The Book of Dreams Forgotten: (A Broken Creatures Novel, Book 2) Page 6

  “I know. We humans break easy,” I mumbled under my breath.

  Lia shook her head again. “No, I mean Jera.”

  I raised a brow.

  “She’s weaker, Peter. Much weaker than she’s letting on. The bond, when . . . ignored, it goes after physical strength first, then her abilities.”

  I frowned, then peered at her closely. “You know, she’s not the only one weaker than they’re letting on.”

  Gray eyes widened then flitted to the floors. Around her, her dark energy’s ribbons pulsed weakly, reminding me of the buds of dying fireflies.

  I squared off with Lia just as Jera and Nat did.

  “You know you can talk to me about what happened,” I drawled. “It’s not something you should keep to yourself.” She hadn’t mumbled a word on what occurred in that dark prison and anytime Jera or I broached the subject, she shut down, fled the scene, leaving me perplexed and Jera enraged at her helplessness.

  “I’d rather not,” was all Lia said as she placed her feet apart the way Natalie had shown her, fists in their defensive positions.

  “Just like you’d rather not talk about what’s going on with your dark energy,” I noted glumly. “The black nuller, you don’t have it anymore. Whatever was hurting you before is attacking faster now.” It wasn’t as if she could deny it, not when I could feel the significant difference in her strength.

  No one could completely detach from conversations quite like the twins could. I watched as Lia’s gray gaze, though staring right at me, created a distance so large, I wasn’t sure any blow I aimed would hit her. The same as my words hadn’t.

  This was a woman who’d been impossibly open with me before, one I’d likened to a sister, but what occurred at that laboratory had completely stripped that away.

  “Danny said you’re not the same,” I said, trying a different angle as beside us, Natalie let out the first of what would no doubt be many grunts.

  “Neither is he,” Lia returned. “And why should he be after losing his brother?”

  I threw my first punch, this time angling it the way Nat had instructed.

  Lia blocked it effortlessly with her padded, gloved hand.

  “We should talk about things in our own time, I get that, but,” I threw another one, quicker. “Can’t you give us something? It’s hurting those around you.”

  “Did you, Peter?” she asked, blocking again. “Did you give those around you something following your own tragedy? Did you talk about it?”

  I gritted my teeth, knowing she had a point. I’d shut down after my family’s death and the more Natalie had tried to get me to open up about it, the more I’d retreated into a black refuge of isolation. And speaking of opening up, it wasn’t like I was the most upfront of people. I had yet to tell either of them about the strange letter I’d gotten. But that was because I didn’t want them to needlessly worry, especially if it was nothing but a hoax, trap or prank.

  Then again, that was why most people did a lot of things, trying to protect the ones they cared for. Only for it to often backfire.

  I swung again, this time with a combo of left, left, left, right.

  She blocked them all without breaking a sweat, her smile sad. “I know you and my sister are worried about me, but it’s alright, I’m fine. Can you say the same, though? With all the practice you and Jera have been doing with your dark energy control, you’ve been sleeping a lot more—and waking up in a fit. Nightmares?”

  I creased my brows, and beside us, it was Jera who grunted now. “I don’t think so,” I ceded honestly. Or, to be precise, I couldn’t remember. The dreams I had, from what little I could scramble to collect upon waking—which was primarily colors and emotions—they weren’t nightmarish. Their atmosphere, I knew it was a black and blue influence, a blanket of somber similar to a stormy blue-gray morning. But nothing similar to the nightmares I would have as a child, those of monsters and falling.

  These dreams were more so . . . strange. As if they weren’t dreams at all, but lost memories.

  Lia wore her look of concern, lowering her hands and stepping close. “Are you sure? Because—”

  A loud growl interrupted her, right before a solid thud sounded. I put my hand to my forehead and sighed—but when I dared look, it wasn’t Nat face-planted on the mat, but a very agitated, wide-eyed Jera.

  Natalie wore the brightest, most triumphant smile, Jera’s hand pinned behind her back, Nat’s knee wedged between her shoulder blades. “And this, my young pupils, is the result you’ll receive if you follow my lead.” Not even an attempt to spare Jera’s dignity, she extended a hand to help her up.

  Remnants of the succubus I knew shined when Jera swatted it away and clawed to a stand. “Sheer luck,” she spat, twisting on her heels to stand beside me. “Lesson over for today.”

  Natalie protested. “It hasn’t even been twenty minutes!”

  Jera looked at me. “We’re done for today.”

  My feet stayed rooted. I didn’t like this. Already I was losing the twins for separate, serious reasons. I didn’t want Natalie to distance herself from me as well over some petty reason like not honoring a favor for a favor. Especially not when she was only doing this on my behalf. Even if I didn’t see myself implementing these moves in the unforeseeable future.

  “Jera, we promised—”

  The succubus laced her fingers with mine, grip firm but her eyes just then . . . they softened into misty clouds when she looked up at me, pleading, and I had to admit, it wasn’t my best moment. My brain cells, I could all but feel them fry, and in their place was an obsession. An itch beneath my skin, screaming for me to please her, secure her comfort and happiness above my own. Above anyone else’s.

  My words, I swallowed them back, mouth snapping shut before I said something that would condemn me to years of embarrassment. I shot Natalie an apologetic look.

  What was wrong with me?

  Natalie threw her hands up, then shook her head, tugging off her gloves in disbelief. “Class dismissed, I guess.”

  *****

  “Save it, Peter,” Jera said the moment I stepped into the kitchen.

  12:15, the shop was at its first rush hour of the day. Jera was upholding her usual station, washing the dishes while I alternated between assisting whichever station was in demand. Which was currently the register. But now was the first moment I would have alone with her, something she’d been actively trying to avoid after what she pulled at the dojo.

  Popping on two yellow gloves, I came up beside her and held my hand out for one of the sudded plates. “I’m not going to ‘save it.’ Not when you’re bound to do it again. We made a promise to Natalie—”

  “You promised her.”

  “Fine, yes, I did. But you told me you would behave.”

  “This may come as a surprise to you, brute, but I’m not your pet. I’m not your domesticated human wife.” She glanced at her rubber-gloved hands and the dishes. “You know what I mean. I am allowed to do as I please.”

  “And I’m not trying to control you, but your word has to have some bond—and speaking of bond, you can’t keep manipulating me with it like I’m your plaything.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  I rinsed the mug she handed me. There was no sense in her acting innocent, but if she wanted me to elaborate, “The whole googly eyes and coercion back at the dojo.”

  “G-googly?” Anger brought color to her cheeks.

  “And hand-holding,” I specified.

  I half expected her to throw the next plate at me. Instead, she said in exasperation, “I may have grabbed your hand, but I assure you, there were no despicable googly eyes.” At the doubtful purse of my lips, she pressed, “Have you ever considered you are simply a pushover? An invertebrate? Congenitally submissive?”

  Not a day went by she didn’t make that inexplicable clear. But unnecessary assertion and aggression only bred more of the two. Did that make me a pushover or a pacifist?

  I set the mug on the r
ack. “And have you ever considered that if we don’t talk about the actual problem here, you won’t be here anymore?”

  A muscle jumped along her jaw, her teeth set like a vice, eyes boring into the next dish she scrubbed.

  Not wanting a repeat of the incident in the dojo’s bathroom, not with customers just on the other side of the door, I took a deep breath, counted down from ten and said in a calmer tone, “We have to think of something.”

  “There’s nothing to think about,” she assure

  Well, maybe in a methodical approach there was nothing to think about. Sex was a straightforward act performed since the beginning of time, but given our circumstance . . . it was more complicated than ‘just sex.’

  “Is it because I look like him?” I asked suddenly.

  The way she stiffened, that always-telling surge of heat to waft by me, was enough to determine I’d hit the mark. I only wished I’d hit a different mark, because if this was truly the reason, that I resembled a man in which she harbored a fierce hatred towards, there wasn’t really a way forward from it. I couldn’t alter how I looked on the outside.

  “Jera—”

  “Why must you be so persistent, Peter?!” she erupted and there was an abrupt silence in the parlor.

  I tried to defuse her with a whisper. “Because I did this to you, so it’s my problem to fix.”

  There was a spark in her eyes, a little glint of pain and such irreparable hurt, I felt as though I’d just stumbled five steps away from the truth I was so eager to gain.

  “Just tell me what’s wrong,” I said. “Just tell me so I can fix it.”

  “I don’t want you to fix it!” she hissed.

  “And why is that? Do you want to die, because I find that very hard to believe.”

  “No one wants to die,” she said acerbically.

  “Clearly you do,” I returned with equal venom, matching her step towards me.

  If she was anything, she was a reputable teacher in the art of body language. When words failed her, her gesticulation was almost a science. A brutal, primal science that, if not learned, then it did what science was prone: destroyed.

  Jera tilted her head to meet my gaze, and whatever she saw in it caused a haunting chasm of something primitive to open in hers. “Do not destroy our shaky alliance over this, Peter. It’s not worth it.”

  “Your life isn’t worth it?” I challenged, expecting those same fangs to sprout from her, that same rage to poison the hairline of space between us.

  But the voice to speak next wasn’t hers.

  “Porter, we have a teensy situation,” Niv said.

  Neither Jera nor I moved to glance at the faery, as though invisible hands gripped us where we stood. Threatening, warning. Should I move, fire waited. Should she move, I waited. And apparently, by the darkening look in her eyes, she truly saw me as a threat.

  As the Maker himself.

  “As interesting as your love affair is,” the faery chimed. “I do need to borrow your male, succubus.”

  Before either of us could protest, Niv’s hand was on my shoulder and the coffee shop’s kitchen blinked out of sight.

  *****

  The smell of wet dog hit hard. After a week of living with Danny’s little mud-destined puli, I was half expecting to find the dog sitting in front of the storage room door, tongue hanging out, watching me intently. What I found instead was a bedroom I didn’t recognize.

  The sound came next. Heaved, wheezing whimpers that set my teeth on edge.

  Understanding came last.

  Niv had teleported me. I stood in what must have doubled as an art atelier. Easels and their canvases were scattered at random about the room, some of them half finished, blue tarp crinkled beneath the easels’ legs, and the others blank, cartridges of paint dotted about the scene haphazardly. There were no windows, only corner lamps whose dim lights hardly met one another’s radius.

  “Niv, you can’t pop up at the shop,” I ground out. “There are customers there. Humans with working eyes. What more, you can’t just come and steal me in the middle of the day. Where even am—”

  There in the corner, was a canopied queen sized bed. My eyes trailed over the lump posted on top of the mattress. A dark figure, panting, half its body hanging off the ledge.

  I stumbled back when I made out the shape—right into Jera. She must have gripped me at the last moment and teleported with me. I wouldn’t put it past her to only have done so to get out of kitchen duty.

  Shoving away from me, she pushed aside locks of hair and squinted at the muscular wolf-creature laid out over the duvets. “It’s dying,” she noted.

  “Clever little demon,” Niv said in such a way as to suggest it was obvious. She stalked into sight then, an inconsistent height upon each step, until finally she stopped before the bed and turned to us, resting at eye level with me. “While your human pet expressed doubt towards the letter, I knew better. I gave the wolf pup the vampire venom as instructed but it would seem it’s not enough.”

  Sitting beside the beast, who was about half her size, she stroked its lupine head, fingers threading behind a thick, ruddy brown fur. Its head lolled towards her, another faint whine bristling through a brief flash of sharp, long canines. “I know,” she purred at it.

  Not it.

  Bryan. The human hybrid.

  “You . . .” I blinked, my words dying off as a fuzz began to clutter in my head. Shaking it once, I tried again. “You gave—” That fuzz serpentined to my stomach now, where it grew into a familiar dark hole, gaping, searching. The pound of hunger was sudden, my vision swimming once.

  The last time I’d felt this, I’d been . . .

  “Are we at your club?” I managed, taking deep breaths to calm down, close the hole inside of me.

  During Jera and I’s training, we’d spectated on multiple causes for my inexplicable desire to devour dark energy when thrust into situations where I was exposed to large quantities of it. Our only solid theory: others’ dark energy fueled my own. This attribute, this need, Jera had said it hadn’t been present in the Maker and that because I was human, there was likely a legion of differences between me and the Maker. I was nothing more than a contorted impression of him. A human body trying to sustain a god’s ability, she’d joked bitterly.

  I found nothing amusing about needing to feed on another’s dark energy to fuel my own ability.

  The last time I’d felt such a scathing, distracting gnaw had been when I’d gone to Niv’s club and stood over an underground dance floor packed with immortals.

  “You most certainly are at my club,” the faery giggled, then purred a soft shhh at the wolf who was now basically curled against her lithe side. As usual, it took a few moments before I realized the faery was inebriated.

  She not only sold emotion cocktails drawn up from another immortal’s blood, but she was a prime indulger.

  She patted Bryan’s wolven head, then whispered at us, green eyes seeming to war between concern and excitement, “This is my bedroom. It lies beneath the club and is the only place poor Brent here could sleep while we inspected him.”

  “Inspected?”

  “Did I not tell you I often take immortals in need into my care? It only makes sense I make an effort to understand them before I try to assist them.”

  “What exactly is wrong with him . . .?” I pressed.

  “The same thing that’s wrong with all humans infected with dark energy for too long. It’s killing him.”

  I shook my head, having learned one thing: dark energy wasn’t as deadly as I’d once thought it to be. With Danny’s brother, the dark energy that’d been inside of him had turned out to be the one thing protecting him from a deadly tumor.

  When I told Niv this, she shook her head. “In the end, the substance destroys all humans, even should it aid them for a short interval.”

  This news should have bothered me. As a human infected with dark energy, I should have been counting the days left on my longevity calendar, but
with the amount of death and potential death I’d been washed in as of late, there was a growing numbness towards my own.

  I straightened. “You actually believed some letter and gave him vampire venom?”

  “What letter?” Niv asked, face blank for a moment, but after a few seconds she said, “Oh, yes, the Sanctuary is no place to fear. They help both humans and immortals.”

  “When anyone is ready to tell me about this letter,” Jera said, voice dripping with agitation aimed entirely at me.

  I stiffened, having forgotten I’d neglected to tell the twins about the letter. I was fairly certain this constituted as a step back from the three of us being on steady, trusting grounds. “It’s nothing,” I muttered. Jera was the one woman that would surely make a mountain out of a molehill if she sensed dollar signs involved. To Niv, “So the dark energy is concentrated in his stomach like the letter said and all I have to do is extract it?”

  “A simple thing,” she confirmed.

  I started for the bed, feeling Jera’s hard stare on my every step and the wolf’s skeptic yellow eyes boring into me, discerning me from friend or foe as if he didn’t remember me. Which was feasible. Who knew how much of the boy’s memories Niv had erased.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said as genuinely as I could muster, having never been good at bedside manners.

  Niv shifted away and through whatever strange relationship the two had developed, the wolf grunted in disappointment. If anything, it was a good thing he was lucid and communicative. It meant his illness hadn’t begun to take too large a toll.

  “Werewolves expend less energy in their wolf state,” Niv explained. “I can’t remember when it was he shifted, but he hasn’t taken his human form for at least five hours.”

  I nodded. Would it be more difficult to heal him seeing as he didn’t exactly . . . conform to human anatomy?

  With a deep breath, I closed my eyes and slipped into his dark energy’s stream with a startling ease. Which meant all of Jera and I’s practice hadn’t been futile. We’d been at it every night for the past week. Before the intensive nightly sessions, there’d been an entire deep breathing, mind emptying routine I’d had to undergo to locate another’s energy ribbons. Either that or examine something with the patient’s essence, like a strand of hair or a fingernail.