Free Ambushed by Dean Murray

Taggart more than a month
to contact someone for the first time. I wasn't up to a month
straight of trying yet, but I couldn't get away from the feeling that
I wasn't getting any closer to success.
    Even
as worried as I was, it only took another ten minutes before I nodded
off. Apparently I was even more exhausted than I realized.
    I
transitioned into my own dream after what felt like no time at all,
and found myself inside of my bedroom back in Minnesota. I'd been
dreaming about home a lot. I was getting better at remembering my
dreams lately even after I woke up, so I had a unique view into what
was going on inside of my subconscious.
    I
was homesick. It wasn't like that was any kind of surprise or
anything, but it didn't make being away from my family any easier. I
hadn't even been able to call them. I understood why, but that also
didn't make things any easier.
    Taggart
was being hunted by the Coun'hij, the shape shifter ruling council,
and I was probably being hunted by more of the vampires who had
nearly killed me back in Minnesota. Illegal phone taps and traces
were nothing to people like that. As long as I cut off all contact
with my family they would probably be safe, but if I were stupid
enough to call home it would put them, and me, in danger.
    I
couldn't change the fact that I was homesick, but I could choose not
to dwell on it. I changed the bedspread on the bottom bunk to a
fluorescent orange that Cindi never would have chosen for her bed and
some of the tension between my shoulder blades disappeared. It had
been easy to make that small change to the dream, which meant that I
really was inside of my own dream rather than having accidentally
wandered into someone else's dream again. That meant I was safe, as
long as I didn't pull someone else inside of my dream with me.
    Well,
that wasn't quite guaranteed either, but I was fairly sure that there
weren't any powerful vampire mentalists crouched outside of our room.
Vampires were a lot more common than I ever would have believed, but
not as much so once you crossed the Mississippi. Apparently the shape
shifters made it a point to try and keep the vampires confined to the
more urbanized eastern section of the United States.
    Safe
was good. Good except for the fact that I was supposed to be trying
to get out of my dream and into someone else's. It was tempting just
not to try. I was exhausted and scared, and it would probably be good
for me to take a night off from dream walking, but if I was going to
make that argument I probably should have made it before I went to
sleep.
    I
couldn't lie to Taggart. I'd tried a little white lie not long after
we'd left Minnesota and he'd caught me instantly. Apparently being a
shape shifter turned you into some kind of human lie detector. It was
possible to lie to a shape shifter and get away with it, but I wasn't
a complete psychopath, so I wasn't going to manage it anytime soon.
    All
of which pretty much meant that I was going to have to try and make
it into Eric's dream. I hadn't told Taggart beforehand that I needed
the night off, so he was counting on me being there, or at least
doing my best to be there at the meet. Besides, he was right. A
certain amount of learning to dream walk was just going to come down
to getting out and dream walking.
    To
be fair though, I had expected things to be a lot less trial and
error now that I was working with Taggart. It only made sense that
one dream walker should be able to shorten the learning curve for
another, but so far that hadn't really been the case. Taggart had
warned me about that, but I hadn't realized until we'd been working
together for a few days just how different our abilities were.
    We
could both dream walk, but he seemed to be a lot stronger inside of
the dream than I was. Even when we were in my dream sometimes I couldn't stop him from changing our environment.
When we were inside of his dream I couldn't even come close to
holding my own.
    I'd
initially thought that had to