Dream Wars_Rising Read online

  Dream Wars: Rising

  Leia Stone

  Dream Wars

  Leia Stone

  Copyright © 2018 by Leia Stone. All rights reserved.

  Dream Wars characters, names and related items are trademarks owned by Leia Stone.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, live or dead, are purely coincidental.

  Stone, Leia

  Dream Wars Rising Book One

  Gilbert, Arizona

  1. Science Fiction, Fantasy

  For information on reproducing sections of this book or sales of this book go to www.facebook.com/leia.stone

  [email protected]

  Created with Vellum

  Dedicated to anyone who has ever been affected by or loved someone with autism.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Los Angeles 2030

  I tipped my black coffee back, taking down the rest of the cup in one big swallow. I needed to stay awake until we met our next job assignment in an hour.

  As I rolled out my neck, my comrade gave me a once-over.

  “You look like shit. When was the last time we slept?” Brisk asked me. His deep, husky voice always made me melt a little, but we’d tried the dating thing and were better off as friends, coworkers. Besides, everyone knew he’d end up with Ronnie anyway, once she learned to get that stick out of her ass and finally give in to his advances.

  “Forty-nine hours, and she’s on her period, so that doesn’t help,” my best friend answered for me.

  I rolled my eyes, groaning. “Geez, Ronnie! Stop stalking me.” I warned her as she tied her long, black, silky Asian hair into a bun and placed two small throwing knives in to secure it.

  She pursed her lips. “Need I remind you of my position on this team, Commander?”

  Sass. So much sass.

  I didn’t think tracking my periods helped her be any more or less of the team surgeon and medic. Maybe it did, what did I know? I failed biology. I was more of the F in math and science but A in English and ceramics kind of girl. I could make a mean table vase, but don’t ask me to do your taxes or explain why volcanos erupted. They just did.

  I’d wanted to beat the shit out of Ronnie when I first met her at the Dream Wars Cadet Academy. She was a smarty-pants, know-it-all with a serious attitude problem. But now I’d come to crave that verbal ass-kicking that only Ronnie could give. Veronica Sato was an Ivy League graduate and the best damn trauma surgeon I’d ever seen. It was her job to make sure that our team of five, including her, stayed healthy and with our organs tucked safely inside of our bodies.

  I groaned, the weight of sleep pulling at my limbs. “We’ve gone longer,” I reminded Brisk, shivering as I thought about the time I went seven days without a single minute of shut-eye. I thought I was going to die.

  Ronnie nodded. We all had gone long stretches without sleep ever since the ghouls, an invisible alien race, landed on our planet ten years ago and started feeding on the human bodies of those asleep. The ghouls were like a cross between vampires and zombies. Nodding off had become a fight for our lives, but it also kept me employed. Avoiding sleep allowed me to heal the wounds I sustained while in the Dream Wars. If a ghoul injured you in the Dream Wars, it carried over into your physical body. So I refused to sleep unless I was 100 percent.

  “Just the coffee or any stims?” Ronnie had her little freaking torture flashlight out and was shining it in my eyes.

  I flinched, avoiding the light. I didn’t like stims, not since losing one of my best warriors to a stim addiction. She knew that. She’d also spent nearly every minute of the last two days with me, so she knew I hadn’t taken any. Dick. I just glared at her.

  She threw her hands up. “Okay, no stims. Chillax, mamacita.” Even though Ronnie was Japanese, she somehow turned into an old Mexican lady when she was frustrated. It was weird but I’d come to love it. She frequently bitched us out in both Japanese and Spanish.

  “Did you see this client’s file? He’s like mega rich and uber hot. My favorite combination,” Maxine cut in, purring in her raspy Marilyn Monroe voice.

  Maxine was our resident beauty queen. Literally. She was runner-up at a Miss USA pageant four years ago at the ripe age of seventeen. Don’t ask me why we were still having beauty pageants when humanity was dying off in their sleep. Priorities, right?

  It wasn’t until Maxine’s parents were mutilated in their sleep by ghouls that she joined the cadet academy the following year. I’d never seen someone with so much rage. When she fought, it was like a bomb went off; once she started, she didn’t know how to stop herself. She was my front-line soldier, one of the best I’d ever had.

  “Of course I’ve seen his file. I’ve memorized it,” I told her.

  She was right. He was rich—all of our clients were—and he should be. He owned Striker Industries, a private weapons research facility on the west side that he headed up with his genius little brother. He was also, in fact, uber hot.

  “I’ll bet he’s a total dick,” I continued.

  The hot, rich ones always were. You had to be rich to be able to afford my team, but we usually protected fat, lazy, old businessmen. Not young, model-hot, in-shape guys like him. Nearly half of my equipment was from Striker Industries. Next to the President of the United States, this was the highest-profile client I’d ever had.

  Maxine grinned. “I wouldn’t mind if he got a little rough,” she said with a wink.

  I chuckled. Maxine didn’t hide her promiscuity, that was for sure. She lived life to the fullest and it was admirable.

  “I heard his last three teams got killed,” Nox, our dark and broody warrior, spoke then, from his corner in the shadows. Nox Lightfoot was our resident pyrotechnics expert. He loved to blow shit up. His father was Japanese and his mother a full-blooded Navajo, which gave him a smooth brown complexion and cheekbones to die for. We often called him “pretty boy” just to rile him up.

  “I read that,” I told him.

  I had to keep calm, couldn’t let one ounce of fear into my mind this close to entering the Dream Wars. Nodding off after dwelling on bad shit just projected you farther into the war zone.

  That was the reason I was commander of this team. Not necessarily because I was a badass fighter, which I was, but because I had complete control over my mental state before sleep. My mentor, Master Aki, taught me well. It didn’t hurt that I also had a special affinity for mental projections and telepathy. Ever since the ghouls landed, I’d had some certain gifts creep up. Many of us did, as if their presence somehow heightened aspects of our humanity that were previously suppressed.

  Brisk stood then. At six-foot-four and stacked with muscle, he cast a long shadow over Ronnie and me. “I’ll pull the car around,” he said, and tossed his lucky green beanie over his messy brown hair.

  I nodded, going over inventory one last time before feeling confident enough to head to this client’s house. His file was vague on why he needed protection. Most high-profile cases ha
d a nightly warrior or two whom they went into the Dream Wars with, but it wasn’t usually with an expensive special ops team like mine. That was a bit of overkill for nightly guarding. Especially for Damien Striker, who had military training and an endless supply of weapons. And though most people couldn’t afford us for longer than a week, he’d booked us “indefinitely.” I’d never seen that on a contract before. At a hundred grand a week, it was certainly going to cost him. The average Joe only needed a single warrior to guard them, but hiring an entire team meant something was up. With three teams already dead, something told me nothing about this would be easy.

  Walking over to the mirror, I splashed some water over my face. Master Aki taught me this ritual. The water symbolized a cleansing. Whatever trials of the day, or the week, or the year, they were washed away with the water. Tonight was a new night. A new sleep. A new dream. A new war.

  “I’m in control. I project peace. I give protection. I harness strength,” I told the blue-haired girl in the mirror. My eyes fell onto the smattering of freckles across my nose and faintly on my cheeks, reminding me of my late father. He told me growing up that they were angel kisses.

  My team was used to my ritual by now. They didn’t say a word, just sat in quiet reverence as if witnessing a person in deep prayer. Which they were. My mind was my temple, and I needed to keep it pure before sleep.

  The guy’s file kept running through my mind. Three teams dead. He hasn’t slept in four days, and he’s injured.

  More water.

  “I’m in control. I project peace. I give protection. I harness strength,” I said again.

  The Dream Wars were my bitch.

  I got this.

  After drying my face, I applied some of my signature red lipstick and ran a brush through my indigo hair. This was about as professional as I got.

  I turned around. “We got this!” I told my team, just as Brisk laid on the horn outside.

  Ronnie was strapping up her medical kit when she stood and took in my armor. I was wearing my full Kevlar zip-up bodysuit, with wire meshing around the abdomen to keep my guts in. My lucky grenade was hanging off the edge of my knee-high black boots. It was an unusually warm summer in LA, so the full-body suit was going to be warm but necessary. Even with half the population dead, global warming didn’t seem to be slowing down.

  “Going in heavy,” Ronnie observed. I didn’t always do the full suit, but my gut was telling me tonight was going to be rough. My gut had never let me down.

  “I’ve got a feeling.” I shrugged. I didn’t want anything to mess up my Zen, so I didn’t say any more.

  Ronnie just nodded and added another gun to her armor belt.

  “I got a new flamethrower I’m dying to try out,” Nox admitted as he grabbed his duffel, and then opened the large metal roll-up door to the garage of the building that we owned downtown. I was a city girl through and through; the suburbs made me sleepy.

  I strode over and clapped Nox on the back. “I pray you never have to use it.” I was in my zone now. My positivity zone, that Master Aki taught me to allow nothing to enter. Tonight we would be projected to a peaceful place within the Dream Wars, far away from the front lines, and we would have a good night’s sleep. That was my mantra. Nothing before sleep could disturb this.

  Nox just chuckled.

  As I watched my team pack up and head over to the jeep, I couldn’t help but reminisce about younger times. For the past six years I’d slept next to these fools, since we were fourteen and new cadets at the academy. Only Maxine had joined us recently, two years ago when she was eighteen. I’d been with Nox, Ronnie, and Brisk since we were young. Hands interlocked, holding on for dear life, we’d fall asleep together each night. Even when my father died and I had to fly home to Boston for his funeral, they came. They didn’t want me to have to sleep alone.

  As we all piled into the black jeep, I plugged in our client’s coordinates. He lived in some fancy mansion in Bel Air. I liked our downtown loft just fine. We’d bought an old sewing factory, and constructed it so we all had our own separate apartments—so it didn’t matter if one of us had a lover over—and also a training center. The most important room in the building was the room we co-slept in, sporting four king-size beds. At the end of the day, we all slept together. Considering we each made an even cut of twenty grand a week, we could afford to live in Bel Air if we wanted to, but it didn’t suit any of us. Except maybe Maxine.

  We drove to the address in relative silence. Only when we passed the infamous crater made by the now long-gone ghoul ship, off the 101 highway, did we begin to rustle in our seats. Looking down at the deep depression in the earth, I had a visceral response. Every muscle in my body clenched as rage flooded through me. Staring at the black scorch marks where the military had attempted to level it, I was taken back to my childhood.

  The mammoth titanium-looking ships had arrived on August 22nd, 2020. The ships had no windows, no lights, and when the doors opened, no beings inside. None we could see anyway. We assumed they were empty communication vessels or something, but that night the whole of humanity’s collective consciousness was hijacked. We were projected into the Dream Wars, some type of alternate reality, as the ghouls controlled the landscape and took us out one by one. They started with the animals, the easier game, but eventually made it to the disabled and elderly. Now only the fittest, smartest, richest humans survived the night. It was a literal survival of the fittest, most well connected or the most hardcore. I once saw a fourteen-year-old Latina from a local gang take out a ghoul with a metal ice pick.

  Maxine raised her middle finger to the ghoul ship indentation, and shouted obscenities out the window. I simply closed my eyes, focused on my breathing and chanted my mantra.

  After about twenty minutes, we approached the residence and Ronnie went into medic mode.

  “How’s the knee, Nox?” She peered at our pyro warrior, who had a lighter in his hand and was twirling it between his fingers. That man was never without fire. Ever.

  He slapped his leg just above the knee and smiled. “Like brand new.”

  Nox had been badly injured a couple months ago, but he seemed to be recovering fine.

  “Maxine, how are you feeling?” Ronnie checked in. Maxine suffered from bouts of extreme anxiety and PTSD. She’d seen her parents murdered right in front of her, so I didn’t blame her one bit. Some jobs just made her jumpier than others. If I saw signs of it, then I usually put her to the back of the line.

  She looked calmly at Ronnie. “Full of rage and ready to kill.”

  I grinned. Coming from a gorgeous redhead with the sex drive of a teenage boy, that line always made me smile.

  “I’m your favorite, aren’t I?” Maxine winked at me.

  Ronnie’s mouth opened in shock. “Yeah right! Everyone knows I’m her favorite.”

  Maxine just laughed. “You’re her best friend, but I’m her favorite. There’s a difference.”

  This age-old argument.

  “What if I’m her favorite?” Brisk asked, from his place behind the wheel.

  I scoffed playfully. “You wish. I’ll never forgive you for eating the last of my chocolate last Christmas.”

  We pulled up to the guard gate and Brisk chuckled, turning back to look at Ronnie. “I wish I were Ronnie’s favorite.” He winked at her.

  I was pretty sure everyone collectively rolled their eyes. Brisk had been after Ronnie since last year, but because we dated for a hot minute like two years ago, Ronnie kept telling him no. No matter how many times I told her I didn’t care, or how much chemistry they had, the poor girl shot him down hard.

  “All right, this guy is richer than God. Let’s get into professional mode,” I told my team.

  Ronnie straightened her black-framed glasses and pulled on her white surgeon’s coat. Clients loved that. No matter how good her résumé was, clients never failed to comment on her age. She was twenty-one and one of the youngest Harvard Medical School graduates in history—having starte
d there at the tender age of thirteen. After long days in class at Harvard, she’d spend her evenings training at the Boston academy in military drills. Then at night, she slept with me, Nox, and Brisk. We’d had each other’s backs from the beginning and always would.

  She murmured something in Japanese and Nox responded with a chuckle. I just shook my head. She spoke five languages, came from a prominent family and loved cats. I never understood how we’d become best friends. Sometimes life just stuck you with someone and they grew on you.

  A well-built young man at the guard gate approached our jeep. After showing our papers and IDs, he opened the gates and we drove up the long circular drive. The sprawling estate was fit for a celebrity, craftsman in style but with a modern flair. The home extended the length of the large lot. Standing at the front was the butler, Daniel Hansen, an older man in his fifties with black and silver hair, wearing a full tuxedo.

  “Oh my God, what if our new client is Batman!” Maxine commented after seeing the butler.

  I smiled as everyone else in the car chuckled. “You think Batman needs a team to get him through the Dream Wars?” I asked. I wished Batman was real. Then maybe he could end all of this and we could finally sleep in peace again.

  Brisk parked the car off to the side and we all started unloading our gear.

  “Miss Steele, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” the man’s sweet voice sounded from behind me.

  I turned and extended my hand. “Mr. Hansen, I presume?”

  He nodded. I’d pored over this guy’s file too, partly out of interest, but mostly because I didn’t sleep with strangers in the house. I wanted to know everything about everyone I was protecting. Daniel Hansen was fifty-two years old and had been working for the Striker family for over two decades. He was originally from England, but his accent was mild. No family, no wife, a slave to the job. Interestingly, before coming to work for the Strikers, he was an MI6 agent in British intelligence.