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

by A L Hart

  Now I used scent, the way Jera had taught me. Wet dog, to be exact.

  His threads were the same pulsing lime shade I’d sensed when he’d collapsed at the shop’s door. Except these threads were far less active, rippling lethargically like low tides. That, and the ribbons were but one large mass concentrated just beneath the wolf’s breastbones, somewhere near its middle. I could hear his heart thud through the substance, beating weakly in time with it.

  Slowly, eyes still shut to maintain focus, I drew the ribbons of energy into the eager abyss at my own core. “When all the dark energy is gone, does he turn back human?”

  It was Jera who answered. “There’s no set guide for hybrids, but most likely, yes. Then he can go back to—”

  “Bouncer training,” Niv interjected in warning.

  Right, she’d erased all memory of the boy’s family and his deeds, likely including his school and any work life he may have had. It was no wonder the thing seemed attached to the faery. Just how much had she erased? I wondered again. Was the faery all he knew now?

  I tried not to think about it as the lime coils seeped into me, its threads charged like wire, livening my blood as though I were drinking in fire. Of course, the burn was nothing close to the time Jera had crushed her lips against mine and offered one blissful, scorching sample of the burning substance within her.

  I wondered then, were she to do it again, would it burn the same—or would it be a phantom of that kiss? Thus far, our training consisted of nothing more than reaching into her mind, briefly brushing her dark energy but never consuming. Never tasting. Had her sickness stolen the extent of her fire?

  It was over before I knew it, the sudden vacuous silence and resumption of hunger snatching me from my reverie. I cracked open my eyes.

  Bryan lay nude atop the blankets, brown hair cascaded down broad shoulders, his upper body still dangled slightly off the ledge. Unconscious.

  Despite what it was I saw, clear evidence of success, I searched him for detectable traces of dark energy, any last vestiges that might drag him back into the immortal world via re-infection. There was nothing.

  I turned to Niv and was taken aback at her expression. “What’s wrong? What’d I do?” Was the boy actually dead?

  The faery shook her head, silvery red mane slinking over her shoulders. “He is perfectly fine. Thank you.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  With a sigh, she gazed off to the painting canvases around the room. “I suppose I may have grown fond of having someone around when I painted. I only said he could continue his bouncer training so he wouldn’t go into a fit at the idea of my leaving. But now I must return him to his human world as it is much safer than a club teeming with things that would love nothing more than to play with a human such as this one.”

  “You won’t even remember him tomorrow,” Jera said sourly. “It’s a miracle you even remember us.”

  “I may forget faces and names and places and dates and all that is rudimentary, but I never forget feelings. No one does.” Her eyes returned to Bryan’s slack, sleeping face. “Feelings are scrawled permanently into the mind and body, waiting for us with hands wide open. But you, demon, are all too familiar with such a truth, aren’t you?”

  How?

  “The letter,” Jera diverted before I could pry.

  “It was nothing,” I said again. “Just some dumb joke. It’s not a case we’re taking up.” I didn’t need Jera investigating it and seeing dollar signs. Yes, the writer of the letter had predicted Bryan’s sickness and even helped in healing him, but it didn’t warrant a visit across states into a potential trap.

  “Far from nothing,” Niv betrayed lightly, patting Bryan’s head as though he was still a wolf in her mind. “The letter was from a place known for harboring immortals and humans in need. Run by none other than Inoli herself.”

  “Inoli?” Jera pressed.

  “She’s one of the few dark elves remaining across all worlds,” Niv said ominously.

  “And that’s supposed to make us trust her?” I looked to Jera for backup, but the demon’s face had taken on surprise, intrigue.

  “A dark elf, you say,” she murmured, lips curling in a way that could mean nothing good. Gray eyes flicked to mine. “We’re going.” Then to Niv: “You will teleport us there.”

  Niv shook her head. “I can teleport only to places I have been and those in which I recall.”

  “Useless,” Jera growled. Attention back on me, she said, “Then you will teleport us.”

  Right. “You know that’s not happening.” Our training sessions semi-revolved around trying to get me to teleport myself—anything, really—just like I had twice in the past, but clearly teleportation was just another ability of mine that worked when it wanted to work.

  I crossed my arms, keeping my energy tethered to Bryan’s to monitor his stability, but I stared daggers into the woman before me. “But by all means, you’re welcome to use your vacation days for whatever reason. I’m not going. I have a shop to maintain and no business in Texas.”

  “A kiss,” she said.

  I startled. “What?”

  “I will allow one kiss.”

  This woman was unbelievable. “You’re bargaining with something that benefits you, Jera, really?”

  She coughed into her fist. “Gosh golly, I’m feeling a bit faint. I’d hate to go on this voyage and collapse without my ever-capable, strong male there to save me.”

  I rubbed my temple. “A kiss won’t heal you completely.” But if this was the only time she was willing to compromise . . . “Two kisses and we discuss you-know-what,” I negotiated.

  “One kiss and I promise not to flay you into a crisp,” she barked.

  Unbelievable.

  “Deal?” She hitched a brow.

  “You’re unbelievable.”

  Her lips curled into a smile. “Then it’s a deal. Now, faery, if you would be so kind as to return us home and never bring us to your questionable sleeping corridors again.”

  A soft chuckle was Niv’s only response before she took both our hands and did as told, returning us back to the All American Coffee Shop.

  Ch. 7

  “Don’t scream,” said the voice of rich, black lacquer.

  Scream was exactly what Jai did. She whirled around so fast, she nearly tripped over her own feet and stumbled into the counter. When the noise died down in her throat, she peered into the darkness of her kitchen, expecting the worst. An immortal holding her at gunpoint. Two immortals holding her at gunpoint. A sinister demon from one of those foreign horror flicks. The list could go on, though she knew it was a vivid rush of fear feeding into her imagination.

  She’d never been robbed before, nor did she think any malevolent spirits had it out for her. Ravenburg was a rural set of apartments with relatively older tenants, and the worst thing to have happened here was a wild coyote rummaging through the trash at night.

  Yet, there, seated at her kitchen table like a welcomed guest, was the shadow of a man.

  Instantly, she raked through all of the immortals she’d slaughtered in her lifetime, and when the list grew too long, she settled on deduction: it had to be kin of the faeries she’d had eliminated tonight.

  When the shadow moved, she screamed again, this time grabbing the nearest weapon accessible: the McDonald’s plate. She hoisted it out at arm’s length in warning.

  To her surprise, the shadow ceased movement.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” he assured, but there was something extremely unsettling about the rich tenor to the voice, smooth yet low, slightly distorted.

  “Yeah, well, breaking and entering doesn’t exactly say—”

  Outside, the streetlights flickered on, someone likely walking their dog at the odd hour. Pale orange effulgence filmed through the window, falling dimly into her kitchen. It cast a gruesome, sallow light onto everything.

  Her breath caught.

  The shadow man was deplorable in every lurid and morbid sen
se of the word, because she knew instantly that it was no man, no mere robbery. It was one of them. Loose, dark sleeves snaked up the nape of his wrists, obsidian gloved fingers fisted at his side. The loose-fitting clothing didn’t stop at the torso, but extended to the unfitted black pants faintly redolent of cargo joggers, elastic at the waist and ankles stealing every detail of what looked to be a lithe figure beneath the get-up. But its black shades also took away any real sign of the sinister presence she sensed beneath it. Jai had the distinct idea that this was the man’s intention, to contain his lethal parameter with clothing not quite adhering to his form.

  A ridiculous notion, but one she was riding as finally she met the man’s eyes to confirm what she’d already suspect: immortal.

  The profile before her was so human yet so wrong. The creature’s face had all the allure of a demonic arts and crafts project. Rugged skin and perfectly chiseled features; there were women who would gladly swoon and dismiss the fact that the appearance wasn’t even attractive but menacing. Those bleak black eyes stared straight at her in momentary silence, as though giving her all the time she needed to take in the cut of his jaws, the pink of his lips and tan of his flesh. A thick fall of inkblot curls descended in untamed disarray from behind, pouring down solid shoulders, lassoed sloppily at midlength. The mass of it lay down the center of what looked to be two crossed, sheathed swords at his back.

  “I will say this again,” he said slowly. “I have no intentions of hurting you, Kyoung-ja. Now sit.” She almost snorted aloud. “I want only to speak with you. What happens after entirely depends on you.” He said this as he stood blocking the exit to the kitchen, making it impeccably clear she had one of two options: sit and abide, or abide by sitting.

  Her hand tightened on the plate. Now that her heartbeat had decreased from strangling thunder to a band of drummer boys, she found her tongue had shrunken to a reasonable enough size to ask the imperative. “Who are you and how do you know my name?” He wasn’t a faery or vampire if the eyes were any indicator, their shades purged of stark colors like the faekind maintained and they were too faded a tint to be a vampire.

  Wizard? Werewolf?

  The twisted orange hue of the streetlamp crawled over his visage, his eyes. The black pits looked to the plate she held, swing-at-the-ready (HB’s medics weren’t exactly trained in fighting with their fists). Then, in a slow drawl, his accent untraceable, he said, “I’m Graves, and a distant friend revealed your name to me.”

  A distant friend. She hardly had any close ones outside of her debatable co-workers.

  “Her name is Inoli.”

  The name didn’t ring a bell.

  He took a step closer to her, hand outreached as if to talk her out of doing something rash, such as smash the plate against his head and bolt. Medical skills? Exemplary. Combat? She may as well carve her own grave now.

  “Try again,” she taunted. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  A cloth of silence draped the space between them, and in this quiet moment, she contemplated how close to the fire escape she was. And for that matter, considering she never opened the thing, would she have to fight with the rusted locks and hinges, or would it show her mercy by opening on the first tug?

  He took another step. “I will not harm—”

  She went for the window. Not because she thought it was a brilliant idea, or the only idea at this point, but because impulse was a powerful thing. So was the want to live.

  To apply credit where credit was due, she was all hands on deck, latch pulled, window slid halfway—enough to catch the first raw whiff of freedom and the putrid dumpster mix below—before she felt the cruel bars of defeat wrapping around her waist, hauling her from the sill.

  She was crushed back instantly against his chest and the faint trace of a dark spice drowned out her awareness.

  “Relax.” Cool, collected. The black velvet tone was spoken at her ear from a disarmingly intimate space. There was a lulling incantation to it, foreboding. It dripped right down her spine to the tailbone.

  She shuddered so violently against him, she was sure she would dislodge from her skin and wake to find this was all a dream, and that she had in fact done what she had so many countless other times: fallen asleep in the lab of the compound, using her work folders as a pillow, seven missed calls, all from her dad, calling to chastise her for disobeying whatever rule she’d chosen to break that day.

  “I mean it, relax. I don’t want to have to make you.”

  Her breath came in rapidly. Make her? So much for him not hurting her.

  She was something more than trapped. She was ensnared and rendered motionless. Her left arm forcibly banded beneath her breasts by his hold, her right wrist caged in the iron lock of his cool gloved fingers. And despite the fine texture of his loose clothing, beneath it, where her back was pressed to his torso, there was nothing but rigid muscles and unnatural heat sinking into her skin by the second.

  “Drop the weapon,” he ordered.

  She did.

  The clatter as it hit the floor jolted through her. She didn’t want to die. She had too many neatly outlined reasons for needing to stay alive. Starting with an explicit welcome home party for when they brought back the McRib.

  So, knowing it was futile, she offered him her valuables. “There’s a credit card in the left drawer—though I should warn you, the credit line is only one hundred dollars. I have a laptop and tablet in the bedroom, just make sure you return them to the lab by May; they’re rentals. And there’s soup in the fridge.”

  “I’m not interested in anything you offered.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t eat the soup either; I made it.”

  His chest rose and fell against her shoulder blades with a steely definition. If he wanted to inflict any unsavory pain or irrevocable damage, he wouldn’t need a weapon to do so. She’d witnessed the supernatural strength of immortals. Saw them crush skulls with their bare hands.

  Maybe he wasn’t lying. But that only meant he needed her alive for something else. Something potentially worse.

  “Okay,” she said to the creature, using her most reasonable voice. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to hear you out.”

  “And have a seat.”

  She looked at the kitchen table. It was as she’d left it: one chair, empty mug of Starbucks, a scatter of papers ordered disorderly. The exact place he’d been sitting.

  Okay, yeah, she could do that. At her slow nod, his fingers uncoiled at a cautious rate, and all at once, his heat vanished from behind her. He crossed his arms casually, and even more so, opted to lean against her counter, watching her. Waiting.

  Catching the direction of her gaze, he toed the plate out of her reach as she started for the seat.

  Once settled, she looked back to him and couldn’t help but spectate with inevitable intrigue just what faction he was affiliated with. She had no hint beyond his unnatural stealth, his speed and the fact she hadn’t heard one heartbeat when pressed against him.

  “Relax,” he said again.

  Did she not look relaxed to him?

  “I am.”

  “Your heart’s pounding.”

  “I’d feel more relaxed with my plate.”

  That ominous face tilted. “I was told you’ve a supreme intelligence, but if you truly believe a plate is going to stop me, then I find the claim hard to believe.”

  She pursed her lips and waited.

  He gazed at her. A long stretching silence passed. Until she began to squirm; until the fear dictating the thrashing of her heart gradually ebbed into a steady thud. Only then did he speak.

  “As I said, my name is Graves. With any other person, I may have apologized for the unorthodox meeting, but given who you are, I’m certain you can understand my neglect. Nevertheless, I was careful not to bring any damage to your property upon my entry. Your security system is pitiful, as you’ve no doubt gathered. A true wonder why one of HB’s most valued medics would live in a place like this with no security. I
arrived earlier when daylight still prevailed, anticipating resistance, but when I found no one, I waited. I even found the time to feed your freshwater lifeform.”

  “You fed Charlie Number 9?!” She knew he’d been acting fishy! Unable to meet her eyes with that unfocused stare. Worse, he’d eaten from the intruder then glubbed up the flakes she’d given him as if nothing was amiss. Not even a warning burble.

  Appropriately exasperated, she took careful note of the way he spoke, portraying such insignificant details. “Just what do you want from me?”

  That remote calmness in his eyes flashed in the muted orange glow of the room and a void stringency took lead in his voice. “I’m here because I was sent to retrieve you.”

  “For torture? Answers? I hate to break it to you, but my field is medical. I don’t have access to the pivotal things.” A lie.

  “I’m here for your help.”

  This time she did snort incredulously. “Over my dead body.”

  He lowered his head, shadows passing over already black eyes. “Can be arranged.”

  Disregarding the threat, seeing as she was a walking corpse regardless, she ventured, “You know who I am, what I do. So what could I possibly help someone like you with?”

  “Inoli,” He turned his head away from her to ruminate out the scape of the window, where that sickly street lamp filtered onto his shape unforgivingly. The next part came with the monotone of before, only this time, she thought she saw him tense. “Says you are the only one who can fulfill the role.”

  For a scarce, passing moment, she forgot she was sitting in the dim dark of her kitchen with an immortal abomination, because he couldn’t have possibly said anything more alarming. “Role? What role?”