I went dizzy again. The world spun, and I fell from the ceiling, slamming back into myself with a thud and a gasp.
Jimmy lifted his head, but before I could see his face, his eyes, his no doubt blood-drenched lips, everything went blessedly black.
I dreamed of New Mexico. Oh, come on! Why there?
“Is this hell?” I asked.
“Hardly.” I’d know that deep, mesmerizing voice anywhere, even without the hogan, the bonfire, the sweat lodge, the ramada that seemed to rise straight out of the ground in front of me. The mountains were there too, looming shadows stretching into an everlasting sky.
Sawyer stepped out of the night. Naked, with the moon cascading over his skin, turning his tattoos an eerie midnight blue.
“You dream, Phoenix.”
“Get the hell out of my head.”
“I’m not in your head, you’re in mine.”
“Sheesh. Sleeping with you was like a virus. What else did I catch?”
His lips compressed into a flat, thin line. “You didn’t catch it from me.”
“I had it all along?”
“No.”
Jimmy. Hell.
“You had to sleep with him?” Sawyer asked.
“Yeah, I kind of did.”
Sawyer’s gaze touched my face, then darkened. “I will kill him.”
“The line starts behind me.”
Silence fell between us. The only sound was the crackling of the bonfire.
“He kept his dream walker power a secret from us all,” Sawyer said. “If I’d known, I would have figured out how the Nephilim had gotten their information and staked him twice when I had the chance.”
“What?”
“Only Ruthie knew the names of all the DKs and seers,” he said slowly, and the light dawned.
“He walked in her dreams.”
Sawyer nodded once.
“She didn’t know?”
“A dream walker can wipe all trace of the walk from the victim’s head. At the least, the person might remember dreaming of them, but not what the dream was about.” He spread his hands. “Happens to all of us.”
More than I liked. Especially now that I knew someone might have been trolling the halls of my mind while I slept.
“Jimmy didn’t know he was doing it,” I said.
“No?”
“No. His father, the Strega, said that once he and Jimmy exchanged blood”—Sawyer made a face; I had to agree with the sentiment—”then Jimmy’s vampire nature emerged and he changed sides.”
“You believe this?”
I shouldn’t believe anything the strega, or Jimmy, for that matter, said. Except—
Quickly I told Sawyer about absorbing Jimmy’s dhampir powers, but not his vampire nature, which led me to believe that in order to attain a taste for blood I’d have to actually… taste blood.
“Also, if Jimmy was on the Strega’s team all along he would have killed me, you, Summer, hell, everyone he could. Why wait?”
Sawyer nodded thoughtfully. “I agree. Somehow the strega was able to entice Sanducci to dream-walk and pluck the information from Ruthie before she died without Sanducci knowing it. Perhaps the spell you saw in your vision—the bowl of blood—had something to do with it.”
I recalled the strega saying he’d done everything to get into Jimmy’s head—spells and charms—but nothing helped. He never had revealed just what had given him the access he needed to set doomsday in motion.
“How does the dream walker power work?” I asked.
“You must go into a deep trance, access the realm between life and death, where dreams exist; then you can walk among them.”
“I wouldn’t know a trance if it bit me on the ass.”
“It bit you, all right. Tonight, Sanducci nearly killed you.”
“That’s how I got here?” Sawyer nodded. “Next time I’ll take the bus.”
I paused as several separate thoughts suddenly collided to provide a single answer. “Jimmy said he’d been sick. The worst he could ever remember. The strega was trying for years to get into Jimmy’s head and couldn’t.”
Sawyer’s face smoothed out in understanding. “None of his magic worked, but when Sanducci became ill, he existed in the realm of the dream walker. The Strega was able to get past his defenses, then somehow entice him to walk in Ruthie’s head where every bit of information he needed was there for the taking.”
“Even so, Jimmy wouldn’t have told him the information. Not then anyway.”
“I’m sure it was a simple matter to draw what he wanted from Sanducci when he was still too ill to know what he was doing. The strega is, after all, a very powerful witch.”
In the end. it didn’t really matter how the strega had gotten his information; what mattered was that he had it and he was using it.
“So,” I continued, “why your dreams?”
Those tight lips curved. “Yes, Phoenix, why mine?”
“Because you know so damn much about every damn thing?”
“Testy?”
“Do you know where I am? Do you know what’s been going on?”
“Yes.”
“And why is that?” I considered. “Summer’s a tattle-tale.”
“She did her job.”