Dream Weaver (Dream Weaver #1) (26 page)

             
Sabre closed in again, his warm, gentle hand rested between my shoulder blades. “Emari, where did you go, today?” he asked brusquely.

             
“I don’t know,” I sobbed into Nick’s chest, and caught a glimpse of something red in my mind’s eye.

             
“Where is the dog, Emari? Where is Eddyson?” Sabre pressed and I felt Nick’s arms harden in defense around me.

             
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t…I didn’t…” A cyclone of hysteria spun through me. “Maybe the man took him!”

             
Nick’s body became a rigid cage around me. “What man, Emari?” His soothing tone belied the tension in his body. He knew I hovered on the brink, ready to plunge back into the whirling darkness, the mire from which he had already rescued me—twice.

             
“The man—in the red coat. At the creek.”

             
They exchanged a meaningful glance, and Nick reluctantly bowed his head to Sabre in some silent consent. “Emari? Sabre and I are going to help you remember what happened today. Okay?”

             
I nodded dumbly.
Anything to help find Eddyson and bring him home.

             
Nick engulfed me in the safety of his arms. Sabre rested one hand on Nick’s shoulder with a reassuring squeeze, and then placed the other hand at the base of my skull. His fingers caressed my hair.

             
“Okay, sweetie, here we go,” whispered Nick.

             
I closed my eyes to escape the world, but the sudden memories of the day poured back into my mind, brought cognizance that the world of my memories was no safer than the physical world within my sight. A torrent of images gushed from me to Nick and Sabre. I relived the glorious warmth of the sun, allowed the pleasant sensations of nature to wash through me, and contentedly beheld old memories of Dead Man’s Creek. Then, as before, I felt the icy fright as the man in the red jacket grabbed me and shook me like a rag doll, and delved violently into my mind. Nick’s chest rumbled savagely against me at the Wraith’s lascivious regard of me. I relived the press of hands against my throat. My vision eclipsed and danced with stars.

Chapter 22 Sweet Sacrifice

              I crumpled into Nick’s arms. He scooped me up, and carried me back to the bed. “This is what happens when you
screw
with someone’s head too much,” Nick growled at Sabre.

             
I felt—snapped, like they say when someone has been pushed or pulled beyond what they can endure. They snap. That was me. I was snapped. I heard the word Nick wanted to use, instead of ‘
screw
with someone’s head’, but he didn’t use it. He knew I was snapped, too.

             
I could hear them planning, but my eyes refused to find the light. I knew I needed to open them, but part of me hoped if only I kept my eyes shut a few moments longer, it would all just go away. I wanted to bury my head under my pillow, avoid the inevitable, put off facing the news head-on that was assured to impact my heart and my life in a horrendous and significant way.

             
“How is she?” Sabre’s voice was uncharacteristically soft and filled with concern.

             
“She’s conscious; her mind won’t let her come out of it all the way.”

             
I felt Sabre’s cool fingers brush my forehead. “Come on back, darlin’.”

             
My soul cowered within me and my eyes refused to comply. A war raged in me, two parts of the whole battling for control. Self-preservation conquered.

             
“I can’t pick up anything,” Nick grumbled as he gently and carefully swept his charged fingers across my body. I heard the rustle of my wet clothes in his hands, as he caressed the fabric with his fingertips. He hoped to find them saturated with memories, but only found melted snow. “Not even a trace of a print left on her or her clothes. This one’s very strong. I don’t know that we’ve run up against one quite like him before.”

             
“Or, it's an old friend with newly-acquired abilities.” I could hear the snarl in Sabre’s voice, the anger and frustration. He was not accustomed to being the weaker opponent, on the defensive.

             
“Somehow, he’s wiped every print from her skin and her clothes. And it seems like he’s wiped her brain, but not totally, like he wants us to know some, but not all of it,” Nick interjected.

             
“I don’t think so. I think she blacked out and he kept her that way until he returned her here. I get the impression he is winging it. He hasn’t decided what he’s going to do,” Sabre argued.

             
“Yeah, but how did he get her back here without being seen? Not that there’s a lot of people to see anything, but still, there’s the highway between here and the creek, and even if he was phased, she’s still corporeal, he couldn’t have moved her,” Nick protested.

             
“She may not have even left the grounds. It may all be an elaborate weave of her memories. You know we’ve been running into some extreme evolutions lately with some of the Wraith, as well as some of the Weavers. There is no telling what this guy’s capabilities are. They’re getting stronger, faster, developing new talents—or stealing them,” the growl rumbled in Sabre’s throat. “That Wraith we put down in Cle Elum didn’t even have to be in physical contact with someone, let alone be in the same building, to receive or transmit a memory.”

             
Even through my Cimmerian haze, I could hear Sabre’s wheels as they ground and squealed out his strategy.

             
Nick groaned. I felt him shift beside me as he turned to stroke my hair and kiss my face to try to draw me back. My heart responded to his touch and I unwillingly opened my eyes. “Nick.” It was barely a whisper.

             
“It’s okay, honey. We’re here.”

             
“Eddyson?”

             
“No, sweetie. We haven’t found him yet.” Nick helped me to sit up. “We’re working on something, though.” I pushed myself to my feet and Nick hovered close by my side, his arm wrapped snuggly around my waist. He watched my every move; in case I fainted again or a memory returned, or maybe a hint that I’d had enough of him and his Dream Weaver world.

             
“He was one of them. A Wraith,” I clarified.

             
Nick nodded with downcast eyes, unable to meet my gaze for shame that he had brought this dark being to my doorstep. “I’m so sorry, Em. I should have never told you…”

             
“On the contrary,” Sabre growled, “you should have told her everything.”

             
Nick rounded on Sabre and retorted, “Are you insane?” Protective and tense, he positioned himself against his mentor.

             
How quickly things changed with these two. It was enough to give me whiplash.

             
“Of course, you are,” Nick continued. “The notorious Sabre James, walking that fine line between darkness and light, straddling that precarious fence separating Caphar and Rephaim.”               This was a hostility and a past about Sabre that was new to me. “The less she knows the less they care about her,” Nick went on.

             
Sabre stepped up to Nick, face to face, his frozen granite eyes dared Nick to challenge him. Then, like lightning, his hand flashed out, and he clasped my wrist. He dragged me to the kitchen. Nick followed fuming, but he recoiled from the cold glare in Sabre’s eyes.

             
Sabre threw my hand away and grabbed my shoulders. The shock from the sudden change between them left me mute. “Nick should have told you the truth to begin with!” Sabre’s voice rumbled, like the meeting of two glaciers, low, icy and hard. “Nick shouldn’t have continued to shelter you once you knew the truth of what we are. He should have told you everything so you could have made an informed choice for yourself.
Now,
there is no choice.
They
,” he raged, jabbing a finger toward the darkness outside, “already know you exist and no doubt have deduced what you are. And
they
are ruthless. They
will
come for you.

             
“It’s all about power.” His fingertips gouged into my skin. “The more they can absorb the more powerful they become.”

             
Nick pressed between us and shoved Sabre away from me. “Back off, James.”

             
“I’m not the enemy, Nickolas.
They
are!” Sabre jabbed his finger at the darkness outside the window. “Just you remember that,” he snarled, and prodded the same finger into Nick’s chest. They stood toe to toe, pit bulls sizing each other up, poised for battle, chests heaving, nostrils flaring, and eyes locked, unblinking. I slid myself between them, lifted myself onto my toes and broke their glare. I stared with pleading eyes into Sabre’s. Finally, he snorted, turned on his heel and sauntered away into the dining room.

             
“He’s not the enemy,” I turned and reminded Nick gently. His heart race against my palm. After a moment, the fire in his eyes cooled. He slid his arm around my shoulders and we walked to the living room.

             
“You know stuff, don’t you?” said Sabre through his teeth, as he struggled to calm the seething inside himself. Nick and I turned to see whom he addressed, and oddly enough, he was looking at me. “Before they happen,” he continued undaunted, “you know things.”

             
“What?” For some reason I couldn’t explain I was angry—maybe just their testosterone infiltrating my emotions. More than that, though, I was confused. Why did Sabre think an interrogation was necessary or even appropriate right now? What did the fact that I ‘knew things’ have to do with anything we were dealing with now?

             
“You do,” he persisted, “I’ve read enough of your memories to see it. You think its lucky guessing, even an informed guess. Like you knew your friend would die of the cancer in her brain—or the girl on her paper route—like you knew your parent’s were dead, not injured.”

             
I flinched. “Geez, Sabre, is there nothing sacred to you?”

             
Bridget, a high school friend, had become very sick, a rare form of brain cancer. I knew she wouldn’t survive it. Even when she sat in church, all ballooned up from steroid treatment, her eyes pleading. She tried to reassure me, “I’m gonna beat this thing, Em.” She didn’t. And, I had known she wouldn’t, even as I looked up into those doleful eyes and tried to exhort her. I’d watched her over the months grow from a beautiful, slender young woman, to a bloated chemo-ridden figure, then to a frail, emaciated living-corpse who remembered and forgot me all in a single breath.

             
When news stories reported the disappearance of a person, I knew the end at the beginning. A twelve-year-old girl disappeared early one morning from the dewy mist of her paper route to be found days later in several garbage bags; a little blonde girl never made it to our sixth grade graduation because her uncle had killed her with a hammer; a mother disappeared from the family home on Christmas Eve, only to be dredged from the Puget Sound. Nine times out of ten, I predicted whether they would return or not. It seemed almost delicate to put it that way. That fact was, I could just sense if they were dead or alive. Somehow, I just knew.

             
A wicked grin grew on Sabre’s face and he looked from my bewildered face to Nick’s. “A Weaver with precognition,” he said succinctly, making sure Nick understood each word clearly. The wicked grin swelled as comprehension dawned on Nick’s face. “It’s nearly unheard of. When you develop fully, you are going to have abilities most Weavers only dream of. No pun intended.” Sabre ignored Nick’s roll of the eyes.

             
I threw up my hands and turned away. “You are truly touched, Sabre.” I sneered and tapped my head. Sabre may be an ass, as Nick consistently proclaimed, but I was beginning to think he was, maybe, a little mental, too. I was not as convinced as he was that I
was
a Dream Weaver.

             
Sabre mulled it over a few moments, his brow growing ever darker as his thoughts engulfed him. “That’s what the Wraith wants. He came looking for
us
and he discovered
you
.”

             
“What?” Nick’s arms hedged me in. “Then, why would he let her go?”

             
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s greedy and wants all of us. Maybe he let her go as bait to get to us. We have got to find this guy, Nick. Strike while the iron’s hot.”

             
What a stupid idiom! What the hell did that mean, anyway?
“Wait,” I protested, “No, this guy’s crazy. Crazier than you,” I amended. “He could kill you.”

             
“What about the dog? Why would he take the dog?” Nick joined Sabre in ignoring my protestation.

             
“More bait.” Sabre continued when we both looked at him like Eddyson hearing a funny noise. “The dog baits her. She baits us. And the Wraith feeds.”

             
Despite his efforts to control it, Nick shuddered around me from memories of a previous feeding. Sabre skulked around the living room, a caged feral creature. I sat quietly on the couch with Nick, curled in a ball against his warm chest. Warily, I watched his best friend as he continued to prowl.

             
“So, what’s going to happen?” I whispered.

             
“We’ll have to find him,” he glanced quickly up at my face and just as quickly away, “And destroy him.”

             
“You mean like kill him destroy him?” I really didn’t want to know this. Nick was talking about murder here. Out and out murder.

             
“He’s evil incarnate, Em. No redemption exists for Wraith once they’ve gone to the dark side. It’s not like demon possession that has the option of exorcism. They choose that life, and it's evil. Then, they use that evil to kill people. Not just Caphar, but humans as well. They don’t think twice about driving a person to madness and leaving them to suffer in mental hospitals with delusions of hideous things happening to them. They don’t care if someone commits suicide just to escape the torments implanted in their minds. They derive immense pleasure in draining Weavers of their abilities and leaving them to die. They’re corrupt and heartless. Rephaim are the farthest thing from being human without being truly a demon.”

             
I shook my head, trying not to think in too much detail what that meant.

             
“It’s their choice,” Nick said softly. “No Weaver goes into the life of a Wraith without fully knowing the consequences. They
choose
the power over morality. They choose the high over ‘right.’ We believe something happens to alter their brains. The decision to become Rephaim is evil, but the power or the nightmares, or both corrupt them even more. Like drug addicts, it eventually takes a toll on their minds and bodies.”