Free Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) by Lisa Brunette Page A

Set in your ways. And a dreamslipper, to boot.”
    “That’s what I’m talking about. This damn curse.”
    Mick figured Cat was relishing the chance to speak of their dreamslipping in such baldly negative terms, what with his sister out of the picture. Pris would never allow anyone to call it a curse. He knew from experience. She was his big sister, after all.
    “Once,” Mick began, “both Donnie and I fell asleep in my studio. We’d both been on a roll, the two of us painting like fiends. Maybe we fed off each other’s energy, who knows? But I slipped into one of his dreams. It had been so long since I’d slipped into anyone’s dreams of any consequence, Cat. A lot of the girls I, uh, date don’t dream about much. You’d be surprised by how mundane people’s dreams can sometimes be, if the people are pretty shallow. Anyway, Donnie’s dream was like walking into a painting. The man dreamed in fractal images: crystals forming, strange, perfectly symmetrical shapes that repeated themselves infinitely. It was glorious. I didn’t want to leave.”
    “You loved him,” Cat said softly.
    Mick felt himself smile. She was right. “Oh, I wouldn’t know what to do with a man’s body, and I never thought of Donnie that way, but yeah. I loved him.” He sniffed, feeling a cry well up in his chest, but it was his nature to stifle it, so he did.
    “But Donnie didn’t die because of your dreamslipping. Like mine killed Lee.”
    “Whoa, is that what you think?” Mick said. He walked over and sat down next to her on the couch.  
    “How can I not? The killer in my case followed me out to Seattle and shot him.”
    “But she was trying to kill you, right? And he was there.”
    “He saved my life.”
    Mick nodded. “And Donnie might have saved mine, in a way. Since I let him live in my studio, I stopped sleeping there. I mean, except for that one night when I slipped into his dream.”
    “I used to slip into Lee’s dreams, across thousands of miles.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah. They were like PTSD dreams. From when he was in Iraq. He kept reliving something, over and over again.”
    “Whoa.”
    “He couldn’t save this kid. They’d strapped a bomb to the kid, and Lee tried to save him but failed.”
    “So he saved you instead.”
    Mick let Cat sit with that one a bit. She stopped chewing on her bottom lip. “He figured out I was a dreamslipper, in the end.”
    “No kidding.” Mick had not seen that one coming. No one on Earth knew he could slip into their dreams.
    “And now he’s dead. The only person in the world—I mean the non-dreamslipping kind—who knew what I could do. And he’s dead.”
    “Did he accept it?”
    Cat smiled. “He said, ‘That’s a pretty neat trick you’ve got there with the dreams.’ But he’d been in a coma, Uncle Mick. And then he died.”
    Mick didn’t know what to say.
    “So what do I do with this?” Cat asked, her eyes imploring. Mick didn’t have an answer for her. He wished his sister was there. Pris had an answer for everything.
    “I don’t know. But you can’t stop living. And living means loving.”
    There was a knock at the door, so Cat got up to answer it.  
    “We need to take Mick in for questioning.” Mick recognized the voice. It was Sergeant Alvarez.
    Cat protested, “But you’ve already questioned him.”
    “We have new information.” Alvarez stepped inside and motioned for Speck and Santiago to escort Mick, who knew what this was about. He’d been waiting for it.

    >>>

    They put him in a room without windows, or at least that’s what it looked like, but he figured the glass that appeared blackened was one-way glass, so they could see him, but he couldn’t see them. That’s kind of how he felt about the situation. He had no idea what Jenny had told them.
    Soon Sergeant Alvarez walked in and sat down. “We know you were having an affair with Don Hines’s girlfriend.”
    Mick did not respond. If he hadn’t gone to see Jenny already and