“No problem. I was hoping we could resume the conversation, though.”
Kara’s eyes narrowed into the same scared-rabbit expression they’d assumed before she bolted two days earlier. “About dreams?”
He glanced at the somnium tattoo on her wrist, weighing how much to say. Despite her intimidating getup—black dress, deep red lips, overshadowed eyes—Kara had assumed the body language of a skittish deer. “Yeah, dreams. And a girl named Gabriella.”
“I went straight to my uncle Henry last time you and I met. He’s strong enough to deal with Gabriella. I’m not.”
Igor winked at him. “The man is fierce. If you need magic, Henry’s the right guy.”
Judging by the look Kara gave Igor, she would have turned him into a toad if she knew any hocus-pocus. “Gifts like my uncle’s have been misconstrued as magic for centuries. Let’s not paganize God’s blessings.” She shifted to the door and grabbed the handle.
Brewster couldn’t let her get away again. Misconstrued or not, some form of magic was exactly what he needed. “Come on. Just another coffee down the street. I won’t bite.”
The trucker settled a hand on Kara’s wrist. “We have this man’s back, love. Remember?”
CHAPTER 26
Lamming it
A squad car still lurked along the curb just beyond the company parking lot. Brewster scrunched as low as he could get in the back seat of Kara’s car until they got well past the cop.
His two new friends didn’t seem to notice. Kara had her eyes fixed on the road. Her boyfriend, Igor, gazed out the passenger window, muttering in English mixed with Russian curses about a prolonged DOT safety inspection of his truck. The rig sat waiting its turn in some shop, leaving him unemployed for the day, whereas in Mother Russia, a few rubles pressed into the right palms would have avoided such a headache.
Not all problems could be solved so easily. Brewster doubted rubles by the truckload would keep him off the fugitive list once the police learned he’d bolted from the office building for good. He didn’t have any intention of returning for his car.
Another step off the grid. He wiped a bead of sweat from his brow.
They stopped at the same bar and grill where he and Kara had lunch a thousand years earlier. Once inside, they grabbed a booth in the shadows of the back wall, and Igor continued his rant against American trucking regulations until a waitress came along. They ordered drinks, the waitress returned with them, and the trucker quieted, shifting his attention to a vodka martini.
Kara ignored her coffee. “Dreams and Gabriella are a bad combination,” she said.
“No argument there.” Brewster glanced from face to face. Could a hard-drinking Russian’s quirky girlfriend possibly help a man rewrite the past? He had nowhere else to turn. “Let’s forget her for a minute and focus on somnium. My girlfriend, Carla, and I have been hooking up in our dreams.”
That got a grunt out of Igor. “Hooking up? Kara tells me you’re a writer, but this expression of yours is a cliché, no? Trust your own words better.” He speared an olive and popped it into his mouth.
“You’re missing the point, love.” Kara lit a cigarette, gazed through the smoke at Brewster, waited.
Although he might have tried putting a sane spin on his tale for an ordinary audience, Brewster skipped the fluff with these two. Kara had an uncle with “gifts,” and she dressed like the type who believed crystals could heal. As for her vodka-chugging boyfriend, Igor had earlier come to the office demanding a refund based on what a girl told him in a dream. “Suppose I said Carla fell asleep, stepped out of her dream, and came into my house, one year and nine hundred miles away.”
Kara tapped her ashes into a saucer. Igor grabbed another olive. Neither said a word.
Maybe they’d misheard. “We’re traveling through time! Carla and I have been bouncing back and forth between last year and this one.”
The trucker took a long, forlorn look at his drink and sighed, clearly reluctant to spend a moment away from it. “Haven’t you ever visited your past in a dream?”
How to get through to these people? “You mean in fantasy? Yeah, I guess. But this is real.”
Kara glanced at Igor and nodded. “Last time we met, I told you all dreams are real.” She and her boyfriend made a good tag team.
Brewster stilled his twitching knee and took one more try. “Let me elaborate. I close my eyes in my bed and step into Carla’s life, literally. When I wake up, I find physical objects she gave me in the dream. And the same thing has been happening to her.”
“Then I’d say you’re blessed,” Kara said.
“Blessed?”
She scattered her coffee steam with a puff of breath. “This is us when we dream. Our souls leave our bodies and mingle in the World of Mortal Dreams, a timeless dimension shaped by the imaginations of every man, woman, and child who ever lived.”
Igor fluttered his hands upward and whistled like a bird.
She grabbed a menu and swatted her boyfriend with it. “Don’t always make it so hard to love you, funny man.” Then she glanced around, leaned across the table, and lowered her voice like a spy spilling secrets. “Traveling from one time and place to another is commonplace when we sleep, but the ability to leave the spiritual dimension and rematerialize in the waking world is a rare gift called dream walking. You’re blessed!”
“There’s that word again.” But Brewster’s pulse quickened. She’d implied exactly what he’d been hoping to hear. Other people stepped out of their dreams, too. He just needed the handbook. “How do I do this dream walking thing again?”
“You don’t know?”
“It just happens.”
“Then let it happen.”
His temples throbbed. “What if it doesn’t anymore?”
“Good question.” Kara puffed a ring of smoke, watched it dissolve, dropped a sugar cube into her coffee, watched that dissolve, and puffed her cigarette again. “Then I guess it’s
