t be here to help because you stupidly refused to cooperate.” Even as he tried to offend her, a horrifying thought crossed his mind. My God, if she had kids at home... “Come on, now. We don’t have time to debate whether this is reality TV. Where’s your house?”

She retrieved her cell phone from her pocketbook. Obviously he hadn’t struck home enough. “Why would the cops not believe me? Somebody tried to kill me. I don’t have to say it was vampires. Whose bodies disappeared.”

“Because bodies so often do that,” he said.

Her gaze skittered across the alley as if seeking a logical explanation. A poorly hidden corpse. A cameraman. She inched toward the street, tennis shoes scuffing the snow, and opened her phone. “Who are you people?”

“The people who saved your butt.” Zeke tossed her the pepper spray can, harder than necessary. She dropped her phone in the snow in her attempt to catch the can. “The people who’re gonna cure you of those bad dreams you’ve been having.”