Ambushed by Dean Murray

make any sound. Even so, it only took me a couple
of seconds to get far enough to the side to see that Eric understood
just how thin the ice he was standing on was.
    "Don't
play with me, Eric. You were the one who approached me. In the last
five years there hasn't been a single time when you didn't have
something to report, some new development or rumor."
    "There's
nothing—I swear it!"
    Taggart
grabbed him by the throat. "I can make your life misery
incarnate. Imagine going to sleep every night worried about what
would be waiting for you here. Do you know how often you have to
torture someone to drive them insane? It varies from person to
person, but I don't think it would take much to send you over the
edge. If you want out then just say so, but don't waste my time,
don't try to play me. I won't be mocked."
    Eric
shifted forms, becoming a hybrid in an explosion of flesh and power
that knocked Taggart away. Taggart responded in kind, transforming
into a hybrid before he'd even finished rolling back to his feet. My
heart shot up to my throat as the two hybrids circled.
    "I've
wanted out for years now, but you're never going to let me go. If I
stop helping you, then in your mind I'm no better than any other
Coun'hij enforcer. You'll still come here and spy on my dreams,
you'll report everything you learn to Agony, and one day I'll turn
around and find him waiting for me. I'm good, but I'm no match for
Agony."
    Taggart's
voice came out low and savage. "We're at war, Eric. You have to
choose a side. I'll respect your choice, but that doesn't mean that
you get to sit out the fighting."
    There
was an edge of hysteria to Eric's laugh. "I never had a choice.
Once you picked me, once you managed to make contact with me, it was
only a matter of time before I was going to end up dead. I've been
playing a losing hand ever since then. I tried to convince myself
that I was doing something good by helping you, that I was honoring
Audrey's memory, but the truth is that I've been scared every moment
of every day since you found me."
    "You
always have a choice, Eric. It's not my fault that you're too craven
to make the choice that you wanted to, not now, not five years ago,
not twenty years ago. That's on you."
    "Yeah,
well, the joke's on you. Dream Stealer, the master manipulator, the
man who is better than anyone else at turning people and corrupting
them. You pushed me too far, the fear got to be too much and I
couldn't manage to avoid suspicion anymore. They know."
    The
fear that I was about to witness a massive fight was replaced by a
certainty that Taggart and I had just walked into a trap.
    Taggart
apparently felt the same way. He dodged to the right a split second
before another hybrid appeared out of thin air and tried to rip his
heart out of his chest.
    Everything
happened so quickly that my head spun. I shouldn't have been able to
follow it all. Shape shifters fought with such blinding speed that
humans had no hope of keeping up with the lightning-fast exchanges,
but somehow I was able to see what was going on.
    The
new hybrid, a hulking, red-furred monstrosity, missed his initial
attack, but pivoted on one foot and caught Taggart in the shoulder,
scoring what looked like a shallow set of slices in the muscle there.
Eric took advantage of Taggart's apparent preoccupation with the
newcomer to try and charge him from behind, only to run into a
featureless black slab of rock that materialized out of thin air
between one heartbeat and the next.
    As
Eric reeled drunkenly away from the rock wall, it disappeared and
Taggart attacked the red hybrid. I'd always thought that Taggart was
impossibly huge in his hybrid form, but he gave up an inch or two in
height and even more than that in reach to this newcomer.
    I
was pretty sure that in a purely physical confrontation that Taggart
was going to come out second place, but the red hybrid wasn't just up
against Taggart, he was up against Dream Stealer, the man who'd spent
two centuries inside