Disciple: DreamWalkers, Book 2 (29 page)

“I can use my ability in the sphere,” Maggie said. The person she really needed to convince was Zeke, and his expression wasn’t promising. Knowing him, he was peeved she hadn’t come running to him to save her when wraiths had manifested in the common room. Not that his lack of faith in her combat skills was unwarranted, but inside the sphere was another story. For once, she needed to protect him. “Bellatorix. I can help. I can kill wraiths before they manifest.”

“I should like to see that,” the curator observed creakily.

He tried to sit upright and the doctor pushed him back down. “Please relax, sir. Keep your feet elevated.”

“I need a drink to get the taste of that aspirin out of my mouth,” he grumbled.

Zeke took Maggie’s arms. His gray eyes stared into hers, saying what he couldn’t—not out loud. “You’re probably the one she wants to kill, stupid as that is. You stay out here, where it’s—”

“Are you going to say safe?” Maggie joked. “I don’t think anywhere is safe right now. So far the wraiths haven’t hurt me in the sphere, but I’ve hurt them.”

She felt more useful attacking wraiths in the sphere, where she could tear them apart with her bare hands, than outside, where her lack of combat skills put her and anyone with her at risk. The last time she’d killed monsters in the sphere, the wraiths had begun to dodge her.

Maybe she could chase them off, away from Karen’s conduits. Maybe she was their boogieman.

Then again, if Karen could control them…but she couldn’t think about that. They had to find Karen and stop her, and Maggie wasn’t that beneficial in the terra firma, all things considered.

“Brave girl.” The curator nodded approvingly from the couch. “I want to hear all about it when you get back.”

Adi’s walkie interrupted whatever else the curator was about to say in a hiss of static. A woman’s strained voice on the other end said, “Ma’am, we’re sorry to report that the chopper is down. Repeat, the chopper is down.”

Adi’s lips firmed. “What happened?”

“The flying dinosaur took it out.”

Silence fell in the room as the implications of losing the chopper sank in. Not only were the pilots, soldiers and medics on board dead, but they were without zero air support until one of the other bases or waystations arrived. That wouldn’t be for at least an hour and a half.

They were also devoid of a way to relocate the curator to a proper medical facility. With the horde outside, they couldn’t access the SUVs, much less the coma station.

“The aerial wraith?” Adi asked, her voice harsh in the silence. “Please tell me it’s dust.”

“Yes, ma’am. It went down with the chopper.”

Adi closed her eyes, her dark eyelashes circles of sorrow and weariness on her dusky cheeks. It was easy to forget how beautiful—striking, even—Adishakti Sharma was when what you saw was one of the seven vigils of the North American division. Maggie resisted the urge to reach out to the woman and her obvious pain.

This was Adi’s job. Or it had been, before the curator had fired her.

The curator, who really needed to re-hire the vigil toot suite, cleared his throat. “My friends, there’s no time to waste. I need to explain the camouflage piercing technique before you launch your attack. And you must promise me, should you retain any vestige of my lesson, that it will stay among us. Our secret.”

Adi crossed her arms and inhaled deeply, regaining her composure. “If I’m not needed in the sphere, I don’t want to know it.”

“Well, I do.” Lill tested her blade with her thumb before sheathing it. “I’m a confounder. If Zeke can’t do it, I can. Count me in.”

“Once they’re entranced, we’ll need a team to protect the bodies, ma’am,” the doctor told Adi.

“If we get a fucking chance,” Zeke cursed. A shower of red sparkles popped into the center of the room. Again.

“Oh, dear,” the curator said.

Karen was really honing her aim. If she could conjure flying dinosaurs at will, who knew what else she could throw at them?

Chapter Nineteen

Zeke and the others dispatched two more groups of wraiths before Adi was able to recall a small team of soldiers to protect them while they geolocated Karen. It distracted him more than he liked to fight near Maggie. She carried herself better than he would have thought, cool-headed and quick-thinking, but every time he had to step away from her to kill a wraith, he worried it was the last chance he’d get to protect her.

The guards arrived, covered in dust and slight injuries. They’d been luckier than several of their comrades, who were being tended in the aboveground guard station. The doctor couldn’t leave the curator’s side to care for the wounded yet, although the curator had insisted that she do so several times.

“If I had pepper spray, this would be over already,” Maggie said, shooting Zeke a tired half-smile. When he’d met her the first time, during a wraith attack in an alley, she’d blasted him in the face with spray while trying to help.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” What if seeing Maggie in the sphere set Karen off worse?

Could this get worse?

Well, yeah. Right now, there were no active wraiths inside the bunker. The lull in manifestations gave Zeke hope the troops from the coma station were keeping Karen and her monsters distracted.

This was their best chance to trance in.

The soldiers reported regularly to Adi—not making headway, but not losing ground. Several choppers were en route from other locations, bringing more soldiers. The division HQ and the other six vigils had been notified, and they’d activated the media team to begin the process of concealing the event from civilians and the US government.

It was way above Zeke’s pay grade to worry what would happen if the truth about the Somnium came out of the closet. The rest of the world couldn’t learn about nightmares, as they might also learn, like Karen, how to weaponize them. How to kill with them.

The Somnium might weather this crisis as it had others—but would anyone at the outbunker survive it? Already they’d lost people, good people, not counting the others who’d died in previous code ones.

All the deaths were Karen’s fault, and it was time to end it. To end her.

“I’m sure I want to help,” Maggie said. “I can be useful. I can scare the wraiths away when we drop the shields to search for Karen. And you said yourself, I’m good at geolocation.”

The common room being the largest and most defensible area in the outbunker, they’d set up cots for the trancers. Lill conferred quietly with the curator, receiving last minute advice about how to pierce Karen’s camouflage. Zeke couldn’t look at the old man without seeing the person who was going to take Maggie away from him.

What did Zeke know about training a bellatorix?

Then again, if what the curator said was true, what did anyone know?

“Use the cot beside me,” Zeke insisted. She’d removed her protective vest for their trance session, but Zeke could sleep in his. Zeke could practically shower in his. “We need to go in together.”

Adi reentered the common room, soldiers on her heels, issuing commands right and left. She still hadn’t taken the curator’s dismissal of her to heart. Then again, who would fill her shoes in this crisis? She knew the soldiers, she knew the layout of the land, she knew the dreamsphere, and she knew a hell of a lot about fighting wraiths.

She was a vigil. Her occupation wasn’t just a job. It was who she was. Zeke doubted she was attempting to earn her position back. She’d been stiff with the curator and hadn’t so much as whispered her suspicions about healing.

He didn’t think Karen had made her forget it, either.

He and Maggie settled onto adjacent cots, and he took her hand. The contact stung a cut on his palm. “We get in, use the process the curator taught us to geolocate Karen, and get out. Don’t go haring off.”

“I’ll have to put some distance between us to kill wraiths,” she said. “I don’t know how my power would affect you or Lill if you got in my way.”

“That’s a good way to get yourself killed. You got lucky before. You might not get lucky this time.”

“Relax, Ezekiel. Margaret knows what she’s doing,” the curator said from the other side of the room. He’d refused to don a flak vest, claiming he knew they’d protect him. Since no one could order a curator around, they’d had to accept his resistance. “I daresay she’ll remember more of my instructions than you will. You need her abilities.”

Zeke had had some difficulty paying attention to the curator’s explanation to the three of them—himself, Maggie and Lill—about piercing a veil of concealment. After all, midway through the lesson, they’d had the second internal manifestation.

He was best at killing shit. Chopping off heads. Even before the Karen debacle, he’d never been the greatest mentor. He’d made sentry because of his quick and accurate assessments of tactical situations, his skill in the field, and his precise calculations during area scanning.

His tactical assessment of their current situation was that it sucked ass, and if reinforcements didn’t arrive soon, there wasn’t going to be anyone to rescue. Not many soldiers were left outside the bunker to prevent the horde from invading. Not many soldiers were inside the bunker either.

At least the curator seemed to have perked up. He no longer appeared to be at death’s door.

Lill settled onto the cot on Maggie’s other side.

“Get in, find the bitch, get out,” she said. “If Maggie mistakes her skank ass for a wraith and caves in her skull, no great loss.”

“Absolutely not.” The curator rattled his walker. “Do not harm her. The young lady needs to be analyzed. We’ll be transferring her to the Orbis where we can properly deal with her peculiarities.”

Lill turned her face away from the curator, so only Zeke and Maggie could see her, and winked. “Last one under’s a motherfucker.”

The first thing Zeke noticed about the sphere was how light it was. Swirls of gray so pale they almost seemed white surrounded him. They created a vague panorama of the Wyoming vista, half-cloudy, half-solid.

After two months with Maggie, he’d forgotten dreamspace could be ethereal. No wraiths anywhere, not even a blotch. He threw up a shield, locked his conduit, and flung his senses into the sphere.

Several active conduits dotted the area. Karen’s, he presumed, but no hint of her signature or her tangible. And there…there was Maggie.

She popped up beside him, chewing her lip. Wherever Karen was, sphere or terra firma, she wasn’t bothering to alienate Maggie with a dose of camouflage. He included Maggie in his shield, and she smiled when she realized they could connect. They wore their street clothes, not their weapons and vests.

When Lill arrived, he was able to include her in the shield as well, which suggested Maggie had indeed perfected her oration. Perhaps to matriculation level. Shield sharing only worked with alucinators who could link.

Lill, unlike Maggie and Zeke, was outfitted in battle gear. Not that imaginary Kevlar helped in the trance sphere if your shield failed and wraiths attacked.

“I count four active conduits,”
Lill said. He brought her under his shield easily.
“No, three. One disappeared. Probably too much to hope it’s because Karen kicked it.”

“Can you hear Lill?”
Zeke asked Maggie. Would this be the last time they entered the sphere together? He took her hand, cool and firm, their tangible a pleasant shiver.
“The three of us seem to have an open network. Lill’s inside my shield.”

“I can. So this is what normal dreamspace is like.”
Maggie glanced around, her inspection solidifying the dreamy landscape, influencing it with her perception. More plants. Mountains in the distance. What she noticed compared to what he and Lill noticed.

“Now that we’re situated, let’s try the curator’s trick,”
Zeke ordered.
“Hurry before the wraiths find us.”

The three of them held hands to deepen their network. Zeke closed his eyes, centered himself, dropped his shield, and stretched his senses the way the curator had explained.

Seeking a camouflaged individual, the old man had said, was like doing an area scan with a microscope. The trace you sought, instead of a neonati awakening to the dreamsphere, was the opposite of chaos. You sought a speck of deadness, where the disguised individual mimicked dreamspace. It would be nothing like the red wound of a live conduit and nothing like an alucinator’s signature.

The speck would seem completely normal. Too normal.

The danger came because you had to perform the operation in trance—and without a shield. That meant wraiths could harm you. Kill you. And that meant you couldn’t perform the search for long, even with Maggie there to fight off wraiths.

Zeke tried his best, but nothing pinged on his internal radar as a dead speck or as Karen’s signature. He took a deep breath, noticed the wraith smell had intensified, and tried again.

Nothing.

The hiss of a wraith jerked him out of focus.
“Shit. Incoming.”

“Still searching. Don’t shield yet,”
Lill said.

Blackness marred the horizon. Zeke kept his shield down as Maggie and Lill searched for ten more seconds…eight…six…

A wall of wraiths, their bodies unformed, oozed toward them. When they reached ten yards, Zeke tossed up a thick, protective bubble.

Lill’s eyes popped open.
“Dammit, Zeke, I almost had it. Jesus. Where the hell did that many wraiths come from?”

The dark, gelatinous wraiths smeared themselves across the sides and top of Zeke’s shield until it went completely black. The airiness of the sphere dimmed. Lill had witnessed the phenomenon before, but this was the first time she’d been at the center of the vortex of evil.

“Isn’t it lovely?”
he asked.

“I can practically feel their animosity.”

Maggie squeezed Zeke’s hand.
“There aren’t as many as usual. I can see your face. And they took longer to get here.”

She was right. The wraith density had thinned. It was more of a charcoal than a black. More thunderheads in at dusk than midnight without stars.

Lill approached the edge of the shield.
“You think Karen is sending them after Maggie?”

“Either that or they’re drawn to me because I’m a threat.”
Maggie cracked her knuckles, glaring at the blackness.
“I wish we knew which it was.”

Zeke had wondered himself, but the timing was off for it to be the latter.
“It’s Karen. You weren’t a bellatorix in the beginning, if the curator is to be believed, and the wraiths still came after you.”

Maggie nodded.
“That makes sense.”

“How about we locomote in the direction where I may have detected something, drop shield once we get clear, and sweep again?”
Lill suggested.

“I’ve got a better idea. I stay here with my entourage and you guys go find Karen.”
Maggie wrapped her arms around herself and pulled a face.
“She won’t split her forces and send them after you. It’s pretty clear she doesn’t want Zeke dead.”

“You’re not playing bait.”
Sure, his Maggie could kick some wraith ass. Frankly? He wanted to see that shit for himself. He wanted to see her rip those fuckers to shreds.

However, that didn’t mean Karen couldn’t vigil-trap her.

“We all locomote, drop shield, try again,”
he decided.
“Maggie, don’t search this time. Keep watch. When the wraiths catch up, if you feel like showing us your stuff…just be careful.”
It was what the curator had recommended, after all.

She gave him an OK sign.
“All right.”

Lill guided them in a direction that felt random to Zeke. The murky, distorted landscape flew past, gradually lightening. The curator had mentioned confounders might be better at camouflage piercing, so letting Lill lead didn’t concern him—as long as they found the psycho before anyone else was killed.

Lill halted once they cleared the wraiths.

“We won’t have much time,”
Zeke said.
“Get ready. Dropping shield now.”

He released their protections, closed his eyes, and sought. Sought the difference—the null. Instead of an area-wide skim, he kept it tight, a three-mile radius. The curator said that should intensify scan strength. Roiling dreamsphere, disturbed by conduits. All the same. All the same.

Different?

“Got her,”
Lill announced before Zeke could hone in.
“Shield up.”

Her protections slammed down around them before the wraiths collided into them.

“If she’s sending them after me, she knows we’re here,”
Maggie said.
“She’ll notice when we head her way, and she’ll be ready.”

“She won’t care. As far as she knows, we can only hurl insults at each other. Adi’s not with us to vigil-trap her.”
Lill locomoted them so quickly her shield almost was left behind. The wraiths definitely did.

“She controls the wraiths—which is why Adi’s shield failed.”
Zeke grabbed Lill’s hand to make sure she didn’t fly off and leave him and Maggie in the dust. Only she knew precisely where they were headed.
“It would take a massive attack to break a vigil’s concentration. Or, hell, maybe she made Adi forget how to shield herself.”

“We’ll help Adi remember everything once we get through this,”
Lill said.
“She’ll be okay.”

They approached the swirl of a red, active conduit. Wraith streamers flowed through, each one a manifesting monster that would kill any human it encountered if given half a chance.

Maggie faltered.
“Shouldn’t Zeke try to shut—”

Lill jerked them along, their linked hands an ominous game of whip.
“To seal another person’s conduit, we need the person who created it to cooperate. I doubt Karen will.”

That was when Zeke saw it. A blackness so concentrated it put the hordes that had surrounded Maggie to shame. The void sucked at his eyeballs like a vacuum.