Disciple: DreamWalkers, Book 2 (10 page)

His gaze passed right over Maggie when he inspected the walls of his shield.

She resisted the urge to jump up and down and wave. For one, she’d pop out of her safe zone and into the wraiths. Her finger throbbed in warning.

For another, Karen was watching. Karen knew she was there. Maggie was sure of it.

“Maggie, is it?”
Karen asked, her voice silkier.
“Another woman. Do you care for her?”

“Never mind her.”
Zeke rubbed his hands on his jeans.
“Have you been killing the other dreamers? Sending wraiths after them?”

Karen finally turned back to Zeke. Maggie could no longer see the woman’s face.
“I don’t control them and can’t stop them. You have to get me out of the dreamsphere. They want to use me to—”

A blob on the other side of Zeke cleared a path through the wraiths. Maggie could hear Adi’s hail.

“Zeke, I would like an update. I can sense Karen’s signature. This is the first time I’ve been able to, but I also observe formed wraiths, which is troubling. It means she may be near breaking.”

Perhaps it was Karen’s fault the wraiths weren’t formless instead of Maggie’s regression to total, frightened newbie. Good to know.

“Karen’s here,”
Zeke broadcast.

“I’m here too,”
Maggie sent.

Yet despite the fact she had no trouble hearing Adi and Karen, her hail to the vigil had no effect.

Zeke and Adi continued as if Maggie weren’t there.
“Karen has no conduits, Adi. Says she’s innocent. Supposedly isn’t sending the wraiths to kill patients.”

“I had hoped I could assess her myself, but I suppose not,”
Adi responded.

“
I’m not killing people. I’m trapped.”
Karen started crying again, hiccupping and pawing Zeke’s arm.
“The only reason I can communicate it’s because it’s you, Zeke. Just like I told you. Only you.”

“Or you think I’m a sucker and finally came out of hiding,”
he said bitterly.

“Tell her, tell the vigil, to please, please help me. Help me. The monsters can use me. They can use any weak alucinators. And the strong, they can weaken. They’ve started with the other dreamers. Absorbing them. Looking for channels. You have to get me out and keep me out, no matter what happens.”

Zeke laughed harshly.
“You’re never leaving here.”

“Fine. Murder my body. At least it will stop them. I should have died the first time,”
she wailed.

“Are you speaking with her?”
Adi asked. The wraiths around Maggie—and around Karen and Zeke—hadn’t dispersed enough for Maggie to see the vigil.
“Where is Maggie? There are no conduits but yours and mine.”

Maggie had a fine conduit. She’d locked it, and she could sense it. Adi and Zeke should be able to as well. She could sense theirs. Why were they blind to her?

“I don’t know.”
Zeke sounded exasperated. Angry.
“No sig. No tangible draw. Karen says wraiths can camouflage our signatures and could be concealing Maggie.”

“Not possible. Wraiths are not sentient, and nor are they curators. Perhaps Maggie left.”
Adi didn’t sound as poised as she had. After counseling Maggie for two months, she knew Maggie wouldn’t disobey her orders to support Zeke. Or try to support Zeke.

“They have an intelligence we wouldn’t consider human, but they have it,”
Karen said.
“And they have…they have a leader.”
Karen’s mind-voice dropped to a whisper.
“Explain to your vigil. They’re like aliens. We already knew alien and monster myths were due to manifestations. Is it such a stretch?”

“First tell me where Maggie is,”
Zeke demanded.

“They must have found her for him,”
Karen said.
“I’m so sorry. Pray that they kill her instead of use her.”

“She’s not dead,”
Zeke snarled.

“Who’s not dead?”
Adi asked.

Maggie’s shield chose that moment to falter, really falter. Wraiths slid between her and Zeke, cutting off her view. She felt them squeeze her barriers until she thought the pressure might pop her in addition to her shield.

She did want to support Zeke—but she couldn’t even greet him. If she didn’t get out of here, fast, she’d never be able to support anyone again.

She knew the science. Exiting the trance sphere wasn’t like finding your conduit and letting yourself slide home. You had to shove the entire sphere away from you.

Maggie pushed with her mind like the wraiths were pushing her. The walls of her buffer sank in, crushing, crushed.

The shield burst. Maggie screamed. The darkness swirled and agitated as the wraiths attacked.
“Zeke!”

But they didn’t rend her.

She felt the revolting surges of their invasion. Her body convulsed.
Oh God.
This was it. Maggie thrashed with every part of her and felt sickening, rotten flesh tear beneath her fingers. She heaved. Struggled. She knew she couldn’t affect wraiths in the dreamsphere, but she wasn’t going to die without a fight.

She wanted to kill them the way they were killing her.

Her foot caved something in and stuck in goo. As she yanked free for another blow, fire blazed through her limbs.

She yelled again. Kicked. A skull like an eggshell crunched under her heel.

A wraith shrieked, so high and agonized she shouldn’t be able to hear it. Madness churned around her in explosions of scarlet and white.

Her ears buzzed with agony. Her vision tunneled. Right before everything went black, she looked up. And saw Karen smile.

Chapter Seven

The shriek jagged through Zeke’s brain like barbed wire. What the hell produced a sound like that in the dreamsphere? He ducked instinctively and thickened his shields. Secure. Karen’s spectral body remained erect, her attention engrossed in a disturbance outside the barrier.

“Adi, you okay?”
He didn’t ask Karen. Maybe the noise would pop her head like a water balloon.

“Locating disruption.”
Instead of avoiding the trouble, Adishakti sailed toward it, toward the section of his shield where wraiths burbled like a demented tar pit.

God, he hoped it had nothing to do with Maggie. His best guess was she hadn’t been able to find him after he’d piggybacked her into trance and had woken herself up. It shouldn’t be hard for her to wriggle free after two months’ experience in the dreamsphere. Maggie wasn’t a coward. Nor was she foolhardy.

“Is it Maggie?”
he asked Adi.

“I don’t think so.”
Adi seemed frustrated, confused.
“Tracery of a conduit. It’s gone now. I don’t know if it was active or locked.”

The noise shut off abruptly. Karen hadn’t stopped staring. He peered at that section of his barrier. It settled into the same lumpy, threatening apparitions as everywhere else. Karen attracted as many wraiths as Maggie, but these monsters took form, which Adi had explained as Karen’s nearness to breakdown.

The wraith’s cognizance—and the existence of a leader—was another issue entirely.

“What are you looking at?”
he asked her.
“Your friends out there?”

“My torturers,”
she said, her voice wobbly. “
Oh, God, Zeke. They’ll use her as a portal to attack the terra firma. Can’t you see? Tell your vigil.”

“Nobody’s attacking the terra firma. If Maggie was here, she knows how to lock conduits.”

Karen rushed the edge of the shield as if she could stop the wraiths—or would be willing to help Maggie. When Karen had been his student, he hadn’t mentored any others. While the upturn in neo awakenings had already been underway, he’d told himself it was because he needed to devote himself to his prized L5 disciple. His lover.

He might have thought he loved Karen at one time, but he’d never imagined she was perfect. Her jealousy had been notorious and volatile—more proof of her imbalance that his peers had spotted and he’d ignored.

“Listen to me.”
Karen whirled and grabbed him, or tried. He fended her off.
“Tell the vigil we’re all in danger now that they’ve taken your student.”

When he’d located Karen tonight, she’d kept boohooing and collapsing like a ragdoll. He hadn’t wanted to touch her, but he’d had to hold her upright to get her to talk. The drag of their tangible felt more like undertow than the delicious connection it was with Maggie.

“Fat chance. Maggie’s not here.”
He was certain of it. After two months feeling Maggie so deeply, how could he not feel her now?
“She’s awake.”

“She’s manifesting, and they’re hiding her. Oh, God. It’s started. They’ll move her body around like they did mine in Harrisburg so you can’t stop it.”

“You moved yourself. On your own two feet.”
Karen had avoided Somnium forces for hours during the Harrisburg invasion, despite strategic vigil locks and roving teams of field agents.

“No.”
Karen took a deep, shuddery breath.
“They’ve been planning this. They’ll get me next, then you, then the vigil, wear us down. The world will end.”

“Do you know how ridiculous you sound?”
She was a fucking liar. Wraiths weren’t sentient and couldn’t operate a dreamer like a swinging door to the terra firma. Wraiths sure as hell couldn’t plot and plan and relocate dreamer’s bodies for nefarious purposes at the behest of a wraith leader.
“If they could manifest through us when they wanted, they’d have been doing it all along.”

“I’ve been holding them off.”
Karen fell to her knees at his feet.
“I can’t anymore. That’s why there are so many now. When we grow weak…they come. They’re attracted to weakness more than they are to fear, because it’s the weak who become their vehicles.”

Zeke was uncomfortably reminded of Maggie—the wraiths who flocked to her and her slow, slow progress. Karen wouldn’t, couldn’t, know about that.

“I’m begging you, Zeke. I’m out of time. We’re all out of time.”

He didn’t want to believe anything she said, but would it hurt to check?
“Adi, Karen says Maggie’s manifesting while the wraiths hide her from us, because there’s so much precedent for that.”
Even as he verbally discounted Karen, his unease doubled.
“Maybe we should pop out.”

“Don’t leave me,”
Karen whined.
“Please, I’ll do anything.”

“I heard that,”
Adi said, surprise in her voice.
“Kingsbury, you’re orating.”

“They’re letting me reach you?”
Karen raised a hand to her chest, and her eyes widened.
“It must be because he has a replacement now. He doesn’t need me.”

“He being the pretend leader?”

“Leader?”
Adi asked, surprised.

“No. No. Don’t speak of him.”
She glanced around wildly. Her whole body trembled.
“I swear, I’ll do anything. I’ll live in chains. In prison. I’ll undergo a lobotomy. Get me out of here.”

She seemed panicked enough, desperate enough, for it to be true. But was her desperation because of what she claimed or something else? Would her escape from the sphere restore her power?

He couldn’t discuss it in front of Karen, who was wringing her hands in her hospital gown. Perhaps he and Adi should leave and return later. They could touch base with Maggie and regroup. Karen wasn’t going anywhere.

“How is your body healing so quickly?”
Adi asked Karen.
“If you can tell me that, I will consider attempting to free you.”

“Don’t be a sucker.”
Zeke didn’t care if he did get a smack down for insubordination.
“You can’t trust anything she says.”

“The healing is a fact,”
Adi said, unperturbed by his vehemence.
“I cannot assess her or the veracity of her claims as yet, but she has answers.”

Karen scooched as close to the wall of blackness as she could, near Adi’s metaphysical presence on the other side of the wraiths. With such a tentative link to Karen, Adi couldn’t share their shield.

If the monsters were Karen’s friends, they seemed as eager to get their fangs into her as they did any dreamer. When she approached, wraiths morphed between shadows and creatures like bubbling lava. A couple Whedon vamps began clawing the shield, hissing. A demon rhinoceros reared on ungainly hind legs and crashed itself down on top of the shield.

Zeke supported its weight like snow on a roof—nothing he couldn’t handle but dangerous after days of constant accumulation. Good thing he wouldn’t be here for days.

“The dreamsphere affects the body. It sustains. Heals,”
Karen whispered to the other woman. Was Zeke supposed to hear? He moved closer.
“But you knew that, didn’t you? I can tell you so many things you can’t begin to guess, Adishakti Sharma. If you abandon me here, I promise you, there will be a host on your hands that will put Harrisburg to shame.”

“Threats aren’t gonna get you jack,”
Zeke scoffed.

“It won’t be my doing. It will be him. Using her.”
Karen hugged herself, her eyes haunted.
“They have her, and she’s terrified. Her fear is so loud. She can’t shield. Is she…a phase one L5? From…Virginia. Has a brother, another L5. She’s screaming for him. Hayden. Hayden. She’s given up on you both.”

There was no way Karen was privy to these details about Maggie. Today in the hospital room was the only time Karen and Maggie had been anywhere near each other.
“Why can you see this and we can’t?”

“Because he hurt me for so long, and did things to me, that I had to learn…”
She shuddered.
“It doesn’t matter. She won’t last ten minutes, much less a year. She’s lost—but we can save everyone else if we hurry.”

Did Karen’s knowledge mean Maggie had been at these dreamspace coordinates and Karen had seen what had happened to her? Was it still happening to her? Was Maggie out there right now, trying to find help?

As if on cue, wraiths began filtering away, lured elsewhere. Many remained, but the dreamsphere lightened. Zeke and Adi could see one another. Their gazes locked.

“Go,”
she mouthed.
“I can handle Karen.”

He didn’t need to be told twice. He released his barriers and pushed himself into the terra firma.

As soon as Zeke woke, he groped for Maggie’s body. She’d been beside him on the sofa, holding his hand. There should have been no way to keep them apart in the sphere with their tangible.

She wasn’t on the sofa. Zeke lurched with fear.

Wailing sirens penetrated his freak out. He leaped to his feet and inspected the room. One other occupant—a guard, sword up and ready. The man was as tense as anyone in a combat situation.

“What happened?” Zeke asked.

“Multiple manifestations. Your girl or one of the vegetables.”

He didn’t correct the soldier’s terminology. “We on lockdown?”

“Damn straight.” The guard indicated a pile of weaponry on the floor next to Zeke—a whole kit. “Suit up.”

He strapped on the vest, the gorget—nice—the sword, the bandolier, the guns, the bracers, the daggers. The first time Maggie had been accused of random manifestations, the responsible party had been her damn brother. The coma station employees had better not have used the ECT on her. “Where is my student?”

“They’re stitching her up in trauma one.”

“What the hell—trauma?” They wouldn’t stitch a corpse, but they would stitch an alucinator trapped in a coma. That was when Zeke noticed dark red stains on the loveseat and his jeans. Fuck. “Did she wake before me? When?”

“She came out bleeding half an hour ago. Wraiths slashed her up pretty good in there and followed her out.”

Not unheard of. A traumatized alucinator escaping the trance sphere as quickly as possible couldn’t always be careful with conduits. “How many?”

“Five live ones in here and…well, you’ll be briefed later. The sergeant and I dispatched them.”

Zeke smacked another Velcro strap into place. As soon as he exacted some vengeance, he’d find Maggie and apologize. For everything, including the things he hadn’t done yet. She could have been killed. But the fact she was awake confirmed what he’d known—Karen was a liar.

Maggie wasn’t stuck in the dreamsphere, giving up on him, subjected to wraith torture and some apocalyptic plot. Ridiculous. Maggie had gotten her scrappy ass out of the sphere all by herself.

That being said, he’d wait and be relieved after he checked her wounds.

“Thanks for not letting them eat us,” he said to the soldier as he finished donning his battle gear.

“It’s my job.” The soldier sounded like he’d rather have a different job than babysit a trancer.

“Where are Adishakti and Kingsbury?”

“Next door. Ms. Sharma’s awake.” It surprised Zeke that Adi was up before him—how had that happened? He’d ducked out first. “She’s working on Kingsbury.”

“Working on how?” If Adi wouldn’t euthanize Karen, he would. That deceitful bitch was responsible for these manifestations. He knew it. Didn’t matter what tales she’d spun, whose fault she said it was, or what information she’d offered to share.

“That’s need to know, and I don’t need to know,” the guy said.

Whatever. He’d find out himself in two minutes. “What kinds of critters we got?”

The soldier’s square features hardened. “All one type. Whedons. Lost count at forty reports. I don’t think we’re approaching Harrisburg status, but you’d know more about that than I would.”

“Ayuh.” No use getting belligerent. “How much of the facility has been affected?”

Harrisburg had taught modern-day alucinators a lot about bulk manifestations—a lot they hadn’t wanted to know. They’d already known clusters could happen. They’d already known malingering conduits could happen, plus multiples. But they hadn’t known a psycho like Karen could drag it out for hours. Days.

This had her name written all over it. But this time, they had her body. He knew exactly how he was going to stop her.

The soldier glanced at the ceiling as if counting. “Lower three levels.”

“Is trauma one included?”

“No, it’s above the blast doors, along with storage and the cold box. The morgue.” Since all deceased Somnium employees were sent to the coma station for processing and confirmation of cause of death, the morgues were sizeable.

“Good. Three levels isn’t too extensive.” And most of them filled with body bags to boot.

Zeke approached the door, checking the small window. As far as he could tell, the doctor who’d been at the station outside Karen’s room was no longer present. Blood spattered the counter. Purple flashing lights accompanied the siren. The brains at the manifestation tank had determined purple illumination—black lights—decreased wraith motility by about one seventh. It was something.

“It’s not nothing. We’ve had four fatalities.”

“Shit.” Forty Whedons to four fatalities…that this soldier knew of. Who were the casualties? Anyone he knew? It would be easiest for vamps to take out patients. Physicians in scrubs instead of Kevlar. Trained fighters wouldn’t go down that easy to any fucking vamps.

As he watched, heavily armed soldiers jogged down the corridor, guns and swords at hand. Their black Kevlar was coated with wraith dust.

“Now that I’m fortified, soldier, let’s move.” His rank as sentry placed him over this soldier, whatever his name was. His hiking boots scuffed in wraith dust when he pivoted.

The soldier keyed in the combination, and the door hissed open. It closed behind them. If a vamp manifested in there, it would be stuck until they felt like dealing with it.