“I’ll ask him tonight.”
“Hell no. You’re not going out.”
Maze gave her a patient look.
“What?”
“I don’t have to go out to meet with him.”
Jordan shook her head. Still didn’t get it.
Maze grabbed the remote out of her hand. “I’m meeting him eyes closed?”
“You have a headset?” The Envoi’s headsets had been artfully designed, more like a low, spirally crown. Dress-up.
“Some of us don’t need headsets. He said he’d find me.”
“A random man is going to find you in your dreams?”
“Yep,” Maze said. “It’s just like…meeting at a bar.”
She was meeting men at bars, too? Shit. “It’s not like meeting a man at a bar.”
“Yes, it is. It’s just like the Envoi’s Rêve on that beach. You go up to someone, you talk. Not freaky.”
It was an invasion of privacy beyond all others. “All of it is freaky.” Then Jordan stood up suddenly, horror flashing through her. “You mean Michael Reese can enter my dreams when I’m asleep?”
From her lounge, Maze frowned low, one of her deep-in-thought expressions. “I suppose it’s possible. Not likely, though.”
Jordan was never sleeping again. She’d binge watch TV all night—there were so many series she’d been planning to try. Now was a good time. Then she’d call in sick tomorrow, ’cause she would be. Hold out as long as she could on caffeine and panic.
She gulped. “During the Envoi’s Rêve, Michael Reese touched me somehow.”
Maze gave a deep chuckle. “Michael Reese is welcome to touch me however he likes.”
“No, he’s not. He’s dangerous.”
“Dangerously hot.”
Jordan wanted to shake her. “Potentially deadly.”
“No argument there.”
Call the police? Have them laugh off her complaint? Rêve is safe. Your sleep is safe.
“There’s no saving you, sister,” Jordan said. Lord, she’d tried. “You are totally screwed, and I’m not far behind.”
***
She was having trouble falling; he could feel her tension drawing out with each breath, each slow, desperate blink back to alertness. It was as if she hung off a cliff above the ocean, fingertips sliding toward the edge in grain-by-grain increments.
Wouldn’t take much to dislodge her, but she already didn’t trust him to catch her.
“Come on,” he urged.
Her nails clawed the edge, strength weakening.
And then: a sudden outward breath and the silent fall into the dark water below. Down she plunged, her exhaustion like stones tied around her feet. But the rest of her body, her mind, relished the swift sink.
God, she was beautiful, made of that silver and indigo light, with just the smallest hint of earthly coloring. She’d take on more definition the more lucid she became.
Yes, Rook thought. This was so much better than the psychopaths Chimera had had him hunting, their twisted dreams giving life to his own suffocating nightmares. It was time someone else went into that darkness, because if he did again, he wouldn’t come back the same.
Recruitment was a much better occupation. No wonder Coll stayed with it.
Beautiful and fearful, she hovered in the flotsam of an incomplete dream, its components—a crumbling wall, the strobe of an ambulance, skeleton trees—blurred and barely recognizable in the waters of sleep. She spotted him, and in a rush of color and minute detail—each strand of hair, the mini mole on her neck, the almost imperceptible vertical striations of her lips—she became herself. In light pink sweats.
For all her prickle, yeah, he liked her a lot.
“There you are,” he said. “I’ve been waiting.”
She backed away, but she could never lose him. And he’d watch over her until she conquered this plane and didn’t need him anymore.
“What do you want from me? Why won’t you just leave me alone?”
“I won’t hurt you—” Rook paced a circle around her, an uncomfortable compromise with the part of him that want to reach out and touch. “—but there are things here that can.”
“You followed me today.”
“I made sure no one hurt you, no one snatched you from the street.”
“You threatened me at my work.” She wrapped her arms around herself.
“I don’t need to threaten you. You’re already in danger, and you did it yourself.”
She nodded, went stoic. “I should never have tried Rêve.”
“Not if you had wanted a normal life, but that decision’s behind you now, because you’re here.” His circle had him at her back, and he paused there to feel the waves of her energy vibrate out of her. Felt like the sun shone solely on him.