Page 16 of In Her Dreams (Jenna Graves #7)
Jenna stood at the center of a web that stretched all the way to the horizon, its intricate patterns shifting and pulsing with an otherworldly glow.
She recognized what it was immediately—a colossal dreamcatcher expanded to impossible proportions, its woven tendrils stretching beyond her field of vision.
Unlike the ugly, almost menacing dreamcatchers found in the bedrooms of Richard Winters and Anita Palmer, this one possessed a terrible beauty.
Each strand hummed with energy, vibrating like plucked guitar strings, sending tremors through the air.
She knew this wasn’t just any dream—it was one of those dreams, the lucid kind where the dead sought her out.
“Hello?” Her voice didn’t echo as it should have in such a vast space. Instead, it seemed to be absorbed by the network of lines, the sound becoming part of its pulsing rhythm.
Movement caught her eye—a figure materializing in the distance, wavering like a mirage on hot asphalt. As it drew closer, Jenna’s breath caught in her throat.
“Sam?”
Samuel Rodriguez stood before her, but not as she’d last seen him.
His form flickered between the robust police officer she had known for years and something more insubstantial—translucent at the edges, like watercolor bleeding into paper.
The dreamcatcher’s tendrils seemed aware of his presence, reaching out toward him with slow, deliberate movements.
“Sam, what are you doing here?” Jenna took a step forward, her own police instincts giving way to the dread that too often came with these visitations.
Sam had been retired for six years now, still struggling with his agoraphobia.
His anxiety disorder had made it increasingly hard for him to go anywhere that he couldn’t get out of easily.
Crowded places were difficult, wide open spaces impossible.
He’d finally felt unable to leave his own home, but he’d been very much alive the last time she’d checked.
But here he was in her dream, and that had to mean…
His mouth opened, but no sound emerged. The frustration in his eyes was unmistakable—the same look he’d worn when trying to teach her how to properly fill out incident reports her first week on the job.
As Jenna approached him, the dreamscape shifted violently.
The vast emptiness around them suddenly contracted, forming walls, a ceiling, a floor—a small room barely big enough for the two of them.
Before she could adjust, it expanded again, walls flying outward to create an immense hall where she couldn’t see the crowd of faceless people she knew were there.
Then it changed again—an endless empty plain under a bruised purple sky.
“Your agoraphobia,” Jenna whispered, understanding dawning. “This is what it feels like for you.”
Sam’s face twisted with recognition, his eyes widening with each spatial transition. But the terror in his expression went beyond the fear she’d seen when he’d had panic attacks during his last years on the force. This was something deeper, more primal.
He began making frantic gestures, pointing at himself, then outward, pantomiming something Jenna couldn’t decipher. His movements grew increasingly agitated, his ghostly form becoming more solid as his emotion intensified.
“I don’t understand, Sam. What are you trying to tell me?”
Frustration contorted his features. He looked around desperately, then mimed writing.
Suddenly, a leather-bound journal appeared in his hands—familiar to Jenna as the sort of pocket notebook he’d always carried throughout his career.
He flipped it open and began writing furiously, his phantom pen scratching across the pages with urgency.
Jenna leaned over, trying to read the words, but they shifted and blurred before her eyes, refusing to remain still long enough to comprehend. The letters twisted into impossible shapes, rearranging themselves like living things.
“I can’t read it, Sam. It won’t stay still.”
The air grew colder around them, and Jenna sensed rather than saw the arrival of others.
Turning, she found herself face to face with Richard Winters and Anita Palmer.
They stood side by side, their appearances flickering like old film projections—there one moment, transparent the next.
Richard’s hand pressed against his chest in the same gesture he’d made during his fatal panic attack.
Anita’s eyes darted nervously around the space, as if searching for birds that might materialize at any moment.
“Richard. Anita.” Jenna acknowledged them, a lump forming in her throat. “Can you help him? Can you tell me what he’s trying to say?”
Their expressions were a mixture of pity and resignation. Richard shook his head slowly, his banker’s formality still evident in the set of his shoulders. Anita wrung her hands, her young face displaying the same terror it had shown in death.
“Please,” Jenna implored. “What’s happening? Why are you all here?”
But they remained silent, offering no answers, their presence speaking of shared trauma that transcended explanation.
As Sam continued his desperate attempt to communicate, memories flooded Jenna’s mind.
Sam on her first day as a rookie cop, his patient smile as he showed her how to properly wear her utility belt.
Sam bringing her coffee during an all-night stakeout, telling stories about Frank’s early days to keep her awake.
Sam standing beside her at her father’s funeral, his hand steady on her shoulder when she thought she might collapse under her grief.
Sam had been there for every milestone of her career, every triumph and failure, a constant presence like Frank—not quite a father, but something close—a kindly uncle perhaps. The thought that he might now be gone sent a wave of anguish through her that physically hurt.
The writing stopped. Sam looked up, his eyes meeting hers with an intensity that answered her question more clearly than words ever could.
He tore a page from the journal, crumpled it in his fist, and threw it aside in frustration. As it flew through the air, it soared upward, only to be caught in the web of the dreamcatcher above them.
Sam tore another page. Another brief flight until it became ensnared.
Page after page, until the air was filled with them, sailing around them until a rising howl of wind whipping through the dreamscape carried them away.
“Sam, stop!” Jenna reached for him, but her hands passed through his form as if through smoke.
The dreamscape began to warp around them.
The vast spaces that had been expanding and contracting now began to close in with terrifying speed.
Walls rushed inward, the sky descended like a falling ceiling, the very air becoming dense and oppressive.
The spatial distortions were no longer random—they were collapsing, crushing everything in their path.
Sam’s form began to distort, stretched and compressed by the forces around him. His face elongated in a silent scream as the web descended, its tendrils wrapping around him like hungry fingers.
“No!” Jenna lunged forward, desperate to save him, but the distance between them stretched impossibly. Sam receded from her grasp even as the space between them shrank.
In a final, horrifying moment, Sam’s body seemed to fold in on itself, his worst fear consuming him completely. The web enveloped him, and with a silent implosion, he vanished, leaving nothing but a ripple in the fabric of the dream.
Richard and Anita faded away as well, their expressions confirming what Jenna now understood with sickening clarity: Sam Rodriguez had become the latest victim of whatever malevolent force had claimed them.
Jenna’s eyes snapped open, her body jerking upright. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, her lungs seizing as if the collapsing dream-space had followed her into wakefulness. Cold sweat plastered her nightshirt to her skin, her heart hammering against her ribs.
She fumbled for the lamp beside her bed, desperate to banish the darkness. The warm glow illuminated her bedroom—normal, solid, real—but did nothing to dispel the chill that had settled deep in her bones.
“Sam,” she whispered into the empty room, the name like a prayer and a curse combined.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, her movements stiff as if her joints had aged decades during the night. The digital clock on her nightstand read 4:13 AM. Too early to make calls, too late to hope for more sleep.
Her bare feet carried her to the kitchen where she started the coffee maker on autopilot, the familiar routine a lifeline to normalcy.
The machine gurgled and hissed, filling the silence with comforting, mundane sounds.
She considered making toast, but that seemed too complicated to bother with now.
Jenna slumped into a chair at her kitchen table, her mind racing yet somehow sluggish, as if wading through mud.
The dream had been too vivid, too specific to dismiss.
She’d experienced these visitations enough times to know they weren’t ordinary nightmares—they were communications from the dead.
But the implications were too terrible to face.
Sam Rodriguez. Dead. Another victim claimed by the same force that had killed Richard and Anita.
Memories assaulted her—Sam teaching her to shoot at the range, his patient corrections as she adjusted her stance.
Sam and Mary at department cookouts, his arm protectively around his wife’s shoulders.
Sam on his last day before retirement, accepting the watch the department had pitched in to buy, his eyes misting as Frank make a speech about friendship and service.
How could she possibly call Mary and ask if her husband was dead based on a dream? The impossibility of explaining her knowledge paralyzed her. She took a gulp of coffee, not even noticing when it scalded her tongue.
The shrill ring of her phone sliced through the pre-dawn silence, making her jump. She reached for it, her hand trembling when she saw Frank’s name on the caller ID.
A surge of dread washed over her as she answered. “Frank?”
“Jenna.” Frank’s voice, usually so steady and sure, sounded shaken, thick with emotion. “Something happened. It’s Sam. Mary just called me. He’s—” His voice broke.
“Gone,” Jenna finished for him, her own voice barely above a whisper. “I know. He came to me, Frank. In a dream, just now.”
A heavy silence settled between them, the implications unspoken.
“Just like Richard and Anita?” Frank finally asked.
“Yes.” The word felt like lead on her tongue. “He was trying to tell me something, but he couldn’t. Richard and Anita were there too.”
Frank’s breathing was the only sound for several long moments.
Then, with effort, his voice steadied. “Mary woke up to find him dead near their bed. Said he looked... terrified. Of course, she thinks it was a stroke or a heart attack. That’s what the paramedics told her at the scene.
It wasn’t as if she suspected any foul play.
She just wanted to let me know right away, since he and I were so close. ”
Jenna closed her eyes, picturing Sam’s face contorted in that final, silent scream as the dreamscape collapsed around him. “It wasn’t just a heart attack or a stroke.”
“No,” Frank agreed. “I don’t think it was.”
Jenna took a deep breath, forcing steel into her spine. “I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes. We need to go to see Mary.”
“I’ll be ready.”
As she ended the call, Jenna stood, moving with renewed purpose.
She’d known Sam since she was a rookie, fresh-faced and eager to prove herself.
He’d been a constant in her life, one of the few people who had supported her unconditionally after Piper’s disappearance, who had never once suggested she should “move on” or “accept” her sister’s fate.
She turned off the coffeepot and dressed quickly, her mind already shifting into Sheriff mode, cataloging facts, connections, patterns. Three deaths, all linked to extreme fear. Three victims with known phobias. Three threatening dreamcatchers—two she'd seen hanging on walls, another in her dream
The grief would come later, Jenna knew. For now, she channeled it into determination. Whatever force was at work in Trentville, it had taken someone she loved. As she checked her service weapon and grabbed her keys, Jenna made a silent promise to Sam, to Richard, to Anita, and to herself.
This ended now. Whatever it took, however impossible it seemed, she would find what was killing people with their fears—and she would stop it. Not just because it was her job, but because Sam deserved justice. Because they all did.
Because if she didn’t, she had the terrible certainty that the evil force in Genesius County wouldn’t stop with Sam. It would keep feeding, keep growing stronger, keep claiming victims until there was no one left to fear it.