Chapter 111 — No Safe Mind

Chapter 111: Chapter 111 — No Safe Mind

~ Raven ~

Raven pulled the chair closer and read.

The first thing the book established about Dreamwalkers was how rare they were, and apparently that mattered enough for the writer to say it twice before explaining anything else.

They were mental predators. A Dreamwalker entered through sleep and, once inside, moved through whatever the sleeping mind brought forward on its own: memories, experiences, fears, all the things a person might never willingly show another living soul because the mind, asleep and unguarded, did not know anyone else was in the room with it.

They could not rewrite any of it.

The text was unusually firm on that point. A Dreamwalker could not replace something that had happened or insert a false memory where a real one had been. What they could do was watch, moving through moments their victim would never willingly have shared and leaving with everything they found.

They could also leave something behind—not another memory, but a suggestion, an idea pushed quietly enough into the mind that the victim might carry it around afterward without immediately realising it had come from somewhere else.

Raven’s finger slowed against the page.

She had known the man went through her memories. She had felt him doing it, but until now she had understood it as someone breaking into a locked room and looking around.

The book made the room much larger.

If he’d stayed longer...

She stopped the thought before it went anywhere useful and continued.

The next section explained why Dreamwalkers had ever inspired anything more serious than fear of being watched.

Pain.

Raven’s eyes narrowed.

A Dreamwalker could create pain entirely inside the mind. There was no wound, no hand laid on the body and nothing left afterward for a healer to find, but none of that made it any less real to the person experiencing it.

Worse, it could be sustained, raised and repeated, held exactly where the Dreamwalker wanted it for as long as necessary.

The old records were full of what happened after that. Wolves had surrendered protected information, opened places they had sworn with their lives to defend and carried out acts they would never willingly have chosen, simply because the pain did not stop until they obeyed.

Raven’s stomach tightened.

That was worse.

A Dreamwalker did not need anyone’s loyalty, and he did not need allies who believed in whatever he was doing. Someone could hate him with everything they had and still cross a room to unlock a door for him if he made refusing hurt badly enough.

A strong will could resist longer.

Raven’s gaze caught on the sentence, and she went back over it more carefully.

Certain rare bloodlines and a very small number of abilities built around unusually stable minds could make both intrusion and coercion considerably harder.

The writer was careful, however, not to call any of them immunity.

These were exceptions, not protections that could simply be taught to every wolf, and even those capable of resisting still felt every second of what was being done to them.

By the final paragraph, Raven was reading more slowly.

Dreamwalkers had become so rare over the centuries that most modern wolf scholarship placed them somewhere between an extinct bloodline and an old story. Nearly all of the detailed material—the recorded cases, observed behaviour and documented attempts at resistance—came from vampire sources, because vampires had preserved knowledge wolves apparently had not.

Raven looked at the citations running along the bottom of the page.

Nearly every one of them.

So the thing everyone treats like a bedtime story was real enough that an entire people kept notes on how to survive it.

And one had been inside her head.

Twice.

She kept reading, and somewhere over the next few pages the pieces of the afternoon started falling into place.

You pushed him out?

At the time, Raven had thought Cassian’s reaction excessive. A man who had just made the air itself sting her skin had gone completely still over one sentence.

Now she understood what she had actually told him.

She had not simply woken herself from a nightmare. She had recognised that something else was inside her mind and forced it out, while the book had just spent several pages explaining how difficult even recognising an intrusion was supposed to be.

A chill moved across the back of her neck.

Once that thought took hold, other parts of Cassian’s behaviour began to make sense.

He had pushed until he got what he needed from her in the storeroom, but he had been much more careful about what he gave back.

Even when Raven pressed him about the investigation, he had kept names, suspicions and most of what he knew to himself. And when she asked why they weren’t simply taking everything to the Headmaster, he had refused to explain.

Raven had assumed that was simply Cassian being the secretive bastard he appeared naturally gifted at being.

Maybe it wasn’t.

Raven’s eyes remained on the page as another possibility began to take shape.

Cassian had no way of knowing whether the Dreamwalker had ever been inside his head.

The thought made her sit a little straighter.

If something could enter a mind without being noticed, move through memories and leave with whatever it found, then Cassian couldn’t simply assume his own thoughts were safe. And the more he told Raven about the Ward, the investigation or whoever he suspected, the more dangerous that became.

Because if the Dreamwalker ever got into Cassian and found those conversations, he would know exactly what Raven had been told.

He would know she was involved.

More importantly, he would know she knew enough to matter.

Raven’s fingers tightened slightly against the edge of the book.

That was why Cassian had kept stopping short.

Not because he thought Raven couldn’t be trusted with the information, but because every answer he gave her risked putting another target on her back if the wrong person ever got access to his memories.

And Raven was already interesting enough.

Cassian hadn’t been trying to keep her ignorant.

He had been trying not to make her more important to whoever was already watching her.

The storeroom came back to Raven then: Cassian several feet away, pale lines beneath his skin while the air around her tightened.

At the time, she’d thought his reaction was about whether she was lying.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

If Cassian had believed she knew something about a Dreamwalker, then every question he asked carried another problem with it.

The more Raven knew, the more dangerous she became to the person hiding inside Valerius.

And the more reason that person had to come looking for her again.

Understanding that did not make Raven feel any better about the knife under her jaw, the questions Cassian had twisted around until she answered them, or the fact that she was currently sitting inside a glowing boundary because she’d mocked his taste in books.

But it did leave her with another problem.

If Cassian had reason to worry that a Dreamwalker could get into his head, then Raven had the same reason to be careful about what she put there.

The white place. The black-haired girl in the stone circle. What her wolf had done during the Hunt. Melissa inside the mirror at the bottom of Raven’s bag, telling her, You’re the lead.

None of that was information she could hand over casually anymore.

Because once she told Cassian, it would no longer exist only inside her own head. If a Dreamwalker ever got into his, everything Raven had trusted him with could be sitting there waiting to be found.

Raven leaned back slightly and stared at the page.

So trust isn’t even the question.

Someone could be entirely on her side, genuinely trying to help her, and still become the route through which everything she wanted hidden found its way to the wrong person.

Besides, she did not trust Cassian Blade. Not fully.

She had known him for one term. She knew he could fight frighteningly well, that he read romance novels behind false covers, that he could irritate her almost without effort and that, when the Hunt had gone wrong, he had come through the trees to save her without being asked.

That was nowhere near enough.

She knew too little about him.

Unfortunately, that seemed to be becoming a general problem.

Raven reached the end of the section and spent several seconds staring at the final paragraph without really reading it.

Then her stomach growled loudly enough to interrupt her thoughts.

She looked up.

Oh, you have got to be joking.

There were at least three times as many people outside the boundary now.

Two tables had somehow become six, and several students who definitely had not been in this section earlier were sitting with books open in front of them while making no serious attempt to read. Four slates were pointed in Raven’s direction, and this time none of their owners bothered lowering them when she looked over.

Someone on the gallery above was leaning so far over the rail that Raven briefly considered whether gravity might finally do something useful.

Then she noticed the light coming through the high windows.

It had shifted considerably.

She had been sitting here for hours.

She was hungry, Cassian was nowhere in sight, and apparently Valerius had decided that Raven Rivers trapped inside a glowing library boundary was the most interesting thing available for afternoon entertainment.

Her anger returned so quickly that she shoved her chair back before thinking.

The legs scraped loudly across the floor as she started to stand, and several heads immediately turned toward her.

Raven stopped halfway up.

Bellringer.

She could already see it.

A clip of her screaming Cassian’s name across the library while trapped inside his boundary, followed by whatever title some idiot decided to attach to it.

No.

Absolutely not.

She lowered herself back into the chair, much more slowly than she had risen, then planted both hands flat on the table and kept them there until throwing the nearest book stopped feeling like a reasonable solution.

Only then did she force herself to think.

Cassian had told her nobody outside the boundary could open it.

Only her.

She had asked how.

And he’d said—

Read.

Raven’s eyes narrowed.

She had assumed he meant the material he wanted her to learn.

But had he?

Her attention shifted toward the stack.

Seven books, all chosen personally by Cassian. He had not checked labels or wandered between shelves looking for anything. He had gone straight to each one, taken exactly what he wanted and placed it on the table.

Which meant if there was a way out, he had probably already put that in front of her too.

Raven pulled the first book closer and checked it quickly, going through the front and back, the endpapers and the spaces inside the covers before riffling through the pages with her thumb.

Nothing.

She moved to the second and found nothing there either.

By the third, she was checking faster, which unfortunately only made the audience outside more interested. The whispering increased as she went through one book after another, because apparently Raven Rivers searching frantically through books inside a glowing box was more entertaining than Raven Rivers quietly reading inside one.

By the fourth, her patience was thinning.

By the sixth, it was gone.

I am going to kill you, Blade.

She dragged the last book toward herself and worked through the final printed pages more carefully.

Nothing.

She checked the inside back cover.

Still nothing.

Then she turned one final page and stopped.

A line had been written there in ink.

Not printed. Written.

Small, neat handwriting that had absolutely no business being inside a library book.

Check your front pocket.

Raven stared at the words for several seconds.

Then, slowly, she lowered her eyes to the front pocket of her uniform.