Dream Walker
2021 ISBN 9781631425530 Heat 4/5
Dream Walker by Dima Zales is a 2021 romance. Tropes: addiction-and-recovery, Dreams, dreamwalker-detective, Forced Proximity, Found Family, hidden-supernatural-society, paranormal-murder-mystery, political-conspiracy, reluctant-allies, sick-parent-motivation, slow-burn-attraction, symbiotic-companion-bond, Urban Fantasy, wrongfully-accused-heroine. Heat 4/5. Book 1 of Bailey Spade.
What happened in Dream Walker?
Think your dreams are private? Think again. As a dreamwalker, I can ease your nightmares, inspire creation, or steal memories, all for the small price of a buttload of cash. I need the money to save my mom’s life, and the clock is ticking. Then a gorgeous illusionist comes into the picture—though those mouthwatering looks may just be his powers in action. He sends me on a job with a major paycheck, but the pucking vampires show up and ruin everything. As usual, they suck. Now I’m knee-deep in a murder case where the victims and the perps could all kill me with a snap of their fingers. Throw in a creepy castle, a stinky moat, and a legendary monster, and we’ve got ourselves a party. Especially when the bodies begin to pile up. My name is Bailey Spade, and if I don’t solve this case, I’m dead.
What tropes are in Dream Walker?
Where does Dream Walker fall in Bailey Spade?
Book 1 of Bailey Spade. Reading order
What should I read next?
Dream Hunter by Dima Zales.
Chapters
Chapter 2
Bailey, a dreamwalker from Gomorrah scraping by on Earth, breaks into VR executive Bernard’s New York penthouse to extract secrets from his dreams. Desperate to pay two million cc for her mother’s life support within two weeks, she relies on addictive vampire blood for alertness and a sleep grenade to incapacitate her target. When Vampire Enforcers swarm the building, she is forced to initiate a dangerous subdream dive despite Bernard’s Ambien suppressing REM sleep—a gamble that could drive her homicidally insane if she dies in the dream world. As she makes skin contact with Bernard to trigger the transition, Bailey plunges into the darkness, risking her sanity to save her mother.
Chapter 3
The narrator stands atop an ocean of black water beneath a burning magma sky, facing a horde of grotesque dream-beasts. A whip-like appendage erupts from their wrist as the first creature—a monstrous fusion of ant mandibles—lunges forward with shrieking jaws. The narrator cracks the whip, triggering sonic booms that bisect the beasts one by one, though a talon from the second creature sears their left shoulder, drenching them in blood and pain. Despite the wound, they press the attack, decimating the remaining monsters including a fleeing ten-foot tardigrade-sea-cow hybrid. Victory comes at the cost of a gaping shoulder wound, and just as the last creature falls, the dreamscape itself begins to destabilize around them, plunging the chapter into unresolved transformation.
Chapter 4
The narrator awakens in their Gomorran dream palace to find their shoulder injury from a subdream battle behaving dangerously real—mere liters of blood loss from death here, and they would go insane in the waking world. They quickly heal the wound and reshape their dream body into a sharper, more imposing form before their symbiont Pom appears, transformed into a weaponized-cute owl-like creature. Their banter about Earth humans and racial guesses gives way to urgency as they race to the tower of sleepers to reach Bernard, their newest client, who is trapped in a trauma loop marked by dark clouds. Pom refuses to enter, terrified of the psychological toll, leaving the narrator to venture alone into Bernard’s nightmare to break the cycle before time runs out.
Chapter 5
Bailey infiltrates Bernard's trauma loop—a warped playground memory on Gomorrah where a primitive sandbox crawls with maggots and the swings sway like ghosts. Bernard walks with his two young children, a toddler girl and her older brother, toward a filthy public bathroom where they bicker over stalls. When a stranger suddenly snatches the boy and escapes to a waiting car, Bernard freezes in agony as the child vanishes. Though Bailey recognizes this as a raw memory rather than fiction, the grotesque details threaten to overwhelm them until they use exposure-therapy techniques to stabilize the vision. Just as the chase peaks, Puck's voice cuts through with an urgent warning, and a sharp slap in the waking world shatters the trance. Bailey opens their eyes to find Bernard awake and facing a room crowded with vampires—a jarring collision of dream and nightmare reality.
Chapter 6
The narrator is ambushed in Bernard's apartment by a dozen vampire Enforcers led by Kain, who confiscate forbidden Otherland comms and interrogate them about a sleeping grenade and a vial of diluted vampire blood used to stave off sleep. After being slapped by the vampire Firth—privately renamed 'Filth'—the narrator is escorted under threat toward the Council castle in a speeding limo. While Felix warns via earpiece that the Council summons means mortal danger, the narrator stealthily slips into the dream realm through Pom, a looft symbiont worn as a furry bracelet, to finish a lucrative job for Valerian and secure money for their mother's hospital care on Gomorrah. The chapter closes on the threshold of dreamwalking, with survival hanging on whether the payoff arrives before the Council does.
Chapter 7
The narrator returns to their dream palace and bickers with Pom, the symbiont living on their wrist, over whether he is a parasite or a mutualistic partner. Pom reveals he regulates the narrator's appetite and provides nutrients via bloodstream, explaining recent weight loss. When they find sleeper Bernard absent from his bed in the tower, the narrator retreats to their memory gallery—a museum of plasma-framed snapshots—and dives into their earliest memory from age seven, a recollection entangled with an unhelpful mother and the unanswered question of who their father is. The chapter closes on the threshold of that buried memory, leaving the family mystery unresolved.
Chapter 8
The narrator relives a childhood memory of accidentally shattering a clay vase bearing mysterious handprints, triggering guilt over their mother’s lingering grief. Back in the present, they navigate the tower of sleepers, finding Bernard absent from his nook, which grants unexpected time to infiltrate a gargoyle nurse’s dream. By altering the nurse’s subconscious surroundings, the narrator witnesses their comatose mother in a hospital bed, machines sustaining her still body, reinforcing the desperate need for money and survival. After banishing the vision with a happier birthday memory, they discover Felix finally asleep and establish a dream connection to warn him about impending danger. The chapter closes on the unresolved tension of Bernard’s whereabouts and the urgent mission to complete Valerian’s job before facing possible death.
Chapter 9
Bailey infiltrates Felix's dream to interrogate him about the mysterious Council that kidnapped her. Trapped in a hyper-real Manhattan warehouse under attack by monstrous pucks, Bailey interrupts Felix's heroic rescue of his girlfriend to seize control of the dreamscape. Shifting them to her cloud therapy office, she extracts crucial intel about the Cognizant hierarchy—learning that Councils rule hidden regions, Enforcers act as their agents, and the Mandate determines one's safety. After showing Felix her surreal dream palace and the tower of sleepers, she discovers he already knows about her secret therapy patient, Ariel. As Felix exits the dream, Bailey pivots to her real mission: entering Ariel's dream to provide the treatment that has been changing her life. The chapter balances sharp banter with mounting dread about the Council's unknown intentions.
Chapter 10
Bailey conducts a remote dream therapy session with Ariel, guiding her through exposure therapy for vampire blood addiction in a simulated nightclub. When Ariel successfully resists drinking from a captive vampire's wound, Bailey is violently ripped from the dream into a limo where she finds herself imprisoned with the sadistic Enforcer Filth and Kain, the powerful head of the Enforcers. Threatened with mutilation if she sleeps, Bailey endures the journey to a massive castle built inside a mountain, where hooded Brotherhood monks deliver a robe to Kain. Before she can learn why she was summoned, Kain uses vampire glamour to erase five hours, leaving Bailey disoriented and surrounded by the Council with no memory of the time lost.
Chapter 11
Bailey Spade stands trial before the New York Councilors, accused by prosecutor Gertrude—a former acquaintance nursing a personal grudge—of violating the Mandate by revealing her dreamwalking abilities to a human painter. Defense attorney Kit, a shapeshifter in an anime disguise, argues the exposure was an honest mistake while illusionist Dr. Hekima projects evidence of Bailey's fiery dream form and a stray hair. Neutral party Kain notes the lack of proof regarding other victims and pivots the room toward a mysterious unrelated investigation where Bailey's sleuthing skills might serve. As Gertrude calls for a death vote and the hooded Councilors rise one by one, Bailey realizes the hearing has become an execution, her heart hammering as the final verdict looms.
Chapter 12
Bailey survives a hostile Council vote only to be coerced into a deadly investigation. When she demands payment for her mother's life support, Kain offers healing through Isis but reveals he knows about her forbidden crimes—bringing Gomorran technology to Earth. Threatening her life if she talks, he assigns her to invade the dreams of Council members to find a killer among them. Trapped between saving her mother and protecting her own life, Bailey accepts the mission while her bracelet, Pom, signals danger. The chapter shifts from political survival to intimate blackmail, ending as Bailey stands alone in a tower with a powerful enemy who holds all the cards.
Chapter 13
Bailey, a dreamwalking germophobe, encounters Valerian, a devastatingly attractive illusionist who materializes invisibly in the castle. Their charged meeting crackles with instant attraction—her looft wristband flushes coral pink—and Valerian conjures a lush bedroom illusion that nearly leads to a dream-based tryst, though he ultimately declines, citing the Mandate and their brief acquaintance. He offers to spirit her away from the Council, but she refuses, bound by their DNA tracking and her mission to enter Bernard's dream tonight. When vampire Kain escorts her to her "quarters"—a grim dungeon cell—Council illusionist Hekima transforms it into a meeting room, and the interrogation into the murders begins. Bailey's internal conflict between her touch aversion and her craving for Valerian underscores the chapter's simmering tension.
Chapter 14
Bailey investigates four brutal murders on the Council: succubus Tatum, found with an arrow through her heart; elf Ryan, her husband and the only elf on the Council, pushed from a cliff; dreamwalker Leal, mauled to death by his own doves in his lab; and animal-controller Gemma, torn in half. Hekima recreates the deaths through illusions, revealing Leal trusted his killer before the fatal shove. Kain tasks Bailey with establishing dream links to every Council member to uncover the murderer, warning that Leal possessed blackmail on everyone. They arrive at Leal's lab, where Bailey is left alone with the murderous birds and the promise of dark secrets in the dead man's notes.
Chapter 15
Asha searches the cluttered lab of dead dreamwalker Leal while trapped inside by Kain, her exhaustion mounting after months without sleep. With Felix guiding her remotely, she discovers a hidden Gomorran comms device behind an M.C. Escher painting and extracts three fragmented diary entries. The excerpts reveal Leal’s grim method of killing doves with a cheap drug to access the dream world, his struggles dreamwalking in werewolf territory, and his discovery of the “black window”—a technique to erase or hide memories within dreams. Realizing Leal may have concealed evidence in his victims’ dreamscapes, Asha faces a growing craving for the vampire blood in her pocket as she finds the lab door locked, leaving her imprisoned with only her cooing avian captors for company.
Chapter 16
Bailey awakens in her dream palace with her symbiont Pom, hoping to wake him to verify whether Valerian's appearance is an illusion. When mental shouting fails to rouse the creature, she attempts to master Consciousness Duplication—creating a second body and trying to inhabit both simultaneously—but sleep deprivation leaves her trapped in only one form. Frustrated, she manifests a dream doppelgänger of herself that seduces her, revealing her private fantasies before she freezes the construct. Felix interrupts her reverie about Valerian from the waking world, forcing her back to the lab where Kit has arrived to relieve Kain. Declaring her intent to interview the Council's strongest members, Bailey watches Kit transform into a towering orc and smash the door to prove her power, ending the chapter as the creature advances menacingly.
Chapter 17
The narrator, a dreamwalking therapist turned reluctant detective, interrogates Kit—a shapeshifter suspected of four murders—only to discover she possesses a verifiable alibi with Lola, a nymph. Though Kit’s ability to mimic the victims’ forms makes her the prime suspect, her emotional attachment to the deceased succubus Tatum and her willingness to share intimate details undermine the accusation. As tensions flare, they compile a list of physically powerful suspects including the vampire Kain, the giant Colton, the werewolf Eduardo, and the telekinetic Nina. The chapter culminates with a visit to Colton’s surprisingly modern kitchen, where the giant offers a goat-herding alibi while the narrator grapples with food-contamination paranoia and a prank order for his rival Firth. The investigation narrows but the killer’s identity remains elusive, heightened by the absence of Council member Bowser, whose lie-detection ability is currently off-world.
Chapter 18
Bailey continues her investigation into Council member Gemma's murder by interrogating suspects alongside the shapeshifting Kit and anxious Felix. They extract alibis from Eduardo, a werewolf alpha hunting with his pack; Nina, a telekinetic mid-yoga routine; and the hostile vampire Filth, who claims to have been working with Kain. Kain then pressures Bailey to establish dream links with every Council member to keep them paranoid, before leading her to his bedroom—a disturbing space lined with restraint equipment—where the chapter ends on a tense cliffhanger suggesting imminent danger.
Chapter 19
The narrator, a Dreamwalker, enters vampire Kain’s REM sleep to clear him of murdering Gemma, manipulating his dream into a reenactment that proves his innocence while also exonerating fellow Enforcers. Back in her new spartan quarters, she battles the side effects of diluted vampire blood—suppressed hunger, intense euphoria, and uncontrollable arousal—which she temporarily relieves through a conjured dream of Valerian before Kain interrupts with fury. She deflects his accusation by claiming she was verifying friend Kit’s alibi, which she confirms through Kit’s dream, clearing her as a suspect too. As Kain escorts her back to his dungeon bedroom, he demands their encounter remain secret, leaving the narrator under the weight of his threat, her blood addiction, and the still-unsolved murder of Gemma.
Chapter 20
Bailey is coerced by the vampire Kain—using a potent glamour that turns his eyes to mirrors—into entering the dreams of Gertrude, a murder suspect restrained to a bed. Gertrude suffers from REM Sleep Behavior Disorder and wields a gangrene-giving touch that rots flesh, forcing Bailey to use only the tips of her hair to access the subdream without losing a finger. As Bailey prepares to enter, they debate whether the missing dreamwalker Leal could have died in his dreams and turned homicidal, becoming a secondary killer. The chapter crackles with uneasy alliance and bodily threat: Kain promises to extract Bailey the moment REM sleep triggers Gertrude's free hand, leaving Bailey to navigate the lethal subdream alone while questioning if she will survive—or emerge insane.
Chapter 21
The chapter opens in a hallucinatory dreamscape where the narrator flees across a black ocean beneath magma skies, mounted on a furry unicorn. Pursued by monstrous warthog-spider mounts bearing tentacled mole-rat riders, the narrator fights for survival in brutal close combat—a tentacle lashes their neck, drawing blood, but the unicorn impales the attackers in a flurry of horn and hoof. Realizing this is a lethal subdream within their own palace, the narrator withdraws from their body to heal the wounds, narrowly avoiding dream-death. Yet the chapter closes on a sharper tension: Gertrude, now trapped in REM sleep, could awaken and touch them with her free hand at any moment, leaving the narrator exposed in a waking world that may be just as dangerous.
Chapter 22
Bailey wakes to find Gertrude's unbound hand swinging dangerously close and is pulled back by Kain, who insists she scrub her hands with detergent after potentially touching the vampire. Frustrated but cautious, Bailey learns that Gertrude was alone watching the film Catwoman at the time of the murder. To clear Gertrude's name, Bailey enters her dream but first gathers intel by visiting sleeping roommates Felix and Ariel in their subdreams—Felix provides a description of the film's star while Ariel supplies the plot. With the necessary details secured from her found family, Bailey prepares to confront Gertrude's trauma loop to verify her innocence, despite the danger.
Chapter 23
The narrator infiltrates the dreams of Council members to clear suspects in a murder investigation. First, they enter Gertrude's trauma loop—a harrowing memory where her latent condition accidentally destroys a lover during sleep—confirming her alibi as an innocent movie-watcher. Next, they visit the giant Colton, finding him peacefully herding goats in his dream, another false lead. Racing against dawn, they systematically connect with ninety percent of the Council, including the healer Isis, the illusionist Hekima, and the probability manipulator Chester, while Kain reveals Gertrude consumes vampire blood, making her susceptible to his glamour. Left locked in quarters as bait for the real killer, the narrator prepares to enter the traumatic subdream of Bernard Anderson, the final piece of the puzzle.
Chapter 24
The chapter opens inside a repeating trauma loop where the narrator watches Bernard Anderson’s marriage fracture as his wife packs to leave, enraged by his obsession with a missing-children case. When the loop breaks with a painful slap, the narrator wakes to find Filth—a vampire enforcer with predatory fangs—looming over them. Despite the threat of becoming a 'blood bag,' the narrator negotiates for information, confirming Filth supplies Gertrude with blood while citing Kain’s protection. After securing a lead on the Council’s voting and Mandate records, the narrator follows the hostile vampire into a sealed, ornately carved chamber, leaving the investigation’s next move and the approaching trauma loop hanging in the balance.
Chapter 25
In the vast paper library of Gomorrah—where printed books cost as much as a week of medical bills—the protagonist investigates Council voting records while evading suspicion. She encounters Chester, a probability manipulator accompanied by a massive white lion, who directs her to a specific stack of tomes in an act that smells like intimidation or self-clearing. Digging through the dusty volumes, she discovers Chester voted to execute her, and notices a chilling pattern: Chester only votes for the ultimate penalty in cases involving exposure of the Cognizant to humans, mirroring his own past expulsion for leaking secrets. The theory crystallizes that Chester is assassinating Councilors who once condemned their own kind. She enters Felix's dream to confirm her suspicions, but Kain interrupts, pulling her out to a supposedly private spot by the castle moat—where the elderly illusionist Hekima stands smoking, and a monstrous dinosaur-like creature erupts from the water to devour him in a single bite, leaving the conspiracy and the new predator unresolved.
Chapter 26
When Hekima is devoured by a monstrous creature on the bridge, the narrator and vampire enforcer Kain wake in terror only to find the body gone. Retreating to the dream world, they interrogate the nature of the beast—Nessie, a Loch Ness monster gifted to the Scottish Council—and debate whether this was murder or accident. With Gemma’s unique powers absent, suspicion drifts toward Chester and his probability manipulation, prompting them to check his Las Vegas alibi. Kain, desperate to protect his reputation as head of the Enforcers, locks the narrator in his quarters under strict orders to eat nothing and speak of nothing. Exhausted and fighting vampire-induced insomnia, she finally collapses into his bed only to be jolted awake at dawn. With Pom buzzing at her side, she dives into Chester’s dream to uncover the truth, the chapter closing on the threshold of his subconscious secrets.
Chapter 27
The chapter opens with Councilor Chester discovering his wife Matilda dead in a bathtub, an apparent suicide that drives him to fury. The dreamwalker protagonist enters Chester's dreams to investigate whether he murdered Gemma and Tatum, manipulating dream settings to verify alibis. Despite their mutual hatred—Chester voted to kill the narrator because his wife's death made him despise dreamwalkers—the investigation clears Chester of both murders, establishing an uneasy truce. Aided by the telepathic helper bird Pom, the narrator then checks fellow Councilor Nina's dreams, finding only telekinetic training and clearing her too. When Eduardo's quarters stand empty, the duo investigates remaining Councilors, ultimately discovering Albina dead in her bed with fatal neck trauma. The chapter closes on this new murder, deepening the conspiracy while the narrator's own life hangs in the balance from the Council vote.
Chapter 28
Adrenaline surges through the narrator as she witnesses Kain desperately feeding his blood to the dying Albina, only to watch the attempt fail and another life slip away. Consumed by guilt and a dangerous craving for vampire blood that borders on addiction, she self-administers a diluted dose to stave off collapse, her body betraying her with unhealed wounds. When the healer Isis arrives, she confirms Albina is beyond saving, and Kain’s murderous glare makes the stakes brutally clear: two Councilors are dead, and the narrator is next if more die on her watch. Racing to the werewolf Eduardo’s apartment, they find him in deep REM sleep and prepare to invade his dream to uncover the truth behind the murders, leaving the chapter poised on the edge of a psychic confrontation.
Chapter 29
Bailey enters the dream world with her helper Pom to practice the multibody technique from Leal’s diary. While she cannot yet occupy two bodies simultaneously, she discovers she can teleport between them, a functional workaround. She teleports into Eduardo the werewolf’s dream to verify his alibi, but finds him experiencing two overlapping dreams—one violent, one intimate—a phenomenon she believed impossible. The wolf detects her and bites her neck before she can escape, forcing her to wake. Back in reality, Kain confronts her, revealing he used glamour to extract the truth and now imprisons her in a room with orders for her execution. Trapped and anxious, she waits through the hours, retreating to the dream world to examine other sleepers, including Bernard, whose trauma loop worsens in a courtroom nightmare. The chapter ends as Kit’s voice abruptly interrupts Bailey’s fantasy of her employer Valerian, leaving her fate at the Council’s mercy unresolved.
Chapter 30
Firth wakes to learn Kit has secured a three-day reprieve from execution, though the Council remains hostile and Kain secretly voted to spare them despite his role as head of the Enforcers. When Kit offers to smuggle Firth out using her shapeshifting abilities, Firth refuses, needing Isis to heal their mother and unwilling to live under Kain's DNA surveillance. The tension escalates when Nina reveals she is Leal's "dead man's switch"—a living vault whose subconscious contains black windows hiding clues about Leal's killer, including one repressed memory that will return if Nina herself is guilty. Nina telekinetically pins Firth to the ceiling and threatens to kill them if they enter her personal black window. Despite the threat, Firth systematically clears Council members via dreamwalking until only the werewolf Eduardo and Nina remain, closing the chapter with Firth preparing to risk everything by entering Nina's dangerous hidden dreams.
Chapter 31
Puck and Nina meet in a dream sushi restaurant to hunt through Nina’s black windows—portals hidden in her dreams that hold memories Leal weaponized as a dead man’s switch. They breach two windows: one reveals Gemma forcing a werewolf through cruel trials, suggesting Eduardo had motive to kill her; the other exposes Tatum dominating Eduardo in an intimate encounter that reveals an affair and a grave offense of mind control. As they theorize Eduardo’s motives for murdering Leal, Gemma, and Tatum, Puck attempts a third window and nearly drowns in the freezing black lake where his powers fail. The chapter ends with him gasping underwater, the killer’s true secret still locked behind glass.
Chapter 32
The narrator awakens in a hallway after dying inside a dream, discovering her dreamwalking powers have vanished for the day. Confronting the vampiric Council member Kain, she names the werewolf Eduardo as the prime suspect—only for Kain to discover Eduardo murdered in his sleep. While trapped by Kain’s glamour, the narrator watches as a chemist named Roger finds a syringe containing a lethal sleep drug he designed for the deceased dreamwalker Leal. Though Gertrude publicly accuses the narrator of the killing, Kain dismisses the theory, declaring the narrator will be executed regardless for allowing a Council murder. Left paralyzed beside the corpse, the narrator faces imminent death as the true killer remains unidentified.
Chapter 33
Bailey awakens in the grip of glamour that masks her terror as Kain escorts her to a dungeon cell—the stripped remains of her former quarters. When she attempts to contact Felix via earpiece, Kain’s vampire hearing exposes the call; he crushes her devices and condemns Felix to death, leaving Bailey imprisoned with only a sliding bolt between them. Desperate and facing execution, she vomits into the cell’s sewage hole and weeps for her mother, whom she failed to save, and for the dreams she’ll never share. Cornered by a four-month sleep debt, she considers the vial of addictive vampire blood in her pocket but instead pours it away, choosing clarity over oblivion. Exhausted, she lies down on the stone floor and surrenders to sleep—knowing she will face her trauma loop alone.
Chapter 34
The narrator confronts their mother on Gomorrah about her worsening insomnia, nightmares, and retreat into VR isolation, pressing her to allow dreamwalking intervention despite a childhood oath forbidding it. Their heated argument ends with Mom storming out—and being struck by a rare self-driving car failure, leaving her in a coma with flat brain activity despite successful body trauma surgery. Facing crushing guilt and the prohibitive cost of private care, the narrator pledges to pay for a healer while battling their own trauma loop in a holding cell, haunted by the fear that they caused the accident and by unfulfilled longing for both a father and Valerian. As execution looms, the narrator surrenders to sleep, the chapter closing on the unresolved question of whether dreamwalking could save Mom—and whether the oath will hold.
Chapter 35
Isis and Spade ride through New York to a secret JFK hub, passing through a turquoise plasma gate to Gomorrah to heal Spade’s comatose mother. On the alien world of the single mega-city, they savor calorie-free manna before reaching the hospital, where Isis channels arcs of golden energy into the flat-lined patient, forcing the medical staff to disconnect the machines as Mom’s brain activity surges frantic and she awakens with a tender smile. Just as the reunion seems complete, Spade notices the Pom bracelet missing from her wrist—a sure sign she is dreaming. This healing was only a fantasy of what might have been had Eduardo not been the killer. Heartbroken, she retreats to her dream palace, leaving the false victory behind.
Chapter 36
The narrator confronts the devastating revelation that Pom, their furry symbiotic companion, cannot be separated without killing both of them, as their nervous systems have become irreversibly interlinked. Facing execution by the Council for murders they didn't commit, they deduce that Valerian—an illusionist with unrestricted access to the dream palace—is the likely killer who manipulated each Councilor's death through deceptive visions. With no concrete proof and only a theory, they decide to test their recovered dreamwalking abilities by entering Councilor Bernard's trauma loop, weighing whether to complete a lethal assignment for Valerian to secure promised funds despite his suspected guilt. The chapter closes with the narrator touching Bernard's scarred forehead, ready to venture into the subconscious.
Chapter 37
The narrator infiltrates Bernard’s dreamscape and finds his trauma loop in full, violent swing: the chained killer of Bernard’s son saws at his own wrist under duress until he attacks, forcing Bernard to unload his gun. After the memory dissolves, the narrator follows Bernard through later recollections of Valerian’s Bale Inc. keynote, realizing the illusionist plans to hijack human belief to amplify his Cognizant power. Seizing the chance, the narrator possesses Valerian within the dream and plants a cutting-edge VR algorithm into Bernard’s mind, ensuring the discovery will seem like his own. But when they return to the tower of sleepers, they find something impossible: the executed murderer is sleeping in a nook, alive in the dream realm.
Chapter 38
Confronting the supposedly dead Dr. Hekima, the narrator and Pom discover he is an illusionist who faked his death—making them believe a creature had devoured him—to hide his true purpose. Dreamwalking into Hekima’s trauma loop reveals his daughter Siti, also called Puck, was executed by the Council for using forbidden powers to ease the final pain of hospice patients. Enraged, Hekima infiltrated the Council through the Orientation program to systematically eliminate those who voted for her death, including Eduardo, Leal, and others. The narrator realizes Valerian was never the killer, but Hekima’s methods mirror what they suspected of Valerian. When the narrator accidentally reveals themselves within the dream, Hekima wakes by smashing his own nose, now knowing the narrator knows his secret. The chapter ends with the narrator back in their dungeon cell, trapped with the knowledge that a vengeful illusionist is hunting the Council while aware of their discovery.
Chapter 39
Waking refreshed in her cell, the narrator's mind finally clears after months of sleep deprivation, revealing the killer's identity: Hekima. Remembering the lockpicks from her earlier break-in at Bernard's apartment, she picks the padlock and slips into the corridor, where hope briefly flares—she only needs to reach the Council now that she knows the truth. But her escape is cut short when Filth corners her, his eyes turning mirror-like as he invokes glamour to freeze her as a 'blood bag.' The chapter closes on a cliffhanger of capture versus revelation, the protagonist's razor-sharp intellect pitted against supernatural coercion.
Chapter 40
Trapped in a Council cell, Asha feigns frozen helplessness while vampire Filth prepares to execute her—claiming she chose starvation over euthanasia. When he moves to drain her blood, she strikes with concealed lockpicks, driving them into his eye, but the vampire's preternatural strength quickly overpowers her. Battered and thrown against iron bars, Asha gasps for breath, her body wracked with pain as Filth advances with fangs bared, promising a slow death. With her last strength, she scans the corridor for the ray of hope she spotted moments before, knowing survival depends on finding an ally or escape route before the vampire closes in.
Chapter 41
The narrator, held captive by the vampire Filth in a castle corridor, is rescued when Ariel and Felix arrive armed for the Mandate ceremony. During a brutal fight, Ariel repeatedly stabs Filth while the narrator strikes him with a padlock, ultimately allowing Ariel to behead the vampire—a wound that cannot heal. As the narrator tends to his bleeding neck, Ariel faces a severe test of her vampire-blood addiction but resists the urge to consume the blood, spitting on the corpse instead. Suddenly, Hekima appears and projects illusions that make Ariel see the narrator as Kain, a murderer she hates, turning her against her ally. The chapter ends with Ariel attacking the narrator under the delusion, leaving their alliance fractured and the narrator in mortal danger.
Chapter 42
Puck is trapped in a jail cell as Ariel—whose superhuman strength is literally bending the reinforced bars—closes in. After witnessing her brutality toward Filth, Puck abandons any hope of fighting and bolts for the only escape route: a sewer grate. Though the fetid abyss represents a fate he considers worse than death, the stakes are existential: his friend Pom and his mother will perish unless he reaches the Council to prove Hekima is the real murderer. With heart hammering and senses sealed against the stench, Puck grips a sanitized blade and leaps into the darkness, trading certain capture for a desperate gamble on survival.
Chapter 43
The narrator plummets into the castle’s flooded sewers and surfaces in a viscous, stinking morass that threatens to drown or disgust them. With an open wound on their neck and only a folding knife for defense, they swim toward a distant light at the tunnel’s end, dreading the flesh-eating horrors that supposedly haunt these depths. When ripples signal an approaching threat, the narrator braces for another illusion—only to watch in primal terror as Nessie herself surfaces, jaws full of dagger teeth, ready to make the legend literal. The chapter closes on a fight-or-die cliffhanger as the monster lunges.
Chapter 44
The narrator battles Nessie, a massive aquatic cryptid with regenerative healing, in the castle's sewer system. After stabbing the creature's tongue and being ripped free, the narrator escapes by swimming frantically through underground waterways, bursting into the castle moat where monks happen to be carrying a goat. The monks sacrifice the animal to the pursuing beast, buying the narrator time to reach the coliseum chambers. Despite protests about bad timing and hygiene, the narrator insists on interrupting the Council's meeting to report the attack and warn them about an unnamed killer whose identity remains unfinished.
Chapter 45
Trapped in Hekima's Colosseum illusion, Asha faces the emperor who claims she knows too much and must die in self-defense, invoking the memory of Siti. Dressed in a fantastical gladiatrix costume, she battles a puck-like illusion that turns out to be a real, ordinary opponent she manages to knock down. But the stakes escalate when a drekavac materializes—a creature that kills with a touch—and Asha realizes Hekima plans to deploy Gertrude, the Councilor whose contact inflicts gangrene. The chapter shifts from defiant combat to cold dread as Asha understands this is no game: a lethal assassin waits in the wings, and the illusion may soon become fatal reality.
Chapter 46
Puck is trapped in Hekima's lethal illusion, battling a monstrous drekavac that is actually Gertrude reaching through the dream layer. After mentally waking his sleeping symbiont Pom, Puck perceives the overlap of illusion and reality, disarms Gertrude, and finds Felix unconscious nearby. While Kit morphs into a giant to attack Colton, the siren Nina telekinetically hurls stone benches through the chamber, killing Councilors on Hekima's revenge list. Puck joins Ariel to bludgeon the vampire Kain with a thirty-pound rock until she crushes him, only to watch Hekima turn his invisible telekinetic force on Nina, hurling Puck through the air as the chapter ends on a cliffhanger.
Chapter 47
Suspended in a gravity-bound space that isn’t the dream world, the narrator is hurled through the air by Hekima while Nina redirects their trajectory as if they were a drone. Desperate and suffering from sleep-deprivation-induced memory loss, they discover a forgotten sleep grenade from the Bernard job and gamble on it, activating the device mid-flight. The soporific gas floods the room, forcing everyone present—including the narrator—into unconsciousness as they crash onto Chester’s sleeping body. The sequence blends frantic aerial peril with dark humor, shifting from active evasion to a forced, group-wide blackout. Though the immediate crash is averted, the chapter closes on the narrator inhaling the gas and losing consciousness, leaving the Bernard job’s secrets and Nina’s ambiguous loyalties unresolved.
Chapter 48
Bailey awakens in a tomato-juice shower dream and realizes she must rally the sleeping New York Council to escape Hekima's psychic trap. Teleporting between dreamscapes, she briefs Kit, Nina, Chester, and others on the massacre's truth, securing a vote of amnesty for herself and her allies. When she infiltrates Hekima's dream to keep him asleep, he proves a formidable lucid dreamer, trapping her in a gladiatorial illusion. Using the risky Multiple Body Technique, Bailey splits her consciousness to battle a monstrous orc while restraining Hekima, nearly learning the secret of Soma—the hidden home of dreamwalkers—before her rival is knocked unconscious by an unseen ally. Waking with her execution stayed but Hekima's secrets intact, Bailey faces an uncertain future where allies heal her mother only if they survive the waking world.
Chapter 49
Bailey awakens fully healed in the Council chamber, where Isis has been mending the wounded—only to find the illusionist Hekima reduced to flayed remains by Kit, who fulfilled her grim vow to slay him as a drekavac. After a frantic shower and a charged encounter with the illusionist Valerian, who materializes in her quarters and trades flirtatious naked projections before vanishing, Bailey departs for Gomorrah with Isis to cure her comatose mother. At the hospital, Dr. Xipil oversees Isis’s golden healing, but her mother slips into an unprecedented dreamless sleep with zero REM cycles for thirty-six hours. Facing the threat of a feeding tube and overriding her vow never to invade her mother’s mind, Bailey finally breaks her promise and dives into her mother’s subconscious to wake her.
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Dream Walker by Dima Zales. https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/dream-walker Plot summaries, not full text.