Dream Chaser
2021 Heat 4/5
Dream Chaser by Dima Zales is a 2021 romance. Tropes: childhood-friends-to-lovers, Dreams, dreamwalking-psychic-heroine, Found Family, portal-hopping-science-fantasy, Urban Fantasy. Heat 4/5. Book 3 of Bailey Spade.
What happened in Dream Chaser?
The god of nightmares is real? How fun. A mystery dreamwalker is trying to turn me homicidally insane? Business as usual. But when a legendary seer gets involved, we end up on a world populated by necromancers. Oops. I’ll have to put on my big dreamwalker panties and learn to forgive Valerian’s betrayal before we’re all killed by Icelus… or zombies… or a deadly virus.
What tropes are in Dream Chaser?
Where does Dream Chaser fall in Bailey Spade?
Book 3 of Bailey Spade. Reading order
What should I read next?
Dream Ender by Dima Zales.
Chapters
Chapter 2
The narrator awakens in her hospital room to the crushing weight of new grief: she has a twin sister, Asha, whom she watched die before she even knew she existed—possibly at their mother’s hand under the influence of Phobetor, the god of nightmares. With her mother comatose and her mind reeling from the trauma of battling Icelus, she retreats to check on Valerian, the man who acted like her partner while she was unconscious. Using her newly awakened REM-sensing ability, she performs a remote dreamwalk into his sleeping mind, where her surreal dream palace and its guardian, Pom the looft, await. Between questions about the deity haunting her family and Pom’s teasing inquiry into her feelings for Valerian, she confronts the terrifying possibility that love might be worth the risk—diving into his dream just as the chapter’s tension peaks.
Chapter 3
Bailey dreamwalks invisibly through Valerian's memories, witnessing his teenage years at Orientation, a secret school for Cognizant teens on Earth. There, the illusionist Hekima terrorizes students with vivid hallucinations of Otherland horrors—toxic wastelands, deadly drekavacs, and cannibalistic humans—to teach the dangers of the parallel universes accessible through gates. While hiding, Bailey sees Valerian deduce with ninety percent certainty that Hekima belongs to the clandestine Icelus. In a subsequent memory, a sweaty sauna encounter with the seer Yaroslav reveals Valerian's ruthless ambition: the seer advises him to anonymously tip off Kain, head of the New York Enforcers, that Bailey is the Icelus suspect, ensuring Hekima's removal and Valerian's rise to the New York Council. When Bailey reveals herself in fury, accusing Valerian of betraying her to Kain's kidnappers, he claims ignorance of her identity, leaving their fractured trust as the chapter's unresolved wound.
Chapter 4
The chapter opens on raw fury as the narrator wakes from a sleepwalking trance, fleeing a confrontation with Valerian after discovering he invaded her dreams. Their argument escalates through an elevator chase, revealing his betrayal regarding the New York Council and his connection to Soma. Seeking solace, she retreats to the dream world, where her wrist companion Pom advises processing the trauma. There, she convenes allies Ariel, Kit, Itzel, and Felix in her cloud office to share revelations about her deceased twin sister and the entity Phobetor, renamed Collywobbles to avoid summoning him. As they recreate the memory of her sister's death on an impossible artificial world, the chapter closes with a jarring shift: alone in Times Square, the narrator faces a monstrous Nutcracker come to life in her nightmare, a creature that refuses to vanish.
Chapter 5
The protagonist battles a mysterious dreamwalker called the Nutcracker in surreal combat within their lucid dreamscape, using shapeshifting and object-manifestation powers to survive until waking unharmed. Realizing the attacker needed no physical contact to enter, they establish a safeguard with their looft companion Pom, who can now wake them from danger. Training with friend Felix in the dream world, they harden their dream-body into metal to withstand future attacks. They confirm the Lucid Dreamer VR game—a potential power source for saving their mother—remains on track, but discover Felix has been communicating with their estranged love interest Valerian. Despite Valerian's escalating apology gifts, the protagonist rejects reconciliation with increasingly sharp rebuffs, ending the chapter with romantic tension unresolved and Valerian confronting them at a werewolf restaurant.
Chapter 6
Bailey confronts Valerian at a Gomorrah restaurant, her anger flaring at his betrayal while her pet Pom’s fur shifts from pink to furious red. When Valerian isolates them with an illusion to talk, he reveals he is working with the Gomorran Senate and Earth’s Councils to protect her from a deadly threat: someone is hunting her in her dreams because of her conflict with the dangerous figure known as Collywobbles. The tension breaks when the legendary seer Nostradamus and his werewolf companion Marius crash their table, claiming they know how to save Bailey’s life before the dream-hunter strikes in the waking world.
Chapter 7
Bailey dines with her reluctant protector Valerian when the infamous seer Nostradamus appears uninvited, bearing grim tidings. He reveals that nearly every timeline leads to Bailey descending into homicidal madness—unless she avoids sleep entirely and flees to the mysterious Necronia with the probability manipulator Chester. Refusing to give exact instructions for fear of altering fate, he offers only cryptic warnings about a "Fate Motif" and departs with his werewolf companion. Their tense meal is abruptly shattered when a dozen Cognizant—elf, dwarf, gargoyle, and dryad alike—storm the restaurant wearing nightclothes and kitchen weapons, their eyes burning with the same magma-fire Bailey’s mother displayed when she murdered her twin. As the possessed attackers lunge, Bailey realizes the prophecy has already begun to unfold.
Chapter 8
Bailey and Valerian fight off kitchen-weapon-wielding Overtaken in a restaurant before Virgil arrives with vampire Enforcers to massacre the attackers. In a limousine escape, Valerian reveals that the Overtaken are humans possessed by the nightmare god Collywobbles, identified by fiery eyes, and that Bailey’s mother was one of them. He explains the interdimensional threat of Icelus and the impending bioweapon attack on Necronia by the Pales, pressuring Bailey to join a mission to stop a deadly virus despite her terror. They travel to Earth, where Bailey meets the team—Itzel, Ariel, and Felix—in a secret lab and receives protection from Edith, the oldest vampire on Earth, and Thalia, a silent warrior nun. As romantic tension simmers between Bailey and Valerian, the chapter ends with sleepwear-clad Overtaken ambushing their car with gunfire, leaving Bailey trapped between duty and desire.
Chapter 9
The chapter opens mid-ambush as Overtaken attack the bulletproof limo carrying Bailey, Felix, and Ariel. Vampire Edith demonstrates terrifying power, dispatching attackers at super speed while glamoured bystanders clear the road. After escaping to Felix and Ariel's Brooklyn apartment—where the telepathic domovoi Fluffster and a judgmental Persian cat reside—the group shares a domestic interlude marked by banana-fueled banter and Felix's reveal of plans to build a VR empire on Gomorrah. The respite ends when Valerian summons them to a lab, where an international council of supernatural operatives assembles: a probability-manipulating satyr, a telekinetic, a giant, a werewolf Alpha who invented wolf-form martial arts, a chort enforcer, and a genius virologist. After donning virus-protective masks and arming themselves with everything from katanas to sleep grenades, the team steps through a shimmering gate toward Necronia, leaving Bailey to wonder what horrors await beyond the plasma.
Chapter 10
The crew hops through perilous gates in the Otherland, where each world brings fresh threats—from pterodactyl strikes to stampeding megafauna—while Valerian leads them toward Necronia, a realm ruled by necromancers with draconian moral laws. Tensions flare when Kit flirts openly despite warnings about local taboos, and Edith reveals her vampire nature can be glamoured to fool the undead authorities. The emotional peak arrives when Valerian confesses he recruited a second dreamwalker from Raira to coordinate cross-world defense, yet refused to surrender the narrator to the Council of Councils, sparking hurt and confusion. After Nina’s telekinetic lift saves the group from a mammoth stampede, they emerge on a primitive world only to face a tribe of hostile giants marked as Overtaken, leaving the travelers staring down a deadly new cliffhanger.
Chapter 11
When Overtaken giants ambush the team in a world where firearms fail, the battle turns brutal: Edith the vampire is decapitated after shielding comrades, her death a stark cost of war. Survivors retreat to a forest hub, where grief gives way to strategic dread as Valerian reveals Collywobbles has hunted Icelus five times before, placing her on a god's priority kill list. As they make camp, Dylan speculates on the nature of the Overtaken while Valerian insists on guarding Icelus through the night, their truce softened by shared food and proximity despite her lingering resentment. The chapter closes on the weight of impending danger and the uneasy comfort of protection.
Chapter 12
The narrator awakens from a vivid dream of public exposure and reunites with Pom in the dream realm, where they visit a comatose Lidia and search for traces of a dead twin, uncovering a buried memory of Asha's death. After therapy sessions and anxious discussions about a deadly plague, the group awakens to find Valerian standing guard. They journey to a world ravaged by a hemorrhagic virus, discovering corpses and meeting Maxwell, the sole survivor of his team, who suffers from haemolacria. Maxwell reveals the Overtaken are born from a contagious nightmare spread like a mind virus, and several party members have already been infected through casual conversation. As Chester, Kit, Nina, and Colton depart to escort Maxwell to Gomorrah for quarantine, the remaining team debates their mission—pressing on to Necronia despite Nostradamus's grim prophecy and the narrator's suspicion that Maxwell may be the enemy dreamwalker known as the Nutcracker.
Chapter 13
Trapped in a shadowed canyon, the team is forced through a narrow rock tunnel by a dense horde of masked, animated corpses bearing glowing internal carvings and nightmarish biomechanical designs. When Dylan attempts to parley in Necronian, the thousands of dead reply in a terrifying unison, accusing the group of lying about the Icelus virus and offering one last chance to flee—or be converted into 'helpers.' As the escape route seals shut and the shambling horde raises claws in a coordinated attack, the survivors' desperate pleas for a leader go unanswered, leaving them facing imminent transformation or death in the suffocating dark.
Chapter 14
The squad holds the line against an endless horde of reanimated necros in a brutal canyon battle. Ariel shreds the undead with plasma and gunfire while the narrator discovers his katana slices through bone effortlessly, a skill honed in dreams. Each teammate unleashes distinct powers—Valerian’s illusions fail against the necros’ hive sight, Dylan’s Gomorran gun proves useless, but Stanislav phases through attacks, Fabian morphs into a wolf to maul foes, and Itzel hurls lightning. As exhaustion sets in and arms burn with fatigue, the overwhelmed fighters face thousands more zombies until a squadron of roc-sized bat-pterodactyl hybrids swoops down, dropping fresh masked riders and corpses into the fray. With hope dwindling, the narrator refuses to surrender, bracing for the impossible surge that leaves them “beyond pucked.”
Chapter 15
Exhausted and bleeding through her mask, the narrator hacks through a zombie horde until the creatures unexpectedly fall silent and demand to speak. Their leader, Nulen, offers parley on the condition that the survivors disarm completely—a gamble the weary group takes when Valerian admits defeat is inevitable. But Felix outsmarts the horde by hijacking his own robot shell with a magenta energy ray, stashing the party's weapons inside the automaton before it marches to the mountain's edge. When Nulen finally emerges from a fresh tunnel—pale, painted in black lines, and greeting each survivor with an unsettling stare—he interrogates them about their psychic ranks, specifically hunting the mythical ability to make men weep blood. As the standoff crackles, the narrator spots the first crimson tear gathering in Nulen's eye, realizing the contagion they sought to stop has already taken root in its own messenger.
Chapter 16
Bailey and her team navigate the treacherous canyons of Necronia under necromancer Nulen's escort, racing to reach the Parliament with news of a deadly virus. After retrieving their protective masks from zombie minions, they endure a surreal journey on a litter carried by the undead, passing through villages where the dead serve as furniture, labor, and even offered companions. Tensions flare as Valerian deploys his hygieia device and flirts aggressively, revealing he hails from Soma, while Bailey discovers she can induce REM sleep through touch—mirroring Maxwell's power. When the innkeeper offers sexualized zombie 'bedroom companions,' the group narrowly declines. The chapter closes with Bailey slipping into Stanislav's dream, her newfound abilities raising stakes as they await judgment from the Parliament.
Chapter 17
The narrator dreamwalks into Stanislav’s memory, where he tenderly cares for his girlfriend and their Siberian kitten, Murzik. When Stanislav asks whether the narrator can visit his girlfriend’s dreams, the answer is no—dreamwalking requires physical proximity and a prior connection. Later, the narrator’s own sleep turns treacherous: a sadistic vision of a vampire court forces them to consume blood until bliss curdles into an inescapable, body-wide assault that persists even after attempts to exit the dream, duplicate their consciousness, or counter pleasure with pain. Waking fails; the sensation follows into the waking world at the inn, where Valerian’s comfort cannot stave off oblivion as the narrator’s consciousness finally snaps. The chapter closes on a cliffhanger of violated autonomy and unresolved psychic attack.
Chapter 18
The narrator wakes in Valerian's embrace following an intense psychic surge triggered by the release of the Lucid Dreamer game, which has amplified her dreamwalking abilities through collective player belief. Though initially disoriented by the pleasure-bond, she learns her new threshold may soon let her jolt her mother awake—but Valerian insists they must first save Necronia, as Nulen would defeat them in Gomorrah. During the journey with Nulen's zombie escort, the crew learns Maxwell has reached Gomorrah safely and scientists there are crafting a cure, though Dylan's inquiry about Nulen's virus provokes a dangerous threat. Tension simmers between the narrator and Valerian, complicated by her heightened arousal and his protective restraint. The chapter culminates in a surreal nightmare where the narrator battles a shape-shifting Nutcracker in a collapsing classroom, her powers failing as the dream turns deadly.
Chapter 19
The chapter opens in a lethal dreamscape battle where the narrator disables the Nutcracker's weapon and drives him through the floor, only to face him again in a surreal Icelandic concert hall. After a brutal duel on the Atlantic Ocean that leaves her forearm bleeding, she unleashes her ace—duplicating herself to sever his wrist—and wakes gasping in the inn beside Valerian. They plot to capture an Icelus cell leader to identify their tormentor, debating whether the suspect Maxwell could be the Nutcracker in disguise. The group rides to Necropolis, a necromancer-only city ringed by millions of zombies, and is imprisoned in a gloomy building while awaiting the Parliament. When a sharp-tongued woman named Rowan finally enters, she delivers the shattering news that their guide Nulen is dead—and the ruling council blames them.
Chapter 20
Rowan, a sharp-tongued necromancer from Earth, drags the captured team to the Parliament under threat of execution. Though she plays reluctant guide through a city where the dead walk as 'helpers,' her barbed banter masks genuine peril: she's betrothed to Keyser, a powerful Parliament member, against her will due to her own necromantic potential. As the group—including the super-strong Ariel, the telepathic Valerian, and the increasingly unhinged Stanislav—marches toward Decagon Square, Rowan displays her control over Frank, her undead opossum, to ward off local hostility. But when Stanislav's eyes begin weeping blood at the Parliament's threshold, the mission's true stakes crystallize. Trust is scarce, weapons are nonexistent, and the Parliament's motives remain as murky as the corpse of Nulen they interrogated.
Chapter 21
When Stanislav falls ill with a highly contagious virus after a brief maskless exposure, panic ripples through the team. Valerian leads them into a vast decagonal chamber where ten colossal masked zombies serve as proxies for the ruling Parliament. Despite threats and Rowan's reluctant translation, Valerian offers a desperate bargain: the capture of Icelus agents in exchange for a cure. But when the Parliament calls a vote on their fate, six of the ten giants rise to their feet—a majority that seals their death sentence. The chapter closes as the team realizes they are officially condemned, tension cresting at its peak.
Chapter 22
When a rhythmic knock—echoing Beethoven's Fate Motif—interrupts the Parliament chamber, a bloodied, purplish-skinned stranger bursts in speaking Necronian, delivering LEGO letters that challenge the narrator to "play the detective." Racing through the clues, the narrator deduces that the Icelus virus must already be on this world, infected the deceased hub guard Nulen, and that Nulen's predecessor Exozar is likely the traitor who let them in. After the messenger dies and necromancer Rowan resurrects him with a blast of multicolored energy, the Parliament debates the outbreak: the cynical Keyser dismisses the virus as a source of "helpers," while Shegan urges action against the spreading contagion. As the giant council prepares a life-or-death vote—where standing means execution—the chapter ends on a knife-edge, with the protagonists' survival hinging on whether the majority remains seated.
Chapter 23
The council vote has secured Rowan a leadership role in the investigation, but she has secretly tied her fate to the group by falsely implicating Exozar, earning a warning from Keyser that she now shares their destiny. With Stanislav showing symptoms of the messenger's virus, the team disguises themselves as zombie helpers to infiltrate Exozar's quarters. When dreamwalking attempts fail at a distance, Stanislav resorts to knocking the necromancer unconscious so Bailey can enter his dreams via touch. Bailey successfully pulls Rowan into the dreamscape alongside her, setting up a psychic interrogation to determine if Exozar is truly guilty.
Chapter 24
The narrator finds her dream palace lobby interrupted by Pom’s exposure therapy experiment with a Nutcracker figure, a moment of fear that softens into a tender vow from the telepathic pet to join her dangerous work. Infiltrating the dreams of necromancer Rowan to probe for Icelus ties, she witnesses a devastating memory: Rowan’s betrothed Keyser brutally murders her beloved pet Frank, only for Rowan to resurrect him using forbidden necromancy that preserves the original soul—a secret punishable by death. Clearing Rowan of immediate suspicion but sworn to secrecy, the narrator prepares to enter Exozar’s dreams next, the stakes rising as Pom rides her shoulder into deeper, more perilous oneiric territory.
Chapter 25
The narrator infiltrates Exozar's dream alongside Pom, only to find the target lost in an erotic reverie about Rowan. Shifting the dreamscape from bedroom to warehouse, the narrator swaps the object of Exozar's fantasy for a wooden mannequin to test his subconscious, then relocates them to the Necronia hub to summon the figure Exozar must have met there. The dream manifests Percival, a pitch-black-eyed Necronian, and his cell of pre-vamps—beings immune to the virus they spread. They hand Exozar vampire blood to stave off infection and a dart-like device laced with Koshmar poison to force REM sleep during a full-moon noon, risking nightmares. Just as the narrator realizes the timing aligns with the dreaded Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy trigger, they jolt awake to escape the impending Nutcracker.
Chapter 26
The team confronts Exozar in his bedroom, confirming his guilt after spotting him meeting with the pre-vamp Icelus collective. But their triumph curdles when the narrator realizes the necromancer has woken—The Nutcracker’s dream invasion has backfired. Zombies flood the room under Exozar’s control, forcing a chaotic fight as the bed collapses on the villain. When they spot a zombie carrying lit dynamite, panic erupts. Rowan blasts the carrier with multicolored energy, but the squad is overrun and flees into the night. In the desperate sprint, the narrator spins back in horror to realize Valerian never made it out, leaving him trapped inside with the ticking bomb.
Chapter 27
The team corners Exozar in a burning house, but Ariel restrains the narrator from rushing in just as an explosion launches Valerian through the air. After confirming he survived, they realize Exozar sacrificed himself, leaving no remains, evidence, or chance for interrogation—only a zombie fire brigade in red to extinguish the flames. With nothing to show the Parliament, they retreat to Decagon Square, where Rowan must convince skeptical officials—especially her fiancé Keyser—that Icelus and their Collywobbles-worshipping pre-vamps are behind a spreading virus. As they strip off their disguises and face a divided chamber, the narrator grapples with the fear that without proof, they may never be allowed to return home, ending on the tense precipice of a parliamentary vote.
Chapter 28
When the giant Keyser throws a tantrum in Parliament and collapses, necromancer Rowan seizes the moment to negotiate freedom for the group—securing Icelus as the Parliament’s top priority, quarantine protocols, and access to premium supplies. With Stanislav’s life hanging in the balance, the party commandeers a massive zombie-labor raft stocked with real beds and provisions, fleeing Necropolis under Rowan’s command. During the journey, Rowan confesses her desire to immigrate to Earth, begging the narrator to intervene with Valerian, though vampiric influence among the Earth Cognizant makes such a request nearly impossible. The relief curdles to dread when the group spots Keyser waiting ahead on the road—his eyes burning with the magma of the Overtaken, signaling a threat far deadlier than political obstruction.
Chapter 29
The chapter opens mid-siege as Rowan’s undead clash with Keyser’s beefier warrior zombies while the entity Puck spreads a viral nightmare. Valerian discovers his illusions fail against Keyser’s necromantic sight, forcing the group into brutal hand-to-hand combat. Fabian transforms into a wolf, Itzel hurls lightning only for zombies to sacrifice themselves, and Rowan is knocked unconscious by the contested Mordamned bird. When the narrator’s mask is torn off—deliberately stomped by enemies—the stench overwhelms them as they and Valerian are swarmed. The bird finally deposits Keyser before the narrator, revealing the villain’s bloody, virus-infected eyes. Keyser gloats, identifying the narrator as a “child of Soma,” and ends the chapter by spitting mucus into their face, leaving them helpless and horrified.
Chapter 30
Keyser ambushes the group with a contaminating assault, infecting both Bailey and Valerian with a massive viral load before the battle erupts. Rowan awakens to turn the tide, and Frank—her free-willed zombie pet—smothers the necromancer into submission, ending the fight but leaving Keyser reanimated as a mindless Overtaken. As the group flees the approaching spectators, Dylan reveals that Stanislav is exhibiting advanced infection symptoms, while Bailey and Valerian confront their own likely contagion. Trapped in a private illusionary garden, they share a desperate kiss and pledge to enter the dream world to break the black window holding Valerian's wiped memories of his home, Soma. But with the virus progressing and the cure still undiscovered, their fragile hope hangs on whether they can reach Gomorrah in time.
Chapter 31
Bailey dreamwalks into Valerian's mind to uncover a locked secret about Soma, only to find him passionately kissing a dream duplicate of herself. After banishing the duplicate out of jealousy, she convinces Valerian to help her break the black window containing his missing memories. Together they plunge into a freezing dream-ocean where Bailey must swim for what feels like days, dragging an unconscious Valerian in a boat tethered to her waist, until her newfound powers finally grant her a second wind. They wash ashore on Soma—a pretzel-shaped O'Neill colony—in the very clearing where Bailey's mother killed her twin sister Asha. As Valerian's childhood memories unfold, revealing his friendship with Kojo and his mother's lullabies, Bailey confirms she was born on Soma and confronts the final memory: six-year-old Bailey and Asha playing with young Valerian and Kojo.
Chapter 32
Bailey and Valerian plunge through a cascade of shared childhood memories on Soma, discovering they knew each other as children and that Valerian's father Davu was present at pivotal moments in their past. As the memories accelerate—from birthday parties to a funeral where Valerian learns his parents were killed by Icelus—Bailey realizes Valerian was her first crush. The reverie shatters when both awaken with bloody tears, a horrifying symptom of Maxwell's virus. Dylan reveals that vampire blood would accelerate the disease now that symptoms have appeared, leaving them desperate for a cure. The chapter ends with the death of Stanislav the chort, who phases into ghost form, underscoring the mortal stakes of the outbreak.
Chapter 33
The chapter opens with a somber eulogy for Stanislav, whose death leaves the group reeling with grief and guilt. The narrator, infected with a deadly virus unleashed by Phobetor, faces a race against time as symptoms worsen—heart palpitations, gnawing hunger, and the promise of purple skin. A moment of respite arrives when Valerian kisses her passionately, but he pulls away, prioritizing her need for rest over desire. Hope emerges when Dylan reveals she dream-received a simple cure recipe from Maxwell, to be synthesized at a lab on the nearby world. As the group travels toward the hub, desperation mounts: Icelus has blocked their path, and the virus progresses rapidly. The chapter closes on the precipice of either salvation or death, with the group clinging to a fragile chance of survival.
Chapter 34
The team learns that the Icelus pre-vamps are expert jumpers after Rowan's helper bird is captured, forcing them to abandon stealth for a bold assault. Rallying at the canyon entrance, they arm themselves from Felix's robot suit—including poison grenades—and rely on Rowan's necromancy to turn the enemy's dead into allies while Valerian cloaks them in invisibility. Despite makeshift mask protection, the plan unravels when Percival ambushes them from above, his superhuman leap dislodging Rowan and Valerian's defenses and leaving the narrator vulnerable. As the chapter closes, the narrator feels a sharp prick in her neck and succumbs to blackness, leaving the team's fate hanging.
Chapter 35
The narrator awakens mid-battle as Fabian’s claws miss Percival’s neck, only to face a swarm of newly made vampires. In a visceral nightmare sequence, allies fall one by one—Ariel is bitten, Felix loses his arm, Dylan is slain, and Valerian begins turning purple—until the narrator realizes the horror is a Koshmar drug hallucination injected via dart. Relief washes over them as they confirm their friends live, though uncertainty lingers about the real world outside the dream. They teleport to awaken Rowan, who can render them invisible to vampires, and Valerian, who can seize control of the creatures entirely. As they prepare to fight with newfound powers, the eerie strains of The Nutcracker’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy begin to play, leaving the chapter on a tense, unresolved note.
Chapter 36
Trapped in a dream battle against the Nutcracker at the Sydney Opera House, the narrator fights desperately as the wooden antagonist levels the landmark with a rocket and reveals that the ancient vampire Percival is slaughtering their friends—including the werewolf Fabian—in the real world. After escaping to the Harbour Bridge and manipulating gravity to evade an orca, they clash with swords, both combatants unleashing the Multiple Body Technique to create armies of themselves across Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, Pisa, and the Brandenburg Gate. When the Nutcracker versions sacrifice themselves as nuclear bombs to destroy the narrator's copies, the stakes escalate until a final one-on-one duel reveals the shocking truth: the Nutcracker is Ratridevi Bhairava, Valerian's head of development, hiding in plain sight.
Chapter 37
The chapter opens in the thick of a blistering duel inside the Lucid Dreamer, where the narrator trades blows with Rattie—the game designer whose villainous Rat King persona she has unmasked. Through a flurry of steel and cutting dialogue, she deduces his identity by connecting his obsession with spiders and clowns to the Nutcracker’s Rat King, confirming that his playable-character power boost was a selfish grab for dominance. The fight escalates into a brutal mirror match: when she slices his wrist, his blood mirrors her own wound, and the combat reaches a paralyzing stalemate with blades pressed to both their throats. Neither will yield, leaving the chapter suspended on the razor’s edge of a mutual-suicide scenario where insanity awaits if either strikes.
Chapter 38
In the shifting landscape of the dream realm, a deadly standoff erupts between the narrator and the dreamwalker Rattie, two combatants locked in a silent, high-stakes confrontation. The tension shatters when Pom, the narrator’s loyal symbiont, launches a surprise attack, demonstrating that bravery and recklessness can walk the same line. Seizing the opening, the narrator ends the fight with swift, decisive violence, delivering a fatal strike that triggers a devastating shockwave of raw dream-manipulation energy. The blast threatens to unravel the fabric of the dream world itself, but instead of destruction, it acts as a violent awakening, hurling the narrator back to waking consciousness. The chapter closes on the uneasy aftermath of survival and the lingering question of what the dream fight truly cost.
Chapter 39
The narrator awakens amid a desperate battle, weakened by the progressing Puck virus that causes crippling pain and dizziness. Using a newly awakened REM detection sense, they confirm that allies Rowan and Valerian remain alive but trapped in Koshmar-induced nightmares. While Percival and Fabian clash in a blur of supernatural speed, Felix and Ariel hold the line with advanced weaponry, and Itzel unleashes devastating lightning strikes at the cost of her own strength. The narrator fights off two vampire attackers with their katana, but their deteriorating condition leaves them vulnerable. When Itzel collapses from exhaustion, Dylan is suddenly seized by a female vampire who threatens to kill her unless the group surrenders their weapons, leaving the survivors facing an impossible choice under mounting pressure.
Chapter 40
In the midst of a brutal melee, the narrator refuses to surrender their katana despite a hostage demand, calculating that Dylan has only minutes before suffocation kills her. While Fabian battles Percival and Ariel and Felix hold their ground, vampires swarm the narrator, who dispatches several with lethal efficiency—only to discover they are sire-bonded to Percival, obeying his command to impale themselves on the blade. When Puck sacrifices himself to disarm the narrator, another vampire immediately seizes the narrator's throat, threatening to suffocate them unless all weapons are dropped. With the cure for a deadly virus slipping away and Valerian doomed without it, the stakes escalate as the narrator faces an impossible choice between surrender and survival.
Chapter 41
The chapter opens with the narrator suffocating under a vampire's grip in the waking world, playing dead to buy precious seconds. With oxygen dwindling, they use their pet Pom's fur as a psychic anchor to plunge into the dream palace, fighting to stay conscious while teleporting to the tower of sleepers. Inside Rowan's nightmare—induced by a Koshmar dart—they find her trapped in a grotesque canyon battlefield surrounded by the mutilated bodies of their friends, with Frank desecrating her mind. The narrator purges the horror, heals Rowan's wounds, and commands her to wake and save the narrator and Dylan from their real-world peril. After jolting Rowan awake, the narrator attempts to reach Valerian, but the lack of air drags them back to waking, leaving the rescue mission incomplete.
Chapter 42
The chapter opens in the suffocating aftermath of a vampire assault, with the narrator regaining consciousness as necromancer Rowan seizes control of the enemy horde. While allies Felix and Ariel subdue their opponents, the ancient vampire Percival proves immune to Rowan's powers and brutally overpowers werewolf Fabian. Desperate, the narrator plunges into Valerian's nightmare to warn him of the danger to their friends. Awakening, Valerian unleashes a psychic assault that terrifies Percival, but Ariel—trusting her ability to sense death—ends the ancient vampire with her gate sword before Valerian can interrogate him. The victory is hollow: Dylan succumbs to his wounds, and both the narrator and Valerian reveal a deadly purple sickness that threatens to claim them next.
Chapter 43
Valerian coerces the necromancer Rowan into resurrecting the virologist Dylan to create a cure for a deadly virus ravaging the group, threatening to use his mind-control powers if she refuses. After Rowan revives Dylan with a blast of energy, the weakened survivors flee through a gate to a hospital, where Bailey receives the bitter cure and loses consciousness. In a layered dream sequence, Bailey unearths buried memories revealing that the god Phobetor once Overtook her parents, forcing them to attack illusions of her and her twin Asha—whom Bailey believed dead. The visions expose a cryptic prophecy about "Two working as One" defeating the nightmare god. Waking to find the virus gone, Bailey learns from Valerian that Asha is actually alive and hidden away, a revelation that reshapes everything before their parting kiss.
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Dream Chaser by Dima Zales. https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/dream-chaser Plot summaries, not full text.