Hunted by Dean Murray Page A

you down."
    It took me a couple of tries to get my voice to work. "If
that's true then I don't have much of a chance. I don't even know
enough to figure out which parts of my dreams are just normal dreams
and which parts are something else. Something nasty could just
pretend to be part of my dream, blending in until I let something
important slip."
    "Exactly,
that's why I'm trying to convince you to let me come teach you. The
safest thing right now is for you to be moving around. If you don't
spend more than a day or two in any one part of the country then even
creatures that learn more about you than you'd like won't have a
chance to act on their knowledge before you've relocated."
    I
shook my head. "I'm sorry, I want to trust you, I really do, but
I'm not going to take that risk. Is there a way to detect other
people inside of my dreams?"
    He
frowned but nodded. "You control your own dreams which means
that you can flush people out fairly easily. Change something big
about your surroundings and you'll usually notice any intruders.
Freezing everyone suddenly like you did earlier works, as does
changing your environment. If you go from outside to inside or inside
to outside, often times you'll see someone stumble as the ground
underneath them literally moves. The same strategy works to a lesser
extent inside of someone else's dreams."
    "What
do you mean?"
    "You
can't control the whole dream like you can your own, but if your will
is strong enough then you can change some aspects of it. If you find
yourself in a dream and are unable to make a large global change to
it then you know you're in someone else's dream and you must be
careful. Leave if you can, or if that isn't a possibility then you
need to try to blend in as much as possible."
    His
shake had pretty much disappeared, but he was looking weaker by the
second. He coughed and I got the feeling that it wasn't something
that had happened here in the dream, or rather not just here in the
dream. He'd coughed because his dream body had been forced to mirror
his physical body.
    "I
don't have very much longer. Being in the dream burns up energy that
I can't spare, at least not right now, not with my current injuries.
If you're going to tell me how to find you then now is the time to do
so, otherwise I'll let you ask one more question as a show of good
faith in case we do ever meet up again."
    There
wasn't any two ways about it. I panicked. I knew so little about this
business of sharing people's dreams that I didn't even know what I
didn't know, didn't have any idea of what I should be asking. The
sheer importance of the next few seconds threw me into a kind of
paralysis and I couldn't think of a single question about the dream
that I thought might keep me alive if I ran into something as
dangerous as he'd indicated I would.
    "I
want to know about that guy you were spying on. Kaleb. I want to know
about him."
    The
question had just kind of tumbled out of my mouth. It had been driven
by nothing more sinister than the feeling I'd had back when I'd first
seen Kaleb, the impression that he looked familiar. Not like I'd ever
seen him or anything, but he was related to someone who was somehow
important to me, someone who had been missing from my life.
    I'd
thought the question a pretty harmless one, but he lunged to
his feet. Pieces of the desk he'd been sitting in went flying across
the room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a couple of my classmates
disappear as shrapnel tore through them, but most of my attention was
focused on the massive creature that had replaced the Native American between
one heartbeat and the next.
    "Did
he send you? Did Kaleb put you up to this in an attempt to find out
what I've learned?"
    I
fell out of my desk, scrambling backwards on all fours as he stalked
towards me.
    "I
don't know Kaleb. I just asked because he reminds me of someone
else!"
    The
creature's wickedly long claws were fully extended now and he sliced
through desks and people with equal