Dark and Deadly: Eight Bad Boys of Paranormal Romance (63 page)

But this senseless, crazy rush?

His hands shifted from her hips—she’d sob if he let her go—but he splayed one low on her belly, the other caressing none too gently up to cup a breast. She opened her mouth and their tongues rubbed and tangled. She wanted more, not caring any longer that he was basically a stranger, that she wasn’t being smart or safe. The electric shocks of awareness shook her so badly that she whimpered.

She grabbed his hands where they heated her body. How could she get him inside her, to be full of this incredible feeling, mindless of anything else?

His mouth ripped from hers, and she cried out. But he didn’t let her go. He found the crook of her neck where it met her shoulder and breathed there, panting hot and fast. His hands moved across her body, his arms banding her to him to control her shudders.

“Shhh,” he said against her skin.

The dream surroundings—shapes incomprehensible—gleamed so bright that her vision was dazzled.

“Is it always this intense in dreams?” She wondered who the hell she was, didn’t recognize herself. Or was the heat of the kiss a product of her essential self, too long confined?

“I’m pretty sure it’d be this way between us while awake, too,” he said. “We should experiment.”

The huskiness of his voice, proof that he was similarly affected, made her glow. And like him, she already knew what the outcome of said experiment would be. She’d been putting distance between them from the first moment they’d met for that very reason.

Not him. Dangerous. Bad.

God, who had she thought she was fooling? From her first glance at him, her whole body had become painfully, frighteningly aware. It was just that she couldn’t afford to lose her mind over anything or anyone right now. Maze needed her, always needed her. She was in trouble again.

“You think about it.” Didn’t seem like he’d accept an answer he didn’t like.

Yes, she wanted to try this awake. “You warned me about danger.”

He laughed, and it felt so good rumbling against her.

“I didn’t mean
me
,” he said.

“I’m pretty sure you’re the most dangerous thing in Rêve.”

“Will you let me show you around? You’ve really got to know how to operate here.”

She knew she was going to love it, no matter what might lurk in the dark. She felt amazing, all-powerful, as though anything and everything were possible.

But then, Michael’s arms were still around her, so that might have had something to do with it.

***

He had to release his hold—couldn’t very well travel holding her as tightly as he was—but he kept a grip on her hand. The hollow in his chest had lit with something. The sensation was so sharp and sweet it almost hurt, and he was scared that it might go out.

Fuck it. Girl was never getting away. Not after a kiss like that. He was near cross-eyed with the need to finish what they’d started—and he would in the waking world. It’d never been like that. Never. If he’d known it could be, he’d have tracked her down years ago. Brought flowers. Begged.

How weird that she was the kind of woman his mom would’ve liked. Pretty and sweet—a nice girl, a young lady. Next to her he was so rough.

But when Jordan looked up into his eyes and said, almost daring him, “Show me,” he forgot how rough he was. Didn’t really matter. They were the same in at least one way that mattered. Dreams were like that.

It’d been so long ago that he’d first tried Rêve, when he’d been plugged into a dirty dream cooked up by a street-corner dealer who’d shifted from selling silver to something even more psychedelic. The crash into sleep had been hard—dangerous by any standard—and the bootleg shared dream had been a twisted mindfuck with talking 2D animals doing bad things to Revelers.

Jordan, on the other hand, was just waking to the possibilities of shared dreaming.

She surveyed her surroundings, which were dimming and growing more detailed. The random crumbled walls became the red brick of a suburban house with windows so dark that they were empty, sad, and frightening. Where she’d grown up, maybe?

Protocol said to begin by walking through her dream and showing her how to take it apart. However, this particular house was so meticulously recreated and solid that it went beyond the mere suggestion of real that was so typical of dreams, to something iconic in her imagination. He was hesitant to move her toward it after they’d started out so well.

Didn’t feel right.

When she yanked her attention away, he took her cue and ignored the house, too. Another time. He had things in his dreams he wanted to ignore, too, and no one should be forced to reveal their darkest places to others or even investigate them themselves if they weren’t ready or didn’t want to.

Next up, the Agora, which she should know about anyway. That’s where she’d learn, crossing into Rêves and observing how they were created, until her talents became evident and she was sent out into dreamspace in whatever capacity Chimera saw fit.

That she would become one of them was a foregone conclusion. Free agents never lasted long. And after she signed up and took her vows, he’d casually break it to her that Michael wasn’t his real name. It was a security measure for anyone who went out in the field.

Rook turned away from the house and drew her down the street. “All the basic stuff to know you should feel, but I’ll go over it anyway.”

In a regular dream, the rest of this neighborhood might materialize out of her memory, but since he was leading, the street gradually deteriorated, more and more houses seeming empty, incomplete, with missing walls. Haunted. The pavement crumbled beneath their feet.

“The further you get from your own dreams, the less control you have,” he said. “Enter another Rêve, and whoever is in control there dictates the setting and what happens. You only control yourself.”

Simple settings—like the
Envoi
’s beach Rêve—were easiest to create and very commercial, appealing to the masses. But some Rêves were becoming more complex, even plot-driven, so that Revelers could enact stories, each with myriad outcomes. Even he, who’d seen everything, was impressed.

“When you opened that door into the
Envoi
’s beach Rêve, you broke through the barrier of your individual dreamwaters. Now that you know what it takes to get out, you can do it whenever you want. It’s a feeling, like learning to ride a bike.”

Jordan sent him a sharp look. “What about others getting in? My sister brought someone into the
Envoi
’s Rêve. And here you are in mine.”

Exactly. So smart.
Like she knew what he was thinking. “Yes, some people have a knack for crossing boundaries.”

“Do I?”

The woman was a total wild card. “Don’t know yet. Give yourself time to acclimate before you try anything.”

The pavement crumbled at last into the boundary of a vast, empty plain, what agents called the Scrape, though who had initially found and named it, no one knew. Beyond the edge of her dream, the ground rippled like a desert or the ocean floor, grains pushed continually over each other by a constant harsh wind.

She gaped at the emptiness before her. Yeah, it had that effect.

“There are no rules in the Scrape. No one controls it. You can feel pain. You can die. You don’t go out here alone, not for a long time, you hear me?”

She shook her head like she didn’t want to in the first place.

“We’re going to cross into the Agora,” Rook said, which he could already sense as a wavering desert oasis of matte silver light, less vibrant and colorful than a real dream. It’d take only one step to get from here to there. “
Agora
is Greek for
meeting place
, and all legal shared dreaming that initiates in the United States occurs there. Agents come and go at will, and you’ve been granted temporary access with an escort.”

The fierce Scrape wind screamed in his ear as he stepped out of her dream, drawing Jordan with him.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she chanted as her hair whipped crazily around her head.

People got lost in the desert, which is why he shifted from holding her hand to putting an arm around her shoulders. He appreciated any excuse to pull her close.

In one electric pulse, they crossed into the silence of an inactive Rêve in the Agora. They arrived in an area where no dream was in effect, so the space was vast and dark. The Agora’s characteristic Corinthian columns created an infinite grid on a horizontal plane within the darkness. In reality, there was only one pillar repeating over and over again, but that was the stuff of popular trivia.

Marshal Harlen Fawkes was leaning against a pillar, apparently waiting for their arrival. As a tracker, Rook rarely stayed in one Rêve for long, but the Agora was Fawkes’s territory. After someone like Jordan was scouted, she would usually be given to a specialist for orientation in the different venues.

Yeah, not this time. Rook had no intention of giving her up.

“Coll told me to expect a new Reveler,” Fawkes drawled, shifting his weight in his big boots. “He didn’t tell me she was beautiful.”

“Jordan Lane,” Rook said drily, “this is Marshal Harlen Fawkes.”

“Nice to meet you,” Jordan said. “I didn’t know there were marshals in Rêve. Isn’t it supposed to be safe already?”

Rook liked the implication of her statement,
If Rêve is safe, what’s this guy good for?

“Well, I keep it that way.” Fawkes swaggered forward while simultaneously putting on at least two inches in height and bulking himself up noticeably with muscle under his shirt. He had stretched a big, white cartoon smile. Must think he was so damn charming.

Likewise, Jordan chuckled, a gorgeous low sound.

Introduction officially over,
Rook thought. “You got any Rêves going today?”

“In fact I do.” But Fawkes kept his attention on Jordan. “High-end dating meet-and-greet. I had to throw out a scammer who got in without paying the twenty grand fee,” he bragged for her. “Seems the elite want to make sure they only dream-hump other elite.”

“How very classist,” Jordan responded.

It was true: the wealthy got access to Rêve. The poor waited on lists or found illegal hookups, like Jordan’s little sister. Like him, too, before Coll scammed him into joining Chimera.

“Yeah, and the Army’s got some freaky History of War going, but I’ll steer you clear of that shit.” Fawkes shrugged melodramatically. “I don’t like violence. I resort to it sometimes, but I don’t like it.”

Rook put a hand to Fawkes’s massive pectorals and pushed him away from her. “Anything else?”

Fawkes swiveled his eyeballs in their sockets to address Rook. “Just the usual. There’s a boardwalk full of retirees—” He flashed those bright whites again at Jordan. “—but she’d probably enjoy something a little more exciting. Hmmm…. Jungle?”

Jordan merely blinked.

“Alien adventure?”

Rook wanted to laugh when a little line of alarm appeared between her eyebrows.

“Or do you go in for symbolic, existentialist bullshit? We could preview the Rêve co-curated by the Museum of Modern Art and NYU. Been babysitting them all week.”

“The existentialist bullshit sounds very intriguing,” Jordan said with a friendly wink, “but whatever Michael has got planned is good for me, thanks.”

Rook didn’t hide his smile this time. His girl saw through all kinds of illusions. Maybe that’s how her talent would manifest.

Fawkes’s thumb jacked Rook’s way. “This guy? Now don’t get me wrong, he’s a good agent and all.”

“Gee, thanks,” Rook mumbled.

“But you don’t want to go where he goes, darlin’.” The marshal was talking now, not Fawkes, the ladies’ man. “It’ll mess with your head. You have to
be
a little psychotic to track psychotics. Have to have spilled blood to cross into the dreams of someone who does it for fun.”

Rook didn’t contradict him because the good marshal had barely touched the surface of the things Rook had seen and done, both in Rêve and in the waking world. On behalf of Chimera, he’d become the killers they wanted to catch. He’d gone so deep that the nightmares stalked him now.

A warning was warranted, and since Rook intended to be as greedy as possible where Jordan was concerned—he was no hero, never had been, had no aspirations to be—this was all the caution she was going to get.

Innocent Jordan lifted her face, that sharp sparkle in her eyes, and repeated, “I’m good with Michael, thanks.”

***

“What a character,” Jordan said as Michael led her away from the marshal and toward another massive pillar, where he was going to show her how Rêves were built and maintained.

The columns of the Agora were common knowledge. A sketch of one was the logo on the official Agora website. And regardless of what company was hosting the Rêve, all had the column somewhere at the bottom of their advertising. But staring up at the massive things, how they vanished into darkness beyond sight, was a
wow
kind of crick in the neck.

“Rêve’s full of characters,” Michael said, “but you get in trouble in the Agora, you call for a marshal or you get to one of the columns and a marshal will find you. The columns are like home base. You’re safe there.”

The massive things couldn’t be in
every
Rêve, though. It would mess up the theme of the dream. To that effect, she chuckled. “Are columns in the alien adventure he mentioned?” Spaceships whizzing around them in a laser fight. Right.

But Michael was serious. “Yes, if you look for them. If you want to see them. No columns, you’re not in the Agora. Means you’re lost in the dreamwaters. Means no one knows where you are. No one can help you.”

“Couldn’t you just wake up?”

Michael looked at her. “Try to wake up. Right now.”

She didn’t want this to end, wanted to stay with him longer, share the dream, but she was suddenly worried. “How?”

“Exactly. You don’t know yet. And there are people who can hold you under if you’re not strong enough. What would you do?”

She had no idea whatsoever. The thought that she couldn’t wake up when she wanted to was the most frightening thing she’d learned yet. “Point taken. I’ll stay in the Agora or in my own dreams. For now.”