Ambushed (8 page)

"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.

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.