CRIMINAL CHRISTMAS: A Set of 8 Holiday Suspense Stories, page 19
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Books in the Justice Team Series
Stealing Justice
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Romantic suspense books available by Adrienne Giordano:
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Risking Trust Relentless Pursuit
Man Law Opposing Forces
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Dog Collar Crime (Romantic Mystery)
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Book 4 - Christmas Interrupted
Kim Hornsby
Also called The Dream Jumper’s Christmas
Dedication
To Cresty, whose enthusiasm for my writing goes beyond a neighbor’s politeness.
Christmas Interrupted Copyright 2015, Top Ten Press
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Top Ten Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Kim Hornsby
www.kimhornsbyauthor.net
Christmas Interrupted
(The Dream Jumper Series)
A Holiday Suspense Novella
By KIM HORNSBY
Although this is a companion novella to the Dream Jumper Series, Christmas Interrupted is a standalone story, and it’s not necessary to read The Dream Jumper’s Promise, The Dream Jumper’s Secret, or The Dream Jumper’s Pursuit to understand or enjoy this novella.
Christmas Interrupted follows Book 3 in the timeline.
Christmas Interrupted
Chapter 1
Tina floated among the decrepit ruins of the sunken ship and signaled for her husband, Jamey, to follow. The dive they’d chosen was a wrecked pirate ship at twenty-five feet under, somewhere in the Caribbean. Who knew if such a place actually existed beyond her mind, but as Jamey said, “Darlin’, if you can imagine it, we can go there in a dream.”
Before falling asleep, they’d decided on a wreck dive. Both scuba instructors, they hadn’t had a good dive together in months. December on Maui had seen some rain and consequently soil run off that made poor beach diving conditions. And their dive boat was always busy these days with tourists. Making money. Besides, diving with paying customers, they had a baby to consider now and taking off for the afternoon to dive was more difficult than it had been before Kai’s arrival almost a year ago. Dreaming a dive was doable.
If anyone had told Tina two years ago that she’d have this vivid dream life, she would’ve laughed in their face. Until Jamey, she hadn’t believed in paranormal mumbo jumbo at all. She was a business major with a traditional upbringing by two very conservative parents. Then the mumbo jumbo became her life—entering other people’s dreams, sharing lucid dreams, even telepathy, which Jamey called hyper-intuition as a way of soft-peddling a “freaky-ass ability.”
They kicked their way to the sunken pirate ship through crystal clear, turquoise water. Tina led the dive. She was the dive instructor with the most experience, the boss underwater, and now the main dream jumper. Ever since Jamey lost his ability and she’d inherited it, she took him along on these fantasy dreams. Her husband wasn’t totally happy to follow, but, for a macho kind of man, he was a good sport.
Tina pulled herself through a doorway on the schooner and maneuvered down the stairs to what looked like the ship’s dining room. A long wooden table and benches dominated the room. As ordered, the visibility of the water was extraordinary, the fish plentiful and the exploration of this fictitious pirate ship fascinating. A large candelabra dominated the center of the dining table, an ornate chair with carvings of mermaids at one end.
When she turned to Jamey, he wasn’t there. Hadn’t he followed her? She kicked herself up the stairs to the deck, but Jamey was nowhere to be seen. That was strange. He couldn’t leave a dream without her, so where was he? If he’d woken, she would’ve too.
Tina took away the water from the dream and suddenly stood on the deck. “Jamey? Where’d you go?”
No answer.
Where the hell was he?
The ship wasn’t so large that he wouldn’t hear her. “Jamey?” Nothing. She glanced over the railing to see that the vessel now rested on a sandy bed in what used to be a picturesque bay. Then, she heard an anguished cry from her husband.
“No!” Jamey’s voice sounded very far away and seemed to come from every direction.
Tina ran to the bow’s highest point, frantic to find him. Aside from that one word, the dream was deathly quiet around her.
Footsteps ran up the wooden stairs and Jamey emerged from the doorway.
“Where were you? We stay together in dreams.” Now that he was safe and in front of her, she was angry.
“We need to end this.” His face had that shut up and follow my lead look. “I’ll tell you what happened when we jump out.”
She didn’t ask why. Didn’t need to. Jamey was the expert dreamer. They joined hands, ran to where they’d arrived, and on Jamey’s “1, 2, 3…” jumped into the air.
The trip back to their prone bodies was less than two seconds from the moment they jumped. Tina opened her eyes, still holding her husband’s hand from when they fell into the dream, probably only minutes earlier. “Where did you go?” She sensed something was wrong, her ESP another ability she didn’t particularly embrace.
Jamey sat up in bed. “I was taken into another dream.”
That was impossible. “How?”
“I don’t know. But Pops’ house was on fire. Burning to the ground. It was snowy and Pops was inside, trapped in his bedroom. I kept yelling at him to jump out the window, into the snow, but he wouldn’t.” Jamey turned to her, his eyes skittish with emotion. “He just watched me, nodding like this was his time to die. He didn’t even try to escape.”
Tina slid over to wrap her arms around his shoulders. “Was it a proph?” They’d taken to calling dream premonitions this name, shortening the word prophetic.
“I couldn’t tell. Everything was on fire. I don’t know.” Jamey was rattled, a state she rarely saw with her confident husband, the ex-cop and soldier. “There was a Christmas tree in the window.”
Prophs were easy to tell with pale colors and fuzzy edges. “…it was probably just a bad dream.” Pops was a capable person, still spry in his mid-seventies. “Your dad wouldn’t just let himself die inside a burning house. He has a fighting instinct.”
Jamey’s breathing was labored from the dream. “You’re probably right.”
In another two weeks, she and Jamey would head to the mainland with Kai to spend Christmas in snowy Carnation, Washington. Maybe Jamey was worried about his father’s health again. “How did you enter a different dream?” She tried to get him to focus on something else even though the most concerning part was Pops’ house burning down.
Jamey reached for his cell phone on the bedside table. “Not sure. I’m calling.”
Tina waited, her cheek on the back of her husband’s shoulder. For over a year, she’d been leading these dreams they called Fantasy Fun Time. Jamey had never left one in the middle. Her timing of the dream was his timing, like he was attached to her. She’d shared probably a hundred dreams with Jamey ever since he’d unknowingly passed a thirty-four-year-old ability to her.
“Pops, you okay?” Jamey said. It would be three hours later on the west coast but still too early for a leisurely phone call. “Sorry I woke you.”
She watched him in the darkness of their bedroom. Jamey’s father was used to years of phone calls in the middle of the night. He didn’t need details.
“Just a bad dream, I guess.” Jamey mumbled to his father. “Don’t get your Christmas tree until I get there, okay?” He hung up, then turned to Tina. “He hasn’t got the tree yet. Either I drifted from your dream into a proph or the proph was still part of our diving dream. I had a very strong feeling that Pops’ house is going to burn down.” He took a deep breath. “I need to get to Carnation. See what’s going on. I’ll have to leave tomorrow.”
She nodded. Two things. Jamey wasn’t an alarmist and Jamey was rarely wrong.
****
The next day, Pops met Jamey curbside at SeaTac airport, south of Seattle. Jamey threw a duffle bag in the back of the old Ford truck and hopped in the cab. “Surprise.”
“Good to see you early, Kid.” Pops navigated away from the curb, and in to traffic.
“Sorry to arrive during rush hour.” Jamey patted his father’s dog, Harry, who sat on the bench seat between them.
“No problem. It’ll give us some chew-the-fat time,” Pops said.
That was Pops. Always saw the silver lining. And for that reason, Jamey hadn’t told his seventy-five-year-old father that he’d seen him in the window of his bedroom while the house burned down around him. Only that he was coming to Seattle ahead of his wife and son for many reasons, including more time with his twin daughters who lived nearby. His dad seemed to buy that, especially when Jamey reminded him he’d had a bad dream. Pops knew all about Jamey’s dreams, jumping, prophs, remembrances, and all the intricacies of the ability.
In some ways, Pops was more the expert on dream jumping than Jamey having spent his whole life listening to accounts of jumps from his brother Don—someone who was now dead from a heart attack during a jump with a serial killer. Throughout his childhood, Pops had been Don’s go-to for dream jumping and now was Jamey’s. This made him what Jamey teased “the encyclopedia of dream jumping,” keeping mental notes of the ability’s particulars to help him make sense of a life Jamey hadn’t chosen.
On the fifty minute drive to Carnation from the airport, Jamey even told his father the secret he’d been keeping from Tina for months. Something he guarded against detection on a daily basis. “I’m jumping again. I got it back, but I can’t tell Tina. Not yet.”
Pops looked to his son with raised eyebrows, “How’s that going, keeping a secret from your smart wife?”
“I’ve done harder things in my life,” he answered. “She can’t know, or it puts her in a difficult position if the military comes for me. I don’t want anyone on that psychic team in Afghanistan picking her brain for information about my ability.”
“You’ve done a good job keeping her safe from induction,” Pops added.
Jamey had to agree, although it hadn’t been easy. Recently, his Special Forces Unit Commander, Milton, told him they didn’t need a dream jumper anymore. Jamey had been on leave since he lost the ability over two years earlier. “If they knew the extent of Tina’s abilities, they’d be after her before they could say “We love psychics.”
Pops nodded.
“Although, Milton told me they have better options on the Force now for honing in on enemy secrets. They don’t need dream jumping.” Jamey looked out the truck window at the gorgeous Seattle downtown skyline as they turned east towards Carnation. “Until I’m released from duty, I have to keep pretending I can’t jump on my own, just in case Milton is lying about his hot-shot new psychics. I think he’d still love to pull a confession out of me. I’ll keep lying to Tina for her own good. I don’t want her to know, get probed by those telepathic freaks and then both she and I would be up the Kandahar creek without a paddle.”
“How’d you get jumping back?”
“Not sure, but I entered Kai’s baby dream a few months ago on my own.” Jamey chuckled to think how basic a baby’s dream actually is. “It’s strange I lost the ability after weird brain activity on a bad jump with another jumper, and I got it back with an innocent baby dream. Over the last few months, I’ve thought a lot about what might have restarted my ability, but don’t have a definite conclusion. Only that maybe it had to grow from a very basic dream. Maybe I needed a simple baby dream, something short and sweet to take hold of.” He smiled at his dad. “I wondered if Kai’s a jumper and pulled me into his dream like Tina does.”
“Have you entered other people’s dreams besides jumpers’?”
He knew why Pops asked. If not, it probably meant Kai was a jumper and Jamey still wasn’t. “I have.” He looked at his dad in the driver seat. “I needed to test it after Kai’s dream, but you remember, I have to be touching the dreamer, so that was a tough one. We had friends over with a napping baby, and that worked. Then, the next day I was on the boat with a friend when he fell asleep on the way back from fishing.”
“Hopefully he didn’t wake up with you touching him inappropriately,” Pops smiled.
Jamey shook his head. “That would’ve been hard to explain.” The two men chuckled. “His dream was more elaborate and it took a while to get in, but I did. I wondered if my ability had to grow again before I could jump adult normals.”
“That makes sense,” Pops chuckled. “If anything about dream jumping actually makes sense.”
They zipped along Interstate Highway 90, and soon pulled off at Fall City towards Carnation. Jamey was amazed how much snow they had in his hometown as they drove over the bridge, turned right and headed down the road. Soon they were navigating Pops’ long driveway. “You said there’d be snow, but I thought you were just trying to get your grandson here for Christmas,” Jamey said.
“Callin’ me a liar?” Pops parked the truck. They exited the garage and Jamey headed for the house. A house where Pops had raised four children, pretty much by himself. Pops waited with Harry, the mixed breed, who was sniffing around the back yard.
“I’ll be there in a jiffy, Pops said. “Harry needs to make some yellow snow.”
Inside, Jamey did a quick check of the main floor to look for anything suspicious. Anything that might stand out as a fire hazard. There were no old rags soaked in anything flammable lying around, no faulty wires springing from lamps. In the basement, the fuse box looked normal, there was nothing to suggest that the house would go up in flames in the next few weeks. But, in the dream he’d seen a Christmas tree in the front window. It had to happen soon. In his hurried inspection, Jamey had noted that Pops did not have his Christmas tree yet. That was good.
The house looked like it always did—from the outside, in need of a coat of paint and a new roof, and from the inside, full of family photographs and old, familiar furniture. The only things Jamey could see that were different in the last few months were a string of twinkling Christmas lights over the fireplace in the front room and a large box full of decorations and lights where the tree would eventually go. Pops saved the decorating for Jamey and his daughters. His girls lived for this sort of thing.
Gavin, his oldest brother, was coming over tomorrow to offer a second opinion on the house’s safety. Besides Tina, Gavin was the only other person who’d heard Jamey’s dream in horrible detail. And Gavin had been justifiably worried. He’d seen his brother’s premonitions come true too many times to not worry.
“You can prevent this, right?” he’d asked Jamey on the phone.
“Absolutely.” Years earlier, Jamey had realized that the future could be altered from a prophetic dream with careful interference. And he planned to interfere, in a big way. For starters, he planned to take down the old Christmas lights at the front of the house with the excuse that he wanted to replace some bulbs. He’d buy new ones, just to be safe. Pops had owned those things for decades. The front yard tree looked okay. Pops had paid a handyman to decorate the twenty foot Douglas fir tree on the front lawn, but that thing wasn’t close enough to the house to be a threat. Jamey didn’t even recall seeing the tree in the burning dream. He’d update the smoke detectors, buy some extinguishers, and have an inspector come out to check the house, among other things.
