Dream on, p.1
Dream On, page 1
part #4 of The Hunter and the Spider Series
Dream On
The Hunter and The Spider, Book 4
by
E.M. Jeanmougin
and
Jay Wright
Copyright © 2022. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter 1 — Every Day Is Exactly The Same
Chapter 2 — Requiem for an Impossible Dream
Chapter 3 — Black and White and Red All Over and Over
Chapter 4 — Puttin’ On the Ritz
Chapter 5 — The Debutante Ball
Chapter 6 — The Stranger
Chapter 7 — Ballroom Blitz
Chapter 8 — Tainted Love
Chapter 9 — Total Eclipse of the Heart
Chapter 10 — Sleeping With The Enemy
Chapter 11 — The Queen of Queens
Chapter 12 — Wandering Spiders
Chapter 13 — A French-Canadian Bloodhound in New York
Chapter 14 — Jumper
Chapter 15 — Wilder Things
Chapter 16 — The Raven
Chapter 17 — Science Fantasy / Double Feature
Chapter 18 — Sleeping Beauty
Chapter 19 — Dream On
Chapter 20 — Crimson’s Web
Chapter 21 — A Study in Redd
Chapter 22 — A Nightmare on Huntsman Avenue
Chapter 23 — Summer Knights
Chapter 24 — All That Jazz
Chapter 25 — River of Dreams
Chapter 26 — Nevermore
Chapter 27 — Hangman’s Curse
Chapter 28 — The Pink Lady
Chapter 29 — The Old Maid and the Chariot
Chapter 30 — Over the Rainbow Forest
Chapter 31 — The Sounds of Silence
Chapter 32 — The Gatekeeper
Chapter 33 — Disco Inferno
Chapter 34 — Lucky Cat
Chapter 35 — Kiss From a Rose
Chapter 36 — The Knight of Swords
Chapter 37 — Rude Awakening
Chapter 38 — Deal or No Deal
Chapter 39 — Spiders Like Us
Chapter 40 — You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid
Chapter 41 — Universal Monsters
Epilogue — Three Years Later
The Hunter and The Spider Series
Dedication
For Debbie and Barbara, our Mommy’s Dearests
Acknowledgements
Jay wants to thank her Dad, for always encouraging her to follow her dreams and pursue art in all forms. I’ll see you again in that great cosmic party in the sky, Papa Bear. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing and keep smiling.
Taylor and Cory, you’re our rocks and our favorite cheerleaders. To the Fellowship- thanks for diving into this crazy world with us.
Thanks again Pauline for fixing our mistakes and thank you River Hemans for our cover.
Finally, thank you to the folks who reached out and left reviews or sent messages about our books. We appreciate you guys so much!
You can visit hunterandspider.com for more information on the writers and the series.
Prologue
The stranger hoped the rumors were true.
Rumors of a famous collector who fell beneath the power of two of her prizes: an ancient werespider and another creature, one with flashing white eyes. Enhanced speed and strength, an immunity to demonic persuasions and venoms. A creature not unlike the stranger himself.
The rumors said the pair had returned to their home. New York City. The stranger had never been.
Big cities were full of big problems. Too many curious questions. Too many bad intentions. He preferred not to draw unwanted attention, but some couldn’t be avoided. Money, unfortunately, was still a requirement.
He limited his university visits, long enough to build a reputation, but never long enough to be known.
He’d been at Oxford for three and a half weeks when he learned of the pair. His decision to go to New York was quick, he would not be missed, and no one would see him go, of this he was sure.
All of his earthly possessions fit into a single backpack. Simple, multipurpose clothing, two laptops, a gaggle of miscellaneous tech. He shouldered it with a shrug and strapped the GEM to his thigh. The device was the shape and size of a Walkman radio. It had three dials, two switches, and thirteen buttons up one nickel-plated side. Years of research and development were hidden inside. His entire life’s work. His purpose.
The first switch activated a perception filter, making him appear invisible.
The second was a work in progress, its final intent to return the stranger to where he belonged. He knew one day he would get back; he simply had to find the correct path. As it was now, it was useful for getting around fast. Oxford to New York City? Five thousand four hundred and eighty-seven and a half kilometers, there and gone in minutes. The GEM calculated the correct route. A dozen jumps and thirteen steps.
The stranger flicked the second switch and stepped forward, leaving Oxford and the realm it was grounded in for another, stranger place. Gone was his small, impersonal room at Oxford; with a single step forward he was somewhere else.
Cracked red ground.
A bruised chartreuse sky.
An eyeless creature with three mouths full of pointed teeth hissed at the healing gash in reality the stranger left behind. The creature turned and scurried up the dry, bare tree in which it perched. But it need not flee; the stranger was gone from the realm in the next step.
Green tinted-skies filled with flocks of flying things were swiftly replaced by a forested land blanketed in a dark sky, freckled with a hundred thousand multicolored stars; a black sanded beach along a red sea; a grassy knoll under a lavender dome, hung with two full moons.
All passed with each step, like rapidly flipping through an endless picture book.
The stranger left nothing behind except a closing crack in reality and the burning scent of ozone.
Traveling through worlds was a shortcut across Earth. The stranger slipped through the spaces where the realms overlapped, saving time by burning the energy unique to his species. His ultimate goal for the technology was to find his way back to his realm, but it was not as simple as punching a hole through space. He had to find the right door.
The stranger took a final step, leaving behind a world of smoking darkness and landing upon frosted grass. Ahead of him was dark water and a city of glass and steel, rising out of the earth like a promise, filling the night sky with the stain of light, blotting out stars. White light fled from his eyes as he sat heavily down on the cold ground. Traveling left him exhausted, but he was strangely invigorated now. There, somewhere in front of him, hidden in a city of nearly nine million souls, was another like him. A brother in blood, or at least in half. And he would find him.
Jasper Craig.
Chapter 1
—
Every Day Is Exactly The Same
A Californian winter sounded like a dream; a season bathed in sunlight, with white sand instead of snow and palm trees in lieu of evergreens. Days spent on the pier, nights spent exploring the city, going to bars and clubs and shows, or even just staying in with the window open to the cool night air, the sounds and smells of LA reaching them up in the safety of their apartment while they read or watched a movie or listened to music or did nothing at all but enjoy each warm moment they had.
Dreams, it turned out, didn’t come true.
Jasper knew he would never return to Los Angeles; it held too many memories. Many of them were good. It was where he and Crimson had gone to be together, safe from the Hunters who thought Jasper had died, and from the demons who wished the same thing. Jasper had been able to be himself there, where he didn’t have to pretend he wasn’t gay and in love with a werespider to boot. They could just… be. He’d liked his job and his co-workers, people whom he considered his friends until one of them betrayed him and brought him into the arms of his most feared enemies: a collector named Cecilia Folami, who wanted to keep him trapped within the walls of her mansion in Mexico, and Regan Knightly, a vampiric anthromorph with a hunger for blood vengeance and a penchant for torture in many, many forms.
This memory, and the ones that followed after, tainted California for him. The very thought of the sparkling ocean or his and Crimson’s little one-bedroom apartment sent his stomach turning, his head spinning. He couldn’t go back. He couldn’t even bring himself to unpack any of the boxes Clover, Crimson’s niece, had shipped to the New York house in their absence.
They had visited many places in the meantime. Or rather, Crimson and his fledgling, Retribution, had. To Jasper one location was much the same as the next, his own bed-bound view hardly differing regardless. There was a homogeneity about hotel rooms, no matter where one went. The art on the walls changed theme week to week. The bedspread changed from solids to florals to houndstooth print. Sometimes there was a balcony or a patio attached to the building, sometimes just a tall window. Jasper kept the curtains closed either way. The stress of having them open took much out of him.
Being home in New York
Crimson tried to ease him into it. While Jasper sat bundled in a blanket from his bed, watching the television with distant eyes, Crimson hauled over one of the boxes labeled “books” in Clover’s flowing, uniform script and began to unpack, lining the spines along the already crowded mantel above the fireplace where green and blue flames danced. Jasper’s mother’s copy of To Kill a Mockingbird was put on display, cover out.
Crimson broke up the task with casual questions, queries about the plot or Jasper’s thoughts on a novel, whether he wanted to keep it or not. The half-blood answered as shortly as possible, but eventually grew tired of the task. He stood up from the couch without fanfare and returned to the quiet solitude of bed.
And that was where he stayed for the next seven days.
He didn’t leave the old three-story Victorian. He barely left the attic room except to go down to the third-floor hallway, where the bathroom was located. The idea of hitting the New York City streets, with all their familiarities and comforts, was not entertained. He couldn’t even bring himself to read, something he’d done all the time before.
That was how he thought of it, as before and after. Before the whole thing happened, he and Crimson had been happy; Jasper had felt lucky to have someone he loved so much it sometimes took his breath away, and even luckier to be loved in return. They’d been free with their affections before, throwing “I love yous” around like rose petals, physical affection as simple and easy as breathing. Now, after, Jasper couldn’t stand the touch of another person, and that included Crimson.
A kiss to his cheek had him grinding his teeth, a soft touch on his hand or shoulder made him flinch. He didn’t want to be this way, but he couldn’t help it. They no longer slept in the same bed, back to separate mattresses in the attic. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d shared one, at the mountain house? Months ago.
Jasper knew Crimson wouldn’t touch him if Jasper said he didn’t want him to, but he also couldn’t ignore the fact that Crimson wanted to touch him. Crimson had never made it into a confrontation, but Jasper knew his new distant behavior hurt the werespider. He hated himself for denying him the simple act of touching, hated how the easy way they had once talked and moved and lived together was now disjointed, off-kilter. Part of him hated Crimson too, which only made his self-loathing even worse.
Crimson didn’t deserve it—since he’d woken up at the house on the mountain, Regan and Cecilia dead and behind him, Crimson was nothing but kind and understanding, gentle in his care for Jasper. He was patient and thoughtful, and Jasper knew how much the other loved him. It pissed him off a little, being so unable to move on from the experience. Other than his concern for Jasper, Crimson seemed fine, unfazed by the fact he’d been kept and tortured for two and a half months.
Jasper hated that too.
He carried what had happened to them heavy in his heart, like a weighted black cloak. He didn’t expect to ever get over it; he carried the literal scars on his body, a constant reminder. Gashes across his forearms, gouges ripped from his stomach and chest, three slashes on his face, across his left eye and cheek, and bisecting his chapped lips.
It had been two weeks since they arrived home, and today he had managed to make it out of bed, though only so far as the couch. He sat on the beaten old secondhand, black leather number, wrapped in his blanket and half-watching a sitcom. Crimson sat next to him, the two of them surrounded in a painful silence, which was also the new norm.
Crimson’s attempts at conversation had dwindled to the occasional query or comment. Jasper wanted to talk to him, but he never knew what to say; it was like there was a wall stuck up between his mind and his mouth, a psychological gag.
“You hungry?” Crimson asked during a commercial break. His chin propped in his palm, dark eyes watching the TV without seeing anything. His raven black hair had grown out from where it had been shorn in a darkling fight nearly a year earlier. A waving lock curled softly around his perfect ear. Werespider hair grew faster than human hair. At this pace, it would fall down his back by the beginning of summer.
“No.” Like most other things, eating had lost its appeal. Jasper wished he’d answered differently though. If he said he was hungry, then Crimson would go get him something to eat. Then maybe Jasper could go back to sleep without being pestered. “Actually, I guess I could stomach a bite.”
“Alright.” Crimson stood. Jasper knew he was looking at him. He could imagine his eternal young-old face, unscathed, unscarred, achingly beautiful, but quietly pained. He kept his gaze fixed on the screen. “I’ll go get you something. Be back soon.” Jasper didn’t reply, and Crimson didn’t wait. He grabbed his long leather duster from the hook by the stairs, pulled his heavy black boots on, and was gone, shutting the attic door behind him.
He was probably as happy to go as Jasper was to have him leave.
On his way out, Crimson stopped by a room on the third floor, rapping his knuckles twice against the frame of the half-open door. Inside, his fledgling, Retribution, sat on a pristine made bed. Retribution was the room’s first resident in twenty years and had salvaged the space better than Crimson expected. In his white hands, he held the controller to an old gaming system, some remnant of Salem, no doubt; Crimson had no patience for video games, not seeing the point in chasing a little pixelated ball around a screen, but Ret found some use for it.
The young werespider paused the game, narrow blue eyes turning his way. He offered him the secondary controller, rectangular and gray, with red and black buttons. “Do you want to play?”
“Nah.”
With a shrug, Ret tossed the controller back in the strangle of electronics cables piled on the floor in front of the entertainment system. “I found a bunch of videotapes in a cardboard box when I cleaned out the closet. Universal monsters, black and white. You like those, right? What do you think? Little bit of Invisible Man, Black Cat, and The Mummy? The VCR still works.”
“I actually kinda hate The Mummy.”
“Why? Is it like”—he did a double take towards Crimson, with a blinky expression as if having gotten a clear look at him for the first time—“offensive?”
“Well, yeah, but mostly it’s just a bummer. Here ya got this guy, back from the dead after three thousand years spent locked in a box under the fuckin’ desert, lookin’ to rekindle a romance with the reincarnation of his long-lost forbidden lover, and the poor girl ends up with some over-entitled, no-name daddy’s boy who isn’t even the main character.”
“So… let me get this straight, to make sure we understand each other properly; you think the mummy is the hero of the story?”
The Spider sneered when he laughed. “Oh, Retribution, there’s no heroes in The Mummy. Just a spectrum of bad and slightly less bad people, with one brainwashed, half-Egyptian dame standing in the middle.”
“Oh yeah?” Retribution stood with a stretch. He was a tinch over five feet tall, but strong-shouldered, arms and chest and legs packed in muscle. “What about the one with Brendan Fraser?”
Crimson clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Equally inaccurate. But the man’s obviously a treasure. What more could be said? Now, what was I gonna ask?” He paused to recollect his thoughts. “Oh. Right. I’m not in the mood for a movie, but do you wanna maybe go for a walk instead?”
Ret sighed but nodded. “Yeah, sure. One sec.”
Ret favored a simple, classic peacoat in a beige too light to last through a feeding. Other than Ret’s room, the rest of the house remained unchanged, crowded with piles of boxes and discarded things, pieces of previous lives Crimson could never be bothered to go through and find a use for; besides, the mess was largely deliberate, meant to make it more difficult for intruders to get around and easier for them to wander into traps that had been installed, pitfalls and swinging blades, darts set to paralyze or kill, depending on the type of fool to walk into them. The place was tricked out like a tomb in an Indiana Jones movie, or a medieval dungeon, wrapped inside the guise of a run-down Victorian home. Still, Crimson thought as they passed through the half-remodeled entryway with its soft orange walls (and a scorch mark on the floor where a Hunter had tried to set him on fire two years earlier), he should spruce it up a bit. Maybe if the rest of the house was nicer, Jasper would come out of the attic.
