Hunted Dreams (31 page)

So what
if they did it again? She’d survive; it’s what she did best.

Quina arrived sometime in the afternoon. She wore the same clothes as earlier, but she smelled like the outdoors when she swept into his room and perched on the end of his bed. Reed sat cross-legged on it, propped against its headboard.

They sat in silence for a minute, perhaps two. Finally, and without looking at him, Quina asked with her customary coolness, “Are you due to check in with the Clan anytime soon?”

Reed hesitated for half a second before replying, “I communicate once every other day. If I don’t, they know to send someone in after me.”

Quina sighed before turning her head and favoring him with a tiny smile. “I have no idea if you’re lying. I was really hoping not to have to do . . .” She gestured around his room. “This.”

“Hoping you could continue to ‘test’ me and get me beat up every day till you got tired of it, huh?” Reed asked. “Yeah, I’m real sorry that had to end early, too.”

“Ah, Reed.” Quina shook her head at him. “That was always your problem: you all-too-easily see the splinter in our eyes without noticing the plank in your own.”

“You getting Biblical on me, Quina? How . . . unexpected.”

“I’m stunned by your audacity,” Quina said. She didn’t seem stunned. At best, she looked a little bored. “You came into our home, ate our food, accepted our training, and passed our information on to our enemies. And now you’re complaining about our training techniques? My goodness.”

He drew a deep breath. “Your punishment techniques, you mean. You worked me as much as I did you, Quina, and you know it. And please don’t play the offended hostess card. The type of food your household ate was the biggest problem I had.”

She gazed at him through half-lidded eyes. “As much of a problem you’ve caused me today, I admit to being glad to finally meet the real Reed Jayvyn. Only, that’s not your real last name, is it?”

“How did you do it?” he countered. “How did you keep a perfectly ordinary, twenty-six-year-old woman locked into REM sleep—not just sleep, but nightmares—for weeks on end so you could snack on her terror?”

“I am curious how you know all this, since you and Katrina spent less than a minute together before you assaulted Luisa.”

Reed’s mouth twisted into a smile. “Your concern for humankind is touching. But you’re evading my question.”

She smiled back at him. “As you are mine. But since you appear so interested in my professional work, let me condense it down for you: psychopharmacology. Do you know what that means?”

“Us landscapers don’t use them big words much, but I imagine it means mind-altering drugs.”

“More or less. As you know, I study cognitive psychology. Some colleagues and I have been working on this project for a few years. We’ve had drugs for the last few years to mimic constant fear, guilt, and other emotions that evoke anxiety. Last year, however, we came up with drugs that lock humans in the dreaming part of the cycle. Mixed together, well . . .” She extended her hands once again to the room.

“So Kat—Katrina is your guinea pig for this miracle drug cocktail,” Reed said. He didn’t even try to hide his disgust from her.

Quina’s face bloomed into a rare smile. It transformed the hard angles of her face into a softer, more shadowed geometry. “No. After several trials, she’s our first semi-successful implementation.”

Jesus.
He stared over her head, avoiding her eyes. Finally, he asked, “Semi-successful?”

“The experiment went beautifully, as you no doubt felt. But we knew she wouldn’t last long before she gave out in one way or another, and of course we were right. Humans just aren’t hearty enough to serve as long-term fuel.”

Her words reminded him of Cor’s accusation of his own self-righteousness as a meat-eater. Had he ever spoken with such callous disregard about the beings on whom he feasted?

“How did you know about her, Reed?” Quina asked, tilting her head. It looked oddly coquettish, something Mari would do.

“I figured it out, Quina,” he said. “Give me some credit. I’ve been here for a few weeks, noticed the difference in being here versus leaving. That, and something Mari said about a constant source of nourishment.” He tried to radiate sincerity. He wasn’t sure how the truth could hurt Katana or him, but he refused to give the Daleths any more information than he had to.

Quina stared at him for a moment before saying slowly, “Just so you know, Katrina is never alone. If anyone so much as rattles our doorknob, we’ll kill her instantly. You we’ll keep for a bargaining tool, but she’s completely useless to us. So I ask again, When are you next scheduled to check in with the Clan? Is there a protocol?”

If he could just get to a computer. “Via email every few days.”

She nodded once. “Good. Paul is adept at using computers. Alberto says you use his sometimes. I’m sure Paul can figure out who you contacted and what you said. We’ll email using similar words and monitor the response. If there’s anything more we need to know to keep the Clan far away from this house, please let us know. You’ve lost a lot of sleep over Ms. Anders. I would find it an amusing irony to think your loyalty to a group you hate would end up costing her life.”

When Katana woke several hours later, she insisted on sitting up on her own. Maybe tomorrow she’d master standing. Would the wonders of the twenty-six-year old invalid never cease?

An hour or more later, she met her latest guard, a young man several years her junior. Cocky in that way adolescent boys adopt to mask their terror of the big, bad world, he swung into the room with a couple of paperbacks in his hand.

“In case you get bored,” he said, shrugging.

“Thanks,” she said with a smile. He shrugged again and slipped out the door, presumably to his station right outside.

He’d brought her two books that, if the covers were any indication, continued in the fine tradition of space operas. Not her favorite, but after her experience, she’d gladly let someone else entertain her brain.

That night, as she dropped back down beneath the covers, she wondered if she’d encounter Reed in her dreams. Had he really found her through his psychic powers? If so, had her awakening broken the spell, the psychic field, or whatever it was? Would it even be possible, now that she seemed to cycle through the dream stages like a normal person, to overlap dream cycles?

Lying there, her breath squeezed off in her throat and her heart pounded. As she talked herself down, she wondered how long she’d suffer from a fear of sleeping or, more precisely, of not waking up.

Around him, yellow light resolved into a viewing screen filled with Saturn and a dozen or so of its moons. He stood before an obscure array of science fiction machinery. On his right, a woman with purple skin snapped orders to a pulsating, glowing white cloud. People rushed by him, all clad in uniforms similar in shape, if not color. He looked down and, sure enough, wore a similar outfit rendered in green. Overhead, a smooth, hammered metal ceiling arched.

“Isn’t it cool?” a voice asked. He spun around and found Katana, clad in a bright pink uniform, lounging in the giant captain’s chair in the middle of the metallic room.

He took a step toward her, grinning, but stopped when Katana held up a hand. Expression sober, she said, “You didn’t ask the captain permission to leave your station.”

His grin widened. “Captain, may I leave my station and approach the captain?”

Katana tilted her head, considering. “The captain will take it under advisement and render a decision later.”

He advanced on her, and she laughed, leapt to her feet, and embraced him. “I woke up!” she said against the smooth fabric of his shirt.

“I noticed,” he said, smiling.

“And guess what!”

“Hmm?”

“I peed! And ate dinner. Well, it was broth and water, but still.”

He laughed and released her. “I’ve never heard someone get so excited about beef broth.”

“It was chicken broth,” she corrected with a smile. “I don’t eat red meat.”

Reed studied her for a moment. “You remember?” he asked.

She nodded. “Everything from my fourth birthday party to Professor Daleth inviting me over to her house in Pasadena. That was a bad decision on my part, by the way.” She still smiled, but it had shifted into sharper angles.

“Your family? The . . . man?”

She looked at him strangely. “Yeah. All that. And I figured something out.” She told him some of her experience with the invader, how he’d made her watch her family’s bodies stiffen over the course of three days, telling her over and over how they’d died, his mention of hungers and satiation, his scary eyes.

Oh my god.
“He was a fucking Leech.”

Her lips lifted very slightly. “That’s what I said.” Sort of.

What she’d gone through, this poor young woman. And to end up so smart, so strong. God, she was a miracle. Wait a minute . . . “Said?”

She did an awkward, single-shoulder shrug. “I chatted with, you know, him—I mean, obviously not
really
him—before I woke up. It was some stupid test my psyche set up. I guess I passed.”

Reed shook his head. “Girl, you’re amazing. Stronger than a whole pack of Leeches.” He grasped her hand and squeezed.

She shrugged again, but he could see his comment had pleased her. “So what are we doing now? I can’t help but notice we’re not sunning ourselves in the Bahamas right now.”

He flinched. “I’m sorry, Kat. I really fucked up.”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant,” she said quickly, and hugged him briefly. He’d never, ever been this physical, this tactile, with anyone in his life. Granted, in the dreamworld, it was symbolic physicality, but still. “What should we do to get out of here?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. They have you under guard, and Quina promised any unexpected turn of events would . . . not go over well.”

“No need to sugar-coat. I’ve heard it before. You so much as sneeze on them, they promise to kill me dead.” She sighed. “These bugs are starting to annoy me.”

After a second, Reed laughed. When she quirked her eyebrows at him, he explained, “I don’t think they had any idea what a bad idea it was to try to turn you into a victim.”

She grinned at him. “I just remembered why I love you,” she said, and kissed him. As their kiss continued, his breathing grew jagged.

Finally, Katana pulled back very slightly. He opened his eyes and found them alone and inside a small, metallic, space-aged bedroom. “Captain’s quarters,” she teased. “Until we can find each other in reality again, this is going to have to do.”

He thought that was a fine idea.

When she awakened the following morning, Katana found the Leech who’d murdered her family sitting ten feet from her bed, smiling fondly.

For the next ten seconds, while her blurry gaze cleared, she tried to remember the mechanisms of breathing. Finally, with a small twitch, she managed to inhale again.

He did not disappear.

I’m dreaming
, she thought, even though she knew she wasn’t. Her rumbling tummy and need to pee aside, dreams and reality simply felt different.

“Good morning,” he said, still smiling.

She stared at him, heart pounding and mouth dry.

He chuckled. “I was going to ask if you remembered me, but there’s really no need, is there?”

She remembered him. He’d lost or shaved off his light brown hair and had gained sixty or more pounds, but his eyes remained as gas-light blue and his cheeks as rosy.

She blinked the last bit of gumminess from her eyes.

“This dynamic feels familiar,” he teased. When she did not respond, he slapped his thighs and said cheerfully, “Well, no wonder, I guess. I gave you quite a shock, didn’t I? I came in to introduce myself, since our last meeting was entirely unofficial. My name is Paul Daleth.”

Daleth.
He lived here.
He lived in this house, the house in which she’d spent the last few weeks of her life. He lived here and, once again, had partaken of her terror.

He leaned forward. “It wasn’t Daleth when we first met. I’d just moved here from Arizona, and I was rogue-ing it.”

Paul Daleth rose with an athletic grace to his feet. Katana’s heartbeat pounded in her throat, cutting off her air. His grin widened, and he bowed his head at her.

“I’ll come back and chat when you’ve had a chance to . . . wake up. I just wanted to wish you good morning and tell you how thrilled I am we have this opportunity to make up for lost time.” With a jaunty finger wave, he slipped out the door.

Katana’s breath slammed out of her throat in a sob. She clapped a hand over her mouth and gritted her teeth. Her eyes burned with hot tears. Finally, quietly, she let herself cry for a few minutes.

This doesn’t change much
, she thought.
Our goal is to still to get out of here
.

The more she thought about it, the calmer she grew. She had a name, a face, an opportunity she hadn’t had before. For a few days, at least, she was safe; they needed to keep her alive to manage Reed. Maybe it was for the best. She’d killed him once, in her dreams. Maybe now she should make her dreams a reality.

She lifted her arms over her head, clenching and unclenching her fists, rebuilding her strength.

No one visited Reed throughout his second day of captivity. He spent the day practicing the falls and other moves Quina and Paul had taught him. Sociopaths, the lot of them, but they knew a thing or two about the capabilities of his body. The Clan had trained him till he was fourteen and the human military after that, but until recently, no one had taught him how to tap his . . . other side—ah hell, his Leech talents. The room was small, but he managed a few creative falls and some enthusiastic, stationary calisthenics.