The Book of Dreams Forgotten: (A Broken Creatures Novel, Book 2)

by A L Hart

  Contents

  Entry #1575

  Part 1

  Ch. 1

  Ch. 2

  Ch. 3

  Ch. 4

  Ch. 5

  Ch. 6

  Ch. 7

  Entry #1577

  Part 2

  Ch. 8

  Ch. 9

  Ch. 10

  Ch. 11

  Ch. 12

  Ch. 13

  Ch. 14

  Entry #1581

  Part 3

  Ch. 15

  Ch. 16

  Ch. 17

  Ch. 18

  Ch. 19

  Ch. 20

  Entry #1584

  Part 4

  Ch. 21

  Ch. 22

  Ch. 23

  Ch. 24

  Ch. 25

  Author's Note

  Ch. 1

  “I’m only saying, if I find a fat man wobbling down my—”

  “Our.”

  “—chimney, I’m lighting the wood beneath said chimney..”

  I let out a sigh and leaned forward to cut open one of the large cardboard storage boxes.

  December 1st, it was officially the designated day for saying farewell to autumn decor, clear skies and a fair chance of a warm breeze. This was the day for defacing your home with everything Christmas, from a towering green tree—be it plastic or fir—to throwing reindeer ears on the family pet. Which, I guess I had a family pet now, even if he didn’t actually belong to me, but Danny. Who was currently somewhere lost behind the mountain of boxes in the corner.

  “See anything?” I called out to him.

  “Not yet, boss,” he called back.

  The four of us were looking for the Christmas lights—well, the three of us. Jera lounged across the wide windowsill, much like a fat house cat, ridiculing the nature of Old Saint Nick and listing reasons grown men with gifts should be barred from climbing down chimneys just like everyone else. No doubt she actually believed the children’s tale of Santa and the whole leaving milk and cookies out. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her otherwise.

  The little things we do for amusement.

  Ophelia, the woman’s irrefutable, spitting image twin, was rifling through boxes at the speed of light. Literally. Ever since explaining to Danny (in patient increments) the existence of immortals, the boy had taken it much better than I had. Rather than deny it until the bitters end, he found it “cool.” Which gave the twins the freedom to slip into their nature when it was just the four of us.

  Decorating was Lia’s idea.

  I’d tried to be subtle when hanging the wreath downstairs on the shop’s door so as not to draw any attention to the holiday and get stuck explaining it, but she’d caught me. Questioned what I was doing. What a wreath was. Why a wreath was. And thus, I was dragged into explaining Christmas to the two demon twins from another world. And as could only be predicted, it had spurred her to embellish the entire All American Coffee House in Christmas galore.

  If we could just find the decorations.

  I hadn’t been in this storage room in five years. It was something about going through my family’s belongs that brought up their death more severely than walking the halls of this shop they’d once occupied. But now I had a reason to be in this room. Two reasons.

  Outside of rummaging around for decor, I’d also concluded that the space could serve as something more than a storage room. A bedroom.

  The twins had all but staked their claim on what used to be my bedroom before they’d somehow extended their previously negotiated residency from a month to an undetermined duration (read: infinity). It left Danny and I with nowhere to sleep.

  Which would have been fine, seeing as I rarely slept these days, but Danny, an eleven year old boy prone to depression after just having lost his last standing family member, would need sleep. Even though he tried his hardest to keep pace with the rest of us.

  “I found them!” Ophelia declared, holding up what looked like the outdoor string lights Ma used to hang up on the roof during summer cookouts.

  I told her this and the way her shoulders sagged reflected how I felt about this entire ordeal.

  Not that I disliked Christmas. I’d just never found a reason to celebrate the holiday. That, and we’d been searching for hours. I knew the decorations were here somewhere. When boxing up Elizabeth’s belongings, the decorations had been the first thing I put away. It’d been my sister’s favorite holiday and the first memory I’d wanted to banish in her absence.

  “Boss, what’s this thing?” Danny asked, head of tangled bronze curls poking up from behind the boxes.

  With a grimace, I rose and stretched. My wings, I’d discovered, were a nuisance when out and when in. When out, I stumbled and knocked over virtually everything within an eight foot radius. When in, the dark energy they thrived off of would contract, constricting my ribs, lungs and just about every organ inside of me. Trying to fit a square into a circle. Jera said I would grow used to the things. But then again, Jera said a lot of things that turned out to be loose truths. Like when she said she’d help find the lights when what she really meant was she’d watch us search.

  As it stood, I had to keep the wings retracted. A spatial courtesy, seeing as they were goliath in their own right.

  At the fortress of boxes, I leaned over what must have been Ma and Dad’s clothing articles, and found Danny tinkering with a device almost a head taller than him.

  Dad’s old jukebox.

  I stared at the thing for a second, its chrome rim and golden mesh plates bringing back those crackling 80s hit, Bon Jovi taking over the shop’s lounge while Ma prepared Liz and I’s breakfast.

  “It’s a jukebox,” I told him before the nostalgia could take over. “Put a dime in it, it plays a song. Or it used to. I’m pretty sure the thing’s busted.” No surprise, the thing was ancient.

  By all accounts, it was likely time I trashed it, but eying the smooth disks inside, still shiny despite the gray coat of dust smothering its outsides, I was met with reluctance. Hoarder? No. It was just the sentimental value, yet another trinket I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of. To let pieces of them go.

  The smell of woodsy chestnuts rose up and I looked down to find Jera regarding the contraption. One thing I was still growing used was their stealth. That, and her takeover of my shampoo. She’d yet to buy some for herself with her own paycheck, instead insisting on using mine until the scent became her.

  “Could you possibly stare any harder, brute?” she shot up at me.

  “Could you possibly stand any closer, Jera?” I returned. “See what I did there? I used your name. A common custom amongst us lowly humans; you should try it.”

  “But then one might mistake me for one of said lowly humans. I can’t have that.”

  “I suppose I should just be honored that Her Highness bothered to get up from her perch.”

  “I wanted to see the thing responsible for your mood change, nothing more.”

  I didn’t bother asking how she knew. Ever since kissing her and accidentally bonding us, I found the tiny hellish woman was even more in tune with my thoughts and emotions than she’d been before. What irked me was that it was one sided.

  “And here I thought you came to help.”

  “Strictly spectating.”

  “Predictable.”

  “It’s only 6 AM, and as such,—”

  “—manual labor should not start until 7,” we all finished, having heard her mantra seven mornings in a row.

  “Precisely. If you all wish to pointlessly expend energy, by all means, indulge this thi
ng called Christmas.”

  “Ever hear of the Grinch?” Danny asked, a mischievous crooked smile curling the corners of his mouth.

  I had to hide one of my own when Jera stared on obliviously.

  Downstairs, the doorbell rang.

  Ophelia crouched, gripped the jukebox, then moved the thing as if it didn’t weigh nearly five times her weight. Moments later, she announced, “I found them!” This time, they actually were the Christmas lights.

  Sighing in relief, not wanting to spend another minute rummaging through boxes and going down memory lane, I stepped back. “Fantastic. There should be five boxes of decorations around it. I’m going to go get the door.”

  “I’ll come with,” Jera said.

  I didn’t understand why until we were downstairs and I opened the door to Natalie’s nonplussed face. She’d been stopping by ever since Thanksgiving, usually to look me over and ensure I wasn’t getting up to anything dangerous. Like breaking into an immortal facility and putting myself in perilous situations while also “adopting” a child under the table and passing out for three days straight. Not that she knew the truth behind any of that.

  “Really, a doorbell?” she asked me, handing Jera what was becoming a daily lunch box filled with who knew what high protein edibles.

  “It was a necessity,” I told her.

  “You can buy a doorbell but not actual food? You do know that’s necessity too, right?”

  I sighed. I’d recently installed the doorbell seeing as when the coffee house closed at 8, the customers didn’t stop coming. Merely, they changed. From scatterbrained Uni students in need of a caffeine fix to strange monsters and human hybrids in need of a literal fix, be it bodily or circumstantially.

  Having such . . . oddities show up out of the blue was no longer acceptable with Danny around and threats roaming far and wife. Instead, I’d revived the shop’s landline, allowed the immortals and humans alike to blow up the phone and express their woes, and in return, all I asked was that they used the bell just so I’d have a heads up on who (and what) they were. Since installing it, there hadn’t been many rings.

  And by not many, I meant none. Zero.

  We hadn’t gotten a single case since the last memo went out.

  I had no objections. If someone was terminally ill—which had been the case with some of my last cases—I figured they would bypass the “policy” and show up here anyway. As Danny would say, this was America, after all.

  “As you can see, I’m alive and well,” I told her, though I knew my tight smile wasn’t convincing anyone. Especially not Mind Readers 1 & 2 here.

  Jera did her usual scoff of doubt.

  “You always say that, but you know it’s never true,” Natalie noted after.

  “Well, it is this time.” Things were surprisingly calm with HB halfway out of the picture. They didn’t know where the twins were located anymore, where I was located, and after the faery Niv had done a number on their agents’ psyches, I was fairly certain they had bigger matters to deal with.

  Jera watched us in that borderline irksome manner of hers, audibly snacking on an apple from the lunchbox. When she caught me looking, she shifted the food out of my reach as if I was even remotely interested in its contents.

  “You should be,” Natalie said. “You all’s training start tomorrow and you have to keep your energy up.”

  Inside, I groaned, only to realize I’d done so aloud.

  “That’s right,” she went on. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  In return for watching Danny when Jera and I’d gone away on important business (Ophelia’s rescue), we’d all promised to be the first participants in her newly rented dojo space. And it wasn’t a one day thing. The four of us had to actually attend and complete the class. The skillset? Krav maga.

  “We’ll be there,” I told her.

  “Oh, I know. I’m stopping by to make sure first thing in the morning.” Because we began the shop’s prep at 8, we’d all agreed to attend at 4:45 AM. Even though I seldom slept, I was tired just thinking about going to learn fighting moves before the sun rose. In the dead of winter.

  Jera, now crunching on a celery stick, said, “So this krawl monger—”

  “Krav maga.”

  “—is how humans defend themselves?”

  Natalie, having gotten used to being referred to as a human—about as well as she’d gotten used to the horns protruding from the demon’s skull—nodded. “But it’s more than that. It also exercises discipline, control, strength, both mentally and physically.”

  “All of which I mastered the day I was born,” she said whimsically, drifting away from us.

  I grabbed the collar of her shirt and planted her back beside us. “Jera will be there just like the rest of us,” I assured Natalie.

  The three of us craned our heads when a clash sounded above.

  Shoulders sagging, I said again, “We’ll be there.”

  Casting one last concerning glance to the staircase, Nat nodded and left us to it.

  Or me, anyway. Jera wandered over to her usual breakfast station: the pastry compartment.

  “Leave some for the—”

  “Customers. Yes, I know.”

  Shaking my head, I took the stairs two at a time to examine the crashing noise, and when I opened the door to the storage room, it took me a moment to register what it was I was seeing.

  Danny was cowered down on the hardwood floors, arms shielded over his head as the jukebox leaned at an angle, moments away from crushing him were it not for Ophelia’s grip on the machine. Like before, she moved it to the side as if it weighed nothing more than a feather, then offered her hand to Danny.

  “It must have tipped,” she said as Danny hesitantly slid his hand in hers.

  But that jukebox had to have weighed three hundred plus pounds.

  Beside Danny, I noticed the dog, Tathri, huddled low, its dark moppy fur cascading around his tiny form as he trembled. Just barely, I made out the quiet rumble of growls shaking from the dog’s core, his one blue and one green eye glossy, pinned on Ophelia.

  Though she and Danny got on well, Tathri wasn’t sold on the demon. I guess it just went to show, animals could feel jealousy, because other than having a heart so warm it could be overbearing at times, there was no being in this universe that could dislike Ophelia.

  The woman currently dusted Danny’s shoulders off, fixed his hair, then looked to the decorations. “Maybe it would be best if I get them,” she murmured.

  “Yeah,” Danny said slowly, looking at the jukebox oddly. Then to Tathri, he motioned. “Come here. Let’s go outside.”

  But the dog remained rooted, growling.

  Before Liz’s death, my sister used to always be obsessed with animals of all varieties, but it’d always been dogs that intrigued her the most. Naturally. The things loved her almost as much as she loved them, despite Ma never letting us have one. Liz had said they could sense when something was wrong. When others were sick.

  So as I stood there and watched the way it stared down Ophelia, I wondered if it knew what I knew. What I’d been dreading for weeks.

  Could it sense that, deep within the warmth of the woman’s heart, there was a sickness there?

  When HB had captured her, they’d removed the nuller that’d consequentially slowed whatever illness had been progressively devouring her alive from the inside. Without the collar, no matter what length she went to hide it, no matter how easily she lifted and moved a three hundred pound jukebox, Ophelia was only growing weaker.

  Inside of her, the dark energy that breathed essence into all immortals, was attacking her mortality like a cancer. I’d learned that most demons and immortals alike with abilities were able to discharge their powers at will, but something about the way Ophelia’s dark energy was wired made her only capable of doing so in defensive scenarios, and because of this, it was as if the substance was expelling within her rather than out of her. Destroying everything in its path.

  Our eyes
met briefly, and there was something faded in the misty gray of hers. A light dwindling.

  And so I wondered, how long did I really have before it was too late?

  At some point in our lives, we come across those in need of saving. I’d saved Ophelia. Me, Jera and Niv. We’d gotten her back. But as I watched her while she retrieved the decoration boxes, only one question suffocated my thoughts.

  Had we saved her only to watch her die another kind of death?

  Ch. 2

  Ophelia wasn’t the only sick one.

  The next day, 4 AM on the dot, Danny had the sniffles and Jera was notably sluggish. So much so, that when I woke her up, there was no hissing or tug-of-war with the blankets, only a groan and shift away from me. The dark rings around her eyes were telling.

  Luckily, I knew what this sickness was.

  Unluckily, I didn’t know the solution.

  Partial empathy and telepathy wasn’t the only side effect of a succubus’ bond. The main, most concerning aspect was what the bond primarily entailed: sex. For a bonded succubus, sex with their mate wasn’t simply a heightened luxury, but a deadly necessity.

  One Jera seemed intent on rejecting.

  She and I had kissed three times, and each time, while it may have staved off the ill repercussion of her sickness slightly, it was hardly a lasting remedy. I didn’t know the inner workings, and frankly, I didn’t want to know them, but there was apparently something life-sustaining with intercourse when it came to succubi. Was it controlled on a molecular level? Magical? Or was it another beast entirely: dark energy?

  Somewhere in this, I should have been worried about my methodical regard to it all.

  But I didn’t see our bond as romantic. Not when the absence of sex was the equivalent of one large scythe looming over Jera’s neck. There was nothing sexy about death.

  That and, she and I weren’t exactly two peas in a pod.

  Only recently did she cede that she didn’t entirely hate me, and only recently did I acknowledge that I very much entirely cared for her. As big a revelation as it’d been, it didn’t bar our mutual loathing of one another’s presence. Though I couldn’t understand what reservations she had with me, I understood where my reserves lay with her.