Dream Eyes

quickly, she would be swept over the falls into a cauldron of churning energy from which there would be no escape.
    But she’d had a lot of practice making the crossing.
    She took a deep steadying breath, pulled on her talent and hauled herself up out of the treacherous currents. She lowered her talent and allowed the real world to coalesce around her.
    The first thing that struck her was that she was not alone. Judson was there. She had forgotten to lock the connecting door.
    She had a rule about deep dream trances. She never went into them unless she could be sure that she would be alone and undisturbed. She had learned long ago that her self-imposed lucid dreams, like her habit of talking to ghosts, unnerved others.
    She was propped up against the pillows on the bed, dressed in her nightgown and the white terry cloth bathrobe and slippers provided by the inn.
    Max meowed again and butted his head against her shoulder. Automatically she reached out to stroke him.
    She looked at Judson. With her senses lowered, he no longer appeared enveloped in hot ultra-light. In the deep shadows, she could tell that he was wearing the crewneck T-shirt and the khakis he’d had on earlier.
    “Oh, crap,” she said. “Sorry about that. I should have locked the door. Didn’t mean to alarm you.”
    Judson did not let go of her hand. “It was just a dream.”
    “No, it wasn’t just a dream. It was a trance dream, and you don’t have to act like it fell into the category of normal. People are always freaked out by the way I dream. I told you, my talent is a serious problem when it comes to relationships.”
    “Oh, yeah, right. You send men screaming from your bed. You know, I have to tell you, that sounds interesting.”
    “Okay, maybe not
screaming
. But there were some extremely awkward partings back in the days when I was trying to fall in love and pretend that I was normal.”
    “I know where you’re coming from,” he said. “I told you, my talent gets in the way of relationships, too.”
    She was very conscious of the feel of his strong hand wrapped around hers. His eyes still burned.
    She knew that she was out of the dream, but there was a familiar, dreamlike quality in the atmosphere. An effervescent energy swirled around her, teasing and arousing her senses. A liquid heat built inside her lower body.
    High wire,
she reminded herself.
No net
.
    “Do you always talk out loud to the ghosts in your trance dreams?” Judson asked.
    He didn’t sound worried. He sounded curious.
    Bored by the proceedings, Max jumped down to the floor and wandered off toward the other room, tail high.
    “Not always,” she said. But in this case, I was talking to Evelyn again. I deliberately put myself into the dream to see if I could understand what she was trying to tell me with the map. It has to be important. Otherwise she wouldn’t have hidden it inside the mirror engine. And she wouldn’t have left that message on the back of the photo for me to find.”
    Judson looked at the map unfolded across her thighs. “Get any ideas from your dream?”
    “Nothing concrete.” She ran her fingers through her hair, pushing it loosely back behind her ears while she struggled to pull facts from her visions. “In my dream, I set out on a road trip. I was walking from one circled town to the next. Evelyn’s ghost told me that the names she wrote on that map and the six circled towns were important. But she also told me that I should go back to the beginning.”
    “Back to Wilby?”
    “That’s just it—I’m not sure what it all means. I went into the dream assuming that the places she marked were sites of paranormal activity that she had researched online, places that she planned to check out as potential
Dead of Night
episodes. I thought one of them might be a clue to whatever is going on here in Wilby.” She stabbed a finger at Reno. “I got this far before Evelyn appeared and told me I have to go back to the beginning.”
    “Wilby.”
    “I suppose so, one way or another.” She tightened her hand into a frustrated fist. “Sometimes my talent is so damn frustrating.”
    “It’s been a long day,” Judson said. “You need rest.”
    “Probably.” She sank back against the pillows. “So do you. Sorry I woke you.”
    “I wasn’t asleep, at least not very soundly.”
    She gave a small sniff. “I’m not surprised, given all that psychic noise you’ve got going on in your aura.”
    He tensed. “Don’t start with the