Heart and Soul by Shiloh Walker Page A

suspending life as they worked. Depending on how practiced they were, they learned to control some of the external signs. But a young one—one with less control—could make the air as cold as winter in the Arctic.
    Agnes reached Leandra’s door and laid her hand against it. It was cold, icy cold. This dream thief was still learning to perfect her craft, and Agnes had no intentions of seeing her improve.
    Reaching down, she closed her hand around the doorknob and tried to open the door. It was locked—just locked, though. Agnes dealt with that easily and pushed the door open, stepping inside.
    Mike lay next to Leandra, his eyes closed, face relaxed, completely unaware.
    That was the danger of dream thieves; they operated in such silence. The only obvious sign was the chill in the air, and that was unlikely to bother a shifter. Shifters didn’t feel the cold any more than vampires did. Unless it was subarctic temperatures or it started to snow or rain, Mike wasn’t going to notice it.
    Leandra lay next to him, and though she slept, she looked anything but peaceful. She was perfectly still, but her face was locked in a grimace, and a fine sheen of sweat glistened on her brow.
    Agnes lifted her eyes briefly to the sky, saying a brief prayer.
    Not for herself.
    She was too weary to survive a battle right now.
    No, she just prayed she could pull Leandra out of the potentially fatal dream without harming the young Hunter.
    As she started toward the bed, Mike’s eyes flew open, and he sat up, his gaze alert, clear. He frowned as he saw her. “Agnes—what is going—”
    Cutting him off, she said quietly, “Get Lori and Sarel. Quickly, now, Mike.”
    He rolled from the bed, his lean body nude. Following her gaze, he looked at Leandra as well, but there was nothing he could see or sense that would concern him. “What’s going on?” he demanded coolly.
    “Know you the same things a witch does, boy?” Agnes said calmly as she leaned over Leandra. She placed a brow on the young witch’s head, and Leandra didn’t even stir.
    That, probably more anything she could have said, got through to Mike, and he began to sense something was wrong. On his way out the door, he grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor. Agnes’s last glimpse of him was that of his butt as he pulled the jeans up over his lean hips just before he stepped outside.
    Shoving him from her mind, Agnes cupped Leandra’s face in her hands. With a sigh, she murmured, “It seems there’s one last battle left for me to fight. Let’s get it over with, shall we?”
    Closing her eyes, she separated mind from body as she slid inside Leandra’s dreams. They were dark; Agnes suspected they often were. Tortured girl, so full of guilt, anger, and loneliness. And the dream thief had been drawn to them like a magnet.
    In the dream, Leandra was fighting against a hideous darkness, some formless, shapeless thing. Agnes knew she was only interpreting the images as best as she could, but she suspected Leandra’s fears were the darkness. She fought against the darkness she sensed within, but in this dream, the darkness was winning.
    Leandra was losing herself to her doubts, completely unaware that Morgan also hovered at the edge of the dream, fueling that darkness and drawing power from Leandra’s despair.
    Agnes knew the moment that Morgan felt her presence.
    The dream seemed to still, and the fabric of it grew weak and thin for the slightest second. Then the dream’s reality seemed to realign itself, and the darkness expanded, converging once more around Leandra.
    He doesn’t want you . . .
    Morgan pulled an image of Mike into the dream and used her magick on the fabric of the dream, made Leandra watch as Mike turned from her.
    See? He doesn’t want you . . . he wants somebody pure, somebody clean.
    Agnes didn’t know the new woman Morgan brought into the dream, and she suspected neither did Leandra. But that didn’t matter; it was the pain that mattered, the pain that