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The Dream-Hunter (A Dream-Hunter Novel, Book 1)

The Dream-Hunter (A Dream-Hunter Novel, Book 1)
By Sherrilyn Kenyon

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Product Description

In the ethereal world of dreams, there are champions who fight to protect the dreamer and there are demons who prey on them...

Arik is such a predator. Condemned by the gods to live eternity without emotions, Arik can only feel when he’s in the dreams of others. For thousands of years, he’s drifted through the human unconscious, searching for sensation. Now he’s finally found a dreamer whose vivid mind can fill his emptiness.

Dr. Megeara Kafieri watched her father ruin himself and his reputation as he searched to prove Atlantis was real. Her deathbed promise to him to salvage his reputation has now brought her to Greece where she intends to prove once and for all that the fabled island is right where her father said it was. But frustration and bad luck dog her every step. Especially the day they find a stranger floating in the sea. His is a face she’s seen many times.... in her dreams.

What she doesn’t know is that Arik holds more than the ancient secrets that can help her find the mythical isle of Atlantis. He has made a pact with the god Hades: In exchange for two weeks as a mortal man, he must return to Olympus with a human soul. Megeara’s soul.

With a secret society out to ruin her expedition, and mysterious accidents that keep threatening her life, Megeara refuses to quit. She knows she’s getting closer to Atlantis and as she does, she stumbles onto the truth of what Arik really is.

For Arik his quest is no longer simple. No human can know of a Dream-Hunter’s existence. His dream of being mortal has quickly turned into his own nightmare and the only way to save himself will be to sacrifice the very thing he wanted to be human for. The only question is, will he?

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #8810 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-02-06
  • Released on: 2007-02-06
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Mass Market Paperback
  • 352 pages

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Editorial Reviews

Review

PRAISE FOR SHERRILYN KENYON

"Kenyon is the reigning queen of the vampire novel."--Barbara Vey, Publishers Weekly

“An engaging read.”—Entertainment Weekly on Devil May Cry

“Kenyon’s writing is brisk, ironic, sexy, and relentlessly imaginative. These are not your mother’s vampire novels.”—The Boston Globe on Dark Side of the Moon

 

About the Author

Sherrilyn Kenyon is a #1 New York Times bestselling author with more than sixteen million copies of her books in print, in over thirty countries.  She is the author of the Dark-Hunter novels, which have an international cult following and always appear at the top of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today lists.  Writing both as Sherrilyn Kenyon and Kinley MacGregor, she is also the author of several other series, including: The League, Brotherhood of the Sword, Lords of Avalon, The Dream-Hunters and BAD.

Near Nashville, Tennessee, Sherrilyn Kenyon lives a life of extraordinary danger . . . as does any woman with three sons, a husband, and a collection of swords on which all of the above have a major fixation. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One
 
Santorini, Greece, 1996
 
“my kingdom for a gun.”
 
Shaking his head at Geary’s hostile words, Brian calmly opened the car door for her as she approached their small taxi that waited in the heart of the crowded Greek thoroughfare. “You don’t have a kingdom.”
 
She paused on the sidewalk to glare at him. Given the fury in her system, she couldn’t believe he’d dare point out the obvious to her. She’d been known to verbally let serious blood when only half this riled. Truly, the man had no sense of self-preservation. “And I don’t have a gun—looks like I’m shit out of luck all the way around, huh?”
 
Still, he was his ever present calm self—which didn’t really help her mood. For once, couldn’t he get ticked off, too? “I take it you didn’t get the permits . . . again.”
 
She could have done without that “again” part. Really. “What was your first clue?”
 
“Oh, I don’t know. That stomping stance as you walked down the street, clenching and unclenching your fists like you’re already choking someone, or maybe it’s that way you’re looking at me like you could claw out my eyes when I haven’t done anything to piss you off.”
 
“Yes, you have.”
 
She could tell he was fighting a smile. Thank goodness he had the good sense to keep it hidden. “And that is?”
 
“You don’t have a gun.”
 
He snorted. “Come on now, you can’t shoot every Greek official who gets in your way.”
 
“Wanna bet?”
 
Brian stepped back to let her enter the taxi first. At six three, he was a good-looking man in his mid-forties. Very distinguished and intelligent. Best of all, he was independently wealthy and more than capable of financing their latest venture in futility without complaining too much.
 
Unfortunately, he wasn’t into bribing public officials.
 
Was it too much to ask that she find a corrupt financier? Surely Brian should have some vice, and at the moment she couldn’t think of a more self-serving one than that.
 
“So what do we do now?” he asked as he joined her in the car.
 
Geary sighed, wishing she had an answer. Her team was waiting on her boat at the docks, but without the permits that allowed them to excavate the mounds she and Tory believed to be a city wall, all they could do was dive over the surface of what they’d found and do nothing more than admire it.
 
Sad comfort that. It’d been the best lead they’d had in years. “I want another silt sample.”
 
“You’ve already tested and retested those.”
 
“I know, but maybe it will help to convince them to give us the permits.” Yeah, right. She’d been given the run-around particularly good and the words from her latest visit still rang in her ears.
 
“This is Greece, Dr. Kafieri. There are ruins all around us and I will not allow you to begin tearing up the floor of the Aegean, which is a busy shipping area, when all you can give me is another this-is-Atlantis story. Really. I’ve enough treasure hunters trying to pilfer our national history for their own gain. I don’t need any more. We here in Greece take our history most seriously and you’re wasting my valuable time. Good day.”
 
It was enough to make her want to bang her head on the man’s desk until he either relented or had her committed. This wasn’t about treasure, but trying to tell that to him had been as futile as trying to fly with wax wings.
 
“There has to be some way around this.”
 
Brian stiffened. “I won’t be a part of anything illegal.”
 
And unfortunately, neither would she. “Don’t worry, Brian. I don’t want to go to jail for this, either.”
 
But there had to be something else she could do. . . .
 
If only the pain in her head would let up enough so that she could think. But the throbbing pain, much like the official, seemed determined to ruin her day.
 
She leaned back in the seat and watched the beautiful buildings and landscape of the town drift by while people went about their business on the sidewalks. How she wished she could be carefree enough to roam in and out of the stores, shopping and laughing like the majority of them. Unfortunately, she’d never once been a tourist anywhere.
 
Geary Kafieri was always all work and no play.
 
Neither of them spoke as the taxi wended its way through the narrow streets to the dock where their research boat was waiting. While Brian paid the fare, Geary got out and made her way up the gangway to face their team with her gloriously redundant failure.
 
Tory met her first. At fifteen and very average in height, Geary’s cousin had long drab brown hair and thick glasses. She was an awkward teen who had more interest in her books than much of anything else. Even though Tory didn’t remember her father, Theron, she was just like him. Finding Atlantis was her only ambition.
 
“Well?” she asked, her young face expectant.
 
Geary shook her head.
 
Tory let out an expletive that made Geary gape. “How could they not let us excavate? What’s wrong with those people?”
 
“They think it’s a waste of time.”
 
Tory screwed up her face in distaste. “That’s stupid! They’re stupid!”
 
“Yes,” Geary said drily. “We’re all stupid.”
 
Tory scoffed at that. “I’m not stupid. I’m a certified genius. But the rest . . . Stupid.”
 
“I told you not to bother.”
 
Geary looked past Tory’s shoulder to find her other cousin, Cynthia, joining them. Named for the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis, Thia hated everything to do with Greece. The only reason she was here was to get college credit and follow her latest fixation, Scott, who’d thought this would be a fun summer activity. Not to mention the small fact that had Thia stayed at home in New York, she’d have been forced to work in her mother’s deli, which she hated even more than Greece.
 
At a cool six two, the titian-haired beauty was also one of the few women taller than Geary—something that was quite a feat given the fact that Thia was barely eighteen.
 
Geary frowned as she noted Thia’s long blue skirt and white long-sleeved embroidered Grecian blouse. “I thought you were sunbathing,” Geary said.
 
Tory leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “She was, and she took her top off earlier, hoping Scott would see her bare boobs and join her. He didn’t, but the men on a passing boat almost fell overboard before Justina made her go belowdecks.”
 
Thia curled her lip. “You little nark. While you’re confessing things, you should tell Geary how you almost set fire to her reports because her cat scared you and you knocked over Teddy’s Bunsen burner.”
 
Tory blushed before she pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Genius, but not graceful. C’est moi.”
 
Geary smiled at the girl as Tory spoke the terrible truth. Grace had never been Tory’s virtue, unlike Thia, who had more than her fair share. “It’s okay, Tor. I’d have just made you redo them.”
 
Thia gave a heavy sigh as she cast her gaze around the deck. “Is this not the most boring place on earth? I can’t even get Scott to come up from below for more than a split second.”
 
Obviously. If nudity didn’t inspire the man to come up, nothing else would.
 
“He’s down there with Teddy,” Thia continued in an irritated tone, “draped over an excavation map—like that’s ever going to happen. What is it about this godforsaken country that every time I bring a guy here he loses his mind?”
 
“Maybe it’s from being around you too long,” Tory said, tucking a stray piece of hair behind her ear. She leaned forward to whisper to Geary in their own unique language of ancient Greek and Latin. “I think she sucks the testosterone right out of them and then digests it for her own.”
 
Geary laughed.
 
Thia went instantly stiff. “What did she say about me?”
 
Geary shook her head at Tory before she responded. “Why does it always have to be about you, Thia?”
 
“Because it is.” And with that, she flounced off.
 
Tory let out a tired breath. “One day I hope she finds someone who can put her in her place. I’m tired of watching her emasculate poor Scott. I swear she has to be part succubus.”
 
“Oh, don’t go the...

Customer Reviews

I'm Dreaming of a Better Book2
Seriously, Sherrilyn Kenyon needs to cut back on the number of novels she writes in a year. It's still pretty clear that she puts effort in the main novels of the Dark-Hunters series, but these side-story spin-offs are nothing but Kenyon phoning it in to get a paycheck. With only two stories to its name, I can see that the Dream Hunters are going the way of the Were-Hunters in that the series is unabashedly awful.
That brings us to the Dream Hunter. I've given Kenyon's Were-Hunter novels low marks before, but as much as I hated the books, I never took more than three days to read them cover to cover. I bought this on release day and it sat on my night stand for three weeks before I finished it.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but this book is another one of the ones that is trying to build suspense to Acheron's book. As far as I am concerned, I never care if that much promised book is ever published at this point because it is about two years too late. Sure, at first everyone was in love with that character and wanted to know what his deal was. I don't think many people still care, because after many books of teasing and still never getting any real answers, Acheron has turned into the Dues Ex Machina plot device from Hell and a character that almost rivals Anita Blake as most annoying reoccurring character in a series.
Dream Hunter features Arikos, an incubus god of sleep, and Dr. Megeara Kiferi, global trotting PHD in search of Atlantis. Arikos is infatuated with Megeara after giving her naughty, naughty dreams at night. He gets high off sucking emotions out of wet dreams, and decides he wants to experience the real thing. He cuts a deal with the god Hades to make him human for two weeks, but forgot to read the fine print at the end of the contract that stipulates he will have to bring Megeara's soul to Hades in return. Wonderful, a junkie who uses and endangers other people to get his fix is just what every girl should want.
Megeara is an ugly duckling with a PHD. Despite supposedly being smart and focused enough to get a doctorate before she turned thirty, she talks and acts like a dumb valley girl. She's supposed to be an expert in ancient Greek culture but she seems to be totally ignorant of basic points of their mythology. Oh, and Ms. Kenyon and all the other romance authors, being an academic or smart doesn't already automatically translate to being unsociable, a loser, unsexy, and frumpy like you guys seem to think. I spent most of the book wanting to give both these characters a giant slice of clue cake.
There is a plot in here somewhere about excavating the Lost City of Atlantis and the gods fearing a possible resurrection of Apollymi the Destroyer who is sealed up in the ruins. Honestly, it kind of gets lost in between introducing about five new characters to the Dark/Were/Dream Hunter world that ultimately don't serve any purpose.
Kenyon just needs to cut back on books like these. They aren't any good, and they are making the otherwise fine main series seem stale before its time.

Jumped the Shark...1
Well, this is the last book I'm reading from Sherrilyn Kenyon. When Ms. Kenyon started her dark-hunter series several years back, the books were the best thing going in the world of romantic/fantasy fiction. Each book was new, exciting and the romance between the featured couple was tremendous. As time has gone by, this series has invented more and more different species, all with different powers, reporting to different gods with different powers, featuring different story lines, all of course, with different agendas. What is left is a hodgepodge of 10 million storylines & characters all trying to pull together at some point in each book. The series is now confusing, watered down, and a real disappointment. And the romance? It has taken a back seat. There is just too much going on in each book to spare the word count for serious romance. With this particular book, there were 3 or 4 chapters when the old Kenyon magic shown through, but overall, it didn't hold my interest, it took me 4 days to get through it (why I bothered I don't know), and I basically just didn't care. As this is the pattern I have seen with the last 3 books of Kenyon's, I think it is safe to say that this series has ran its course and should die a natural death. At today's publishing prices and the number of books I read a month, I can't afford books that confuse and/or bore me. This series does both.

Dream Yawn1
I have really enjoyed Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark Hunter series, but Mother of Pearl, what's with these boring spin-offs? I had to yawn my way through pages of repetitive text making me feel as though I was on a circular read to nowhere. I laid it down, I picked it up, and finally finished it two weeks after purchase (I usually finish one of her books in an afternoon). I found the characters unappealing (Arik, the "Dream-Hunter," was nothing more than a voyeur) and I fail to understand why SK's mythological deities always use American slang and colloquialisms. It's not as bothersome when her novels are set in the States, but in Greece and Atlantis? The Dream Hunter series was aptly named since it is guaranteed to put you to sleep.