Page 5 of The Last Slayer
She shrank back a bit but nodded. I cut about two inches and placed it inside the circle.
She gestured at the ashes on the floor. “Shouldn’t I get a circle around my bed too?”
“If I put one around your bed, the thing won’t be able to enter your dream.”
“So why don’t we just do that? Then you can leave, right? I mean, we don’t have to fight.”
“It would probably decide to come after you in this plane, physically. Might take a while, but it would find you. Incubi tend to take things like that personally.”
“Oh.”
She slid under the covers and pulled them all the way up to her neck, as if she were a Victorian maiden. But the porn-star sheets and nightgown ruined the effect.
“So I just go to sleep, right?” she said.
“No. When it shows up, you’re going to ask me for help. I cannot use violence in your mind without your explicit permission. It’s illegal.” I hate lawyers, unless they work for me.
Selena nodded. “That’s it then. I sleep and ask for help in my dream.”
“Yep. Then stay out of the way. I don’t want you getting hurt, or worse, used as a hostage.”
“And you’re gonna catch him.”
“Or kill it.” I didn’t want her to give her tormentor any human qualities. “Whichever makes the most sense.” The courts allow hunters to kill if necessary. After all, incubi are deadly creatures.
“What if you can’t?” Selena said.
“I can.” The only way I wouldn’t get it was if it didn’t show, or if she screwed up. I somehow doubted the former.
With the sword still in my hand, I stepped inside the circle, then let a bit of magic flow from me to the ashes and sealed it off. Eldritch power coursed along the line, and I took a deep breath.
Burrowing deeper into the mattress, Selena stared at my weapon. “You know what you’re doing…right?”
Too late to ask for references, baby.
“Yes.” I gave her my best professional, I-know-what-I’m-doing smile. Most clients need a lot of smiles and assurance. “Now go to sleep.”
It didn’t take much time for Selena to fall asleep.
Her hair, brittle and dull, provided the link necessary for me to enter her dream and connect with her senses. Dreamlinking and delinking were the ickiest, diciest parts of the job. The subjective experience can be summed up as swimming through viscous, metallic-smelling gel until you hit a tough flexible wall, like a sheet of inch-thick rubber, that does its best to keep you out. This is the protective barrier of her psyche, and I had to approach Selena’s, like every client’s, with the utmost delicacy. Handled badly, psychic penetration can damage a mind forever.
I breached the barrier with relative ease—it’s always easier with the victims of creatures of nightmare, especially when they’ve been weakened as much as Selena had—and entered the surreal landscape of her dream.
Selena lay on a beach, her pale body bare under a lapis lazuli sky. Not a wisp of cloud marred the blue. Her breasts were the size of basketballs, her waist nonexistent, and her hips flared out like the bottom half of an hourglass.
Typical.
I moved silently and positioned myself behind a tall palm tree and a couple of wildly flowering shrubs so that I could hide and watch her. The link between us was so weak, I couldn’t feel anything she did. Blue-black waves roared and crashed into the fine white sand. The bright sunlight bouncing off of the foam made it scintillate like pale yellow diamonds. Of course none of this stuff made any sense, but hey—it wasn’t my dream. Selena could fly around on a carpet of green cream cheese if she wanted.
A cool breeze stirred the tendrils around Selena’s face and pushed at the wax-stiffened tips of my braided hair. The wind carried the scent of the sea—salt, sand, sun, and the mystery of deep water. I felt like I was trapped in some Technicolor beach resort commercial.
Tall waterfalls appeared just to my right, the spray splashing my skin. My hand tightened around my sword, and I took a deep breath. It isn’t uncommon for things to continue to appear in people’s dreams as they delve deeper into them. I just didn’t appreciate getting surprised by the additions. The falls could have just as easily appeared right over my head. Or it could have been a volcano spewing lava.
The cascading water seemed to reflect the golden sun until I looked closely. Each tiny particle of water was actually a droplet of sunbeam, the kind only found in the Solar Garden, the dragonhold of Armisael. Or so the reporters claimed, but who knew for sure? The media always gets supernatural stuff wrong, and no one had ever actually been to a dragonhold and returned to tell the tale. Rumor had it that even the Pentagon had given up looking for them. Guess their super-duper satellite spyware wasn’t good enough.
Come on, come on.
I wanted to get this over with and salvage what little was left of my “evening off.”
