Hunted Dreams (7 page)

Reed stared for a brief, breathless, achingly tense moment. “Are you Clan?” he finally asked. Okay, probably not the brightest question.

“What do you want with us, Leeches?” the shorter, stockier woman hissed. Her brown hand, held before her defensively, sparkled with various gold rings.

“We’re just walking to our car,” he said in a deadpan tone, although his heart throbbed in his chest. Centuries-old feuds aside, he wouldn’t fight women, no matter how obviously well trained and tough.

“What a
coincidence
,” the woman sneered.

“Nothing Maricruz ever does is a coincidence,” the tall, red-haired White woman said in a much calmer voice, although her posture remained tense.

Beside him, Maricruz’s lips knotted into a provocative smile. She shuddered. “Nothing like a healthy dose of terror, Zee,” she purred, and winked at the heavier woman. “Yummy.”

With a snarling cry, Zee threw herself at Maricruz. Her fist struck Mari’s cheekbone, snapping the smaller woman’s head back. Shouting in dismay at the sight of a larger woman attacking a much smaller one, Reed threw himself in the middle of their fight and struggled to pull them apart. Punches and kicks hammered his body, and adrenalin squirted into his system. Through a red veil, he muttered the word “defense” over and over to remind himself not to vent his pain and rage.

A strong hand suddenly jerked him backward. He was solidly planted, but the grip was iron-hard, the yank immensely powerful, and he stumbled a couple of steps back. Mari and Zee continued fighting, close and dirty.

He whirled around, and the redheaded woman stopped his motion with a fist to the chin. Reed cried out and raised his fists to fight back . . . and then lowered them.

Undaunted, perhaps expecting a trick, the woman twirled and delivered a kick intended for his midsection. Reed jumped back, avoiding the kick altogether.

“I won’t fight you!” he ground out, wishing he could rub his aching jaw.

The woman acted as if he hadn’t spoken. She stepped forward, putting her body weight into the punch. He tried to move aside but felt the impact on his bicep. For such a mundane body part, the pain was intense.

Reed growled at her. “Stop it!” he commanded in his best imitation of a drill sergeant. The woman smiled at him and delivered a kick that almost swept his feet out from under him. He staggered and regained his balance, only to have to fend off another flying fist. He smacked it away.

The woman’s foot made violent contact with his right thigh. This time, he did slam backward, falling heavily and violently against the brick wall of a building. His hammering pulse choked the air from his lungs. His body ached. He watched his fists rise. With a painful, self-disgusted sigh, he rearranged them before his chest in a defensive position.

In spite of feeling sluggish from the pain, he found himself successfully fending off two more punches. The final punch he smacked away with more force than he intended. It would be so easy to give in and attack: punch, kick, jab, smash . . .

“Hey!” someone shouted from several yards away. Reed foolishly turned his head to the right, spied an older Asian couple standing in horror just thirty feet away . . .

And received a kick to his stomach. He crumpled immediately to the ground, overwhelmed with pain and pawing at his chest for air, more air, just a little bit of air,
god
, more air!

Through the roar in his ears, he heard the sound of shoes smacking pavement. A moment later, Maricruz, blurred and wavery, appeared before his eyes.

“Want me to call the cops?” the strange voice yelled.

With a gasp, Reed finally sucked in a dirt-laden breath. It tasted like heaven.

“No thanks,” Mari called. She brushed hair away Reed’s forehead. “Okay?” she mouthed. He nodded and raised his eyebrows in question. She smiled and nodded. “They left before they could take anything,” she shouted to the couple.

Reed looked away from Maricruz and at the couple. The man looked shocked and upset, but the woman stared at Reed with some disgust, perhaps thinking he needed a serious testosterone upgrade.

The woman tugged her companion along, and they quickly left the alleyway.

Reed looked back to Maricruz. Her left eye had swollen closed, her nose bled, and when she backed up a step, he saw she favored her right leg. He could only imagine the sight he presented.

“Can you stand up?” she asked.

Reed nodded, although he wasn’t so sure. He lurched to his feet, wobbled for a brief moment, and then jerked his chin toward the way they had originally come. “How about we forget about that shortcut?”

They walked slowly and painfully back to his ancient pickup.

To a backdrop of moaning and whistling wind, slivers of snow and ice tapped like fingernails against the windowpanes. The woman stared outside and into the whirling whiteness and arctic blue light. She was pretty certain the moaning in the wind was the voice of her mother. It couldn’t be true, shouldn’t be true, but she’d come to know anything, here, could happen.

Wrapping her arms around her soft middle, she turned her back to the window. The cold seemed to creep from the thin panes and smooth like fingers over her goose-pimpled flesh. She shuddered.

Sounds like claws, or perhaps talons, ticking across the window made her spin around in a panic. Ice particles clicking against the glass. It had to be. Outside, her mother’s voice moaned on, a needle-sharp, mournful sound that danced up and down the octaves.

The tiny room behind the woman, constructed from floor to ceiling with graying, time-roughened wood, was perhaps a single-room shack tucked somewhere in a forest or on top of a mountain. She didn’t know.

Sometimes she thought she was dreaming. Other times she thought, well, she thought she might be somewhere else.

A sharp tapping against the windows drew her eyes upward. She hadn’t realized she’d been staring at the floor. This time when she looked out the window, she saw a hulking, hazy, light gray something scuttle out of her line of sight. The creature had moved quickly, stealthily, like some kind of huge animal.

Gasping, she stumbled backward. The only thing between her and that—beast—was a thin, single pane of glass. The room behind her held no means for defending herself.

You’re a big girl
, she reminded herself. No more running. No more terror. No more hysteria. No more curling up into a tiny ball and waiting for her blinks to whisk her away to safety.

No more playing victim.

Her breathing calming, the woman looked briefly at the splintered wood of the ceiling. When she lowered her head, she felt her body warming, just a little, and her heartbeat slowing. She turned her back to the window once again and was not surprised to find a slender, gleaming, slightly curved sword propped up against the far wall.

When she picked it up, she found the grip fit perfectly in her hand.

Leaning heavily against one another, Reed and Mari limped back inside the mansion. Quina and Paul appeared instantly at their sides and helped them to the nearest couch.

“We’re okay,” Maricruz said quietly.

“What happened?” Quina asked Reed.

He gazed tiredly at her. “Don’t insult me,” he said.

Quina dipped her head in a slight nod.

“They’ll kill us as soon as look at us,” Paul said, holding out several protein bars. He lowered his bulk into a recliner, crossed his hands over his rounded stomach, and stared mildly at Reed.

Reed devoured three bars. A moment later, he turned to Quina. “Do any of your lessons not involve broken bones?”

“Only the less important ones,” she deadpanned. She turned to Maricruz with a raised eyebrow.

“He let Brynn beat him up rather than fight back,” she said, gingerly patting her cheekbone. Her hunger must be as intense, but she had only finished one bar and was currently nibbling on the second.

Quina slowly shook her head. Paul,
damn him
, looked amused.

“This isn’t etiquette school, son,” Paul said, tapping his fingers against his stomach. “Chivalry in our world only gets you nice and dead.”

Quina’s lips pursed. “You call it ‘chivalry,’ I call it ‘chauvinism.’” She leaned forward, the better to emphasize her derision. “You’re stronger and faster than the average human, Reed Jayvyn, but Hunters aren’t average. In fact, they’re at least as strong and fast, and they’ve been training for years.”

Reed stared back at her. “I won’t fight women.”

Maricruz laughed, and flashed a beguiling grin from her puffy, bloodied face. “They sure as heck will fight you,
guapo
. And go ahead and fight only Clan men, but somehow, I don’t think you’ll be so eager once you know they’re harmless. It’s Clan women—the Hunters —who fight; the men are Psychics and don’t do much aside from telling the Hunters where to go and when. Psychics aren’t any tougher than the guy that pumps your gas.”

Reed let his head drop back to the leather cushion. He was still so damn hungry.

“Unlike us, they’re forever divided in their capacities. And only we get the wall-walking,” Mari added, eyes hooded.

Quina rose. “Think about it, Reed. Outdated gender prejudices are dangerous in our world. We wouldn’t want to find one of our own only to lose him to ignorance.”

Before he retired to bed, Reed sought out Alberto, who had tucked himself onto a loveseat in the entertainment room, tackling a thick textbook with a bright orange highlighter. From what Reed could see, it was the odd sentence that Berto
didn’t
highlight.

“Man, I hate Bio,” Berto complained, and snapped the book closed. “I don’t plan on being a doctor, so why do they make me take it?”

“To torture you,” Reed said. He sat down on a wooden chair next to the loveseat.

Berto grabbed a can of soda from a side table. “No offense, bro, but you look like shit.” He took a sip.

“How weird. I feel like dancing the night away.”

Berto grinned. “Lesson Two, huh?”

Reed growled in response, and Alberto laughed. “It sucks, I know, but it’s a good lesson to learn. Those bitches are tough, and there’s nothing they’d like more than to grind you and me to a sticky paste. Besides, you’ll feel better after you sleep.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk about,” Reed said. He glanced toward the empty door. “I’ve been . . . Is it usual to have vivid dreams when you’re, when we’re around others like us?”

Alberto considered, cocking his head. “I dunno. Nobody’s ever said anything like that to me. Mari and me were found when we were little kids, and I don’t remember my dreams before then. Quina’s teaches psychology at the university. You want me to ask her?”

Reed shook his head, although Quina’s profession surprised him.

“You havin’ funky dreams, huh?”

Reed shrugged. “Just kind of vivid. I figured it must be all the mind waves or psychic hoodoo or whatever. No big.”

“You want to borrow my Bio book? I guarantee reading it will put you into a dreamless coma.”

“Don’t show it to Quina. She’ll use it to brain me.” Reed rose, bid the grinning boy a good night, and left for bed.

Chapter 4

The cityscape pressed against the swollen face of the moon. Dark and skeletal buildings leaned at unnatural angles, casting elongated shadows that tangled themselves into an inky network of lace, while the sky stretched above in shades of black and gray. Textures gave way to shadow and light.

Reed felt as though he’d stumbled into a Tim Burton film. At any moment, he expected to hear a self-consciously melodramatic crash of thunder. However overdone the ambiance, the setting did qualify as creepy.

Glancing downward, he felt slightly relieved to find himself clothed in nondescript jeans and a dark gray T-shirt. His feet were bare.

Looking closely at the silhouette of buildings, he thought this world, this dreamscape, this whatever-it-was represented L.A. An exaggerated, film noir version, but definitely a vision of downtown L.A. He was staring southward at it, and to the right of the cluster’s middle he could make out the U.S. Bank Tower, proudly stretching just a head above the rest. Moonlight and silvery-white streetlight hinted at tangled knots of freeways snarling somewhere in the darkness beneath the skyscrapers.

In spite of the cartoon-esque spookiness of the scene, he saw little actual menace: no tornado of nothingness, no tortured women in party finery. He was—

—suddenly standing in the very downtown he’d been viewing just a second ago. Dream-travel at its finest. Around him stretched impossibly tall walls that blotted out the moon. All around him crowded various buildings, many touching, none leaving enough room for something as mundane or useful as a street. He stood at a crossing of alleyways. To move forward, he needed to choose among the four possible routes. Ahead, back, left, or right?

“It’s a damn dream. It’s not like it really matters,” he reminded himself. Feeling a tug to move forward, he instead turned to his left and proceeded down that pathway. The concrete felt warm and dusty under his feet.

Shadows blanketed the alleyway. He could tell the walls on the left were made with stone and the ones on the right with brick, but otherwise, the nuances of the scenery evaded him. Because the obscenely tall building blocked the moon, the alley’s main light source came from the streetlights behind and somewhere in front of him. He could see no more than ten feet ahead or behind.

A soft tickle on his foot jerked his gaze downward. The scant light flickered off a dark brown carapace scuttling away from him. Cockroach, then. L.A.’s human inhabitants could sport thousand-dollar weaves, nibble lunch at the swankest Beverly Hills cafés, and pump enough silicone in their chests to lubricate a thousand lawnmower engines, but nighttime in the City of Angels still belonged to its less refined residents.

He started onward again. Either he needed to do something to end this dream or it would wind down on its own. Either way, there was no use loafing uselessly around. His bare feet whispered against the pavement.

Whoever orchestrated this dream had a knack for detail. He’d spent his entire life in Los Angeles, and downtown smelled just like this. Although he could neither see nor hear any vehicles, the sharp stenches of exhaust, gasoline, and oil stuffed his nostrils. Underneath their acridness loomed the faint, powdery scents of dust and dirt.

A sudden, scuffing noise coming from the darkness ahead halted his footsteps. The noise silenced. Reed stayed motionless, channeling his senses into the murk lying ahead of him. After a moment, he heard the slight sound come yet again, this time from near the ground. Probably, given the grim setting, a rat. This dream spared no—

Something impacted the inside of his knee at the same time he felt a sharp forward push. Dream it might be, but he felt his teeth clack hard together when he slammed to his knees in the dirty alleyway. His momentum sent him forward, and he braced himself with his hand before he could fall face-first to the asphalt.

Palms stinging, Reed straightened onto his knees from all fours. He was about to rise to his feet when a feminine voice behind him snapped, “Don’t move.” Something sharp pressed against the back of his neck. He stopped.

“What are you doing here?” the voice demanded. He was pretty sure he knew who it belonged to.

“Enjoying the night,” he replied without inflection.

“It’s a mistake to underestimate me, smart-aleck,” she said quietly, but he heard a slight vibrato of fear. “Are you following me?”

“Um, perhaps you hadn’t noticed, but you’re the one who snuck up on me.” His tone was infinitely polite. He stared before him into the patchy darkness.

“You know what I mean,” she snapped.

He started shaking his head, felt the hint of a sting against his neck, and halted his movements. “Actually, I don’t. I’d love to know what the hell’s going on here. I mean, no offense,—this is a lovely place and all—but I’d rather be sailing the Pacific or exploring Mars or living like a god somewhere.”

“What are you talking about?”

He took a breath. “Hey, I’d love to have a heart to heart. Could you back off and let me get up?”

She remained silent for a moment. Finally, she withdrew the blade from his neck. “I’m backing up, but I still have the sword. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Straight out of a television cop drama. If this woman were architect of this dream, why would she need a sword? Trite threats? To fear
him
, a harmless, unarmed interloper? He rose slowly and painfully to his feet. Once he was certain he’d regained his balance, he turned around.

She stood five feet from him, holding a thin, curving sword that pointed right at his stomach. Dream it may be, but according to his knees and palms, he wasn’t immune to pain.

Carefully, slowly, Reed nodded at her. “Good to finally meet you.”

As he’d noted before, the woman was young, perhaps in her mid-to-late twenties. She stood tall and broad, a Viking warrior of a woman with long, dark brown hair, strong hands, and a suspicious scowl. Today she wore an all-black outfit: jeans, T-shirt, and plain denim jacket. Her feet, like his, were bare. No other nakedness this time.

More the pity.

“Who are you? What do you have to do with”—she jerked her head toward the wall—“this?”

“I wish I knew,” he said. “The first night I thought you were a part of my dream, but after last night”—he shook his head—“I’m pretty sure this whole setup belongs to you.”

She stared at him, her mouth slightly open, her eyes intense. “What do you mean?” she demanded.

Reed gestured to the sky, the walls, the buildings that crowded around them at unnatural angles. “This is your world,” he said, “not mine. I’m just a bit player. Somehow you pulled me into your subconscious playground.”

She drew her breath in sharply, and her nostrils flared. “Are you saying this is a dream?” she all but whispered.

Surprised, Reed nodded. “Yeah. Didn’t you know?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t know where this was. I considered a dream, but why don’t I ever wake up?”

Forgetting the sword, Reed took a step toward her. She threw him a cautious look but didn’t say anything. “It’s just a dream,” he said. “You do wake up. You just don’t remember it. You’re sleeping right now, just like me. The only mystery is how you dragged me into—”

“You’re wrong,” she said hoarsely. “I don’t wake up, not ever. I just flow from one scene to another.”

“Girl, you’re dreaming,” he soothed. “Dreams make us think weird shit, forget the waking world. In ten minutes you’ll move on to another sleep stage and forget all about this conversation.”

He heard her painful exhale. She tilted her head at him, and her strong jaw had clenched around a teeth-baring snarl. Her movement caught a ray of light, and he could see her eyes sparkled with a haze of tears. “I’m not wrong or crazy. If this is a dream,
I can’t wake up
.”

Reed still didn’t believe her, but the intensity of her pain, anger, and fear kept him silent. It was all he could do not to give in, to take a long sip. . .

“What’s your name?” she asked him with a sudden sharpness.

He inhaled, held it, let it go. “Reed.”

“It’s coming, Reed,” she said. “We need to get going.”

She placed the sword in a narrow scabbard resting against her curvy left hip before grabbing his arm and propelling him forward. They jogged forward, since an outright run in such a dim place seemed unwise. The woman kept a grip on his arm.

“What is ‘it’?” he asked as they chugged doggedly forward.

“I don’t know,” she ground out, angry, he thought, not with him but the nameless ‘It.’ “It takes different forms every time.”

They jogged forward, and although Reed could feel the dust under his feet and see slight shifts in light patterns, he could find no other signs of progress. For all the good they were doing, they may as well run on a treadmill.

After a moment he heard “It”: a whooshing sound growing gradually closer. He turned, and the woman snapped, “Don’t look at It!” It was her dream, and she likely understood the logic of it better than he, but he didn’t much like feeling helpless and ignorant. His head swiveled, and he saw nothing.

Reed started to ask the woman if running seemed wise when something brushed through his hair.

“Duck!” the woman yelled, but her warning came too late. Some thin, furless, prehensile object wrapped around his chest and yanked him upward. Rather than glance above at his captor, he instead watched the woman’s eyes as he rose toward the night sky above. Her face was painfully blank.

“What’s your name?” he asked her quietly. His ascent was silent, and although he was a good twenty feet above her, he knew she could hear him.

She opened her mouth, floundered for a moment. “Katana,” she called before he rose too high to see or hear her.

Mina watched with great amusement from the sidelines as Quina ordered Reed to spar with Maricruz. Mari, her long hair pulled into a ponytail and her slender body clad in a body-hugging workout outfit, grinned at him.

Reed scowled back at her.

“What’s the matter?” she teased, her hair bouncing around her face as she threw fake punches his way. “Scared I’ll show you up?”

“Girl, you terrify me,” he said seriously, quirking his brows. Grinning, she kept bouncing around him. Once behind him, she delivered a light, bare-knuckled punch to his shoulder.

Reed sighed. In the last few days he’d received more battering than any time since—hell, even
during
!—basic training.

“I’ve seen you kick serious ass,” he said. “But I also weigh double what you do.”

Mari punched his bicep. It hurt, just a little. “Quit searching for excuses. Just accept that I’m gonna win and you’re gonna be humiliated.”

“No Hunter is going to wait for you to work through your sexist guilt,” Quina threw in. Standing twenty feet from them, she glowed like a flame in her yellow outfit.

“I am not sexist,” Reed snapped. He knew they were taunting him, but the word stung. His mother, a brick house of a woman with a frown that would make professional boxers run weeping, had taught him the strength and might of women.

“Mari, quit it,” he said through clenched teeth when she punched his stomach. He’d mostly healed from yesterday’s (
beat-down
) excursions, but he remained pretty sore, especially around his ribs.

“I’m such a poor, helpless little
chica
,” she mocked him, circling around him once again. “I hope no big, scary man threatens my delicate womanhood by expecting me to do anything but cook and pop out babies.”

Reed couldn’t help it—he chuckled at her performance. She grinned back and punched him in the face.

“I’m really starting to take this physical violence thing personally,” Reed commented a few minutes later as Maricruz applied a band-aid to his cheekbone. He noticed again how delicious she smelled.

“Good,” she said quietly. “It’s pretty personal when a Hunter wants to snap your neck or crack open that thick skull.” She gently patted his cheek, which hurt like hell, and sat back.

They occupied a bathroom, Reed slouching against the counter and Mari rising up on her tiptoes to tend to him. This tastefully lit room (that just
happened
to contain a toilet), decorated in subtle earth tones, could easily have swallowed the living room of his old apartment.

“Did getting hit make you want to hit me back?” she asked.

He could feel the gentle heat from her body, smell that sweet scent that emanated from her. He hesitated, and then nodded once.

“It’s a start,” she said, and brought his face lower so she could kiss his non-bandaged cheek.

When she opened her eyes, she found herself staring into a translucent sheen that floated atop a pool of dark red liquid. She sat huddled beneath the broken window, feeling the rasp of cold air against her skin. She wore a long T-shirt, and her bare legs stretched before her. The room around her lay swathed in darkness and weak moonlight.

I shouldn’t be here
, she thought.

She wrapped her arms around her middle. The movement caused something near her hip to scrape against the wood floor. She glanced down and saw a flash of metal, sharp metal. Her sword.

Katana took a deep breath and looked around the room: White walls, hardwood floors, broken window, a bed and chest of drawers. She sat under the window in a sprinkling of broken glass. Overhead, the ceiling sloped upward. Something shimmered in her peripheral vision, but when she turned her head, she saw nothing but room and moonlight. She let her breath out in a slow leak.

Around her, the scene vibrated with silence. But, she knew, it hadn’t always been so quiet. The house shifted, and she jumped slightly, pushing shards of glass further into her palms. She raised her throbbing hands to inspect the damage.

An adult’s strong, long-fingered hands.
I’m a woman
, she thought.
A woman named Katana
. A woman in a dream?

That’s what
he’d
said: she was dreaming. According to him, none of this—the dark room, the unseen menace, the constant fear—was real. It made a little bit of sense and explained some of the oddness of her recent experiences: the impossible scenarios, her memory problems, the fuzziness and rapid changes. But if this was a dream, why couldn’t she wake up?