Hunter froze as the air around him shifted, jagged, and in that breath, the dream cracked. What moments ago had been warm and golden was now cold, shuddering, and warped. He felt the snap as the dream unraveled, a pulse of wrongness that dragged him from her warmth and flung him out of the scene and into nothing.
Her mind was shifting. Hard.
Confused, scrambling, Hunter tried to move with it, to flow with the change the way he was made to do. To fasten himself, regroup, and guide the sequence.
But... Something.
Something was off.
Fucking wrong.
A lot had gone to shit tonight, and he needed to understand it all, but this? This wasn’t a nightmare.
He wasn’t steering anything, and neither was Daphne.
He would know if she was.
No, this wasn’t a dream anymore.
This was something else–something older, with teeth and claws. The shadows felt closer now, hungrier. It felt like they were both pushed to the sidelines as mere observers, unwelcome guests in her own goddamn mind.
There was no precedent to this.
The origin point was clear, to some extent. Hunter was the best Dream Devil in the fucking department, but anyone would recognize where this damn thing came from.
Her trauma was playing, uncontrolled.
Which should have been impossible.
Trauma couldn’t just run on its own.
And then, with one gut-wrenching twist, Hunter was ripped from the dream like a puppet yanked off-stage. He stayed in his natural form in the cold, real world, fluttering around, confused.
He didn’t go back to HQ.
Didn’t report.
Didn’t speak.
He just went to his cabin, the little one tucked in the middle of the Norwegian wilderness, far beyond any town’s borders. He shifted again, skin and bones and nerves, and simply dropped down right on the frozen earth, legs folded, elbows on his knees, breath clouding in front of him. The snow bit at his skin, numbed his fingers, and tried to calm the fire crawling through his chest.
It didn’t work.
His heart was still racing, his body still shaking, and that impossible, soul-deep feeling that something had come alive wouldn’t leave.
And he had no clue how to stop it.
Hunter didn’t know how long it took before he could make the decision, but when he did, he didn’t lose any time.
One minute, he was sitting in the snow, trying to piece himself back together. The next, he was standing in front of Dorian’s cabin like some half-frozen idiot who’d made a habit of fumbling assignments and showing up uninvited.
No one–not a single soul–went uninvited to Dorian’s as a general rule. Unannounced and after hours meant looking for pain.
Fine.
Hunter sighed. Clearly, he had lost all self-preservation instinct along with his professional boundaries.
He reformed inside, making sure he had remembered to reform with clothes on. Quietly, carefully, he padded through the dark cabin like the trespasser he was, nerves scraped raw. He walkedto the bedroom door and found it open. He looked at his feet as he knocked lightly on the doorframe. Dorian was going to end him for this, but if he got a whiff that he saw something inappropriate about Amelia, that would mean a lot of suffering on top of being ended, and he didn’t need any of it.
