Delaney's Shadow by Ingrid Weaver

pulling away from the presence on the bed.
    He didn’t move quickly enough. Something tingled across his back. Not a touch, yet deeper than a touch. It held him where he was as her voice slipped into his mind. “Don’t go. Please.”
    He felt himself start to soften, to lean into her, the way he used to. It was a reflex response. He gritted his teeth and held himself rigid. “What the hell do you want this time?”
    “Max?”
    “Who else did you expect?”
    “Max?”
    She sounded surprised. He didn’t know why she would, because this sure hadn’t been his idea. She’d been the one to bring him here.
    But where was here ? She’d drawn him into her grandparents’ yard this morning. He’d recognized the scene as it had formed around him, because she’d often played with him there. He glanced at the corner again. The plant and bookshelf seemed real, but the rest had the wavering haze of an unfinished dream. He swung his legs over the side of the bed.
    “Max, wait!”
    “This has to stop, Deedee. Quit barging into my head.”
    “Don’t leave me.”
    “Hey, you were the one who left me.”
    “What?”
    “Forget it. Go back to wherever it is you’ve been all these years. We’re done.”
    “Help me, Max. I . . . need you.”
    “What? To remember? I told you—”
    “No! I don’t want to remember this part.”
    The sounds of crunching metal grew closer. The glow in the distance—in the corner—brightened until flames covered the plant and licked up the walls. At their core was a dark mass, part car wreckage, part seaweed, writhing in rhythm with the screeching metal. As he watched, it stretched tendrils across the floor toward his feet.
    This wasn’t a dream; it was a nightmare.
    Deedee’s nightmare.
    Max twisted to look at the bed. In the flickering light of the flames she had created, he could see the outline of her shape beside him. She had curled into a ball, her face pressed to her knees as she shivered and gasped for air. Someone was screaming, but it wasn’t Deedee; it was a man.
    The dark tendrils from the mass in the corner reached Max’s toes and flowed upward. Cold slime, like the muddy bottom of a pond, enveloped his ankles. He was being drawn toward the core of the nightmare.
    “Make it stop, Max. Please!”
    He could free himself with a snap of his thoughts. She was the one who was generating this image, not him. He could break the connection between them as he had before and be back in his own bed in the next second.
    That was what he should do. She didn’t belong in his life. This was the second time she’d ambushed him when his mental defenses were down, and she had no right. The boy she was looking for didn’t exist any longer. He owed her nothing.
    “I’m begging you, Max.” She was shaking so badly her teeth chattered. “I can’t do this alone. Help me. Keep me safe . ”
    For all its urgency, the plea was silent. It was here and yet not here, like all the other words she’d spoken and the bed he sat on and the room he was in.
    Yet it held him in place as firmly as her touch that hadn’t been a touch . . .
    Damn. Damn! Max kicked loose from the slime that gripped his feet and swung his legs back onto her bed. “You’re okay, Deedee. It’s only a dream.”
    She moaned. “It’s real.”
    “It’s a dream,” he repeated. “It won’t hurt you.”
    “It will. It always does.”
    Always? Had she experienced this horror before?
    Light flared from the corner, sending the flames racing along the ceiling while the dark seaweed tendrils crept over the edges of the mattress and up the bedposts. Deedee wrapped her arms around her legs and curled more tightly into her ball.
    Max inched closer and leaned over her until he sensed the curve of her ear beneath his lips. “Deedee, you have to stop this.”
    “How?”
    The slime touched his feet again. He braced his hands beside her and shifted to his knees. “You know how. Go somewhere else.”
    “I can’t.”
    “We’ll go