Free Ambushed by Dean Murray Page A

do with the fact that he was a lot
older and more experienced, but there were other differences, the
biggest one being that I was able to pull other people into my dreams
against their will.
    It
sounded like a small thing, but Taggart, the infamous Dream Stealer,
hadn't ever managed it. More amazingly, I was able to pull people
into the dream strongly enough that they could even die there. That
wasn't supposed to be possible. Dream walkers are vulnerable whether
in their own dreams or in someone else's, but non-dream walkers are
supposed to be safe.
    It
was possible to torture someone and make the experience traumatic
enough they would remember it when they woke up. It was even possible
to cause them phantom pain the next day, but it wasn't possible to
kill them. Except I could.
    That
was how Taggart and I had killed one of the vampires who had been
after me back home. Taggart was practically jumping up and down at
the possibilities, but I wasn't so sure how I felt about being the
perfect assassin.
    As
a general rule I wasn't interested in killing anyone, but I'd had a
rather pointed lesson in the fact that there were…well, I
guess you still called them people…out there who were truly
evil. I've never been a fan of those tricky philosophical questions,
but if there was a modern-day Hitler out there killing a lot of
innocent people and I had the ability to sneak into their dreams and
kill them no matter how well-protected they might be in the real
world, didn't I have a duty to prevent even more innocents from being
killed?
    Luckily
it wasn't something that I had to decide right away. Taggart might
have some flaws, but he wasn't going to force me to kill people. For
now I just needed to learn how to control my abilities enough that I
wasn't always showing up inside of the dreams of every nearby shape
shifter or vampire. That was a good way to draw the kind of unwanted
attention that could end up with me being dead.
    I
sighed and climbed up to the top bunk. If I was going to do this I
figured I might as well get comfortable and I couldn't think of
anything more comfortable than my old bed.
    For
all that there were some serious differences in how our abilities
worked, Taggart's description of making initial contact with someone
matched up exactly with what I remembered from the time I'd pulled
him into my dream. It was like your mind sent out thousands of tiny
threads, racing away at incredible speeds.
    Once
one of the threads found the person you were looking for, you
reabsorbed all of the other threads and then strengthened the
remaining thread enough that you could pull yourself to them. Or if
you were me, you sometimes pulled them to you.
    I
slowed down my breathing—apparently even in my dreams I still
needed to breathe—and focused on the image Taggart had shown
me. I cleared away all of the emotions that Taggart said were nothing
more than a distraction and started pushing tendrils of energy out of
myself. I was getting better at that part, but although they left,
they didn't seem to really be going anywhere.
    It
was frustrating, and not just because I couldn't explain it. I'd
never realized before I started working with Taggart just how hard it
was to describe a feeling .
Sure, we talk about feelings all the time, especially us girls, but
how do you really know that the feeling you're describing is the same
feeling that someone else is experiencing?
    It
didn't seem like what was going on now was the same as the time I'd
consciously pulled Taggart into my dream, but the last time I'd tried
to explain that, he'd told me that once the threads started spinning
out of him that he either found his target or he didn't, there wasn't
any way to mess things up once you got to that point.
    The
surge of frustration triggered a reflexive effort to clear my mind
once again, but I stopped before I even really got started. Taggart
was big on being a blank slate when he was working, but nearly every
single time I'd accomplished