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single most important person in your life."
     
     

Chapter 4
    Isaac Nazir
I-30
Western Arkansas
    We made it
through the night without any problems. I got a full three hours of
sleep, and then once Ash was satisfied that I wasn't going to pass
out at the drop of a hat he finally resigned the wheel and let me
drive until almost dawn while he slept.
    Kristin slept
the entire time without waking up, but it wasn't a peaceful slumber
by any stretch of the imagination. She thrashed around almost
constantly while Ash was asleep in the back of the SUV, and a few
times she yelled loud enough that she woke up Ash.
    It was one of
the more disturbing experiences that I'd had to endure. It felt like
I was sitting next to a bomb. Dream Stealer had a long history of
driving people insane, he just usually worked with a finer touch than
this. Most of the time his victims didn't even realize what was going
on until it was too late.
    From the
outside, most people never even saw it coming. You woke up one
morning and met a friend for breakfast. Maybe it was your girlfriend,
maybe it was a buddy you'd known since before you could walk.
    Sometimes you
knew that they'd been struggling with insomnia, sometimes you didn't.
Maybe they weren't there when you arrived at
the restaurant, maybe they arrived late, maybe they never arrived at
all and you didn't know what had happened until you saw the special
report on the news later that day.
    Sometimes
they snapped and drove a fuel truck into an elementary school. Other
times they walked up to you and stabbed you in the chest before you
could get out of your seat. There was no telling how one of Dream
Stealer's victims would go off of the rails, but they all went off of
the deep end eventually and they usually took someone else with them
when it happened.
    Ash
seemed confident that Kristin still had things under control, but I
wasn't so sure. Dream Stealer had turned two-hundred-year-old shape
shifters. A teenage girl who occasionally had visions of the future
didn't stand a chance against him no matter how spunky she was.
    I
spent the entire time I was driving worried Kristin was going to wake
up and try to stick a knife in the side of my neck. It wasn't exactly
conducive to recovering from nearly being disemboweled, so I
protested a lot less than normal when Ash offered to relieve me
behind the wheel.
    We
made the switch at the next gas station and then hit another
drive-through for a fatty breakfast of sausage and biscuits that had
plenty of calories to stoke bodies that had all been pushed to
their limits in one way or another.
    The
smell of the food was enough to finally wake Kristin, but she was so
groggy that I was done with my food before she'd done much more than
start picking at hers. I made a mental note to ask Ash if the
lethargy was a new development as I pulled out my tablet and plugged
it into the keyboard that turned it into the equivalent of a laptop.
    "Is
that safe given what happened the last time you fired up one of your
gadgets?"
    I
was pretty sure Kristin was trying to get a rise out of me. Knowing
that made it easier to avoid rising to the bait.
    "My
tablet doesn't have any kind of cellular connection on it and I've
even got the wi-fi turned off. There is zero chance of anyone using
this to track us down. Besides, you're one to talk."
    Ash
shot me a look and then reached over with his free hand and
intertwined his fingers with Kristin's.
    "Isaac
knows. He figured it out last night."
    Kristin
almost seemed to come apart before my very eyes. The facade of the
strong, independent, devil-may-care woman crumbled into pieces and
for the first time I could remember I saw real fear in Kristin's
eyes.
    "What
are you going to do now that you know?"
    Ash
interrupted before I could respond. "He's not going to hurt you.
Even if he wanted to I wouldn't let anything happen to you."
    Kristin
gave Ash a sad smile before she turned back to me. "Isaac is a
big boy, he can answer the question for