Disciple: DreamWalkers, Book 2 (19 page)

If Maggie wanted to be a threat, she’d be a huge one. But she didn’t. And she wasn’t.

When they emerged from the stairs on the bunk level, Zeke didn’t spot any soldiers in the hall. Quick as a wink, he snatched Maggie and practically tossed her into the unisex john.

Luckily, there was nobody inside.

“What the hell?” Maggie exclaimed. “T minus eight.”

He locked the door behind him and stalked her until her back hit the wall. “That’s not much time.”

She stared up at him. “For what?”

Zeke kissed her. She opened for him immediately, clinging to his shoulders and pressing herself against him. With a groan, he picked her up and wedged himself between her legs. His cock, hardening, ground against her.

Feverish, he absorbed the taste of her. He needed so badly to fuck her right now and forget what was happening around them. The tangible bade him closer. His skin zinged like a shockwave where they touched. The good kind of shockwave, not the stomach-walloping lurch he felt with Karen.

Maggie wasn’t Karen. Maggie was stable. Smart. God-help-him sexy. She wrapped her legs around his hips and kissed him eagerly, petting his hair, his shoulders. Whispering things he needed to hear.

That it was going to be okay.

That they’d be together again eventually.

That she trusted him.

He wanted to eat her up, she was so sweet—even the taste of the damn jelly.

A loud banging on the door interrupted them. “T minus four. Everyone report to their stations.”

“Shit.” Zeke let her slide to the floor. His cock felt like it could hammer nails. Her breathing hitched. From the rosiness of her cheeks and the redness of her lips, it was obvious what they’d been doing. “I hate this.”

“I know.” She splashed water on her hot cheeks.

His hands fisted. He felt impotent. Ironic, considering the state of his dick. “I hate Karen.”

A little unsteady, she walked to the door and unlocked it. “I know.”

What else could he tell her? To keep her here—to make her understand. She was the one he wanted to be with. It wasn’t the tangible. If anything happened to her, he didn’t know what he’d do.

Before he fashioned the right words, she slipped out of the restroom.

He stayed another two minutes, giving himself a breather. When he returned, Lill waited in the hallway for him.

“Dumbass,” she muttered when he walked past her. “Karen tried to come after you. Lucky for you she can barely walk.”

Yeah, lucky him.

The dreamsphere wasn’t as chaotic as it could be—wasn’t as black as Zeke had seen it with Maggie—but the extra helping of wraiths outside the group’s five point network unnerved Constance and Roberts, who hadn’t experienced it before.

Zeke could tell. Their shields were stable, but the full link required for them orate with him—and combine shields once they matriculated Karen—allowed him a whiff of their inner emotions.

He did his best to keep his inner emotions muffled with regard to Maggie. He didn’t care if the others cottoned on to how much he detested Karen.

She clung to him like algae on a dock post. With her stuck to his ass, he couldn’t stretch past her annoying tangible buzz to check if Maggie had entered the sphere. He couldn’t ask Lill about Maggie because he wasn’t an idiot.

Karen would go after Maggie if she realized he felt more deeply about her than he would any other student. Lill had warned him needlessly.

“Karen, you have to concentrate on opening yourself and broadcasting your signature.”
He unwound her arms from his neck. Again.
“I know you can orate. You did last night with Adi, and now you need to repeat it. I have to matriculate you.”

She tried to worm her way into an embrace. He locked his elbows, keeping her away from his body.

She gazed at him worshipfully. It was creepy as shit.
“We’re together again. That’s all I can think about.”

“We’re not together.”

“I’m not alone,”
she said.
“That’s what I mean. I was trapped with no one but the Master for a year, Zeke. Tortured. Abused.”
She quit angling for a hug and crept to the edge of his shield.
“I know the other L5s think they can protect me. I can almost sense them. Can they read my signature?”

The other L5s were stationed around them like points on a star, waiting patiently to accept Karen’s hail. He hadn’t convinced her to open up. No one, not even Karen, had reported any demonic visitations from this Master guy—and they hadn’t reported on Maggie.

It annoyed him Lill wouldn’t risk an update. They’d agreed on a coded sentence in case Karen could overhear more than his side of conversations. But Karen hadn’t tried to link with the others yet. She’d spent the past twenty minutes sliming herself all over him.

“The others can sense you. Now do your part,”
Zeke said. In fact, Adi had just asked for a progress report, which had been short. Very short.
“Adi is five paces to your left outside the barrier. Try talking to her. Like yesterday.”
Matriculation was intimidating to many. Allowing others—allowing all others—an open invitation to your psyche wasn’t comfortable. But it was necessary, and Karen, like Maggie, had demonstrated the initial glimmers.

“I’m too frightened, Zeke. If the L5s can tell I’m here,
he
can. The Master is going to come after me. He won’t care who gets in his way.”

It had been forty minutes, real-time, according to Zeke’s internal clock. When Karen wasn’t weeping dream tears on his shirt, she was shaking with fear and puling about how awful it would be if he got hurt because of her.

Too bad she hadn’t felt that way in Harrisburg.

“Come on. It won’t take long. All you have to do is relax your guard and let Adi assess you. It’s not like it hurts. I mean, it’s invasive, but it won’t send you screaming out of the sphere,”
Zeke urged.

“This was a mistake.”
Karen wobbled along the barrier, almost as unsteady in the sphere as she was outside it.
“He could already be on his way. We’ll never escape.”

“If you’d try to do what Adi wants—just a little—I bet she’d agree to call it a night.”

“I would not,”
Adi corrected in an annoyed tone, since she and the others could receive Zeke’s end of the conversation.
“We will accomplish what we’ve set out to do before exiting. You’re not soothing her, Zeke. Take her hand. She seems calmer when you express physical affection.”

Karen gave no sign of overhearing the vigil. She continued to gnaw her nonexistent fingernails and pace.

Physical affection, his ass. Zeke ignored the vigil’s suggestion.
“When we come out of the trance, Karen, I’ll barricade you from the sphere for the rest of the night.”

“Oh, could we, Zeke? Could we?”
She clasped her hands as if he were the answer to her prayers.
“I would feel so safe, sleeping in your arms again.”

Zeke had to congratulate himself. He didn’t gag.
“Sure. We’ll leave the dreamsphere as soon as you actually orate instead of whining on and on about—”

“Sentry,”
Adi snapped.
“Don’t express negativity. She is fragile. She must be cajoled. Tell her that you care for her wellbeing and that cooperating with us will enhance our ability to protect her.”

He stopped himself from an ugly response. He could hear Lill chuckling. Adi had ordered him to let Karen touch him if—and how—she wanted. He was supposed to comply with whatever it took to make Karen feel comfortable, safe, and willing to show them how the healing worked.

Adi was his fucking pimp.

“If you can link with the others, they’ll have more power to help you,”
he bit out to Karen.
“Lots of people will be able to help you after you let Adi assess you.”

He hadn’t matriculated anyone since before Karen, but he’d processed over a hundred students in his time. For the final assessment, a disciple had to expose herself completely while maintaining a shield. A tricky balance. Sometimes this phase could last several nights.

He wanted to be done with Karen tonight.

He wanted to be done with Karen now.

She gazed up at him with a hungry expression.
“I don’t need them. I don’t need anyone but you, Zeke.”

The way she always repeated his name when it was obvious she was talking to him unsettled him.

“If the bad guy gets you, we’ll ECT you out of the sphere again,”
he promised.
“That worked like a top. You’re going to have to try to link with the others. You agreed to show Adi the healing.”

She placed a clammy hand on his arm.
“I could show you instead. I would love to show you. I would give you anything, Zeke, for saving me.”

“I’m not a vigil. I might not be able to do it. We already discussed this.”

“You’re my savior,”
she insisted.

“Adi saved you. I followed orders. You need to matriculate and teach her.”
While he was curious about the healing ritual, it took a qualified assessor like Adi to really understand what another alucinator was doing metaphysically. If healing turned out to be a specialized talent, what use was showing Zeke?

Anyway, teaching Zeke so Zeke could teach Adi was a roundabout way to accomplish a simple task. He’d learned all the lessons he cared to from Karen Kingsbury—lessons about what a dumbass he was.

“I’d like to give you the gift, Zeke.”
Karen’s eyes glinted.
“The gift of eternal life. Let me teach you before you matriculate me. They don’t have to know.”

Zeke’s eyebrows rose of their own accord.
“Eternal life? Come on.”

“Well, I can’t be positive,”
she said coyly. At least she wasn’t sniveling. She began rubbing his forearm. The tangible felt like it was pulling his arm hair, and he tried not to flinch.
“I haven’t had the opportunity to test whether I’m going to age. I’m only twenty-seven. Quite a bit younger than your other student.”

“I’m not sure how old she is,”
he lied.
“I think, like, forty-eight?”

He heard Lill snort. Karen frowned.

About what? Had she heard Lill laugh?

“Something wrong?”
he asked her.

“I sense…”
She gazed toward the top of their bubble, where fewer wraiths congregated. It was odd to be here without the near-complete blackness that followed Maggie. Pearlescent gray gleamed beneath their feet. He had no trouble seeing Karen or the others. The unformed wraiths were sparse enough to count separately instead of a black wall of hatred and mush.

When Karen stared at him again, her eyes seemed to glow like the swirly parts of the dreamsphere.
“Zeke, I sense evil.”

So did he. It was stuck to his arm like wet toilet paper.

“Whereabouts?”

She waved a reedy arm toward Lill’s point of the star.
“That way.”

“You think your guy is nearby?”
He braced himself. If a boss wraith was about to attack, they couldn’t be more ready. Now they could find out what the hell was going on.

Karen’s breathing accelerated. Her pupils shrank to pinpoints.

“Evil,”
she whispered.
“Can’t you feel it?”

“No.”
Goddammit. Nobody else could link with Karen and keep an eye on her, but her claim of approaching evil called for a geoscan.

“Somebody needs to go deep,”
he told the others.
“See if we got a bogey. Karen’s saying some shit about evil approaching.”

“Constance,”
Adi said.
“Scan for us, standard grid. We need Zeke to remain hands-on with Karen.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

The L5 dropped out of the network and locomoted in a circular pattern, scouring the immediate area for conduits, presences and signatures. She soon departed visual range but not oratory and included them in the feedback of the geoscan imagery. Trance scans were like flying over a terrain map, except all the terrain was gray and identical. Far off in the distance there were white sparks—a locked conduit, a signature.

Maggie?

No.

“On duty orator.”
Constance’s mind voice was muted. Farther than the on duty orator, she located a few registered scanners. No looming demon. No Master. No evil.
“I’ll keep searching.”

Zeke tried to concentrate on Constance, but Karen plastered herself against him. Her thin form seemed to have a hundred arms and the strength of a professional weight lifter. He couldn’t wriggle free. The tangible threatened to override his link with the others.

“There’s no evil,”
he told Karen.
“I’m right here. You don’t have to strangle me.”

“He’s coming.”
She wrapped her arms and legs around him, trying to scrabble atop him like a drowning victim. He staggered and cursed.
“He’s coming he’s coming he’s coming to eat her we have to get out of here he’ll eat us too!”

“None of us sense him. Our shields protect us from all wraiths, including your buddy. Chill out.”
He pried her off him, half-surprised there was no suction release noise. Her weight was inconsequential, but this much bodily contact was turning his stomach.

“Why is she panicking?”
Adi demanded.
“Are you hurting her, Zeke?”

“Hell, no.”

Karen’s hands fisted in his hair. He growled. That would make it really hard to shove her away. He tried anyway.

Her eyes bugged out of her head, she began to hyperventilate.
“He’ll devour her. Use her as a portal.”

“Who will he use—Constance?”
Zeke asked, letting go of her hands.

“No, the other one. The girl.”
She could barely mind-speak as her breath whooped in and out of her.
“We’re dead, we’re dead.”