I do, and a moment later, a deep sleep washes over me.
At first, it’s exactly what I want—what Ineed. Deep rest laced with wicked dreams, untold desires, and orgasms that flood my subconscious with pleasure again and again, lulling me deeper into a sensual void of perfection.
But then, my chest suddenly goes cold. A hollow darkness creeps into the corners of my mind, overshadowing everything until I can no longer sense Crypt.
Instead, I find myself striding through a stone hallway. Not just any stone hallway—this is the vast entry within the citadel I used to loathe visiting. Is this a memory? I try to place it, but it somehow feels both familiar and unfamiliar.
Finally, I come to a stop in the dream and find myself facing…children. Thirteen children of varying ages, with gray-draped necromancers standing guard around them. Dagon’s voice echoes beside me, sending chills down my spine because I’ve heard his sickly voice far too many times.
“My liege, these are they who survived passing into your great kingdom upon your command. Through the efforts of the liches you sent, these few were able to withstand the Divide…but my everlasting lord, I must still warn you. Mere mortals cannot reasonably survive the things which I shall put these younglings through.”
My gaze catches on a very young girl standing at the edge of the little mortals. Her black hair is a tangle around her serious face. The others are crying, trembling, sobbing at the sight of me, but she is utterly still and watchful with large, dark eyes. Fear is thick in the air except for around her.
A strange pride fills me, but it doesn’t feel like my own.
“Begin with that one,” a rattlingly deep voice booms…from my mouth.
It sends fear coursing through my veins. Pain shoots through my chest, shock sluicing through my system as I jolt awake, shedding the dream in an instant. Immediately, I feel Crypt’s hands cradling my face as he leans over me flat on my back. His silver-flecked violet eyes are wide, panicked.
The others are awake, too, gathered around me on the bed. The only sound in the room is my struggle to breathe and the fireplace’s crackling. I’m vaguely aware of the fact that I’m completely bare from the waist down and still incredibly wet from whatever Crypt was doing with me.
“What just…” I trail off, disoriented.
“I couldn’t get into your subconscious anymore. No—I was pushedoutof your subconscious,” Crypt growls, his face darkening with pure fury as his light swirling markings light up faintly.
“A lot of fucking good you are to her,” Baelfire snarls, his eyes shifted into draconic-slitted pupils. “Maybe if you were more focused on protecting Maven’s dreams and less on using her for your sleeping fuck doll fantasy?—”
“Change your tone before I rip your tongue out, dragon.Neverhas this happened before in all the dreams I’ve walked,” Crypt snaps before turning back to me. “What was that, love?”
I swallow to try steadying my voice, more disoriented when I see sunlight streaming through the small window of this little cabin bedroom. “It was a dream of a memory. But not mine.”
“Whose, then?” Silas demands.
“Amadeus’s.”
They all recoil.
Crypt swears. “I cannot pass through the Divide even in dreams. That must be what ripped me from your subconscious and prevented me from waking you. If you’re sharing a dream state with that Undead bastard, it means your psyche is somehow linked to his.”
Everett stiffens. “Through the shadow heart in her chest?”
“Perhaps,” the Nightmare Prince mutters, tracing the side of my face as he watches me with tender concern.
All four of them look concerned, actually. Far too much.
I sit up, finding my discarded panties and pants to slip into. “We need to go to Argentina.”
Baelfire scowls, his shifter temper flaring. “Are you seriously going to brush this off like it’s fucking nothing? You just shared a dream with the asshole who put you through hell! Don’t act like it didn’t freak you out, too. We need to?—”
“What?” I interrupt, fixing him with a stern look. “We need to what? Spiral and spew theories about why this is happening? Panic? Crack open my fucked-up head to see what’s going on?”
He snarls again, more viciously and far less like Baelfire. His dragon must be fighting hard for control. “Don’t even fucking joke about that right now,” he warns.
“We have bigger problems to focus on,” I point out, looking at each of them as my own emotions spike in the wake of that off-putting dream. “If I don’t get etherium soon, my plan goes to shit. I need to keep you four safe, but if I don’t end another one of my targets soon, Amadeus is going to start killing off humans, starting with?—”
My voice breaks, and I shut my eyes.
“Maven?” Everett asks softly.
