He’d known this could happen. Hell, it was why Dorian had sent him in the first place. She was a lucid dreamer with trauma deepenough to fill the fucking Grand Canyon. Of course this was going to get messy. He had news for her, though. No matter how far she pushed, how much power she reclaimed, he was still part of this shit show.
Hunter adjusted.
Lucidity gave her power, but she wasn’t omnipotent. She was still in the landscape of her subconscious, and the subconscious held anchors. He started scanning for cracks in her awareness, the seams in the dream where her lucid control frayed, where emotions blurred the edges. That’s wherehecould still move.
He found one.
Not surprisingly, it was her father.
A familiar presence in the nightmare, the one that held the most emotional baggage. The form her fear still wore when she wasn’t looking.
Hunter focused there and slipped into her father’s shape. The stance. The emotional weight. The exact, measured cruelty in the way the man moved. Hunter wore it all. He didn’t like it, but the subconscious recognized power. Let the dreamer fight back and reclaim the ground.
Daphne must have gotten that memo, though, because she didn’t freeze, shrink, or even blink. She walked straight up to him—
—and punched him in the face.
Not theoretically, not symbolically. It wasn’t dream-weight.
No, no. It was fucking real.
He felt the hit, the stunning impact that rattled his skull and cracked through the entire dream like a brick thrown through stained glass.
Then–
Whiteout.
A flash of nothing. The unmistakablesnapof being ejected.
Hunter was ripped out of the dream, violently severed from her mind, and flung back into the sentient white fog that was really him.
Formless, and yet shaken and spitting metaphorical teeth.
It took him a second to pull himself together and reform in his office at the Dreamscape HQ. His body defaulted to his favorite form, human. Jeans. Bare feet. White t-shirt. He slumped on the floor, relieved that being human allowed him to pant out his surprise–fuck that, his shock. Eyes closed, he rested his head back on the wall.
His ass had been kicked out of a nightmare.
He was millennia old.
Fuckingmillenniaold. Had dealt with countless nightmares. And never, not once in his existence, had he been jerked out like that. The long, deep intake of breath stabilized him enough to open his eyes and get on his feet.
He wiped a hand to his face and.... What...
What?
He walked closer to his reflection in the glass wall across from his desk.
A black eye. He had alegitblack eye. A big one. Swollen and purplish-red.
He blinked.
Twice.
“What the fucking actual fuck?”
It made no sense. He wasn’t supposed to feel physical pain in dreams, and sure as hell, he wasn’t supposed to bring backinjuriesfrom someone else’s dream on a body that wasn’t even really his. “This breaks every law of dream physics,” he sputtered. “And probably most of basic reality.” He touched the bruise gingerly. Flinched. “Seriously?”
Hunter slumped into his chair.
