Welcome to the Dream (A Celeste Cross Book, #1) (13 page)

He would love to know just why
Celeste was such a calm, collected individual, but now was not the
time to discuss it. ‘I'm sure you have a lot of questions,’ he
began.

She locked eyes on
him.

‘
I really can't answer them.
Celeste, everything I can tell you is in that file. You can read
it, but that's it. Understand that . . . .what
we are dealing with . . . we have to be so careful
about it. We are not the bad guys—’

‘
I know that,’ she interrupted,
voice quiet.

Jack shifted back in his
chair and let one of his hands tap hard against his leg. This
really wasn't how he'd wanted his night to turn out. Barely several
hours ago, Celeste Cross had invited him in for a drink, and now
she was sitting across from him in an interrogation room having
survived a Yaoguai attack.

Chapter 9

Celeste Cross

It had been four days since
that night. Four whole days. She'd spent one and a half of them at
the base being debriefed. If Celeste hadn't lived through the
incredible experience, she wouldn't believe it for a second. The
further and further she got away from that night the more she
calmed down. She was trying hard to rationalize the experience to
herself. She'd realized that of course there was some shadowy
government organization that ran around the globe protecting people
from threats they didn't know existed. The world was just so big
and there was so much unknown out in the universe, that it wasn't a
stretch of the imagination to assume that the everyday knowledge of
your average citizen didn't even begin to scratch the surface of
the world's secrets.

As for the fact an energy demon
called a Yaoguai had popped into her bathroom, seeking, apparently,
to absorb her and take on her life force . . . well,
that was one way of explaining it. There was probably a perfectly
good scientific explanation too. Calling the Yaoguai a demon was
romantic, but given time, she could come up with a far more
rational explanation.

She knew that understanding
was always the first step in feeling comfortable about something
and finally overcoming your fear.

The night she'd spent at the
base following the Yaoguai attack, she'd dreamed about one. At
first it had been terrifying, but she’d quickly become lucid, and
she'd dealt with the monster using the method she'd used since
childhood for dealing with nightmares. It had worked, so much so
that the next morning she'd felt a great deal calmer. She still
wasn't comfortable with the fact that there were energy demons
running around the world absorbing people, but she wasn't going to
sit on a chair and shake in her socks, waiting for one to pop by
and munch on her. There was nothing she could do. She wasn't in the
army, she wasn't in Squire. She was just a normal citizen. It
wasn't her responsibility to deal with them, she just had to keep
mum and pretend it had never happened.

It had taken her a couple of
days to calm down sufficiently to work. She'd tried several times,
but she’d kept on spacing out, looking over at the table where
she'd dumped the amulet all those nights before, and running over
the moment in her mind. It hadn't slipped her attention that she'd
found that small caved stone creepy, but she didn't want to read
too much into that. Finding it slightly creepy, and realizing that
it was a cursed object that held some kind of infection of energy
demons, were two different things.

Ever since she'd returned from
the base, she'd been a virtual homebody, and had only gone out of
the house to tinker around in the garden and pick some flowers. She
hadn't been able to bring herself to go back to Gresham City yet.
She didn't know what she was hiding from . . . okay,
she did know what she was hiding from: Jack.

He was a man who had an
incredible responsibility pressing down on his shoulders. And she'd
just added to it. She'd been the one who’d wandered into a
second-hand store, picked up a cursed amulet, and had brought it
home and smacked it down on the table. Yet he was the one who kept
on apologizing about it. Every single time he'd dropped in on her
over the past several days, the first words out of his mouth had
been 'sorry, ma'am'.

In fact, he was meant to be
coming over today, on the premise of checking the hot water
cylinder again.

She'd learned her lesson
though, and this time she wasn't going to run around the house in
her singlet, oh no, she was going to keep fully and totally dressed
until he came and left. She would then wait about an hour or two
before she jumped in the shower.

She found herself pottering
for most of the day waiting for him to arrive. He'd been
non-committal about what time he'd come around, and she figured she
couldn't blame him for that; it sounded as if he had the most
important and stressful job in the world.

Still, that left Celeste at
a loose end, incapable of committing to a substantial task. So when
it was about 7 o'clock at night, she finally flopped on the couch
after putting some vegetables in the oven, and brought out her
favorite book. That dog-eared one on lucid dreaming. If it hadn't
been for that book, she doubted she would have ever gotten over
those nightmares as a child. Right now – considering she'd just
walked into a living nightmare – it was a good time to remind
herself about it.

Jack West

It had been four days.
He'd tried to check on her as much as he could, but things had
become busy, of course they had; there'd been a massive cock up.
That amulet was absolutely not a fake. What was more, it had been
completely infected with Yaoguai, Jack was only thankful that he'd
managed to get to Celeste in time, because if
hadn’t
 . . . . He didn't need his imagination
to fill in the gaps on that one. He'd lost far too many people over
the years – he'd been too late on countless occasions. There was
only one thing you ever found – lifeless, limp, dead
bodies.

Jack pulled up to the house
at about 7:30, and knocked on the door several times until he heard
her walking over the squeaking floorboards. She opened it slowly,
nodding to him as he stood there.

‘
How are you?’ he asked quickly,
not even bothering to say hello.

She pulled the door wide so he
could get in. ‘Fine,’ she said, voice easy. As she walked into the
kitchen, her bare feet slapping against the floor, he gave her back
a good long look.

She really did look
fine.

She gestured to the kitchen with
a flick of her shoulder. ‘Do you want something?’

‘
Tea, if you've got it.’ He
watched as she grabbed the mugs and prepared a teapot. She looked
deceptively fine. She wasn't shaking, she wasn't pale, and she
wasn't in the corner mumbling about the fact demons existed. She
appeared to be functioning normally. Whilst Jack was aware that it
could all be an act, he doubted it.

She glanced over her shoulder at
him and he darted his gaze away, coughing into his hand. ‘How's
your work?’ he tried.

She played with the handles of
the mugs on the bench. ‘I'll be honest with you, Jack, I've been
distracted the past couple of days.’ She didn't add anything, and
just as Jack was getting ready to remind her he couldn't talk about
it, he stopped. She didn't start to question him; she just kept on
preparing the tea. When the kettle boiled, she filled the pot,
warmed the mugs, placed everything on a tray, and padded over to
him, placing it down on the table. She poured him a full, steaming
cup, handed it to him, and then sat down opposite.

She held her piping hot tea
close to her chest and curled her legs up on the chair.

It was clear she was waiting
for him to speak, but Jack didn’t know what to say.

He cast a glance around,
noticing that same dog-eared book he'd rescued from her driveway.
The one on lucid dreaming.

She must have seen him glancing
at it, because she nodded his way. ‘It's a good book. Though I'd
say it's not your style,’ she twisted the mug around in her hands,
the steam pushing up against the ends of her fringe and leaving a
wet patina across her cheeks. ‘It's kind of
alternative.’

‘
You forget my job,’ he said as
he pulled it closer. It looked well-read, the pages bent and fat,
and a flick through the pages told him the book was heavily
highlighted and marked with notes.

‘
It's kind of my favorite
book.’

‘
You must like lucid dreaming
then. Or is this a programmer thing?’ he asked, regretting it as
soon as the words had escaped his mouth. Is this a programmer
thing? What kind of a question was that?

She offered him a wry smile.
‘No. Susie gave it to me.’

He took a sip of his tea, the
liquid tart and refreshing despite the hot night. ‘Really,
why?

She nodded. ‘I used to suffer
from bad nightmares when I was a kid. Anyway, Susie suggested it to
my mum. My mum sat me down and took me through it, and that's the
end of that.’

Jack put the book down and
looked at his watch. She followed his move.

‘
You have to be somewhere?’ she
asked quickly.

He shook his head. ‘Not for a
while yet.’

She was quiet. ‘You really must
be very busy,’ she noted in a soft voice.

He didn't know how to answer
that, so he didn't. ‘I can't say that I've ever had a lucid dream,’
he changed the subject.

She suddenly looked far more
interested, her gaze sharper as she rested her tea on the table.
‘Well, do you remember your dreams much?’

He shrugged, hoping that was
answer enough. To be honest, sometimes he remembered his dreams all
too well, and they were the kind of things he didn't want to
discuss. They were usually of the guilt-wracked variety. And yes,
on more than one occasion he'd dreamt of that horrible scene when
he'd come across Annabel Farmer's body.

‘
I think they're fascinating,’
she leaned back in her chair, the wooden frame squeaking softly. ‘I
think they’re such a unique perceptual experience, and even though
I know it sounds a bit corny, I really do think they can teach you
a lot about yourself.’

She looked as if she was waiting
for him to chuckle or to dismiss her, but he did neither. ‘How did
you use lucid dreams to get over your nightmares?’

‘
Pretty basic really. You
recognize you're dreaming, that nothing can really hurt you, then
the nightmare pretty much dissolves. Okay, so it's more complex
than that, but that's the gist of it. You recognize that you're in
a dream, and you're creating everything, and then you realize that
whatever is attacking you, or chasing you, or giving you grief is
something you've created anyway. So, you absorb it back into the
dream. End of story and end of nightmare,’ she did not look
uncomfortable as she spoke. Neither did she look embarrassed or
nervous. Jack could guess this was a personal topic for her, and
yet she didn't seem shy about discussing it.

‘
How do you do it, how do you
become lucid?’ Jack asked, because now he was interested. He'd come
over here tonight, thinking he'd have to check up on Celeste and
make sure she wasn't going out of her mind, considering what she'd
just found out. Yet here she was the one helping him. He wasn't
prepared to admit to her his dream life was a harrowing one, but
that wouldn't stop him from trying out any advice she could
give.

She pushed her tea to the side
and leant over the table, grabbed the book from him, rifling
through the pages until she handed it back. ‘There are a couple of
different methods in that chapter. The one I find best is just try
to maintain attention as you are going to sleep.’

He nodded, but he didn't
really understand.

‘
You should try it; it's a lot of
fun. When you get proficient at becoming lucid, you can start to
program yourself to do all sorts of cool things. Like after I was
getting over my nightmares, I always promised myself that I would
turn towards the dark.’ She waggled her eyebrows.

His nose crinkled as his
lips flattened against his teeth.
That sounds a bit bizarre and maybe even
macabre.
He
thought.

She obviously saw his confusion,
because she gave a light chuckle, her shoulders moving up as the
fabric of her shirt played against the edges of her long, black
hair. ‘Okay, that probably sounds a bit emo or something – but it
isn't. You just promise yourself that whatever happens in your
dream, you turn towards whatever dark things are occurring. You
don't run away from them, you chase them down. If something is
gnashing its teeth in the corner, then you walk over there and face
it. You always turn to whatever is darkest, and no matter what
happens, you keep chasing it down. And you always remember that
hey, at the end of the day, it's your dream and you're creating
everything, so nothing can really hurt you.’

He nodded, pretending he
understood. He wanted to, but he didn't have a great deal of
context to make sense of what she was talking about. In fact, if he
didn't have the job he did, he would have probably dismissed it.
However, heading up a team that looked into demons that tried to
suck the life force out of people tended to give one a fairly open
mind.