“This damn dream again,” I muttered in sudden realization.
I blearily looked to my left, and sure enough, one of the elves was seated in the grass, one leg stretched out and the other bent up, his arms resting against his knee as he watched me keenly. I stared back at him mutely for a few more seconds before I recognized him as Locien.
“Where’s—” I began, then cut off with a startled gasp when I felt something squeeze my middle.
My eyes shot down and saw a pair of black-clad arms wrapped tightly around my stomach as well as a pair of long legs also clad in black stretched out in stark contrast alongside my khakis. Was I sitting in Seren’s lap? This was certainly something new. In the previous dreams, I couldn’t recall ever being this near to either one of them.
Well, I supposed there were worse things to dream about than lying in the arms of a hot guy, even if that hot guy had pointy ears.
“Do you remember the last thing we talked about yesterday?” Locien suddenly asked.
I frowned, considering. I remembered us having some of that weird-tasting elven drink with an even weirder name I could never remember, much less pronounce correctly. I got the sense that we had talked a lot, that I had gotten riled up, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall anything. Oh well—this was a dream, so it really didn’t matter.
I shrugged. “No clue.” I looked over my shoulder at Seren. “I don’t even know how we ended up in this position, but I have no complaints.”
I pressed back against him and grinned playfully. My smile widened when I saw his already large pupils dilate in response. I really hoped I didn’t wake up anytime soon. This dream seemed to be heading in a really interesting direction this time.
Locien sighed heavily, capturing my attention again. “There is nothing else to be done,” he said, a hint of irritation coloring his tone. “The suggestion is gone, but apparently, so is almost seven days worth of interactions. We shall simply have to begin again.”
“She seems receptive enough,” Seren said against my ear, the feel of his breath and the soft vibrations of his voice making me shiver a bit.
“I can be very receptive,” I agreed in a low voice, turning around just enough in Seren’s arms to place a light, teasing kiss against his exposed neck. Might as well make the most of this dream while I had the chance.
Instead of tightening his embrace as I had expected, Seren went positively rigid the moment my lips touched his skin. I pulled back immediately in surprise and looked up at the younger elf’s face, but he wasn’t looking at me at all.
“Locien! You—” he began, something like anger flashing in his eyes.
“I swear I did not do anything more than remove the suggestion!” Locien interjected. “You know His Majesty would never approve her otherwise, so why would I even chance it now that we have finally come so close?”
They might as well have been speaking some elf language for all I understood what they were talking about. I was also a little annoyed that this dream wasn’t going the way I wanted. I couldn’t imagine why my brain wanted to derail my efforts. It had been a couple months since I had split with my last boyfriend, so wasn’t it reasonable that I had conjured up a pair of unrealistically gorgeous men out of a need for some male companionship? Yeah, I had to admit, a threesome was a bit overboard, but still!
“Then are you certain there was only one suggestion implanted?” Seren demanded.
Locien nodded. “I looked beyond even her subconscious to her essence, itself. There was nothing else.”
Apparently, they were intent on talking over my head as though I wasn’t even there. I needed to do something fast before the flow of the dream changed again or they disappeared completely. While Seren was distracted, I quickly twined my arms around his neck and rose up to crush my lips against his mid-word.
He let out a startled “mmph!” and then immediately tore his lips away before I could really start to appreciate the softness and fullness of them. The look he gave me was so bewildered that I couldn’t even feel offended at his instant rebuff.
“You don’t want to?” I asked, wondering why my own mind was insisting on torturing me like this.
He exchanged a brief, inquisitive look with his brother. “Do you remember us being intimate before?”
“What difference does it make?” I replied a little sullenly. “They were different dreams, anyway.”
“Of course,” Locien spoke suddenly.
I looked over to him, and he was looking at me with a crooked grin. In that moment, he looked so much like Seren that it was uncanny.
“Megan, you think you are dreaming right now, do you not?”
“Of course I’m dreaming,” I scoffed. “I’m in the middle of a huge, foggy field talking with a couple of elves.”
“This is not a dream.”
The absolute gravity lacing Seren’s voice made my heart stutter and sink to the pit of my stomach. Okay—maybe it was time to wake up because I didn’t like the direction this dream was now heading. I smacked my hands hard against both my cheeks and was a bit shocked at how much it had stung. I couldn’t remember ever feeling any sort of pain no matter what had happened to me in my dreams.
“This has to be a dream,” I said stubbornly as I rubbed one of my now-throbbing cheeks.
There was probably something seriously wrong with my head if I was now arguing with what was essentially my own subconscious. I couldn’t for the life of me understand how I had managed to turn a perfectly good, potential wet dream into something this convoluted.
“Do you not recall speaking to us earlier near the doorway between this world and the human realm?” Seren asked.
“I can’t even remember how I ended up lying in your arms. Hell, I don’t even remember going to bed, or what I did at work today. Everything after yesterday is a complete blank. What more proof do I need that I’m dreaming than all of that?”
“Her lost memories today are probably my doing,” Locien said. “They were intricately connected to the enchantment I lifted from her mind, so I am not surprised she remembers nothing of our latest meeting. At least now we know for certain that she somehow came in contact with another Sidhe sometime between when she left us yesterday evening to a couple of marks ago.”
“What do you mean, ‘she’?” I asked, wondering why I was even bothering to follow this dream’s script any longer.
“It’s the name of our people,” Seren explained.
“Okay, but you are the only elves I have ever dreamed about if that’s what you’re wondering,” I said, resigned to letting the dream just run its course until I woke up.
Locien released what sounded like a frustrated sigh. “You were not quite this obstinate the first time we met. In fact, you were rather certain that you lacked the imagination required to dream up this world, and my brother and me especially.”
“I imagine that I could practically see anything if some asshole slipped something nasty into my drink,” I retorted. “If this isn’t a dream, then the only logical explanation is that I’m on some wild trip because supernatural things like elves and vampires and werewolves aren’t real. Unless—” I sucked in a sharp breath and instantly leaned away from Seren. Could they be—was this really—had I just kissed a—
“For the last time, we are not aliens,” Locien barked before I could even choke out the word. “We Sidhe have been living on this earth longer than humans have even existed.”
I looked at him skeptically. “Then why is it that we only know about elves through myths and stories?”
“That is because the elven realm exists within a different dimension of the same overall space. To use a human phrase, it is the flipside of the same coin, the coin in this instance being the human realm.”
“So…are you telling me that I’m in the elven realm right now?” I asked slowly.
Was I really awake? I wasn’t sure I was ready to believe that. This was all just too crazy.
“This is the Inbetween,” S
eren replied, sounding infinitely more patient than his older brother, “a pocket of existence where both humans and Sidhe can meet in our true forms.”
“How in the world did I get here? Did you bring me?”
He shook his head. “We only provided the doorway.” He pointed towards the two conspicuous trees that lay a few dozen meters away. “You stepped through all on your own.”
I snorted. “I find that even harder to believe than all of this craziness being real.”
“The first time you came here, you said you had accidentally stepped through the doorway while in search of a phone lost as you were jogging.”
“I guess that’s plausible enough,” I said grudgingly, “but why did you open a ‘doorway’ along a jogging path of all things?”
The smile he directed at me was enigmatic. “That is the very reason why we have been meeting here with you for the past seven days.”
CHAPTER THREE
As Seren’s words echoed throughout my mind, an excitement like nothing I had ever experienced before welled up from somewhere deep within me, and it was in that moment that I finally believed that all of this—the Inbetween, talking with a pair of elven brothers—was really happening. There was no way the raw emotion that was now thundering through me, making my pulse race and my body tremble, could have been generated by a mere dream. Somewhere, buried within the lost memories they had spoken of earlier while I had been busy throwing myself on Seren, I knew the answer to my own question, and the thought of hearing it again was enough to get my adrenaline pumping.
Still kneeling awkwardly between Seren’s legs, I moved over to sit cross-legged beside him. Both elves stiffened and watched me with narrowed, keen eyes, as though they expected me to make a dash to the doorway between the trees. Maybe I had already tried. I frowned, starting to feel really pissed that there were parts of my life that were missing. Any number of awful things could have happened—or good if this inexplicable excitement that filled me was anything to go by—and here I was confused and clueless about everything.
“Tell me,” I said, looking expectantly between the brothers.
“It’s simple, really,” Locien said. “We are searching for the woman who will bear the children that will continue our family name.”
For a long moment, all I could do was stare back at him. I don’t know what I had been expecting him to say, but I could safely say that anything to do with babies hadn’t even made the list. This was the reason for my sense of excitement? I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I never planned on having children at all!
“You’re looking for a wife?” I asked, not able to hide the incredulity I was feeling. I glanced over at Seren, who was looking at me with a rather serious expression. “Both of you?”
“Eventually, yes,” Locien answered. “For now, we seek a mistress willing to come with us to the elven realm for that eventual purpose.”
“Wait, wait! Why in the world would you even want a human for that?” I demanded.
“Because it is our only choice,” Locien said rather matter-of-factly.
I crossed my arms over my chest in consternation. “You can’t possibly expect me to believe that there aren’t any female elves left in your world!”
As soon as the last word left my mouth, I cursed my loose tongue when Locien’s expression visibly darkened. I had a really bad habit of just blurting out the first thing that popped into my mind when I was worked up, and 99.9% of the time, it made things not just worse, but a thousand times worse.
“I’m sorry!” I said quickly before either elf could say anything. “That was a really shitty thing to say, wasn’t it? You don’t have to say anything else about it…”
“No, for what we are asking of you, you have every right to know the reasoning behind our actions here,” Seren said. Where Locien looked upset, Seren’s eyes held a sort of quiet sadness.
What they were asking of me…
It finally sunk in exactly why I was sitting here with them, why they were even bothering to answer my questions in the first place. If I had been just some hapless human that had accidentally stumbled into a place I had no business being, if they really meant no harm, they would have sent me on my way. Maybe they would have even erased my memories of the whole incident as they had alluded was something an elf could do.
However, if I believed that I had been coming here for at least a week, then it must mean that—what? That this was a strange sort of date? An old-fashioned courtship? Did they expect me to choose one of them sometime soon? There also had to have been at least a little interest on my part since I had kept coming back so many times.
“Do I? I don’t remember at all, but…” I said hesitantly as I looked at both brothers in turn. “…did I make any promises to either one of you?”
“Just that you would consider our proposition,” Locien replied.
“To choose one of you? To go to the elven realm? What?” I persisted, feeling my mouth go dry with more anxiety than I wanted to admit.
“Not to choose,” Seren said, “but to accept.”
Tilting my head in confusion, I opened my mouth for another question, but he held up a hand sharply, instantly stilling my tongue before I could even utter a word.
“For over five hundred years, an elven child had not been born in the realm. Due to a miscalculation by our distant ancestors, every few thousand years, our women will begin to be born barren, and eventually, we must mate with humans not only for the chance to have children again, but to also inherit the exceptional fertility of the human race.”
“So what you’re saying is that a whole bunch of elven men, including yourselves, have come to my world to look for wives? I can’t imagine that would go unnoticed for long. I’m surprised there aren’t already videos of elf sightings up on YouTube.”
Seren smiled. “It’s nothing like that. Each family must petition King Sethian, himself, for permission to seek a human bride, and he only grants permission to a handful of men every year. Even then, it could take years or even decades to find a suitable bride. Locien and I have been looking for almost twenty years now.”
“Wait—don’t tell me you two have been sitting in this Inbetween place all that time waiting for some poor random woman to fall through your doorway like a couple of spiders in a web waiting to trap a fly!”
Seren wrinkled his nose in obvious distaste. “Hardly. I believe we would have easily found a suitable bride within the first year had our circumstances not been so complicated.”
“What do you mean?”
“The king’s law dictates that there can only be one human bride per family,” Locien cut in. “Normally this does not pose a problem as the Sidhe were not a very fertile race even before the problems first began to manifest in our women. It is not uncommon for only one child to be born per couple, rarely more than two.”
“Yes, I see what you’re getting at,” I said with a sinking feeling. “You both want children, but the king would only allow one of you to marry a human.”
“Correct,” Locien said. “That is why Seren and I have decided to allow fate to decide.”
Seren reached over and took my hand. The moment I felt his strangely soft skin against mine, I swear my heart stopped for at least a couple of beats. No—he wasn’t about to…! Sure I had kissed him earlier, but that was because I had thought this was all a dream. It sure as hell wasn’t because I wanted to marry the guy, or elf, or whatever!
“I don’t—” I started to say, my voice pitched slightly higher with panic, but Seren pressed a finger against my lips, silencing me as effectively as if he had cast a silencing spell over me.
“Ease your mind,” he said. “We do not expect an answer from you today, especially now that all of our previous conversations have been lost to you. What we are asking is extremely unconventional for both the Sidhe and humans, but ultimately, the only course that will leave my brother and me satisfied in the end. His Majesty has granted us a special permission to bring a human woman in
to the elven realm to reside in our household for the time being as a mistress rather than a wife—a mistress to both of us. Marriage will come later with whoever fathers a child upon the mistress first. This is why we have yet to find a potential bride. It is a difficult situation to accept, I know, but one we must try, regardless.”
“Try impossible,” I said, shaking my head. “What you’re asking is for me to agree to not only go to a place that might as well be on another planet, but also to sleeping with both of you. While I’ll be the first to admit that the thought of having two hot lovers sounds like it would be great fun, having a baby—well, to be blunt, it’s not something I ever wanted.”
Surprisingly, Seren merely smiled at me. “I know, and that is why we are prepared to spend another seven days, a year, or twenty to change your mind.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The sky was still light when I crossed between the two trees back to my world. Although the two elves had assured me that time moved much more slowly in the Inbetween, despite everything I had already seen and heard that day, I hadn’t really believed them and had been really worried that I would have to navigate the jogging path back to the parking lot in the dark.
For a long moment, I stared back at the “doorway” I had just emerged from, wondering how it could seemingly disappear so completely that nothing about the area looked strange at all. If I hadn’t accidentally launched my phone into the thicket, I never would have given the area a second glance.
Seren had said that they had been searching for a mistress for almost twenty years. While that statement alone raised a ton of questions, namely how old the brothers were, it also made me wonder exactly how many women had fallen into their trap during that time. They could pretty up what they were doing by calling it a “doorway,” but when you got down to it, I thought my spider analogy was pretty accurate. If I asked, would they even answer truthfully, if at all?
Claimed by the Elven Brothers: Decision (An Elven King Novella Book 1) Page 2