Dream Hunter
2021 Heat 4/5
Dream Hunter by Dima Zales is a 2021 romance. Tropes: Dreams, dreamwalker-heroine, Found Family, hidden-family-history, magical-virtual-reality, patient-protective-love-interest, race-against-time, repressed-childhood-trauma, secret-cult-conspiracy, sick-parent-rescue-mission, slow-burn-romance, team-versus-supernatural-threat, Urban Fantasy. Heat 4/5. Book 2 of Bailey Spade.
What happened in Dream Hunter?
What was missing from my life? A crazy cult that worships the ancient god of nightmares, that’s what. When I break my most sacred vow and invade my mom’s dreams, things get complicated, fast. With Valerian’s help, I’m on a quest to boost my powers and learn to forgive myself—all while saving my home world from complete annihilation at the hands of deranged cultists. In other words, a regular Wednesday.
What tropes are in Dream Hunter?
Where does Dream Hunter fall in Bailey Spade?
Book 2 of Bailey Spade. Reading order
What should I read next?
Dream Chaser by Dima Zales.
Chapters
Chapter 2
The dreamwalker awakens in her palatial dream palace after slaying six faceless sword-claw horrors in a subdream, their dying screams revealing a master who hates her. With her symbiotic companion Pom—a color-shifting looft who transforms into her furry blade—she confirms her mission: to infiltrate the comatose mind of her mother Lidia, trapped in non-REM sleep for four months despite healers' efforts. Despite promising never to invade her mother's dreams after a fight that preceded the accident, she steels herself to break that vow to save Lidia's life. Finding no trauma loop above her mother's sleeping form, she wrestles with guilt and the monsters' claim that Lidia views her existence as a blight. The chapter closes as she dives into Lidia's dream to wake her, the fractured bond between mother and daughter hanging unresolved.
Chapter 3
In a recursive nightmare within her mother's dreams, a young dreamwalker witnesses her mom violently attacking child versions of herself—stabbing, shoving, and smothering—each attack revealing cracks in her mother's psyche. Discovering black windows hiding traumatic memories in her mom's mind, the protagonist realizes her mother's rage stems from buried trauma rather than reality. When she reveals herself to stop the slaughter, her mother strikes her with a psychic lightning blast that tears her from the dream world, leaving her gasping in pain. The chapter exposes a fractured mother-daughter bond, the dangerous cost of dreamwalking, and the mystery of what horrors lie locked behind those black windows in her mother's memory.
Chapter 4
Bailey wakes from a failed attempt to rouse her comatose mother, only to discover that Mom’s violent dream-world expulsion has temporarily stripped her of dreamwalking powers. At the hospital, gnome physician Dr. Xipil warns that Mom’s vitals spiked dangerously during the attempt and recommends consulting sleep specialist Dr. Cipactli at the ZIZZ Sleep Clinic. Desperate and burdened by medical debt, Bailey purchases a stealth comms device with a bonus from Valerian, then confronts Dr. Cipactli—a scarred gnome who studies nightmares and believes he can bypass gnome immunity to Cognizant powers through consent. As the chapter closes, Cipactli administers a drug to enter REM sleep while Bailey prepares to dreamwalk into his mind for the first time, hoping to find a way to save her mother before the machines fail.
Chapter 5
Bailey infiltrates the dreamscape of gnome doctor Dr. Cipactli, seeking a way to wake her comatose mother from within her own dreams. Navigating escalating nightmares—including one where a murderous duplicate of herself attacks—Bailey uncovers the dark mechanics of Koshmar, a drug that weaponizes REM sleep by manifesting the sleeper's final waking memory as a traumatic opening act. When Cipactli proposes dosing Bailey's mother with the potent nightmare-inducer, Bailey refuses, horrified by the prospect of trapping her in an endless hell of escalating terror. She flees the consultation and meets illusionist Valerian at Erato's, a lush vertical-farm restaurant run by dryads. Amid heavy romantic tension, Bailey pitches a partnership to supercharge her dreamwalking powers through Valerian's VR company; he agrees to feature her as a game character but demands a personal price in return, leaving Bailey suspended between professional ambition and unresolved desire.
Chapter 6
At a Gomorran restaurant, Asha negotiates with Valerian over a classified Senate investigation, revealing that her mother's incomplete healing and mounting medical bills drove her to risky jobs. Though drawn to him, she keeps the conversation professional until they seal a deal: she'll assist the investigation in exchange for prioritized payment and help recruiting Felix, a technomancer, for game development work on the Illusion Scope. Valerian creates a privacy illusion so they can speak freely, and their handshake lingers into a tender palm massage before he kisses her cheek and departs for a meeting. Already paid for her meal, he leaves her breathless. Asha then travels via the JFK hub gate to Earth, buying hand sanitizer to compensate for the world's lack of hygieia, and heads to Felix's bulletproof apartment in Manhattan's Battery Park to finalize their alliance.
Chapter 7
Bailey returns to Earth and visits Felix and Ariel's apartment, where she reunites with a telepathic domovoi named Fluffster and Kit, a powerful shapeshifter serving on the New York Council. While Felix is occupied helping locate Itzel's missing grandfather Cadmael—a legendary inventor who vanished from Gomorrah—Bailey secures access to the murdered dreamwalker Leal's comms, uncovering frantic notes about Icelus, a clandestine cult accused of terrorism. Torn between her promise to help Felix and her own ambitions, Bailey agrees to develop a VR game for her mother Valerian, who is aggressively pursuing a seat on the Council. As Maya, Felix's jealous teenage girlfriend, watches coldly, Bailey navigates the cramped apartment's shifting loyalties, leaving with a fresh lead on Icelus and an hour to kill before her meeting, the chapter ending on the unresolved tension between her growing power, her mother's secrets, and the dangerous conspiracy in Leal's files.
Chapter 8
Bailey rides to Bale Inc to meet Valerian, only to find herself pitching a new VR game called Lucid Dreamer, where she'll serve as the motion-capture model for a dreamwalker protagonist. Between meetings with game developers Bernie and Rattie and an intimate mocap session in a polka-dot onesie while Valerian glues tracking dots to her face, he reveals that twenty thousand testers believing in her will boost her powers—potentially enough to rescue her mother within days. But when Bailey asks about Soma, the dream realm Hekima died naming, Valerian shuts her down with a warning growl. As the chapter closes, they set a countdown to invade Erato's dreams at midnight on Gomorrah, leaving Bailey buzzing with new purpose and unanswered questions.
Chapter 9
Awakening in her medical pod, Bailey finds Rattie trapped in a traumatic dream loop and deliberately avoids entering his psyche, choosing instead to plant an inspirational seed for later. After a charged exchange with her color-changing symbiont Pom about boundaries and trust, she departs for Gomorrah via the JFK hub to undertake a clandestine job with Valerian. At Erato’s restaurant, they receive virus-blocking masks and infiltrate the Dryad’s plant-choked lodgings, using sleep grenades to ensure she remains unconscious. While Valerian urges speed, Bailey experiments with the touchless dreamwalking technique from Leal’s journal, straining until a vein pops; she falls back on physical contact to establish the dream link. Just as they prepare to extract, Erato’s eyes snap open and the predatory vegetation coils to strike, trapping them in the arbor.
Chapter 10
Puck and Valerian have infiltrated the home of Erato, a dryad whose sentient flora can sense them despite Valerian's invisibility magic. When Erato wakes and attacks with a knife, Puck is caught in a strangling vine until Erato's wild slash—guided by Valerian's illusion—accidentally severs it. The pair flees through the living room, dodging poison hogweed and watching Erato get swallowed by a bug trap flower. But as they near the exit, an acid seed from the okra pods launches at Puck's chest, leaving the escape hanging in the balance.
Chapter 11
When an acid projectile hurtles toward her, Valerian shoves her aside and takes the hit himself, suffering a burning chest wound as they flee through a hostile building. They escape to his private rooftop penthouse—a lavish glass tower containing a thirty-foot indoor pond teeming with exotic creatures—where he heals with emergency vampire blood before dramatically discarding the vial to spare her temptation. Between moments of charged intimacy by the water, Valerian reveals the Senate’s urgent mission: infiltrate the dryad Erato’s dreams to uncover whether the cult Icelus plans to unleash genetically weaponized plants upon Gomorrah. As revelations about Valerian’s traumatic past surface and the dream anchor is prepared, the chapter closes on the threshold of a dangerous psychic descent into an enemy’s nightmare.
Chapter 12
Bailey dreamwalks into the dryad Erato's subconscious to investigate suspected Icelus ties, witnessing a tense confrontation where Erato interrogates a shapeshifting mercenary named Hans Stubbe over stolen plant patents. With her helper Pom, she escapes before the dream turns hostile, learning from Valerian that Erato likely filed the patents as a defensive countermeasure against Icelus terrorism. Valerian projects a stadium full of werewolves so Bailey can identify Hans Stubbe from the dream, confirming he is a hired gun rather than an initiate. Later, romantic tension flares when Valerian kisses Bailey, but her acute germophobia causes her to pull away in distress; she stumbles into a pond, is rescued, and flees home in shame. Exhausted, she reads Leal's diary about Icelus's lethal REM-sleep drugs before texting Itzel about searching for her grandfather. The chapter balances investigative stakes with intimate vulnerability, leaving the Hans Stubbe lead and the unresolved romantic moment hanging.
Chapter 13
Bailey joins Felix, Ariel, Itzel, and Kit at a Nebulabucks teashop on Gomorrah to investigate the disappearance of Itzel's grandfather, Cadmael. Using eighteen-year-old Maya's psychometry on a vape pen found in Cadmael's apartment, the group identifies an aggressive orc named Vas Lube as the prime suspect. To locate Vas, they visit Napoleon, a nain rouge information broker operating in a seedy bar, trading money, a highly illegal firearm, and a reluctant promise to enter his dreams for the gang's coordinates. After arming themselves with sleep grenades from Bailey's apartment and donning Felix's Neo Golem combat suit, the team infiltrates the Filthy Bastards' boarded-up hideout in a grimy cul-de-sac. They breach the door with a sleep grenade—only to turn and face the entire gang standing behind them.
Chapter 14
When Bailey is occupied with a lock, the group is ambushed by orcs, dwarves, and vampires in a cul-de-sac. Ariel leads the charge with military precision while Felix's Neo Golem suit tears through enemies with brutal mechanical force. Itzel channels lightning to scatter attackers, and Kit shifts from orc to giant to neutralize an immortal vampire that shrugs off stun fire. The narrator battles a female dwarf whose beard and resilience test their martial arts skills, ultimately enraging her into a honey-badger fury. With Vas as their target, the team fights to capture an orc alive amid escalating chaos, the chapter ending on the dwarf's berserk charge and the unresolved question of whether they can secure their prisoner.
Chapter 15
Spade topples a dwarf in a brutal cul-de-sac brawl only to be cornered by a vampire until Felix arrives in his Neo Golem suit, chest-guns blazing, forcing the Filthy Bastards to back down. Spade infiltrates the dreams of gang member Vas, discovering Itzel's unconscious gnome grandfather held for a masked stranger, then Kit shapeshifts to identify the vampire escort and volunteers to seduce and interrogate him. Later, Spade recruits Felix for the Lucid Dreamer VR project at Valerian's office, where after signing NDAs they test the Illusion Scope headset and enter a game as Bailey, immediately battling a monstrous spider-clown hybrid in the Rat King's lair.
Chapter 16
Bailey tests a violent VR game with friends Felix and Rattie, discovering the Rat King monster bears Rattie's face as an Easter egg before 'dying' in-game. After Felix fixes Rattie's security demo, Bailey returns home heartbroken until Valerian suddenly messages her. At his penthouse, they clear up the kiss misunderstanding—Bailey reveals her severe germ phobia and inexperience, prompting Valerian to conjure a perfect illusion of himself for her to kiss safely as exposure therapy, nearly bringing her to climax before he gently stops. Though he promises to wait until she's ready, they pivot to Senate business: locating the werewolf Hans Stubbe. Bailey enters the dream of the trickster Napoleon, trading four historical battle reenactments for the target's address. Infiltrating the werewolf's apartment, Bailey successfully enters his dream via touch, but as she exits, the beast's eyes snap open—leaving them trapped.
Chapter 17
Spade and Valerian capture a werewolf—stunned, not killed—and deliver him to a Senate facility before parting ways. Alone in the car, Spade receives a surge of power as a game demo reaches critical mass, realizing she can finally attempt to wake her comatose mother. Racing to the hospital, she confronts a billing administrator demanding new prepayments and barrels into her mother's room. Valerian arrives to assist as Spade prepares to dive into the subdream, handing over her stun gun with a desperate protocol: if she fails to say the password yitten upon return, he must incapacitate her before she becomes a danger. With the stakes set and the trance imminent, the chapter closes on the precipice of a rescue that could save her mother—or destroy them both.
Chapter 18
Asha battles a grotesque flying creature in her Dream Palace, sustaining a shoulder wound before killing it with her Furry Bracelet-turned-spear and healing herself by exiting and re-entering her body. With Pom perched on her shoulder, she teleports to the Tower of Sleepers where her comatose mother lies tube-free and peaceful. Determined to break Mom's coma, Asha hijacks her mother's nightmare, projecting a painful memory of their apartment fight about dreamwalking and broken oaths. The dream confrontation escalates when Mom, terrified of being invaded, flees to the highway and deliberately throws herself under self-driving cars until a fatal collision ends the vision. Asha watches in horror as her mother's dream-self dies triumphant in the crash, leaving the rescue mission's outcome uncertain and the emotional wound raw.
Chapter 19
Bailey wakes in a hospital room to discover her mother—whose consciousness runs on a computer—suffered a cardiac spike triggered by a recovered memory: she deliberately crashed her car to prevent Bailey from dreamwalking inside her. The revelation that her threat drove her mother to attempt suicide shatters Bailey's denial, drowning her in guilt until Valerian carries her from the hospital to his apartment. There, amid tea and manna, he offers comfort and a plan: they will enter the sleeping werewolf Hans's dreams together, with Valerian sleeping first so Bailey can navigate from his REM state into the target's. As Bailey watches Valerian undress and settle into bed, romantic tension collides with mission focus; she touches his chest, senses his REM onset, and finally breaches his dreamscape, leaving their alliance—and attraction—unresolved.
Chapter 20
In the lobby of her dream palace, Bailey hunts the werewolf Hans with her symbiont companion Pom in tow. She locates her ally Valerian in the tower of sleepers and slips into his subconscious through a charged kiss that blurs fantasy and reality. Inside his mind, Bailey discovers Valerian is a skilled illusionist whose dreamwalking techniques hint at secrets tied to the mysterious place called Soma. Together they invade Hans's fractured psyche, where the beast experiences two simultaneous nightmares—one of savage violence and another of a clandestine Icelus meeting plotting a devastating blast radius across Gomorrah. As Bailey manipulates the dreamscape to extract intel about suicide implants and the terrifying deity Phobetor, the boundary between dream and waking frays, leaving her with chilling knowledge of an impending attack and deepening suspicion about Valerian's hidden past.
Chapter 21
Bailey and Valerian wake from a dream to discover Hans the werewolf dead in his cell after a brutal test, raising alarms about a devastating Icelus bomb threatening Gomorrah's blast radius. While Valerian secures evacuation for Bailey's mother, Bailey assembles her team—Itzel, Felix, Kit, and Ariel—to hunt the puck-masked terrorist. They learn Itzel's kidnapped grandfather may have weaponized the Vega reactors, and race to a morgue where they find Enforcers turned hostile and bodies carved with glowing energy. When Valerian is struck down, the mission hangs in peril as Bailey confronts her guilt over her mother's suicide attempt and the mysterious black windows in her dreams.
Chapter 22
Valerian lies unmoving on a slab while hostile Enforcers close in, and every bullet the narrator fires fails to stop them—revealing the guards are already dead. The fight escalates as allies spring into action: Onassis decapitates one with a sword, Ariel stabs another, Kit morphs into a cyclops to knock an attacker down, Itzel hurls a lightning ball, and Felix punches through with his robot suit. Virgil, an illusionist acquaintance of Valerian, stands frozen, battling a mental assault. The true threat emerges when Wrakar, the mortician from the masked figure, reveals himself as a necromancer and seizes control of the Enforcers. As the corpses rise as fresh zombies, the narrator realizes survival now depends on stopping a puppet master who commands the dead—and saving Valerian before the horde grows.
Chapter 23
Inside a besieged morgue, Asha fights for survival as Necromancer Wrakar unleashes a horde of reanimated dead—elf, dryad, orc, and more—upon the Enforcers. When her gun proves useless against the undead, she pivots to nonlethal rounds, hoping to knock out Wrakar and sever his control over the shambling corpses. But the enclosed space turns deadly fast: Felix’s robot suit empties its guns without reload, Itzel’s lightning balls drain her strength, and Kit shapeshifts into a giant to hold the line. As Asha dodges crushing blows and a shoved fall sends her sprawling near Valerian, she weighs the risk of a sleep grenade that could neutralize the horde—but also her allies—just as an Enforcer’s blade arcs toward her throat.
Chapter 24
In a brutal battlefield, Asha suffers a near-fatal sword wound from a vampire Enforcer until Ariel decapitates the attacker. When a headless cyclops zombie chokes Ariel, Asha drinks vampire blood to heal instantly, accepting the addiction risk to keep fighting. With Itzel unconscious, Felix’s suit wrecked, and Kit exhausted, she gambles on a sleep grenade, hurling it at the necromancer Wrakar and freezing his undead army mid-slaughter. But the triumph collapses when she discovers Virgil—the only one who could wake her—is bound hand and foot. As the soporific gas drags her under, Asha realizes she has sealed herself in a trap with no escape.
Chapter 25
Asha’s guilt erupts into a lucid nightmare where her mother, provoked by a careless ultimatum, simulates a fatal leap into traffic, leaving Asha shattered. When Enforcers massacre her friends in the dream and an explosion freezes mid-blast, the sudden absence of her Furry Bracelet reveals the truth: this is REM sleep, not reality. Pom, her furry dream companion, breaks through her paralysis, reminding her that ninety minutes have passed since the sleep grenade detonated and that Wrakar could awaken from a nightmare at any moment. Shaking off self-destructive wallowing, Asha resolves to defuse the real bomb and wake her comatose mother. She teleports to the Tower of Sleepers to check on her allies, finding only Kit, whom she rouses from an erotic dream before the ticking clock turns catastrophic.
Chapter 26
The chapter opens in the chaotic aftermath of battle as the narrator wakes to find Kit looming above in giant form before shifting back. Racing through the morgue, they triage the wounded—confirming Ariel, Itzel, and Felix will survive, and desperately reviving Valerian by sharing vampire blood despite its illegality and addictive risks. While Virgil secures medical transport to the same hospital as the narrator's mother, Valerian obtains a Hygieia device to cleanse the group and blocks the sleeping Wrakar's hearing to prevent him from waking. With the necromancer secured, the narrator prepares to invade his dreams to extract vital information, ending as they slip into the dream world through a cleansed wrist.
Chapter 27
The narrator races to the tower of sleepers to rescue Gomorrah, hoping to avoid the necromancer Wrakar’s trauma loop—confirmed absent by the clear sky above his head. Accompanied by Pom, who vanishes in a Cheshire-like disappearing act, the narrator touches Wrakar’s wrist and dives into his REM sleep. Instead of the expected dreamscape, they find themselves in a surreal subdream realm of endless black ocean beneath fiery skies—a place normally hidden from conscious awareness. Wrakar himself is missing from his own mind. As the narrator searches, a colossal, terrifyingly beautiful figure with black-hole eyes congeals out of the void. Its melodic voice booms “Begone,” flooding the narrator’s mind with visions of dying friends and a mother who never wakes. In an instant, the entity ejects them from the dream, leaving the rescue unfinished and the true nature of Wrakar’s dream unresolved.
Chapter 28
Valerian and his team capture the necromancer Wrakar after a failed dream intrusion, resorting to psychic interrogation to learn that a bomb ticks on the hundredth floor of the Hub building with only twenty-seven minutes remaining. While Kit severs Wrakar’s hand and later binds him in a disturbing silk cocoon to silence him, the trio commandeers a flying car in turbo mode, racing against time as the Senate proves unable to assist. They breach the Hub’s upper levels only to confront a horde of Icelus guarding the device, knowing solely the High Priest can deactivate it. The chapter closes on the razor’s edge of a countdown, with the heroes trapped among enemies and the bomb primed to detonate.
Chapter 29
The narrator infiltrates a ballroom converted into a grim makeshift infirmary, where comatose sleepers lie in rows beside Icelus fanatics clutching daggers. A countdown bomb ticks toward detonation as the black-clad High Priest—revealed to be Dr. Cipactli, the gnome from the sleep clinic—prepares a ritual sacrifice to the nightmare deity Phobetor. When an elf stabs a sleeper, the narrator recognizes fellow captives Gertrude and Itzel’s grandfather Cadmael among the beds, warning Valerian that the priest must stay conscious to disarm the device. But gnomes resist powers and illusions, leaving Valerian hesitant to fire. As seconds dwindle, the High Priest unleashes a lightning ball that strikes Valerian, ending the chapter on a heart-stopping impact.
Chapter 30
With Valerian struck down by the High Priest’s lightning ball, Asha lunges to his side and finds him alive—faint pulse, singed clothes, but no charred skin thanks to hidden protective gear. While she scans herself for vampire blood contamination and finds none, Kit shapeshifts between giant and hummingbird forms to hold off waves of masked Icelus. But when the elf Puck attacks with a dagger, Asha is slashed across the forearm; despite the spurting blood and rising panic, she grapples with him, only to have him force her to the ground and press the blade to her throat as the bomb timer drops below nine minutes.
Chapter 31
Asha fights for survival against a masked elf wielding a dagger, using a Morse-code neural pattern from a werewolf's dream to disable his suicide device and seize his blade. Though injured and dizzy, she presses forward with Kit, her ally, battling through Icelus and clearing a path toward the stage where the High Priest channels deadly lightning. With only five minutes on the countdown clock and millions of lives at stake, Asha plans to force the High Priest to halt the bomb by knife-point, despite the risk of electrocution. As freed sleepers—including the somnambulant Gertrude—wander the chamber, chaos mounts; when Gertrude drifts toward her, Asha must survive the final approach to the stage while the clock ticks down.
Chapter 32
Bailey navigates a lethal dreamscape where contact with the dreamer Puck means losing a body part. When Puck drifts toward their ally Kit, Bailey knocks her out with a blade’s hilt—the second time fate has forced such a brutal choice. But the High Priest appears and strikes Bailey’s wounded knee, sending them crashing down as a lightning ball hurtles toward Kit, who barely transforms in time. Desperate, Bailey attempts touchless dreamwalking to reach Cadmael, the elderly gnome inventor who can disarm the reactor-bomb, straining to bridge the distance through sheer imagination. After false starts, Bailey invokes Cadmael’s granddaughter Itzel to gain mental entry, slipping into the old gnome’s dream world to beg for help before time runs out.
Chapter 33
Bailey breaches the tower of sleepers and plunges into the gnome Cadmael's nightmare, where Icelus agents torment his granddaughter Itzel. Sweeping aside the phantoms, she restores the dreamscape to wholeness and extracts the stunned Cadmael, revealing the horrifying truth: Icelus kidnapped him to construct a Vega-reactor bomb that teeters on detonation. Transforming the dream into the hundredth floor of the hub, Bailey forces Cadmael awake with amplified dreamwalking power, jolting him back to reality just as the threat looms. Returning to the tower where Pom waits with bated breath, Bailey terminates the dream with a fragile promise that they might yet survive the impending catastrophe.
Chapter 34
The narrator awakens from a trance amid a brutal battle against the High Priest, where ally Kit shifts between pixie and drekavac forms to dodge lightning attacks. When a hissing device disarms the narrator and Kit is seemingly killed, the scene violently unravels into a Koshmar-induced nightmare engineered by Dr. Cipactli—revealing the doctor and the High Priest are one and the same. Realizing the bomb never detonated and Kit lives in the tower of sleepers, the narrator teleports into Kit's dream to free her from her own traumatic vision of the narrator's disembowelment. After waking both dreamers, the chapter closes with the narrator steeling themselves for the real confrontation, while Cadmael's fate hangs uncertain and the true Icelus threat looms beyond the dream.
Chapter 35
Trapped beneath the High Priest, Asha watches helplessly as the countdown to detonation ticks toward zero on the stage where Cadmael stands. When the villain’s lightning ball threatens Itzel’s grandfather, the elder gnome intercepts it with his own blast, the collision knocking Cadmael down but buying precious seconds. With no time to spare, Asha drives her blade into the High Priest’s foot to draw his attention, and Kit seizes the moment to shatter the tyrant’s jaw with a crushing blow. Asha finishes the job, ending the High Priest’s life, but the reprieve is fleeting: the timer hits zero, leaving her braced for the inevitable explosion that will consume them all.
Chapter 36
The ticking bomb in the Senate chamber creates unbearable tension as the narrator realizes the countdown signals the Icelus cult's escape through the gates, not detonation—granting them precious minutes to survive. When bomb-disposal expert Cadmael arrives and successfully disarms the reactor-bomb, the immediate threat evaporates just as Senate Guard reinforcements burst through the elevator doors. Kit offers tender reassurance with a protective kiss to the forehead, momentarily easing the narrator's exhaustion and fear. Despite the reprieve, the narrator's body gives out from the stress, collapsing into unconsciousness just as safety seems assured, leaving the chapter on a breathless cliffhanger.
Chapter 37
She wakes in a hospital room after emergency knee surgery, surrounded by friends and her lover Valerian. They debate the fallout from the thwarted bomb plot: though millions were saved, the release of Wrakar's Necromancer Manifesto has handed a propaganda victory to the enemy Icelus. In a private dream-illusion, she and Valerian share an intimate kiss interrupted by her heart monitor, deepening their bond. After recovering fully, she learns her mother remains comatose in the next room and that Dr. Xipil had unwittingly employed the terrorist Dr. Cipactli. Despite the lingering trauma, she prepares to enter her mother's dreams again via subdream, asking medical staff to restrain her should the procedure prove fatal.
Chapter 38
Asha battles a monstrous eyeball with serpentine lashes in her dream palace, driving away a venomous attack with a furry pitchfork that erupts from her wrist before expelling the toxin from her bloodstream. Shifting to the Tower of sleepers, she attempts to rouse her comatose mother with repeated wake-up jolts, but each surge of power fails against the coma's grip. While drifting through the dreamscape, Asha witnesses a harrowing buried memory of her mother standing over a slain teenage version of herself in a blood-slicked bathroom, igniting suspicions that her mother may be concealing a terrible secret behind the palace's black windows. With the Lucid Dreamer project still offline, Asha's desperation curdles into grim determination as she abandons the rescue to drift toward the forbidden glass, drawn by the promise that the hidden truth might be the key to waking her mother—or the reason she never wakes at all.
Chapter 39
Bailey plunges into a freezing black lake within the dream world, fighting exhaustion to reach the shore before drowning ejects her depleted powers. Upon touching the dirt, she accesses her mother's locked Black Window memories, witnessing her own birth—and the startling revelation of an identical twin sister, Asha, named for their father's late mother. The memories cascade through childhood on the exiled Gomorrah hub: pottery with grandmother, birthday parties with Davu's son, and her mother insisting their prior lives were merely dreams. Bailey realizes these memories are surfacing out of order and questions who sealed them away. The chapter closes as a peaceful stargazing memory curdles into something terrifying, leaving the family's true fate hanging in the balance.
Chapter 40
Bailey dreamwalks into a repressed childhood memory and witnesses her mother, possessed by a magma-eyed dark force, fatally attack her twin sister Asha during a woodland chase. The horrific vision explains Bailey's lifelong amnesia about her sibling and her mother's buried guilt. Jolted into a nightmarish black-ocean realm with burning skies—an environment previously seen only in necromancer dreams—Bailey confronts Phobetor, a towering god of nightmares who declares her existence a blight. Waking in a panic, she vomits and grapples with the terrifying possibility that this deity is real and responsible for her family's trauma. The chapter closes on the crushing unresolved question: did Phobetor drive her mother to kill Asha, and is Bailey next?
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Dream Hunter by Dima Zales. https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/dream-hunter Plot summaries, not full text.