The scarred eyebrow rose. “And why is that?”
“Because there’re lots of weird shit roaming the astral plane right now, and you have zero wards on this place. You’re lucky it’s only me that has found you.”
“Am I now? Look, Basset, I don’t know how you keep turning up here, but as I told you before, this is my mind palace,” shesaid, and walked slowly around him. “You look familiar, but I don’t think my mind would have created you.”
“It’s not a mind palace, sweetheart,” he said, trying to be patient. “It’s a pocket dimension in the astral. Mind palaces are confined within your mind. This isn’t one, or I wouldn’t have been able to come in at all unless I was touching your physical body in some way.”
The woman stopped walking and crossed her arms. “And you’re the big expert, are you?”
“As a matter of fact…yes, I am,” Bas replied.
Damn, he never thought the few academic articles on consciousness he had written would ever come in handy. He opened his mouth to tell her his last name and credentials when he remembered that he shouldn’t be giving some random woman in the astral those details.
“Sure you are. Look, I don’t mean to be rude?—”
Bas grinned. “Yes, you do.”
“Okay, fine. Politely bugger off. It’s weird having you turn up and ruin my happy place like this,” she said and pointed at a stone archway that led back out into the forest.
“Well, I don’t mean to come across as an ass, but you really do need to set up some…” Bas let the sentence drop.
A shadow had rolled over the mist, covering them in darkness. He saw the image of a man-shaped creature with claws standing on the stone walls, and cold swept through him. He could feel its voracious hunger and the gnawing terror it wanted to inflict on them.
“Hawk girl! Fly! Now!” he shouted and pushed her with all his mental might. She cursed at him, but Bas was already shifting into his dragon form. He let out a roar of fire, and the dark, creepythingthat was trying to sink its claws into them let out a screech of fury and fled.
“Fucking parasite,” Bas growled, fire dripping from between his fangs.
Bas turned to tell the woman everything was okay, but he was alone. She was gone. He let out a furious roar of frustration that she had slipped through his fingers once again. Only a gold and black feather remained to prove she had been there at all.
2
Bridget Hawkyns had experienced a lot of bad dreams in her twenty-five years of life. She had learned to control them, but there wasn’t any controlling this.
One minute, she was arguing with the hot Irish stranger who kept on rudely turning up in her mind library, and then next, there was a dark creature, a push, and she was on a bare wooden floor with blood pouring from her brow.
This was a nightmare she recognized because she had lived it. Now, she just had to let it play out before she could break free and wake up. She tried to steady her breath through her cracked ribs.
“You aren’t going anywhere, you ungrateful, brown bitch,” her stepfather’s voice hissed through the ringing in her ears.
She had been trying to leave. She was almost eighteen, so legally, she was old enough. But he would never let her go. He needed her to look after the house and the baby. Free labor and someone to kick about.
His manicured hands gripped her around the throat. “It hurts me to have to do this to you, but you need to learn to respect the head of the house.”
These were words she had heard from the first time he had hit her with his fists when she was thirteen. He had been married to her mother for three months and had already slapped Bridget around harder than a parent should.
Her mother had never intervened, already too enamored of the powerful, rich man whom she had met at yet another party.
He was agood man,her mother had told her, who wouldtake care of them from now on. Bridget had to be good to him at all times, or he would leave, and it would be her fault. It didn’t matter that her new white stepfather hated that his new white wife had a light brown child. Her mother ignored Bridget’s bruises, and if she acknowledged them at all, it was her fault. Always her fault.
Some nights, when Bridget lay curled under her bed, hiding, she had thought her mother was worse than him. Bridget remembered being loved a little bit by her at one time. But that was before George and the perfect white baby he had always wanted.
That fateful night, baby George had been crying in his crib as George the elder had laid into her. Bridget’s arm snapped under his polished shoe, and her vision had gone white. There was screaming, and she realized it was her.
Then her stepfather had been ripped off her, and something huge and powerful had stood over her. It looked like an ancient Celt from one of the history books that she read at school. He had black braided hair and was covered in blood and woad. He looked down at her and then at the screaming baby.
“He is not your father,” the man had said in heavily accented English.
George the elder was struggling in the man’s grip.
