Dream Walker (Bailey Spade 1)

Isis catches my gaze. “I take it you don’t know who did this?”

I shake my head, and Kain gives me such a murderous glare I fully expect him to drain my blood—or worse—right here and now.

“The werewolf. Eduardo.” I try to keep my voice even. “Did he have a relationship with her?” I glance at the corpse.

Jaw tight, Kain shakes his head.

“He wasn’t in his room earlier,” I remind him. “Maybe this is where he was.”

“Take care of this,” Kain barks at Isis and strides out so quickly I have to run to keep up.

By the time we get back to the werewolf’s apartment, I’m wheezing for breath.

“He’d better be there,” Kain growls.

We barge into the bedroom and find the large man in his bed, snoring like a geriatric dog.

Kain nods at the bed. “Do your job,” he tells me in a low, hard voice.

“He’s not in REM sleep,” I whisper. “We’ve got to wait.”

His voice rises in volume. “I’m running out of patience. Two more Councilors dead. If I were you, I’d make myself useful forthwith.”

Puck. I guess this isn’t a good time to tell him about the dreamwalker’s notes where he talked about the difficulty of entering werewolf dreams.

Wait a second. How could I forget? The black windows in Nina’s dream. They’re—

“There,” Kain says, quieter this time. “Look at his eyelids.”

He’s right. The werewolf has entered REM sleep—a record, considering he wasn’t in bed only a few minutes ago.

Faking confidence, I sidle up to the prone figure and touch his muscled neck.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Pom shows up as soon as I enter the dream world, and I pet him to relax a little before attempting the multibody technique from Leal’s diary.

Just as before, I create a second body for myself far away from where I stand, in case that helps. Next, I exit my current body and will myself to come back into both.

Nope. I end up in the original body.

I do it again, straining my willpower.

I end up in the farther body instead of the original, but not in both.

“I guess that’s still something,” Pom says dubiously. “You’ve learned a type of teleportation.”

“Right, but that’s not what I need.”

Still, Pom has a point. This is a way to teleport around the dream world. Then again, isn’t going to a different dream already teleportation? Or is that building reality around myself?

Leaving the metaphysics for later, I exit my body, create one in the tower of sleepers, and dismiss the original one. Reentering myself, I end up in the tower—functional teleportation.

Hey, it’s something.

For good measure, I test out the multibody technique once more and fail. I guess there’s no helping it. I’ll need to deal with the werewolf the usual way, in one body.

I teleport to his nook, turn invisible, and touch him the same way I did in the waking world.

As soon as I materialize inside Eduardo’s dream world, I see what the problem is—and it’s a big one.

Somehow, the werewolf is having two dreams at the same time, something I’ve never experienced and didn’t think possible. The two dreams are juxtaposed on top of each other, at least from my point of view, like two movie projectors playing different movies aimed at the same screen.

In one dream—a violent nature show—Eduardo is in wolf form, ripping a gazelle to shreds and relishing the feeling of warm blood in his maw. In the other dream, Eduardo the man is doing it doggy style—or is it wolfy style?—with a woman I don’t recognize.

Could she be Albina?

It’s hard to tell, especially with the sex and violence crossing over into each other.

The wolf abruptly stops eating, raises his bloodied muzzle, and sniffs the air. Looking right at me with animal eyes, he howls and bounds forward. At the same moment, the naked man stops thrusting and twists to look at me.

I want to run, but the two environments make it difficult to orient myself, and pain explodes in my neck as the wolf’s teeth bite down.

Before he can shut those jaws and kill me, I wake myself up.

Back in my real body, my heart is hammering so hard I’m afraid it’ll punch a hole through my ribcage. If the wolf had dug his teeth any deeper, I’d have died in the dream and would be homicidal right about now.

Speaking of homicidal, the way Kain is looking at me isn’t good.

“I’m sorry.” I back away. “I couldn’t check his alibi.”

“You what?” His fangs slide out.

“I knew this might happen. Werewolves are difficult to dreamwalk in.”

Kain’s eyes turn into mirrors. “Tell me the truth,” he orders in a tense version of his usual honey-laced voice.

I speak robotically without meaning to. “He was dreaming two dreams at once, one for the wolf side and one for the man side. Before I could manipulate anything, he lunged at my—”