Shattered (36 page)

A surge of
relief washed over me as the first of the threads left my center,
racing outwards in all directions. It was a good sign, but it wasn't
a guarantee that my gift was working yet. Besides, I was too focused
on the job at hand to dwell on anything else.

Once again my
strength poured out of me with alarming quickness, but the difference
this time was that there was more strength there begging to be
expended than I usually had access to. I'd gotten into the habit of
judging my progress based on my level of exhaustion. It was a useful
measure, but it meant that I was surprised this time at how quickly
one of the threads made contact with the individual I'd sent it out
to find.

I rapidly
reabsorbed the rest of the filaments and then pushed energy into the
one connecting her and me. When I started pulling on the cable
between us, there was a shocking amount of resistance. It was always
hard to pull someone out of their dream, but it was mostly some
low-level passive resistance followed by the wall.

This time it
was all that I could do to get her moving towards me. In fact, I had
to pull so hard that I nearly lost my hold on my own dream, which
would have resulted in me getting pulled into her dream.

She was moving
now, but doubt started clawing at the back of my mind. At the pitiful
rate I was accelerating her, it was entirely possible that I wasn't
going to be able to get her through the wall. If that meant she got
stuck in the in-between space that separated our dreams then that
might not be all bad, but I had a feeling that I wouldn't be able to
replicate that a second time—at least not reliably.

With my energy
levels so far off of normal and her moving so slowly, it was hard to
judge how close we were to the wall, and it seemed like my stomach
had dropped all of the way to my feet by the time I finally felt the
vampire hit the wall.

When I'd pulled
Taggart into my dream to save me from Pamela it had felt like the
universe itself was protesting what I was trying to do. This was like
that only a thousand times worse. The entire fabric of my dreams
seemed to be screaming that what I was trying to do was in violation
of every natural law.

The plain
Taggart and I were sitting on rippled and shifted in time to the
fluctuations I could feel across the surface of the wall, and for a
split second I was afraid that the effort of trying to pull the
vampire through the in-between would destroy my mind.

In the very
next instant the fabric of the universe finally tore and the vampire
popped into existence less than two feet in front of me. I didn't
even think. There were a lot of different kinds of attacks that I
could have used against her, but instead I manifested a transparent
aluminum bat in my hand and swung it forward and down with all my
might.

I hadn't
forgotten what I'd done the last time that I'd hit someone with a bat
inside of the dream world. The bat started out weighing mere grams at
the beginning of my swing and then shifted to something that weighed
more than a ton by the end.

I knew going
into the swing that I couldn't lose this time. The vampire looked
just as my mom had 'painted' her. She was the perfect distance away
from me and she looked disoriented enough that she couldn't possibly
see the blow coming. Only somehow she did.

My bat was a
fraction of an inch away from her when she suddenly looked directly
at me despite my invisibility. At the exact same time she threw her
hands in my direction and rather than crashing into her head with
enough force to bring down a small building, my bat bounced off of
something
that was just as invisible as I was.

It was like
watching two billiard balls hit each other at high speed. My bat shot
away at something like a hundred miles per hour. It nearly clipped me
in the shoulder, which would have probably ripped my arm off, but
instead it zipped by close enough that I felt the wind of its
passage.

Luckily
whatever she had done wasn't immune to the level of kinetic force
that the bat had been carrying. She also shot away, albeit at
something much less than a hundred miles per hour. As fortune would
have it she went sailing directly towards Taggart.

She was fast.
Not quite shape shifter fast, but much faster than I remembered
Pamela being. By the time she slammed into Taggart she had a darkly
shining rapier in her hand. Fortunately the impact hadn't imparted
any kind of spin though, so the sword was still pointed at me when
Taggart's claws took her in the back.

Even then, it
seemed like she almost anticipated the attack. She managed to writhe
around at the last second so that his claws took her behind the
shoulder blade rather than through the kidney as he'd intended.

Her left elbow
snapped back and collided with Taggart's head at the same time that
something grabbed me from behind and pulled me towards her with the
kind of speed that even my souped-up reflexes had a hard time keeping
up with. I was still invisible, but her sword was pointed at roughly
the right spot and I wasn't eager to see just how good her aim was.

I manifested a
translucent shield directly in front of me and braced it against
whatever was pushing me from behind. Taggart went to his knees from
the force of her strike at almost the precise time that she saw my
shield and did something else to conjure another plane of pure force
in front of her.

It was like
being an eggshell stuck between a pair of sledgehammers. The force of
the impact shook my teeth, but I believed with all of my heart that
my translucent shield would hold and that gave it the tiniest little
edge of strength that it needed to not shatter into a million pieces.

Despite my
belief, my shield was starting to crack as the vampire put even more
force into the two planes that she had me pinned between. I would
have probably been a goner then and there, but Taggart slammed the
claws on his right hand into her leg and she lost her concentration.

I would have
expected that to end the fight then and there for us, but apparently
Taggart had just gotten lucky. The vampire sprang away from him,
whipping her sword down across him in the process, and he only just
managed to get his arm up to take the worst of the blow rather than
having his throat cut.

Being dropped
on the ground as the forces she'd been holding me up with disappeared
stunned me enough that I wasn't able to do anything to help Taggart
block the slash that had nearly killed him, but I did manage to get
off a dozen tiny shards of metal that started nearly fifty feet away
from her and flashed towards her in a fraction of a second.

She was
obviously a telekinetic because she knocked most of the projectiles
out of the air with a wave of her hand. She'd almost been too slow
though. They'd all come within inches of tasting her flesh and she
missed one of them entirely. I smiled as the six-inch sliver of metal
took her in the chest. It was too low to have pierced her heart, but
it had almost certainly collapsed a lung.

Taggart
conjured a giant slab of rock twenty feet above her head and let it
fall as he pulled himself back to his feet, but she threw it to one
side with barely any indication of just how heavy it was. I was
impressed, but not as impressed as I would have been if she had
thought to throw it at Taggart and me.

The two of us
split up to make ourselves more difficult targets and started
circling out around our opponent. I threw another set of razor-edged
knives at her again, but it was nothing more than a stalling tactic,
so I wasn't surprised when she easily deflected them all to one side.

We were running
out of time, and I knew it. So far the fact that there were two of us
had been keeping us in the game, but she wasn't stupid or she
wouldn't have lived as long as I suspected she had. She was going to
start figuring out how to use the dreamscape against us and then we
were going to be in trouble.

Taggart tried
to close with her, but she made a throwing motion in his direction
and he was suddenly soaring away into the darkness at the edge of the
plain. I desperately started to extend the plain and then suddenly
realized the perfect weapon to use against a telekinetic as the
massive block of stone that Taggart had conjured took to the air,
flying in my direction.

I envisioned a
world in which the rock shifted to electricity at the same time that
I envisioned an invisible shield that extended over the plain we were
standing on for more than a hundred feet in every direction.

Lightning is
supposed to move in a line, crooked though it might be. This
electricity didn't move like that. Instead it took on the shape of a
gigantic crackling ball that went instantly towards the one spot
nearby on the plain that I hadn't made impermeable to electricity.

My attack moved
too quickly for even me to follow it, but it left afterimages on my
retina that clearly mapped out its movement across the plain. It hit
the vampire with a force that left the ground around her charred and
smoking.

I swayed with
exhaustion as I slowly approached her. I'd acted out of instinct or I
probably wouldn't have tried to transform something so large. Before
that instant I would have said that I wasn't capable of something of
that magnitude, even inside of my own mind, but apparently I was, it
just took a lot out of me.

I stumbled a
little over the rubble that littered the area around her, but even so
I still didn't take my eyes off of her. She was too dangerous to do
otherwise.

A glowing,
crystalline sword appeared in my hand as I finally reached her side,
but she didn't respond to the weapon. Her eyes were fluttering and
she was gasping for breath, either because of the shard of metal that
I'd lodged in her chest or as a result of the shock that she'd just
received.

Under other
circumstances I would have felt sorry for her. The burns that
disappeared beneath her clothes seemed to indicate that I was being
spared the sight of the worst of what had been done to her, but what
I could see was bad enough.

Her eyes
suddenly snapped open and she swung her arm at me as though intending
to launch me away like she'd done to Taggart, but I slapped her hand
away with the flat of my sword.

"Nice try,
but if you move again I'll just cut your head off and save myself the
aggravation of talking to you. How many people are in your group?"

She weakly
shook her head. "This is nothing more than an illusion. My body
is safely resting back where I left it. Nothing you do to me here
will have any kind of lasting consequences, but you have vindicated
my decision to seek you out. You'll make a tremendous weapon."

"News
flash, you dirty parasite, I'm already a weapon and you shouldn't be
so confident that you're safe here. Even if you're right, there's
nothing to stop me from torturing you for a while. It might be
interesting to see how much pain you can withstand before you break."

She started
laughing at me. It was difficult to tell for certain that was what
she was doing because the laughter started a series of gasping,
hacking coughs, but I was pretty certain that I'd failed to
intimidate her.

"Nothing
you could do to me would possibly exceed what I've already been
through, but that isn't why you aren't going to torture me."

"Oh yeah?"

"If you
torture me then when I wake up I'll kill your father. In fact, if you
ever pull me back into this shadow hell I'll kill him. Is torturing
me really worth his life?"

She was
starting to slip away. I hadn't been able to really feel it when
Pamela had started to lose her grip on the dream, but I could feel it
this time around.

"Now
that's funny. You're going to have a hard time killing my dad when
you never wake up."

I pushed
against her with my mind and between one second and the next, a
raging metaphysical wind picked up. I threw everything I had left
into holding her in place at the same time that I pulled her more
fully into the dream. I knew I couldn't keep it up for very long, so
I didn't waste any time ramming my sword into her chest as soon as I
was confident that I'd pulled her in as far as I was going to be able
to.

The sound of
something heavy landing just behind me brought me around to find that
Taggart had returned. Taggart took in the scene before him and then
started to smile, but something froze his expression in mid change.

I whirled
around to find that the vampire was gone.

"She
survived, didn't she?"

"I think
so, but we won't know for sure until we call her number tomorrow.
It's possible that I'm wrong and she didn't make it out, but it was a
valiant effort either way and we finally have some leverage against
her. She won't want to endure an eternity of attacks from the two of
us."

"I'm not
so sure about that, Taggart, but I hope you're right. What happens
next?"

"Given the
way that time often works here, I'm probably nearly due to wake up.
Once I'm awake I'll carry you out to the car and resume driving. With
any luck by then Isaac will have been able to confirm whether or not
your detective friend was able to pinpoint where your family is being
held. Either way, we should be closing in on them."

"I'm not sure I'd classify her as a friend."

"I think you may be surprised what the future may bring."

Adriana Paige
I-35
10 Miles South of Minneapolis, Minnesota

I woke up when
the sun finally got high enough on the horizon that it was shining
directly in my eyes. I had no memory of Taggart carrying me out to
the car, but somehow he'd not only got me out to the car, he'd
reclined my seat, buckled me in, and covered me up with the old,
leather jacket that he always took everywhere with us, but rarely
wore.