Waking The Dreamlost E-Book

Mel Dunay

• Herausgeber: Mel Dunay
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Journey to the country of Jaiya, where insect people live alongside humans, cars, and cell phones, and stranger things lurk in the shadows.

Someone is stealing Itana’s memories, and the young woman doesn’t even know it. Her only chance of escape from the forces toying with her mind is her new bodyguard, a former soldier named Marish. But their love for each other could blind them to the dangers surrounding them, and leave Itana trapped without her memories forever!

Leseprobe

Waking the Dreamlost

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Mel Dunay

Copyright © 2017 Mel Dunay

All rights reserved.

ISBN:

ISBN-13:

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DEDICATION

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To Mom and Dad

Acknowledgments

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Many thanks to Adrijus Guscia (Rocking Book Covers) for an excellent book cover, and to Daniela Marquez (MVCovers) for the alternate cover design. Many extra-special thanks to Carol Davis  (A Better Look Editing Services) for her help in finding and fixing my mistakes.

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CONTENTS

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Acknowledgments

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1

Chapter One

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2

Chapter Two

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3

Chapter Three

40

4

Chapter Four

62

5

Chapter Five

81

6

Chapter Six

100

7

Chapter Seven

120

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Thank you

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Chapter Name

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Chapter Name

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Many thanks to Daniela Marquez (MVCovers) for an excellent book cover, and to Carol Davis (A Better Look Editing Services) for her help in finding and fixing my mistakes.

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Table of Contents

Copyright Page

CHAPTER One

CHAPTER two

CHAPTER Three

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER five

CHAPTER six

CHAPTER Seven

Thank You

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CHAPTER One

“We must take a different approach,” Itana said. “We’ve tried everything. You trying to teach me to block myself psychically against this thing. You buckling a GPS tracker onto me. Nothing’s worked.”

She refused to think of the so-called ‘mindleech,’ the thing stealing her memories, as a human being.

“You’re right. We need more information,” the masked man admitted.

Sometimes Itana called him ‘Vazata,’ because she thought of him as a guardian spirit, but he didn’t like it when she did that.

“I’ve even gotten a lead on someone who might be able to help. But...to follow that lead, I’d have to leave here. Leave you.”

“You would probably do more good there than here. We keep meeting again and again, and it just puts us both in more danger,” Itana went on.

“What if the mindleech figures out who you are?”

“I’ll take that chance,” he said casually.

Itana had made it a point not to learn too much about this man, who wore a kerchief over his face whenever they met.

But she did know two things about him: he didn’t like it when she called him ‘Vazata,’ and danger didn’t faze him.

“The mindleech hasn’t hurt me so far,” Itana said. “Not physically. But what if it freaks out the next time we try to trap it? What if it decides to get rid of me?”

That would convince him to leave her, if anything could.

“You may be right,” he said after a pause. “I shouldn’t risk your life over this.”

Itana took his hand and shook it. “Good luck,” she said....

Itana woke up from a strange dream she could only vaguely remember, about a masked man and an evil creature. She found herself in a small, dimly lit storeroom with her hands tied in front of her. For a moment, she could not remember how she had gotten here, and then it all came flooding back.

Her carefully planned vacation to the snow-capped mountains on the border of Jaiya. The tour bus whose driver had taken them the wrong way. The men with machine guns who had stopped the bus at the narrowest part of the winding mountain road and let the driver go with a handshake.

The way the intruders had searched the tourists, taking anything valuable away from them and sorting them into groups.

“These are citizens of the Doomsday Collective,” the leader of the men had said of one young couple with a small child. “They should be sent home.”

“I renounced Collective citizenship years ago, when I was a teenager,” the husband had pleaded. “My wife and child are Jaiyan. You can’t do this to us—”

One of the men had slammed the butt of his weapon into the captive’s belly, and the young husband had crumpled up like a piece of discarded paper.

Itana had gasped, and the leader of the men had seemed to notice her then.

“Here’s the girlfriend of that Jaiyan politician,” the leader said. “We’ll dispose of her on camera, along with this one. He’s former Jaiyan military, probably served around here.”

He pointed to a tall, golden-skinned man with a fierce, hawklike face and a floppy, fashionable hairstyle—long on top, short on the sides—that didn’t seem to go with the face. He seemed vaguely familiar, but she could not put a name to him.

The other men with guns had hooted when the leader had talked of “disposing” of Itana. Deep down, she knew what they were planning to do, but her brain had frozen and refused to process it. The hawk-faced man had looked fiercer and took a step toward her.

“None of that,” the leader had snapped.

“You can do what you want to the soldier, but if we give the girl anything but a quick, clean death, Jaiya’s media will run with the story and make things worse for us.”

Itana had wanted to say that she didn’t want any kind of death, even a quick, clean one, but the words had stuck in her throat. She had been frozen in place like a statue until they tried to tie her up.

Then the former soldier had started struggling against the men grabbing him, and watching him do that had unfrozen her. She had squirmed and screamed as one of the men grabbed her arms. She had flung herself backward so hard that she’d slipped out of his hands and hit her head against the cracked concrete.

She had knocked herself out—that was the embarrassing part. The base of her head throbbed, and a tiny moan escaped from her.

“It was a good try,” a soft, nasally voice said.

She squinted toward the sound. She was lying in the only patch of direct sunlight in the room, coming from a window high overhead.

Between the dazzling sunlight and the pain in her head, which felt like a hammer driving thumbtacks into the base of her skull, she could not focus on the dark areas of the room very clearly.

Her captors had not tied up her legs, so she half-scrambled, half-flopped sideways out of the sunlight so that her eyes would begin to adjust.

“Are you the soldier?” she asked. “My name’s Itana.”

“My name is Marish, and yes, I am former military, and I probably did kill someone’s relatives around here at some time or another,” he said dryly.

Itana shivered. “The separatists must hate us very much.”

She could make out a vague human shape in the gloom, sitting sprawled against something that looked like a barrel.

There was a pause and a movement from Marish that might have been a shrug.

“Probably. We haven’t always done right by the people here on the border.”

“Maybe our people should just leave.”

“If we do that, the Collective will just take it over, Jaiya will have a new border that’s harder to defend, and the Borderlanders will be no better off.”

“I never thought of it like that,” Itana said.

“And you a politician’s fiancée!” Marish’s tone was light and bantering. His attitude annoyed Itana.

Itana wasn’t happy with her engagement, and would have gotten out of it if she could, but she didn’t feel like allowing this stranger to sass her.

“Sekheret’s more concerned with domestic issues. He feels that our country should leave these foreign affairs alone.”

“That would be absolutely fantastic, if the foreign affairs would leave us alone.”

“How can you talk like that when we’re about to be executed?” she snapped. “I don’t know about you, but I never planned on dying on camera.”

“Nobody plans on dying when they do and how they do.” Marish spoke so softly that she could barely hear him. “Even the ones who try suicide, when they’re found in time and saved, say that it wasn’t what they expected.”

Itana laughed nervously, not because he had said anything funny, but because she didn’t want to cry.

“When I was young and stupid, I always imagined myself as one of those heroines in a tragic romance,” she said. “You know, the kind who dies kissing her handsome but politically unsuitable lover while the evil warlord who wants her for himself rams a spear through both of them.”

“I don’t plan on either of us dying today,” Marish answered. “But you’re welcome to kiss me if you want.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Itana said. “You know I’m engaged.”

“A couple of minutes ago, talking about politics, you were defending yourself for accepting his priorities more than you were defending him.”

“A couple of seconds ago, talking about death, you were flashing back on a teenager’s fantasies, not wishing you could see your fiancée one more time. It’s no business of mine, but...that’s not the way someone in love thinks.”

Itana opened her mouth for a sharp retort and then closed it again when she realized he was right.

Her eyes had become more accustomed to the shadows, and she realized that Marish’s hands were tied in front of him, just as hers were. But his were writhing, constantly in motion, and she realized that he was somehow working on the knots.

“I wish I could do that,” she said.

“Don’t try,” he warned her. “There’s a trick to getting the knots loosened. If you do it wrong, you will just tighten them, and then I might not be able to get yours undone.”

“If you do manage to untie me, you might just get that kiss after all.” She made the joke out of nervousness, and her voice quavered as she spoke.

A moment later, she saw Marish spread his hands wide and sigh with relief. Then he crawled toward her.

“Could you hold your hands up to the light? It might go quicker.”

Itana did as he asked and watched him work.

She still could not see him very well. Her main impression of his face was a long, beaky nose and a pair of shining green eyes bending over the knotted ropes on her hands.

Marish seemed to be wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants, much the worse for wear, and only a lightweight jacket on top of that. His dirty white sneakers stood out in the gloom.

She turned her attention to his hands, moving around her wrists in the square of sunlight. The first thing that struck her was that they were huge hands, not just long but broad and muscular, with fingers to match.

And yet they made adjustments to the knots as quickly and delicately as a watchmaker’s might. Then she caught a glimpse of his wrists, which had been rubbed raw and bleeding by the work of freeing themselves.

In all the time since she had woken up in the storeroom, she had not heard him so much as grunt in pain.

“That should do it,” Marish said.

Itana wriggled her hands out of the ropes while Marish shifted to a more upright squatting position, clearly just about to stand up.

“No, wait,” Itana said, and grabbed his shoulder.

He froze in place. On impulse, she kissed him. He kissed her back hungrily, and for just a moment she could feel her own heartbeat in the throb of her mouth against his and taste the dried blood from a cut on his lips.

And then the moment passed, and he pulled away from her.

“I hear footsteps,” he said quietly. “They might be coming here. Could you lie down in the light with your hands in front of you, more or less the way you were?”

“Why?” Itana asked, but she moved into position anyway.

Marish draped the untied rope loosely across the tops of her wrists. She couldn’t help flinching, but Marish did not try to tie her up again.

“I have a plan,” he said, and stepped behind the door, a moment before it opened....

I shouldn’t have asked her to kiss me, Marish told himself, and then he put that distraction out of his head and got into position.

The terrorist with the green aura walked through the door. All his attention was on the beautiful young woman in the short skirt, sprawled in the light from the window.

Marish grabbed him by the throat, squeezing it so tightly that the man could not make a sound, and snapped his neck. The faint green aura disappeared from Marish’s inner sight at the exact instant that the man stopped breathing.

Itana’s eyes widened, but she didn’t cry out as Marish grabbed the man’s machine gun so that it wouldn’t drop and clatter.

He lowered the body carefully to the ground.

“If it makes you feel any better, that wasn’t a separatist or any other kind of local patriot,” Marish said. “This bunch takes money and weapons from the Doomsday Collective to burn and kill for the fun of it. I’ve had run-ins with them before.”

Itana got to her feet. “What do we do now?”

Marish searched the man’s pockets and transferred a set of keys to his own pocket. He unclipped a sheathed knife from the dead man’s belt and attached it to his own. When Marish found the dead man’s pistol, he offered it to Itana.

“You know how to use this, right?”

He knew that she had been trained with handguns before she had amnesia, but there was no guarantee that she would remember that any more than she remembered him.

“Sekheret doesn’t like me to...but, yes, I do.”

“Good.” That meant that she hadn’t forgotten everything.

Then he stood up and hefted the machine gun.

“Follow me,” he said.

Some of the sounds he’d heard earlier made him think that the family was being held in the room next to theirs, and he found the door quickly and listened at it to make sure that there were no guards in there. Then he unlocked it.

The husband was gone—killed on video as a traitor to the Collective, probably. The wife sat huddled in a corner, shielding her daughter with her body. They had not been tied up.

Marish held a finger to his lips to keep her from talking.

“Are you and the girl able to move?” he asked.

The woman nodded.

“Good. Stay with Itana. I need to leave for a moment, but I will come back for you.”

From what Marish had seen earlier, this was an ordinary Borderland house that happened to belong to terrorists.

The most common floor plan in these mountains involved a square, two-story house with a basement to store perishables and a group of workrooms and storerooms along the chilly outer walls of the ground floor.

There would also be a front door and a back door to the outside world, both contained in vestibules about as deep as the storeroom he and Itana had been held in, but much narrower.

Each vestibule would have an inner door leading into a hallway like the one he was in now, to keep out the cold in the wintertime. In the middle of the ground floor, there would be a dining hall that doubled as a kitchen, with a massive woodstove.

The hallway he was in wrapped around the dining area in a square shape. The second floor would have sleeping quarters surrounding a mezzanine that gave onto the central hall to take advantage of the hot air rising from the stove below.

Marish found the door of the central hall and listened for a moment. It sounded like five or six, maybe more, of the terrorists were in there eating.

They would be armed, and Marish knew that on the ground floor he would be at a disadvantage, so he swept the outer rooms instead.

At first, he only found more prisoners. He unlocked their doors, untied their hands if they were tied up, and warned them to stay put until he came back for them.

Then he closed the doors again to keep the terrorists from realizing that their captives were about to break loose.

The trapdoor to the cellar lay in a nook beneath the staircase leading to the second floor. Marish crouched there for a moment and listened. He didn’t hear anything.

The cellar would be a good hiding place for the leaders of the group in case of an emergency, but apparently even in late spring it was too chilly to be appealing.

Finally, he came to a workroom on the eastern side of the building, next to the staircase.

When he listened at the door, he could hear two men bickering about their video camera, which apparently had an extremely short cord and had to run on batteries when it was mounted on a tripod.

“You shouldn’t have taken so long to kill the traitor,” one of the men was saying.

“If you had stuck to the plan, we would be done by now, instead of waiting for the blasted thing to recharge before we can make the next set of videos.”

“Sure, it took a long time to make, but that video will scare the guts out of those whining Jaiyans,” the other man said.

“Not like what the boss wants for the girl in the miniskirt. Take her into the room, make it clear she’s not hurt. Make a speech. Boom, one, last thing she knows.”

“Yeah, what’s the point of that?”

Marish wanted to kick the door in and put a dozen rounds apiece in them. But he forced himself to listen a little longer to get a feel for their positions inside the room and to make sure there was no one else with them, like a less talkative colleague or an unconscious hostage.

As he listened, he thought: For Itana’s sake, I’m glad they didn’t plan anything uglier for her. But why would their leader arrange things that way?

When he was sure the two men were alone, he kicked the door open and swept the room with an arc of machine gun fire from right to left. The two men jumped in their seats and then fell over.

The video camera had been caught in the spray of bullets, and Marish caught a glimpse of it sparking and hissing out of the corner of his eye as he turned away from the room and ran up the stairs at full tilt.

He got to the sleeping quarters just as the only terrorist up there reached for the gun beneath his pillow.

A burst of metallic chatter from Marish’s machine gun stopped him, and the terrorist slumped back onto his bed.

Hearing noises behind him, Marish whirled and shot two more men coming up the stairs.

There was no door at the top of the stairs to close, so he ducked to the other side of the staircase, closer to the eaves of the house than to the wooden railing at the edge of the mezzanine.

There was a gun rack there, and, fortunately, the terrorists did not keep it locked down. Marish found a rifle there, which he slung over his shoulder, and a spare clip for the machine gun.

Then he lay down on the varnished wood floor and crawled on his belly to the railing at the edge of the mezzanine. He kept the top of the stairs at the left edge of his line of sight, and the machine gun close to his left hand. Three more men came up the stairs, and he shot them left-handed with the machine gun.

Then he picked up the rifle with both hands and focused on the dining hall below. Someone was crawling around there, using the tables and chairs as partial cover and trying to get to the woodstove, which would give the terrorist better cover.

With one eye on the doorway, Marish waited for the man below to show himself and was rewarded with a glimpse of the leader’s head. His first shot hit just above the ear, and the man collapsed. He waited for a moment to see if anyone would return fire or panic after the leader’s death, but all was quiet in the hall below.

If all the men he’d shot on the staircase had been in the dining hall, then he’d accounted for all the terrorists he knew of. But what if there had been more outside the house?

They would have come inside to investigate, and they would probably not venture into the dining hall, especially if they had heard shots coming from the upper story of the house.

Marish slung the rifle over his shoulder and crawled to the staircase. No one shot at him when he peered down the stairs or when he walked slowly and quietly down them. He edged down the stairs as quietly as a cat and checked the hallway.  

The back door to the outside was along this angle of the main hall that ran all around the perimeter, and he thought he could hear sounds in the small room that served as a vestibule between the inner and outer doors.

The inner door swung open, and he shot down another terrorist. After waiting to see if anyone else would come out, he swept the back door vestibule and found no one. Then he checked the front vestibule. No one.

Marish made another circuit of the storerooms, retrieving hostages as he went. So far as he could tell, the young married man who had been tortured to death in the video room was the only hostage who had died.

You can relax now, he told himself. You saved most of them, and you looked after Itana, just like you promised her brother. But how on earth can I keep my promise to her and her brother when the trail’s gone cold?

“Is it safe?” Itana asked him when he caught up with her and the young widow.

“Safe enough for now,” Marish told her. “We need to search this place and find either a radio or a cell phone that we can use to call the nearest military outpost.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are now on approach to Rivertown Airport,” the pilot announced over the intercom. “Please fasten your seatbelts.”

Itana looked out the window next to her seat. So far, there wasn’t much to see, just the plane’s wing and a thin veil of clouds beneath it. She could just about make out hints of brown and green through the white veil, but the ground still seemed far, far away.

Itana leaned her head back and sighed.

“Don’t worry,” Marish told her. “Almost there.”

“I know,” she said. “It doesn’t make it any easier.”

“It beats giving the same statement to fourteen different members of the counterterrorist task force, one at a time,” he said.

“No, that wasn’t fun,” she said. “But I’d almost rather be doing that than what comes next.”

“Paperwork? That’s always the worst part. I left the army just to get away from it.”

Itana giggled.

Then she said, “That’s still not the worst part. The worst part is my heart-tugging reunion with Sekheret in front of you and his personal assistant and about a hundred TV camera crews when we get off the plane.”

“If you feel like you need to talk with him about what happened in private, but you want me along, I can gave you my phone number.”

“If you mean talk to him about what happened right after you untied me, then no, I wasn’t going to tell him,” she said fiercely. “Don’t you take it on yourself to tell him!”

“It’s not my job to say anything if you aren’t going to,” Marish said. “But it does seem like something you might need to discuss with him.”

She shook her head.

“We don’t have that kind of a relationship,” she said. “We’re getting married because our mothers arranged it.”

And now my mother’s dead, and his mother isn’t lucid anymore, she thought sadly.

“He’s never found anyone else—at least, not anyone his family liked—and I could use the financial security and the status boost for my clothing design business.”

“Sekheret doesn’t mind you continuing your work after you get married?” Marish asked. “That’s good, at least. It means he’s not too possessive.”

“Sekheret wouldn’t care about... that kiss. He would just laugh and say I was trying to make him jealous. And he would tease me about it until I was sick of hearing about it.”

“You said he had never found anyone else,” Marish said, his voice pitched low. “What about you?”

“If I had found someone else, it definitely wouldn’t be you,” Itana retorted.

She felt herself blushing, with a heat in her lips that reminded her of that kiss she was trying so hard not to remember.

“Woe is me, for no one can ever replace you,” Marish said with a perfectly flat voice and a twinkle in his eye. “I will have to follow the river down to the Western Sea and become a white-sash monk in the Island City.”

“Ha, ha, very funny,” Itana said. “Can we talk about something else? Anything else?”

“Hmm, let me think. Have you ever met someone who claimed to have strange powers?”

Well, that was certainly random, Itana thought. But I did ask for a change of subject. Aloud, she said, “I bought into a clothing store recently, equal shares with the two original owners. They’re Rina and Kajjal, from Mount Snarl.”

His expression changed slightly, and Itana added, “I see you know the name. Well, Rina’s fiancé is a little...different. Smart and good-looking, but with kind of an otherworldly quality.”

“And he claims to have special powers?” Marish said, his voice neutral. Itana thought he was interested in what she was saying but for some reason didn’t want to show it.

“He doesn’t talk about it. But he seems to notice things that most people don’t, and some animals are afraid of him.”

She stopped herself.

“No, that’s not right. It’s more like, if he wants them to be afraid of him, they are, without him doing anything about it.”

“Interesting.” Marish sounded like he meant it exactly that way: interesting but not surprising.

“I went out to a picnic party with him and Rina and some friends once, and there was this troop of monkeys sitting in a tree, throwing awful things at us. And this Vipin—that’s his name—just looked at them, and they squeaked and scampered away through the treetops.”

“Is Vipin from Cattle City up north?” Marish asked. “About my height, but thinner, with darker eyes, similar nose but not crooked?”

Itana gasped.

“That’s who you remind me of!” she said. “You looked so familiar when I first noticed you, but I couldn’t figure out where I might have seen you. But of course I hadn’t seen you before.”

“Of course not,” Marish said, and his eyes looked sad.

Itana wanted to ask why, but she told herself that she probably wouldn’t like the answer.

Instead, she asked, “Are you and Vipin related somehow?”

Marish looked uncomfortable.

“I’ve probably said too much,” he said. “I work as a security and intelligence consultant. That means I have to do business with some pretty rough characters. People like that don’t need to know anything about my family.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Itana said. “Except maybe Rina, and it sounds like she already knows.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, please remain seated with your seatbelts fastened.” The pilot’s voice echoed over the intercom again. “Air traffic control is diverting us to a special runway, which means that we will need to circle the airport and line up for a different approach. You may experience some minor air turbulence.”

“Vipin is my younger brother,” Marish said. “He didn’t go into the military. Instead, he became an anthropologist. Works for the Ministry of Culture.”

Another thought occurred to Rina. “It’s weird that he and Rina haven’t mentioned you before.”

Marish looked grim. “We’re not on the best of terms right now,” he said. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

“So, how does Vipin do those things?” Itana asked, and she felt her stomach lurch as the small airplane leaned into a tight left-hand turn. “Can he do anything else?”

“That’s for him to tell you if he feels like it,” Marish said with a twinkle in his eye. “But, fair warning,” he added. “If you ask him outright, he usually flat-out denies it. Because his job involves talking to people about old stories and superstitions, he can’t afford to upset them by clai [...]