Disciple: DreamWalkers, Book 2 (20 page)

Since Lill hadn’t used the code sentence, he’d assumed Maggie wasn’t asleep yet. Adi had specifically not wanted Maggie mentioned and had forbidden Zeke to have any contact with her. Everyone, it seemed, remembered Karen’s legendary jealousy.

But Karen’s intense reaction, her obvious dread of something none of the rest of them could sense, alarmed him. The others watched the drama inside his shield with worried expressions.

“He can’t eat Maggie. She’s not asleep yet.”
If he knew Maggie—and he did—once she hit the sphere, she’d be as close to their experiment with Karen as she could get. She’d stand right next to Lill—visible or not.

Awesome. If Maggie was present but invisible, she could be watching Karen climb him like a tree and claim they were all dead.

Karen’s hot breath wafted over his neck, a vampire ready to bite.
“She is here, but he has possessed her. This time she won’t survive. Get us out, Zeke, before he turns his attention to us. Get us out. Get us out. I’m sure the girl would want you to live.”

As Karen gibbered, Zeke snapped at Lill.
“Is Maggie here or not?”

“Not,”
Lill answered.
“Waiting for her—got a channel open. Bet she’s having trouble falling asleep with a bunch of soldiers staring at her.”

“We need to be sure,”
he told Lill. Was Maggie awake or was her signature being hidden again?

“Why are you worrying about her? She’s weak. A lost cause.”
Karen, with the same surprising strength, shook Zeke. His teeth snapped.
“But you’re not lost, Zeke. You have to live. Save us.”

To hell with it. Zeke shoved Karen away from him.
“Hands to yourself.”

“Don’t do this,”
she begged.
“Don’t look for her. Don’t sacrifice yourself.”

“Quit being so melodramatic.”
Damn, he hated clingy people.
“I just gotta
—
”

“Make no contact with the girl,”
Adi barked in his mind, echoing Karen.
“That’s an order, sentry.”

Zeke tried anyway. Without locomoting, which would disrupt the link network, he opened his psyche to the scanning frequency.
“Maggie. Maggie. Answer, dammit!”

Where was she? He cast his brain wide—and nothing.

He couldn’t geoscan while stationary, but he should be able to sense people he was close to, metaphysically and emotionally. Students. Friends.

Lovers.

After another moment of mental cursing and straining, something glimmered far, far on the edge of his range. He focused on it. How’d she get all the way out…

No, that was Chao. What the fuck? He could sense Chao but not Maggie?

God, he hoped she had insomnia.

“Houston, we have a problem. I can’t communicate with Constance anymore.”
Lill’s announcement returned Zeke to the here and now. He snapped out of his deepened trance with a grunt. Karen cringed toward him like a frightened dog, huddled and miserable.

“She’s not far enough in her search pattern for you to have lost contact,”
Adi said.
“Sergeant Roberts, please go after Constance. The rest of you, concentrate on what we came here to do.”

As the other L5 obeyed, a sense of foreboding filled Zeke. He wanted to lock Karen in a closet—somewhere she couldn’t touch him. He wanted to check on Maggie. He didn’t give a shit that they’d made zero progress toward Adi’s goal.

“I don’t like this,”
he broadcast.

“Get us out,”
Karen chanted, mentally and verbally. Her lips moved against the skin of his arm. The dreamsphere inside his shield swam with ripples of sound. Fear skittered up his spine. He hated to agree with Karen on anything, but he wanted out of the sphere.

“Tell Karen to open herself to me,”
Adi said.
“She swore she’d cooperate in return for my assistance. She hasn’t even tried. Does she think I’m a fool?”

Adi was right—Karen had made no effort whatsoever to uphold her end of the bargain. He jostled the woman cowering in his arms.
“Before we go, Adi wants you to at least try, Karen.”

But Karen was beyond reason.
“He has two. Will he never be satisfied? He’s, God, he’s strong, he’s coming fast. Get us out. You have to get us out.”

“Make her do it,”
Adi commanded.
“Make her.”

“Get us out.”
When Karen’s frantic, babbling lips mashed against his neck, Zeke’s pulse stuttered.

“Is she cooperating?”
Adi asked urgently.
“I sense a shift in her signature. I’m going to…”

Zeke lost the thread of Adi’s mind voice when his ears began to buzz. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe. The urge to bolt gripped him, sharp and unrelenting, yet he remained frozen. He couldn’t remember why he was here.

“Get us out,”
Karen demanded.

Right. She was right. They had to escape. Danger was coming. Its bleak presence churned around them like gale force winds. He couldn’t sacrifice himself, for Maggie or anyone. He could fight this evil better from the outside.

“I can’t make Karen do anything,”
he told Adi with a harsh gasp that hurt his throat.
“Look, we need to regroup. It isn’t safe here.”

Zeke found his center and his conduit and prepared to ditch dreamspace, dragging Karen with him.

Unexpectedly, he found his path barred.

Vigil-blocked. What the hell?

Dumbfounded, he stared at Adishakti. The small woman, not yet drooping, stood with her hands pressed against his shield. The foggy mists of wraith swirled around her, thickening. While they’d all been arguing, more wraiths had risen around them as if from the depths.

The blackness grew, and Adi’s expression darkened.

Danger wasn’t coming. Danger was here.

“Karen must complete the training.”
Vigil-blocks, difficult and fatiguing, temporarily sealed the dreamspace barrier in a small geographical area. Adi’s use of one was flabbergasting. The treacherous, brute force move, which could accidentally vigil-trap alucinators in the sphere, wasn’t her style. At all.
“We may not have another opportunity. This is crucial, Zeke. I won’t harm you. Be still.”

He felt Adi’s mind press into him, more intense than any assessment, and through him into Karen. How could she manage that?

And then it hurt too much to do anything but grab his head and curse Adi’s name.

Karen screamed.

“What are you doing?”
He vaguely noted Lillian yelling beyond the white-hot periphery of Adi’s invasion.
“Fuck me, Adi, you’ve locked us in here.”

“Ms. Sharma, this is against regulation,”
Blake said, shocked.

Moisture wet Zeke’s upper lip. The coppery whang of his own blood hit him along with a second splash of pain. Karen slid down his body until she crouched at his feet.

He quickly followed. Dear God, what was Adi doing? It was like nothing he’d ever experienced—nothing he’d ever known could happen.

His shield wavered. Collapsed. Karen rolled into a ball as if her thin arms could protect her from whatever Adi was trying to do to her via Zeke. Her keening wail nearly drowned out Lill’s tirade.

“He’s bleeding. Zeke’s bleeding. Is the terra firma under attack, or are you doing that? You could fucking trap us in here. What the hell, Adi, unblock us right now.”

Zeke staggered to his feet, safe from the wraiths thanks to Adi, Lill and Blake’s shields positioned around them in a protective triangle, but that wouldn’t last. Monsters swirled. Chaos mounted. The air dimmed until the only illumination came from their feet. It was almost as if Maggie had arrived, dragging her constant horde of wraiths with her.

Was Adi the danger he’d sensed? Or was it Maggie’s flock? What about Karen’s Master?

He could only deal with one danger at a time, and Adi seemed to be the danger intent on tearing his brain apart.

He wiped his hand through the blood on his face and shoved it toward the vigil.
“Thought you said you wouldn’t hurt me?”

Adi’s face crumpled. His pain disappeared. She opened her mouth to speak when suddenly she catapulted through the dreamsphere. Her body disappeared behind a black curtain of wraiths.

A blob of blackness, a concentration of wraiths so fierce it quivered, blasted the other wall of wraiths to bits. More harsh keening assaulted his ears, and it wasn’t Karen. In the broken-apart swirls, he spotted Adi in an awkward heap.

Other heaps, bodies, sprawled next to her.

The shadow monsters regrouped, closing ranks, cutting off his view. Blake’s shield parted from Lill’s with a pop like a rubber glove, and he zipped toward his boss. That left only Lillian between Zeke, Karen and the wraiths, and one shield couldn’t function as a defensive line against this many monsters.

With a grunt, he reformed a wobbly shield, undersized and probably perforated, around him and Karen. His head throbbed. Beneath him, the block on the dreamspace barrier faded. That meant Adi had deliberately lifted it, had been knocked unconscious—or was dead.

The wraiths closed in, and he knew his shield wouldn’t last long. Fuck. If only the damned shrieking would stop. Karen’s misery had softened into whimpers, but the horrid screams echoing all around them jabbed into his head almost as painfully as Adi had.

Zeke checked on Lill. Her hands covered her ears. It did little good in here, but the instinct was hard to break.

“Gotta go,”
he sent to her.
“I’ll get Karen out.”

“Leave her to die,”
Lill snarled.
“Karen did something to Adi. I know it. I need to help Blake. The wraiths have gone crazy. I don’t know if he can piggyback Adi out of here.”

“No, Adi did something to us.”
Zeke knew Adi was Lillian’s best friend, and the vigil’s shitty behavior would be hard for his fellow sentry to accept. “
I hate to say it, but Karen’s the victim this time. I gotta yank her out of the sphere and get her ass lobotomized like she wanted in the first place.”

“What about Maggie?”
Lill asked.
“Do you think her signature’s hidden? We know it happened once.”

“I hope your first guess was right—she’s not asleep yet.”
Zeke gathered Karen carefully into his arms. She curled against his chest like a baby animal.
“Let’s hit the terra firma and find out.”

He came awake to a room full of chaos.

Chapter Thirteen

Maggie knew she was supposed to have a natural sleep session in the sphere. Her first time in phase two—all alone. She was supposed to stay out of the way. Let the trained alucinators deal with Karen, Karen’s mythical Master, the allegedly sentient wraiths, and the code one situation Maggie may or may not have caused. The trancers’ mission was not her mission, despite the fact Zeke was a part of it.

When insomnia hit, though, she couldn’t bear it. She placed the dagger the guards had allowed her to keep within reach, curled up on her cot, and tranced into the dreamsphere anyway.

She needn’t have worried about accessing it without Zeke to guide her. She zipped into the sphere as if she’d already been trained to do it.

Unfortunately, a glob of wraiths, so thick it was like they’d been waiting for her, nearly jumped her before she could toss up a shield. It took several panicked, claustrophobic moments to situate herself. Wraiths crowded her tiny bubble, pushing and slavering.

The wraiths—if they got to her—would kill her. It would be her own stupid fault. Sure, she might be a bellatorix, but she wasn’t about to stake her life on it.

Bad idea, Mags. Bad idea.

One she’d rectify as soon as possible. Maggie huddled, cursed, and tried to collect herself enough to escape. It wasn’t as easy as the sleep sphere, where all she had to do was let her conduit suck her back to the terra firma. She’d done this before. Two whole times.

She needed to be calm, not impulsive. She wasn’t a full alucinator—she wasn’t even really a phase two disciple. She couldn’t help anyone if she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t geoscan and find the others if she couldn’t move. She couldn’t do anything but feel stupid. Weak.

Coming here was a mistake. Zeke would be disappointed. Did he realize what she’d done? Tentatively, she allowed her consciousness to reach for him. She’d just check and see if his mission was going smoothly.

To her surprise, he was calling her too, but he passed over her as if she weren’t there.

He wasn’t supposed to acknowledge her presence. Adi had insisted on it—to keep Karen focused. For him to seek Maggie probably meant there was trouble.

More reason to get her butt out of the sphere.

Maggie tried to wake herself up and found the path barricaded. An impenetrable wall sealed her conduit and every spot she attempted to create a new one.

What the hell? What was it—a vigil-block? But why?

She bolstered her shield and forged through the inky soup of wraiths toward the place she’d pinpointed Zeke’s signature. It didn’t take long to find him. She wedged herself and her lame little shield close to others so she could see what was going on through the wraiths that gathered around her.

Nobody answered her hail, of course. Nobody noticed her at all. Two team members had disappeared—Constance and Roberts—and she didn’t detect their sigs. Lill, Blake and Adi focused on Zeke and Karen, in the center of the triangle of shields. Karen, cowering at Zeke’s feet, cried and leaned against his leg. Zeke argued with Adi, something about forcing Karen to cooperate.

Like last night, Maggie managed to hear the others, just in time for Adi to promise Zeke she wouldn’t hurt him.

All of a sudden, everyone was yelling at Adi about vigil-blocking the barrier. Zeke crumpled to the ground beside Karen. His nose bled, and Lill cursed at Adi, something Maggie had never heard anyone do.

Adi was hurting Zeke.

Without a second thought, Maggie launched herself at the vigil. In her haste, she burst out of her protective bubble, but she didn’t care. Wraiths swarmed her, hissing and clawing. Furious, she punched and kicked right through their bodies.

She knew she could—she already knew. It was practically effortless.

She killed ten or twelve before they realized what a threat she was. En masse, they oozed out of arm’s length. She cleared a path to Adi and tackled the small woman, shield and all.

Adi’s head hit the cloudy ground. After a moment, the vigil-block between them and the terra firma faded.

Maggie didn’t wait around to face the consequences of assaulting her boss after busting out her special brand of wraith karate. She hurled herself into the terra firma as if monsters were on her heels.

Because they were.

She had about ten seconds to lie in a daze on her cot, blinking her eyes and wondering what that horrible noise was, before a passel of zombies phased into her room in a shower of red sparks.

The noise? A code one alert.

Maggie screamed and grabbed for her knife.

Who had caused this? Not her—she hadn’t felt the wraiths use her as a conduit, and she knew that sensation all too well. Thank God the manifestation was zombies, not vampires. Vampires would have been impossible to evade. As wraiths went, zombies were easy to kill—though that didn’t help neos seeing them for the first time. Not to mention, fast zombies had started cropping up more since that damned movie had come out.

The zombies—slow ones—noticed her and moaned. She knocked the cot on its side, intending to keep it between them. Then it was attack, retreat, parry—attack. She had to separate them from their heads.

It wasn’t easy.

Especially when she realized a bunch of wraith corpses had followed her from the dreamsphere. She wasn’t sure if the living ones had, but the corpses—definitely. That was going to be fun to explain.

Then, when she made a break for the door, she realized it was locked—from the outside.

Maggie beat on the metal briefly before she had to skitter away, dodging a shuffling zombie. Why the hell had Adi ordered her locked in? She hadn’t treated Maggie like a criminal before this adventure. More like a screw up. Since Maggie herself didn’t know how much of the first code one she’d caused, she couldn’t blame anyone for caution.

But locking her in like a prisoner?

And then—if what Maggie assumed was true—attacking Zeke in the dreamsphere? Everyone, including Lill, had been furious with Adi in the sphere.

Something was going on with Adi, and Maggie would never be able to discuss it with anyone if she got eaten by zombies. And—what the hell—a slime blob?

Goddammit, it didn’t even have a head to chop off.

More due to luck than skill, Maggie managed to dust the wraith population in the room down to one. But it was a persistent one, a very tall zombie—hence her inability to reach its gray-green throat with her dagger. She’d cut one of its arms mostly off, but to hack through the neck, she was going to have to whittle it closer to the ground.

Relying on training she hadn’t realized she’d absorbed, she ducked its outstretched arms and plunged her dagger into its gut. The blade slid in and out like the monster was made of air.

Alas, it did nothing to slow the zombie’s progress. A rope of intestine plopped through the gash, and the zombie shambled on.

“Somebody let me out of here!” she shouted, not for the first time.

She darted past the wraith—dodged the corpses on the floor too—and whaled on the door. Yelled some more. The purple illumination that slowed wraith functionality hadn’t been installed in the outbunker, but the code one alarm blared like a jackhammer in her head.

She gripped the door lever and pushed with all her might. Useless. So much for throwing her weight around. She could make out muffled shouts and sounds of battle through the door yet nobody seemed able to hear her.

The zombie wheezed behind her right before it slammed a floppy hand on her shoulder.

She spat some of Zeke’s favorite curses and smashed herself into the lumbering form. Small blessing—the manifestations in here had been limited to four. A hard-to-handle wraith like a T-Rex, a giant spider or a Whedon, and she’d already be dead.

The only Whedons in here were the corpses she’d killed in the dreamsphere after she’d stopped Adi from hurting Zeke.

The zombie stumbled, tripping over the splintered cot. Maggie managed to keep her balance. She avoided the zombie’s floundering limbs and leaped on its chest. Her blade cut into its throat.

Ick. Ick.
Green goo covered her fingers. Grimly, she sawed, but her proximity had a few downsides. The smell was awful, the goo was repellent, and its fingers could reach her neck.

It caught her in a strong grip. Its greenish lips wheezed putrid breath as it tried to tug her down for a bite.

She bore down on the dagger the way she had the door handle. Luckily, her weight was more effective here. The blade cut through larynx, rotted flesh and bones with a sickening lurch. She gagged and pushed. The zombie’s jaw worked as it dragged her close enough to chomp.

She curled her head toward her chest. Crooked teeth sliced fire into her scalp. Jesus, it was going for her brains. With a boost of adrenaline, she drove the knife that last inch through the monster’s neck.

Its death keen was more satisfying than frightening. It crumbled into sand, and she whomped to the floor.

Alone except for sand and corpses. The slime creature—she’d ended up sawing it in half while the zombies limped after her. Happily, any ick from the creatures turned to sand when the owners did, and she was no longer coated in vomitus goo.

Maggie allowed herself thirty seconds to hate life before returning to her feet, her back against the wall beside the door, her posture as defensive as she could make it. More manifestations could occur at any moment.

At last she was willing to admit Zeke was right—to his face, no less—and she should pay more attention to combat training.

What she wouldn’t give for a gun. She preferred to keep her distance from the monsters, though to dispatch them, you really did have to lop off their heads. A large enough gun should be able to manage that.

As she stood, alert, Maggie whapped the dagger handle against the metal door in a steady rhythm. Somebody outside was bound to notice. If anybody was left. She hadn’t heard any noise besides the zombie and the code one alarm in several minutes.

Her stomach lurched. She clapped her non-dagger hand over her mouth. Blood trickled down her temple from the painful bite on her head. What if everyone was dead? What if that was why nobody had unlocked her door?

She distracted herself wondering who might have created the code one this time. The distraction didn’t last long, since it took twenty seconds to decide, conclusively, it was Karen.

The klaxons ceased. Surely someone would check on her soon? They couldn’t all be dead. Someone had to have switched off the alarm.

Maggie tentatively probed her scalp wound and hissed when her fingers encountered more than she’d bargained for. Was that a flap of skin? Jesus. Fresh pain zinged through her, followed by fresh nausea.

With the room trashed after her struggle with the zombies, it seemed awfully finicky to seek out the garbage can to barf in, but that was exactly what she did.

When she was finished, she rubbed her mouth on her shoulder, grimacing when the sand in her clothes gritted against her face. So much for that PB&J. She returned to the door.

Before she started banging again, she heard noises. Ah, hell, was it another monster?

No.

On the other side of the door, she heard the voice she most longed to hear. “Maggie? You alive in there?”

Her heart leaped with relief. “I’m here! Let me out.”

“You alone?”

“What do you mean, am I alone?” She rattled the door lever. “Yes, I’m alone. Except for a bunch of dead wraiths. I may need stitches.”

The handle snicked, and the door swung open. Zeke, splattered with wraith dirt and blood, stood outside. Weapons bristled all over him, but Maggie wrapped herself around his neck anyway.

He was okay.

“Hey now.” He uncoiled her arms and set her away from him, glancing at the soldiers milling in the short corridor. Between their large, Kevlar’d bodies, she caught a glimpse of Adi’s blue scrubs. The petite woman leaned against the wall, sagging after the vigil-block but still orchestrating the chaos like a maestro. “It’s all right. You’re safe. I came as soon as I could.”

She could hardly ask him about Adi, or about anything, if Adi was watching them.

“I was in the sphere again,” she said in as quiet a voice as she could manage. She kind of nodded her head backward, so he’d notice the corpses. She’d counted them—nine this time, all as solid as she was. “I saw what was done to you.”

“You’re bleeding.” Zeke frowned. His gaze darted over the trashed room, pausing on the cot that had been bashed to pieces, the nightstand, the chair.

“Yeah, and?”

He plucked at her shirt. His frown deepened when sand scattered to the floor. “Is that wraith dust?”

She held up four fingers. “Three zombies, one slime thing.”

“God, Maggie. I’m… You were locked in, weren’t you? With wraiths.” His hands shook. He raked fingers through his hair and stepped away like he needed to put some distance between them—hopefully so he wouldn’t clutch her to his chest and reveal to everyone how intimate their student-teacher relationship had grown.

Maggie eased the door mostly shut behind her. “I don’t know if we should ask the person you mentioned about the scroll we discussed,” she said carefully. “After what she did.”

If Adi identified Maggie as her assailant from the sphere, there could be serious consequences. Maggie could kill wraiths in the sphere. She and Zeke couldn’t hide that anymore, not with nine bodies stinking up the room behind her. It wasn’t a huge leap to wonder whether Maggie could kill alucinators in the sphere as well as wraiths.

“Scroll?” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “What scroll?”

“Antipodes,” she whispered.

“Sorry, I don’t remember that,” he said in a normal voice.

Maggie gaped at him. But…

Oh.

They weren’t alone.

Lillian stalked up behind Zeke, her expression troubled. A cut on her cheek and a huge rip in her leather jacket sleeve lent her a more dangerous air than normal. Her dark braids clung tightly to her head in a neat ponytail. “Did I hear you tell Zeke you killed four wraiths?”

Maggie nodded. She wondered why Zeke didn’t want to talk to Lill about Adi, the scroll and Maggie’s ability—he’d said he trusted Lill—but went with his obfuscation. “They materialized inside my room. I’m guessing those weren’t the only ones?”