Hunted (11 page)

"I
don't know. Lately things just happen when I dream. I don't have any
control over it."

He
frowned at me. "It's not safe for you to be doing this. These
injuries weren't sustained in the real world; they were sustained in
dreams just like this one. You can be killed in a dream just as
easily as in the real world, more easily in some ways."

I
hadn't forgotten the way that he'd tried to kill me the last time I'd
seen him. He didn't look particularly threatening now, but I knew
that there was some kind of monster hiding inside of him.

"It's
not like I have a choice about this or anything. It just happens."

His
color looked like it was getting worse.

"You're
angry that I threw you into the wall the last time we spoke."

"Yeah,
that's a safe bet. Also I'm a little confused as to why you're all
chummy this time around after being so scary the last time."

"I
wasn't trying to hurt you. It wasn't safe for you there; I was trying
to send you back to your own mind."

"By
killing me?"

"By
shocking you, by weakening your grip on that reality in the hopes
that you would naturally fall back into your own reality."

There
was something else there he wasn't telling me. "You weren't
positive it was going to work, were you?"

Was
it my imagination or was his breathing becoming more shallow? I was
almost positive that something had changed there.

"No,
I wasn't. It's become obvious to me that your gift works differently
than mine. At the time it was only a suspicion, but I've been
searching for you since our last encounter and haven't been able to
sense even the slightest trace of your dreams. That's never happened
before."

"So
you did something that you knew might kill me?"

"I
had no choice. If Kaleb had found you he would have killed you. I
nearly didn't escape myself. You would have had no chance of staying
out of his clutches."

"So
teach me. You say that our powers are different, but there must be
some commonality between them."

"You're
wearing your own form, I can see that much, but that doesn't mean
that you're as harmless as you appear."

I
looked down at myself. I'd never even considered that I might be able
to look like someone else while I was dreaming.

"I
don't understand."

The
light leaking out of his chest seemed to be getting stronger. It was
oddly beautiful, but I suspected that it meant he was getting weaker,
that his real body had started bleeding again.

"I
can usually tell when someone is trying to project something other
than their real form. There is a haziness about them."

"That's
how I knew you were there earlier. It looked like an empty corner,
but there was a weird kind of distortion in the air."

"Indeed.
It's a sign that your gift is strong, potentially stronger even than
mine. You need training. Tell me your name and where you live. I'll
come to you as soon as I'm healed enough to travel."

I
shook my head. "I'm not telling you anything of the sort. You're
some kind of monster and I'd be stupid to just blindly trust you.
Teach me what you can now and the next time we meet you can teach me
a little more."

"I'd
be just as much of a fool to teach you what I knew without first
verifying that you are not more than you seem to be. There's not even
any guarantee that we'll run into each other again."

I
wasn't normally very good about standing up for myself, but this was
different. The stakes this time were huge.

"I'm
not telling you where I live."

"Give
me a name then. Trust is a two-way street. We both must risk at least
a little if we're going to start earning each other's trust."

"Fine,
my name is Adri. It's your turn now—teach me something useful,
something that will keep me alive."

He
didn't look happy. Actually it was worse than that, it was like he
didn't appreciate being told what to do and was having to bite back a
response that would have escalated things.

"Very
well. Escaping a dream is all about letting go of the alternate
version of reality that you or someone else has created. To leave you
need to focus on the real world and let what you're seeing in the
dream become less real. For me this takes the form of a kind of misty
impermanence. It may be different for you."

He
paused for a moment before asking his follow-up question. "What
state do you live in?"

My
insides tightened up. Every piece of information I gave out put him
that much closer to finding me. How many Adri's were there in the
United States? A thousand? Ten thousand maybe? Of those, how many
were my age and blonde? If I told him that I lived in Minnesota that
would drop the number down into the hundreds or maybe even a few
dozen. He probably didn't have access to any government databases.
That would make things harder for him, but still it seemed like too
big of a concession on my part.

"No,
that's too much. Ask me something else."

I
was sure it wasn't my imagination this time. His fists clenched hard
enough they turned white and it almost looked like he was shaking. I
needed to be more careful how I responded to him from here on out. I
didn't want to push him over the edge.

"Fine.
Have you run into anyone else in your dreams since your power
awakened who was like you or me, someone who seemed in control of
their environment? Someone who noticed you, interacted with you in a
way that indicated that they knew you were more than just part of the
scenery of their dream?"

"Is
that important?"

"Answer
the question or we're done here."

His
voice came out low, lower than mere anger could account for. It had
an almost bestial edge to it.

"Yes.
There was someone—a woman, I think. I mean she was a woman, but
she might have been projecting a different appearance and I just
didn't know. She was fast, really, really fast. She wanted to know
who I was and when I didn't tell her she started choking me. The
weirdest thing was that just before I passed out she sent these odd
tendrils towards my face."

"You're
going to need to be careful. Supernatural creatures are going to be
drawn to you, or maybe you to them, I'm not sure which. It will start
out as just dream encounters, but some of them will come hunting you
if you give them enough information to track you down."

It took me a couple of tries to get my voice to work. "If
that's true then I don't have much of a chance. I don't even know
enough to figure out which parts of my dreams are just normal dreams
and which parts are something else. Something nasty could just
pretend to be part of my dream, blending in until I let something
important slip."

"Exactly,
that's why I'm trying to convince you to let me come teach you. The
safest thing right now is for you to be moving around. If you don't
spend more than a day or two in any one part of the country then even
creatures that learn more about you than you'd like won't have a
chance to act on their knowledge before you've relocated."

I
shook my head. "I'm sorry, I want to trust you, I really do, but
I'm not going to take that risk. Is there a way to detect other
people inside of my dreams?"

He
frowned but nodded. "You control your own dreams which means
that you can flush people out fairly easily. Change something big
about your surroundings and you'll usually notice any intruders.
Freezing everyone suddenly like you did earlier works, as does
changing your environment. If you go from outside to inside or inside
to outside, often times you'll see someone stumble as the ground
underneath them literally moves. The same strategy works to a lesser
extent inside of someone else's dreams."

"What
do you mean?"

"You
can't control the whole dream like you can your own, but if your will
is strong enough then you can change some aspects of it. If you find
yourself in a dream and are unable to make a large global change to
it then you know you're in someone else's dream and you must be
careful. Leave if you can, or if that isn't a possibility then you
need to try to blend in as much as possible."

His
shake had pretty much disappeared, but he was looking weaker by the
second. He coughed and I got the feeling that it wasn't something
that had happened here in the dream, or rather not just here in the
dream. He'd coughed because his dream body had been forced to mirror
his physical body.

"I
don't have very much longer. Being in the dream burns up energy that
I can't spare, at least not right now, not with my current injuries.
If you're going to tell me how to find you then now is the time to do
so, otherwise I'll let you ask one more question as a show of good
faith in case we do ever meet up again."

There
wasn't any two ways about it. I panicked. I knew so little about this
business of sharing people's dreams that I didn't even know what I
didn't know, didn't have any idea of what I should be asking. The
sheer importance of the next few seconds threw me into a kind of
paralysis and I couldn't think of a single question about the dream
that I thought might keep me alive if I ran into something as
dangerous as he'd indicated I would.

"I
want to know about that guy you were spying on. Kaleb. I want to know
about him."

The
question had just kind of tumbled out of my mouth. It had been driven
by nothing more sinister than the feeling I'd had back when I'd first
seen Kaleb, the impression that he looked familiar. Not like I'd ever
seen him or anything, but he was related to someone who was somehow
important to me, someone who had been missing from my life.

I'd
thought the question a pretty harmless one, but he lunged to
his feet. Pieces of the desk he'd been sitting in went flying across
the room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a couple of my classmates
disappear as shrapnel tore through them, but most of my attention was
focused on the massive creature that had replaced the Native American between
one heartbeat and the next.

"Did
he send you? Did Kaleb put you up to this in an attempt to find out
what I've learned?"

I
fell out of my desk, scrambling backwards on all fours as he stalked
towards me.

"I
don't know Kaleb. I just asked because he reminds me of someone
else!"

The
creature's wickedly long claws were fully extended now and he sliced
through desks and people with equal abandon as he crossed the last
few feet towards me. My back hit the wall and I suddenly realized
that I didn't have anywhere else to go. I tried to make the wall
disappear—it was my dream and he'd just finished telling me
that I should be able to control my surroundings, but it was almost
like there was an unseen pressure holding the wall in place.

He
took one final step forward and picked me up by the throat again.
With the transformation to his beast form the bandages had
disappeared, but the glowing slashes across his chest hadn't gone
anywhere. In this form they were actually bigger and bleeding more
light than they had before.

As
the pressure around my neck grew to the point where I couldn't
breathe I did the only thing I could think of. I tried to focus on
the real world, tried to push the dream away, but it was like there
was something holding me there, some unseen wind that pressed me back
against the wall.

I
pushed harder with my mind and then suddenly the wind stuttered and
the Native American started to disappear. That was all I needed to tear myself
free of the dream, but I was pretty sure that he hadn't let me
go voluntarily. The wounds and the energy he'd expended in an effort
to keep me there had simply been too much for him to sustain.

I
was pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to escape if his
concentration hadn't wavered there at the end.

I
was undeniably jumpy the next morning. I didn't seem to have any of
the physical signs of nearly dying for the third time while dreaming.
My neck wasn't bruised or anything, but when I climbed out of bed my
gray pajama pants slid down off of my hips as soon as my feet touched
the floor.

I
grabbed my pants, pulling them back up before they hit the floor and
then went to retie the drawstring, but it turned out that it hadn't
ever come undone. I always tied my bottoms so they were pretty loose,
but I was sure that when I'd gone to bed that the pants had been
plenty tight enough not to fall down on me like that.

I
crept into the bathroom and looked at myself in the full-length
mirror on the door. Cindi had been going on about the fact that I'd
been losing weight for long enough that I'd finally started to
believe her, but I was still shocked by what I saw in the mirror.

Cindi
was right, I'd been losing weight for a few weeks now, but the
process had accelerated. When I'd looked down at myself during the
dream with the Native American I'd seen a body that was still a little on the
plump side, but the reality was that I'd lost nearly all of the baby
fat that had hounded me for so many years. I was as skinny as any of
the other cheerleaders, as skinny as Cindi even. I wanted to say that
it was inexplicable, but I knew that wasn't the case.

The
Native American had given me the answer, probably without even realizing that
he was doing so. Being in other people's dreams was burning up so
much energy that the calories taken in during the course of the day
weren't keeping up. It was incredible, but no more so than the fact
that I was sharing dreams with people I'd never met in real life.

I
untied my pants and then retied them again, tightly enough this time
that they wouldn't fall off my ever skinnier hips. Having the
drawstring that tight bunched the fabric around my waist up, which
made me frown. These pants were one of the newest articles of
clothing I owned. I'd purchased them a few weeks ago after I started
slimming down. If they now fit this badly then I was in trouble. The
rest of my clothes were going to be even worse.