Disciple: DreamWalkers, Book 2 (38 page)

The nurse and orderlies helped the curator into the wheelchair, rolling his IV pole and portable monitor out from behind the bed. The curator, holding his hospital gown close to his knobby knees, caught Zeke’s eye and waggled his brows. “Think you can get along without me for a couple of hours, roomie?”

“I’ll try not to break any more of my legs,” Zeke said, “if you try not to have a heart attack.”

The burly nurse appeared taken aback by Zeke’s banter, but he was new here, shipped in to fill in the staffing gaps after the incident. He hadn’t gotten to know this particular curator the way Zeke and Maggie had.

“Sit tight, sir,” he advised the curator with a lot more respect than Zeke had shown. “There’s a bump at the threshold.”

Then the curator, the nurse and the orderlies were gone, leaving Zeke and Maggie alone for the first time in days.

Maggie smiled at him. “Good burger?”

“Lock the door,” Zeke told her. “We need to talk.”

Maggie did as asked but glanced pointedly at the camera in the corner of the room—all the patient rooms had cameras. Conversations or activities that needed to remain private took place on paper, outside the facility, or in dreamspace.

“What do you want to talk about?” Maggie didn’t look worried, but she didn’t realize what Zeke had in mind, either. Well, she’d been working her ass off helping reassemble the coma station. She hadn’t been trapped in bed with a broken leg and nothing to do but talk to the old man, watch DVDs, and fantasize about sex.

“Hold on a minute,” he said. “I need to do something first.”

He wondered, sometimes, after what they’d learned about Karen, just how private dreamspace was. Their curator had removed the knowledge of camouflage piercing from Zeke, Maggie and Lill’s memories days ago, repeating his desire for secrecy. Since technically he could have removed their memories that the camouflage existed, Zeke figured the old man wanted to keep a shared secret between them like a bond.

Or an obligation.

Right now, Zeke didn’t care about obligations, or secrets, or camouflage. Right now he intended to take advantage of his alone time with Maggie.

And he didn’t want any damn desk jockey in the coma station’s IT department getting an eyeful of what was about to happen in this room.

Zeke flipped a table knife from lunch through his fingers, testing its weight. Then he sent it spinning straight at the camera.

It struck dead on and shattered the small device. Zeke raised an eyebrow at Maggie. “I don’t know about you, but I’d like to talk about private stuff.”

Maggie frowned. “You’re going to get in trouble for that.”

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her across his lap. His leg only twinged a little. “I’d get in more trouble if I let them film us doing this.”

By the time he raised his head after the best kiss he’d ever experienced while trapped in a hospital bed, Maggie understood completely what he meant by private stuff. And what he meant by talking.

An hour after that, she understood that he loved her, because he told her a blue million times; that a leg in a cast couldn’t bend that way, which he only had to tell her once; and that she could make him cry like a baby when she revealed that she did indeed have condoms in her pocket.

She loved him. He loved her. What they had was tangible in every way possible. He swore to her, in the aftermath of their lovemaking, that he’d never fail her again. He swore to her that he’d only be half as grumpy from here on out.

And Maggie? She swore to him she’d start taking hand to hand combat training seriously. A lot more seriously. To prove it, she showed him the knife she’d hidden inside her shoe.

He’d never been happier in his life.

About the Author

Jody Wallace is published in romance fiction under the names Jody Wallace and Ellie Marvel. She has always lived with cats, and they have always been mean.

To learn more about Ms. Wallace, please visit
www.jodywallace.com
or the cat’s website,
www.meankitty.com
. You can also send an email to
[email protected]
.

Look for these titles by Jody Wallace

Now Available:

A Spell for Susannah

Liam’s Gold

What She Deserves (by Ellie Marvel)

Claustrophobic Christmas (by Ellie Marvel)

The Dreamwalker

Tangible

Disciple

The Realm

Survival of the Fairest

One Thousand Kisses

Dreams don’t come true, but nightmares do.

Tangible

© 2013 Jody Wallace

The DreamWalkers,
Book 1

When Zeke Garrett is reactivated to mentor the next dreamer that pops up on the Somnium’s radar, he’s sure it’s a mistake. The covert organization is still struggling to conceal the fallout from his last assignment, a fatal catastrophe. 

From the first blast of her pepper spray, he realizes this neonati, whose nightmares manifest vampires straight from the pages of pop-culture, is more than he bargained for—a potential dreamwalker. But before her training can begin, he has to convince the stubborn, mouthy woman she’s not dreaming. 

Maggie Mackey hasn’t slept well in a month, but that doesn’t explain how the monsters from her nightmares suddenly seem so real. Or why, when a team of intimidating, sword-wielding toughs rescue her, their leader captures her mouth in a swift, knee-weakening kiss.

Once he tears himself away, Zeke’s mental forehead smacking begins. Their embrace has confirmed they have a rare tangible bond, a phenomenon which fooled him once before. Somehow he must tutor the woman of his dreams without getting attached. Otherwise her nightmares could become his own.

Warning: Contains lots of cussing, pop-culture references and monsters with nasty, big, pointy teeth.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Tangible:

Zeke hated it when the dreamers were Joss Whedon fans. Based on the pixel-perfect accuracy of the vampires she’d conjured—vamps who were now attempting to eat her—this dreamer had memorized every incarnation of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, from the show transcripts to the books to the comics.

Cursing, he flung his knife at an oncoming vamp and whirled to stake a second. The ugly mother snarled its way up the spike before exploding into a million particles of dust. How the hell many were there? The density of the pack wasn’t a good sign.

In fact, it was very, very bad. Especially for him.

The neo they were here to collar huddled in the alley behind him, brandishing a gigantic pocketbook like a flail. Blood from a small wound at her throat trickled down her skin and stained the collar of her coat. He had to hand it to her. She had moxie. And a seriously overactive imagination that had to be harnessed before it got her and everyone else killed.

Well, at least she’d stopped screaming.

“Zeke, five o’clock!” Rhys called. The vamp with the knife sticking out of its shoulder barreled into him, knocked him down and attempted to sink jagged teeth into his neck. His vest and coat protected his torso but not his throat. He grabbed the monster’s head. Yellow goat-like eyes gleamed in the shadows of the buildings that lined the alley.

The rest of the field team was a minute away. His arms trembled with strain and his vision tunneled as he concentrated on keeping himself whole. As many vamps as they’d had the past ten years, they should add gorgets to their field gear.

Not that they could afford it, but it was a nice fantasy.

“Shut your eyes,” commanded a female voice. The dreamer. His dreamer.

“Stay out of this!”

She didn’t. A hand clutching pepper spray appeared between him and his attacker. Desperately, Zeke shoved away the vamp right before a noxious blast hosed its wrinkly mug.

With a howl, the monster convulsed, clawing its head. Zeke rolled the other way fast. Fire bloomed all over his face anyway.

“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. Screw 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.