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  He muttered, low, a small curse. He fucked his fist a little faster, then slowed to squeeze just behind the head to keep his orgasm at bay for a little longer. With his other hand, he slid his thumb down the seam of his balls, pressing that sweet spot that would not only help him fend off the climax but also make it that much more intense.

  Up, up, tighter, twisted. The pleasure built and surged, and Kent rocked with it. Until finally, there it was, that moment of no return. Like that initial crest of a roller coaster in the front car, looking over that precipice before the first screaming, delighted plunge. Ecstasy burst through him. His cock pumped, spurting his belly with hot fluid. Spent, gasping, he let the last final strokes finish him off.

  Blinking, Kent stared at the ceiling while his heartbeat slowed. The stickiness on his skin prompted him to roll a little to grab a cloth from the nightstand. Cleaned up, he settled back onto the pillows and closed his eyes. He sought sleep.

  When he couldn’t find it, he contented himself again with thoughts of Stephanie’s laughter and the curve of her smile.

  CHAPTER 8

  The sly beep of an incoming text tugged at Stephanie’s subconscious just as she was turning around in her usual entry spot into the Ephemeros. She ignored the text. She had only a few hours before dawn, and while she wasn’t going to have any trouble sleeping far past that, all of the times she’d encountered the thief had been during local “normal” sleeping hours.

  That didn’t mean he was actually in her area or time zone, just that he was sleeping during those times. Experience had taught her, though, that it was likely the shaper who was pulling these stunts was in fact pretty close to her. It was why Vadim had sent her here to Central Pennsylvania to find him. She could’ve worked remotely from California, sure, but it would’ve meant a fucked-up sleep schedule for her.

  Sinking deeper into the dream, Stephanie focused on her representation. She’d worked cases where she’d had to use a different sort of face and body, even a few times a different form altogether, and she liked the challenges of forming and keeping those changes. This case hadn’t required her to be anything other than who she was, at least beyond the fashions. So far, though, that hadn’t worked out so well for her. The closest she’d come to getting near the perp was the night she’d represented in that romantic gown, and look what had happened.

  Kent.

  What had that all been about tonight? Cheesecake. Laughter. He’d very carefully not tried anything even remotely romantic. Should she have been relieved or offended? Maybe she ought to have been a little more aggressive. Made the first move.

  She didn’t have time to worry about that now. She was going to find out the real-world identity of Mr. Slick tonight if she had to travel the entire Ephemeros to do it. Then she’d be done with this job and that would mean the weird work issue with Kent would no longer matter. Of course, it also meant she’d probably be heading back to California.

  She’d worry about that part later, too.

  For now, Stephanie stretched, loving the way her muscles and bones worked together inside the dream world. Nothing hurt, nothing cramped or ached. Sure, she could get injured if she wasn’t careful, but she’d been doing this for such a long time that the only way she really got hurt was if someone did something to her before she could stop them, and not something nice like shaping a platter of dessert in front of her or tempting her into a kiss she really wanted anyway.

  On her last case she’d ended up going face-to-face with a woman bent on terrorizing her cheating husband into a heart attack while he slept—that bitch had been righteously crazy, and while Stephanie couldn’t blame her for wanting revenge, murder was still murder even if you committed it while you were sleeping. That woman had claimed not to know she was shaping anything, but her innocence had been a farce, proven when she’d turned herself into a mass of seething snakes and launched herself at Stephanie. The bites had been excruciating, leaving scars, but nothing Stephanie hadn’t been able to handle. She’d managed to wrestle them into a knot and shove them inside a box, slamming and locking the lid until the woman had begged for release.

  Of course, her remorse might not be lasting. That was the problem with punishment in the Ephemeros. You couldn’t make it stick, not without doing major harm to the sleeper’s real-world body. Putting someone in a permanent coma to keep them imprisoned in the dream world was a last resort, saved for only the worst sorts of criminals.

  Stephanie’s goal on this case was to find out Mr. Slick’s real-world counterpart and then send the information to Vadim. Other members of the Crew would connect him to the actual thefts. It might require some fancy finagling of records or “proof,” because it wasn’t as though they could go in and explain how he’d been using dreams to manipulate people into giving him their financial information so he could simply take what he wanted without leaving a trace. But it was Vadim’s job to assign a Crew member skilled in creating those sorts of tracks, not hers.

  Her job was to find out who he was.

  When she had, she was going to take a long vacation, just as she’d promised Denise. Someplace warm, with lots of drinks and food and dancing, and she would stay up late every night and barely sleep at all.

  Stephanie settled deeper into the dream world with a concerted push of her will. She was aware, as always, of her sleeping body. Her head on the pillow. The weight of the blankets. The white-noise machine. Those things were her touchstones. Her way back in the unlikely event she found herself lost in here. It had never happened to her, but she knew it could.

  Every shaper she’d ever met knew the stories of others who’d lost their way and couldn’t wake up. She’d never met one, had not in fact met anyone who ever had, but like urban legends about bodies stuffed beneath hotel mattresses and spider eggs in bubble gum, there was always someone who knew someone who’d heard about someone else. Unlike the spider eggs, Stephanie believed in the real truth of being made incapable of getting out of the Ephemeros.

  It was also not likely she was going to come across Mr. Slick tonight, it being so close to morning, but she figured she had to try. Where might he be? How about a place where a lot of other people were still clinging to their dreams before the alarms went off. So she opened herself to the push and pull of the collective will that shaped the dream world and let herself be drawn toward... What would it be tonight?

  The last time it had been that Victorian mansion. Sometimes it was a dance club, others an amusement park, a shopping mall, a stadium. The places where people congregated in the real world were often represented in the Ephemeros, too, sometimes with bits and pieces of all those sorts of locations all in one. Tonight it was a park, a big one, with green grass and trees and benches and sweetly curving paths on which some people strolled in old-fashioned clothes and others rode bikes or skated on wheels they’d manifested from the bottoms of their feet.

  She saw a few people manifesting with wings or horns or tails, a few curious creatures that looked like beasts but that she knew were really people who wanted, at least for a night, to be animal and not human. She saw no sign of her target. Maybe he’d had a run-in with the Crew before now and recognized her, or maybe he was just wily, because he always managed to disappear before she could get to him.

  “Hi,” said a man from beside her. He was dressed like Bert from Mary Poppins, the Disney version. Striped pants, white jacket, pink bow tie. A cartoonish penguin kept step beside him, a part of his manifestation and not a separate entity.

  “Not tonight, buddy. Sorry.” Stephanie shielded herself from the sleeper’s hesitant attempt at shaping her into the matching nanny to his chimney sweep. What sort of dream that guy was having, she had no desire to discover. She tried hard not to judge what people dreamed about, but damn, there were some things she really didn’t want to know.

  He was easy enough to put off. So was everything else going on. She