“Ideally.”
“How long’s that going to take?”
I sigh and consult my Earth phone. “Ninety minutes, if it was my gas that knocked him out.”
I hear Felix clicking away on his keyboard. Then he says, “I see that he takes Ambien. I doubt it was your gas that put him under.”
“Dammit.” I resist the urge to kick the leg of the bed. “That drug suppresses REM sleep. I might have to come back later or—”
“Bailey.” His tone sharpens. “You’re about to have company.”
I spin around to the door, my heart rate spiking as Pom’s fur darkens on my wrist.
“Vampires,” Felix rattles out. “Enforcers. They have every exit covered. Running would be pointless.”
Pucking puck. Why couldn’t it be any other type of Cognizant? Vampires only sleep if they want to, so my remaining grenade won’t knock them out—and I don’t have anything else at my disposal.
My gaze falls on the walk-in closet in the corner of the bedroom. “Can I hide?”
“They probably have your DNA. How else could they have zeroed in on you with such precision?”
He’s right. Even I didn’t know I’d be here until I’d read my encrypted email an hour ago. This is bad. Armed with my DNA, a vampire could find me anywhere in the Cogniverse.
I stroke Pom, trying not to panic. “What do they want?”
“No idea,” Felix says, “but I doubt they care about your breaking and entering.”
“Arguable.” I whirl back toward Bernard. “Sounds like I have no choice. If I want to keep Mom’s life support running, I have to go in, REM sleep or not.”
“And I’ll do my best to stall the Enforcers. I think I can make the elevator run slower, maybe even—”
“Thanks.” Ignoring the shaking of my hands, I pull out the hand sanitizer and slather it on Bernard’s hairy forearm. “Here goes nothing.” I reach for the (hopefully) decontaminated patch of skin.
In a way, there are silver linings to this clusterpuck. If the subdream kills me and I go homicidally crazy in the real world, at least the vampires will put me down before I can cannibalize anyone. Plus, all this adrenaline is short-circuiting my usual fears of picking up Staphylococcus aureus and other cooties from my target.
My fingers touch the man’s skin, and my muscles stiffen for a moment as I catch a faint whiff of ozone and experience the sensation of falling. Then the room darkens around me, and the world of wakefulness goes away.
Chapter Two
I’m standing on top of black water, with a sky like magma above. Barreling toward me are a dozen creatures, each more hideous than the next.
The first looks as if twenty sets of ant mandibles had mushroomed to the size of a truck and had sprouted antennae and legs. Another resembles a massive spiral worm, or maybe a syphilis bacterium, with centipede-like legs ending in knife-sharp talons. The least horrific of the creatures reminds me of a tardigrade, a microscopic animal that lives in water and has no discernable eyes or nose, a hole for a mouth, and eight limbs that end in claws attached to the body of a sea cow—except there’s nothing microscopic about this tardigrade. It’s ten feet tall.
The mandible creature is in the lead, leaping toward me as it shrieks through each of its mandibles. If I decided to chew up some diamonds, that’s probably what it would sound like. Magnified a thousandfold. I get the creepy feeling that the thing is trying to say something, but on a frequency more likely to make my ears bleed than to pass on any information.
A furry appendage snakes from my wrist and elongates into a whip as the shrieking beast leaps at me, mandibles clacking in unison.
I crack the whip. A sonic boom ripples the black water around me. My whip slices the mandible creature into even halves that plop at my feet, spraying me with sticky green goop. I’m paralyzed with disgust—which is when the syphilis creature’s talon pierces my left shoulder.
The pain is nauseating and sharp, and I feel lucky that my whip is attached to my body, else I would’ve dropped it. Disgust now a distant memory, I crack my weapon again. With a second sonic boom, I cleave the syphilis thing in half and dodge the bloody stream that spurts out.
Seeing what happened to their brethren, the remaining monsters attack with a lot less enthusiasm, which is good because I’m losing blood from my shoulder by the bucketful. Before they realize that I’m weakening, I go on the offensive, cracking the whip.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Only the tardigrade is left standing, and it turns to flee with a speed one wouldn’t expect from such humongous bulk.
I leap after it, whip ready. “Oh, no, you’re not going anywhere.” A sonic boom later, the tardigrade rains down in pieces.
As soon as it does, the world around me changes.
Chapter Three
My shoulder throbs as I whip my head around to take in forty-foot squared-dome ceilings, yellowish blue marble floors, reddish green walls, and a floating collection of glowing geometrical shapes that are impossible in the waking world, such as the overlapping-on-itself Penrose triangle. I inhale deeply, dragging in the sweet-savory aroma of manna, my favorite Gomorran food.
Of course. I’m in the main lobby of my palace. Meaning this is the dream world, and the monsters I just defeated were part of what I call the subdream. Puck. Once again, I didn’t realize what was happening, despite such unrealistic bits as walking on water and Pom’s turning into a whip.
A stab of pain brings me back to the moment. This shoulder injury is behaving all too realistically, which means I’m just a few liters of blood loss short of dying in the dream world and thus going insane.
Oh, well. Now that I know where I am, I can change things as I see fit.
I float out of my dream body as if I were having a near-death experience. The pain instantly disappears. I study the body beneath me and mentally cringe. That shoulder is bad. The rest of me, though, looks pretty boring for a dream.
With barely any effort, I heal my shoulder. Then, because I can, I make my body taller and thinner and exchange my utilitarian cargo pants and camo shirt for a cool leather jacket, tight black jeans, and knee-high boots. A good start. I replace my frizzy black curls with the look I prefer—fierce flames of fire that make my head look as though a firebird has made a nest on it. Since I’m in a rush, this will have to suffice.
I jump back into my body. As soon as I do, Pom appears in front of me—something he does whenever I’m dreamwalking and he’s in REM sleep, which is almost always.
Here in the dream world, he’s not a fluffy wristband. Like me, he takes on a dream form.
The size of a large owl, with ginormous lavender eyes, highly mobile triangular ears, and fluffy fur that changes colors to match his emotions, Pom is pure weaponized cuteness. Allegedly cute beings like otters, pandas, and koalas are downright fugly in comparison.
“You left your face the same,” he says in his singsong falsetto. “How come?”
“You don’t like my face?” I muss his fur until he turns blue, and head toward my tower of sleepers.
He floats up and flies behind me like a selfie drone. “Your face is tolerable. At least Earth humans seem to like it.”