He’s tall, maybe 6’6”, and he’s wearing steely-purple armor like some kind of futuristic warrior.
I squint at him, trying not to sway as I glance back at Ben.
He’s not moving, so I guess I can’t ask him what he sees.
The man in front of me is literally glowing. Blue and purple beams of light arc out of his back and curve around him, giving the impression of… wings?
His armor only emphasizes his huge muscles.
His hair is long, in a dark color that is hard to make out. It’s kind of like an oil slick, looking purple or blue depending on how it catches the light.
He walks forward, arms open, his hands the only things that look nearly human.
My eyes move to his face, and my heart starts racing. Handsome doesn’t even start to describe him. He’s beautiful but in a masculine way. Straight nose, soulful, large eyes, cheekbones cut by a master sculptor, pointed chin on a powerful jaw. His skin glows almost as much as the rest of him, perfect and practically poreless.
Yeah, there’s no way a man like this exists.
I shoot Ben another glare. What on earth did he slip me?
The gorgeous man in front of me takes another step forward, and I realize his eyes are welling with emotion for some reason. His perfect, full lips curve in a bright, happy smile so full of joy it practically bowls me over.
I put up my arm as he approaches because the glow is so bright it feels like he’ll burn me. But then I realize he’s probably a hallucination and lower my arm.
“My love. I’ve waited so long for you.” His eyes crinkle with emotion. “Your warrior is finally here. You may fall into my arms. I promise you’re safe now.”
I swallow, my whole body feeling bloodless. “What?”
He looks confused for a second, then shakes it off and walks forward again. I can tell this person isn’t someone easily shaken from their course.
“My love,” he says, keeping his hands out. As he approaches, the glow dims slightly, and I can suddenly make out that the beams of magic arcing from his back are definitely wings.
Wings. Makes sense.
Wait, no, none of this makes sense.
“Why are you saying I’m your love?” I might as well ask this hallucination what he wants while he’s here.
“I’m your dream mate,” he says, smile a little more strained as he keeps his hands out, still approaching slowly as though he fears I might run.
I guess my shock is showing in my face. “Uh, dream mate?”
He puts one elegant hand up to his heart. “You’re my other half. The true bond of my soul. My love. My dream mate.” His full mouth drops the smile, and his eyes go wide in confusion. He seems to look over his shoulder at something, and the glow dims a bit more as he nods his head and turns back to me.
“You’ve suffered here in this broken world,” he says, looking around him. “Let me take you away from it all.” His smile is back, so gentle and warm I want to just run into his arms and pretend this could be true.
But no, men are not like this. I shake my head, wondering why my crazy-fast metabolism has made most of the alcohol dissipate but left me drugged enough to still be seeing this in real life.
If I reached out, it’s like I could touch him. He’s so beautiful. There is a part of me, I assume a part of any female, that wants to go to him.
My heart is pulled his way. He’s like male beauty personified.
Yeah, I’m definitely drugged.
Even if he’s beautiful, watching him here is so stupid. It’s just a manifestation of younger me, the little girl who dreamed of a fairy prince and hoped he’d come for her someday.
Yeah, right. A little too late, bud.
I sigh, raising my hand and moving it in front of my view of him, back and forth as if I could erase him. “Begone, hallucination!”
His face looks immediately stricken. Damn, I didn’t know hallucinations had feelings. Now I feel kind of bad. No, wait, he’s just…
“I said be gone!” I yell it authoritatively this time, and with one frustrated, gorgeous frown at me, the being who called himself “my love,” disappears in a flash of purple light.
The night darkens as my vision slowly adjusts. I look around for any trace of what I just saw, any evidence it didn’t only happen in my mind, and then shake my head with a chuckle.
Then I pull out my phone to call a cab for Ben and a ride home for me.
When the cab pulls up, I haul Ben up over my shoulder and carry him over to it, dumping him in and ignoring the taxi driver’s hard stare.
I hand the driver two twenties and show him Ben’s address.
As the cab pulls away, leaving me in the darkness, I take a moment to reflect on the night.
There’s wine spilled over the snow, and food containers, and I slowly bend down to pick them up to throw them in the trash because I don’t litter.
By then, Jen shows up in her beat-up Lebaron, which barely has brakes or a working transmission. She won’t let me or any other friend fix it, insisting it’s fine as it is.
Honestly, it probably wouldn’t survive a repair shop. They’d probably label it “undriveable” or “unfit for public roads.”
But I’m glad she’s here to get me all the same. I don’t feel like getting into a taxi when I’m this high.
She parks and gets out, hurrying around the car to see if I’m okay. “You said you were drugged? You want to go to the police?”
“I don’t think it was anything serious,” I say. “Maybe a psychedelic, and I don’t know how to convince the police it wasn’t something I just took. Anyway, Ben won’t be a problem for anyone else now.”
Jen nods eagerly, and her red curls bounce as she envelops me in a hug. “It’s good to see you.” She pulls back, her brown eyes studying me curiously, pert nose turned up. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Just a hallucination.” But I don’t feel like saying more about it right now.
“Hm,” Jen says, leading the way back to the car and opening her door to unlock the passenger side for me. “You know I don’t like how dangerous this job is.”
“I know,” I say, giving her a shrug.
She knows I’m strong. She knows basically everything about me, and I’d trust her with my life. As she would trust me with hers.
We pull out into the night, and as we drive and snow flurries pass my window, I try not to think about aurora-colored eyes.
* * *
Lorien
“Your majesty…” Reve trails off, pushing his teal hair over his shoulder as he stands to come over to me.
I pin him with a glare, and he rethinks it, sending a nervous look at Jerrek as he sits back down.
Both of them pitying me over what just happened is only more infuriating. And heartbreaking.
“I’m no longer king. Don’t call me that,” I say.
Reve grins. “You’ll always be king to me.”
“The best ruler the eighth kingdom ever had.” Jerrek agrees.
I can’t help smiling, just a slight upturn of my lips. “Stop.”
“No, really,” Reve says, grinning. “The most magnanimous, handsome—”
“Record-breaking, revolutionary—”
I stand, turning away from them. “Stop this.” Nothing can distract me from the pain of being rejected—no, banished by my dream mate.
After so many years of searching…
“She didn’t know,” Reve says, slinging an arm around my shoulder as he comes to crowd me again.
Jerrek slides a hand around my waist, laughing at my attempts to escape as we all walk forward, arm in arm.
We’re in a modified dream realm camp we’ve set up while needing access to the human world.
We’ve all located our mates, after hundreds of years of searching, but we stay here at a safe distance to adequately plan how to make them ours.
To be fair, my little brother, Leander, warned me that things were differe
nt in the human realm. That I shouldn’t just go barreling in without studying their kind.
But I thought my dream mate would be waiting for me, wanting me, desperate to hold me as I am to hold her.
Instead, she told me to “be gone.”
“What is a hallucination?” Jerrek asks. “Is it like an illusion?”
Jerrek’s an expert at illusions, so of course he would want to know.
“I don’t know,” I say. “She didn’t seem to be all right.”
“If no dream fae enchanted her, then surely she was under some kind of enchantment. Perhaps a potion.”
“Indeed,” I say, finally shaking off Jerrek and Reve to fold my arms, resting my chin on my fist.
“It’s not over, highness,” Reve says, still persistently standing beside me on the purple-pink clouds that make up the “ground” of our home.
The sky above is the beautiful human blue, and we can walk across these pink clouds forever because we are actually in part of the human dream realm, not the actual, grounded world.
“That’s right,” Jerrek says. “We didn’t cross worlds and dimensions to give up now.”
“Who said I was giving up?” I demand sharply, whirling on them.
Jerrek puts up his hands, his maroon hair falling messily around his face. “I don’t know. I just thought… I mean, that was painful.”
I send him a smirk. “Not really, now that I realize she must have been under the influence of some kind of imbibement.” I think for a moment, then straighten, looking at my cohorts imperiously. “The truth is that she’s my dream mate. I won’t leave until I’ve won her.”
“Um…” Reve sends another look at Jerrek.
“You know the rules the oracle of this world set when your brother told her we’d be in their region.” Jerrek swallows.
“Right,” I say, heart sinking again. “If she tells me to leave, I must.”
“As if we’d actually turn into ‘stalkers’ as they accused,” Reve says.
I let out a breath. “I do not want to be a stalker. But I know that I am born to make her happy. I can sense that she is unhappy in the human world. I will save her. I will win her. I will bring her to the dream world.” I look to the surreal bright-blue sky. “I swear it.”
“I believe you.” Reve stands next to me, resting a hand on my shoulder again. We have deep bonds and can heal and rest and comfort each other through touch and words.
The three of us have been through so much together.
“I never thought when we went looking for your brother that it would lead to all of this,” Jerrek says, shaking his head. “If we hadn’t defied orders to go find him, we never would have found the world that holds our mates.”
“That’s right,” I say, fists tightening as renewed faith surges through me. “Fate is on our side. Love is on the horizon.” I pat Reve on the back as thanks for his support. “Together, we will figure this out.”
“To our mates,” Jerrek says as Reve materializes glasses of fae wine for all of us. It’s a gorgeous blue, and the crystal of our glasses clinks as we lift them in a toast.
As we drink back the liquid, I’m already smirking, thinking about my next move.
If I can’t visit her yet in the real world, I’ll just have to visit her in her dreams.
3
Tess
As I feel sleep coming on, it’s almost like my body resists what’s coming.
My nightmares.
My legs twitch, and I start to see odd things in the dark as sleep finally claims me.
I brace myself as I stand in the darkness, looking around for what I need to fight against today.
Sometimes it’s zombies trying to do terrible things to me with glowing red eyes. Sometimes I win against them with a shovel or anything I can find, and sometimes they tear me apart and I wake up just as they’re killing me.
Sometimes it’s wild dogs, like hellhounds, chasing me down an endless road to nowhere.
Sometimes it’s a dark and abandoned castle with grounds that used to be beautiful but now hold only skeletal trees and shrubs in a gray landscape around the tattered building.
But tonight, as I stand for a minute with my eyes closed, waiting for whatever horror is set to greet me, I feel something warm like the brightest sunlight coming out from beyond clouds, lighting up the darkness.
No, obliterating the darkness, I realize as I open my eyes and see a radiantly bright scene at the center of my vision, surrounded by the prior dark, which fades more and more as the brighter scene takes over my mind.
I blink, staring at an utterly foreign horizon. A blue ocean so clean and sparkling, each perfect wave cresting gently and riding to a glittering beach of white sand… no… pink sand.
A sea breeze hits me and smells like the ocean from when I was a child. I breathe in deeply. The last good moment before I was hurt… It sets my heart at peace.
I look around me, then take a step forward, feeling my toes sink into warm, inviting sand.
As I walk, gulls cry overhead. When I look up at them, they almost seem to smile as they fly by me, far too clean for normal seagulls.
Oddest of all, there are no buildings. Just endless, gorgeous pink sand and waves and the horizon below a bright-blue sky.
Everything feels just slightly oversaturated. But the beauty is so much I could almost cry.
I fall on my butt in the warm sand and put my hands up to wipe away a few tears of sheer relief at not being in a nightmare.
I don’t know what has caused this blessed relief, but I haven’t had a sweet dream for so long.
I grin, staring up at the sky, grateful that, for once, I don’t have to fight zombies.
For once, the nightmare is over.
My body is completely at rest.
Something interrupting the quiet breeze and cresting waves sparks my interest, and I sit up, looking around for the splashing sound breaking the rhythm of the waves.
There in front of me, amidst waist-high, gorgeous aqua waves, a man is walking toward me.
The waves lap at him as he walks forward, perfect muscles bouncing, glistening sun highlighting the water dripping over taut skin and sharply defined pecs and abs.
As he comes closer and I make out long, dark hair over his shoulders and face, my eyes narrow in confusion.
Then he throws his head back, whipping his hair off his face and shoulders, sending an arc of droplets into the air as his face finally comes into view.
Aurora irises.
And open arms.
The man from last night.
He’s only ten feet away now, his gorgeous body revealed fully as he steps to the place where the ocean meets the sand. He’s only wearing tiny swim trunks.
I guess the drugs are still affecting me.
But this time, I feel less threatened by this apparition.
This is a gift, a beautiful dream instead of a nightmare. This perfect sky devoid of all but the fluffiest clouds. This ocean with nothing but sparkling, clean water. No trash. No sharks.
This pink sand that warmly hugs my feet as I walk forward to meet this man.
When this drug Ben gave me finally wears off, I’ll go back to the nightmares and probably never see this man again.
Which is too bad because he’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
And his arms are still open as he walks toward me.
His hair still shimmers, looking somewhere between navy blue and black but with glints of other colors when the light hits it right.
His features are sharp. Excruciatingly handsome.
“My darling,” he says in that deep, smooth voice that calls to something deep inside me. Well, I did invent him from my drug-addled brain, so he probably would be my ideal.
Not that I ever pictured a man with purple in his hair before or a man with glowing wings.
No wings and no armor today.
But still, those sweetly uttered words of love and devotion from last night are pouring forth
as he comes even closer, and I take a few faltering steps toward him.
He’s so tall that I have to crane my head to look up at him even though I’m a tall woman who rarely has to look up at men.
When I do, his face is even more overwhelming. What baffles me most is the tenderness there. The slight, sweet smile on his perfect, full, carved lips as his eyes study my face.
Like he’s so happy to see me he can barely hold himself back. Like I’m special to him.
It’s all a delusion, but as his warm, strong arms pull me in against his muscular chest and the cool sea breeze brushes my hair back and kisses my cheek, I really have no idea what to do.
I feel oddly bashful around him despite him still probably being a hallucination. I haven’t felt this way around a man for a long time. Maybe ever.
One of his hands moves to my hip, gently cradling it while his other hand cups my cheek, gently stroking my hair back with his thumb as it grazes over my cheekbone.
His eyes well as he looks down at me. “You just don’t know how happy I am to know that you truly exist.”
“What do you mean?”
“My dream mate, I’ve waited forever for you.”
And then his arms pull me in again and he’s holding me tightly but gently, his head bowed over mine.
He keeps me there for a moment as if he’s afraid I’ll fly away if he lets go. Then he pulls back, cups my face in his big, strong hands, and gently moves forward to claim my lips in a kiss.
And what a kiss. My hair flies back as ocean wind hits us, cooling me as sudden heat flashes through me from the contact with his mouth.
I let out a groan and my legs weaken, and as he deepens the kiss, I feel something warm and soft wrap my waist, holding and supporting me so I can just relax into the kiss.
This soft, passionate kiss feels like it’s taking everything bad away. Like it’s erasing the pain of the past and filling up everything with joy inside me.
I know it’s not possible, but as my hands move to his warm, sexy shoulders as I open my mouth to let him deepen the kiss, I want it to be.
“Mmm,” he says, running his tongue gently over my lips and then diving in again. He kisses me more ravenously, and it’s all I can do to stay in the moment and not run from a feeling that’s so good I’ve never felt it before.
Sweet Dreams Page 3
