“She hit me,” he muttered, as if saying it out loud would make it somehow more reasonable. “She hit me.In a dream. While lucid. And now my actual face hurts.”
There weren’t numbers high enough to quantify how wrong that was.
Daphne Claire Quinn had officially broken protocol, him, and possibly every Dreamverse law.
He stared at the ceiling.
“Dorian’s gonna have so many big feelings about this.”
And none of them would be nice.
~*~
Hunter didn’t have anything against his natural form. Being fog had its perks like infiltration, anonymity, and a fat dash of creepiness. All the hits. But while existing as sentient vapor allowed him to slip between dreams and dodge literal bullets, it didn’t allow for things like working out frustration. Or punching a wall. Or dramatically pacing a room with his hands in his hair. So he defaulted to human. Skin and meat stitched together with willpower, solid enough to break things. Which he did.
After getting decked by a lucid dreamer inside her own nightmare, booted out of it like an unwanted file, and having a frustration fest, he’d hit the Dreamverse Library. Looking for... anything. Any precedent. Any law. Any loophole in the rules of dream engagement that might explain why the hell a mortal had landed a clean hit on a Tulpa demon, and it had translated into his human form. It still didn’t make sense even thinking it.
He came out empty-handed.
He spoke to other Dream Devils. Veterans, specialists, even that one smug bastard who once claimed to havetangoedwith a Dreamwalker. Nothing. No reports of injuries. No ejections. No physical consequences.
So he’d hit the gym. Not because he needed to. He didn’t get stronger, he didn’t gain mass, and he didn’t have muscle memory in the traditional sense. He decided what shape to be, and he was. But the exertion, the burn from movement, and the illusion of control it gave were the only things that helped him face the fact that he had no goddamned clue what went down in that nightmare.
Even forgetting the hit–which was, supposedly, impossible–she shouldn’t have been able to cut him off like that. Lucid dreamers could influence their dream environments. They could push back and take control, of course. Even kick a nightmare’s ass if they were strong enough. But Daphne hadn’t just pushed; she’d disconnected him completely. Ejected him with force. On top of hitting him, physically, in a form that technically didn’t exist. That wasn’t supposed to be possible, but still had the damn bruise to prove it.
A bruise he could’ve fixed. One snap of focus and his face would be flawless again, but he didn’t want to. He needed the reminder that it had happened and that she had done it, because being delusional would have made more sense.
And now it was Sunday. Which meant roast and questions.
Hunter shifted into fog with a long, drawn-out sigh and reformed at the front door of Dorian and Amelia’s cottage in Mystic Hollow. He could’ve appeared directly inside, it wouldn’t have been the first time, but Amelia didn’t appreciate surprise apparitions in her living room. And after that one time he accidentally reformed in on them while they were naked and wrapped into each other in a way that was hard to logistically understand, he had zero interest in catching a sequel.
He rang the bell, stuffed his hands into his pockets, and waited, taking in the scene.
Damn if this town wasn’t pretty.
Snow covered the lawn in a thick, undisturbed blanket that muffled everything, like the world had hit pause. Christmas lights lined the roofs in warm white loops, and a wreath hung on Dorian’s front door, shedding pine needles. It smelled like cinnamon, cedar, and something sweet that made his heart growl like he hadn’t just tried to metabolizet two pounds of confusion through deadlifts.
The door creaked open. Amelia stood there, dressed in an oversized flannel shirt and thick wool socks, her hair wet and pulled up in a hazardous hairdo kept in place with a huge hair claw clip. Her eyebrow arched to the ceiling when she saw the bruise on his face. “Well,” she said easily, “that’s festive.”
“Yeah, I felt like decorating something.”
She chuckled and moved aside to let him in. “I’m sure there’s a story behind it that Dorian will love hearing.”
Oh, he sure will,Hunter thought. “Where’s the boss?”
He could’ve just scanned the place and reached out to brush his mind against Dorian’s, but the standing agreement was tokeep shields upwhen Amelia was around. Privacy, boundaries, married couple nonsense. Fine.
They made their way to the living room, and Hunter dropped onto the couch like gravity owed him. A fire crackled in the hearth, warm and steady. The cabin had that unmistakable air of a place built around people who actually loved each other. It felt disgustingly good.
As she walked to the kitchen, Amelia called over her shoulder, “He just got out of the bath. Want wine? Beer?”
“I’ll take a beer, thank you.”
He sat there for a second, staring into the fireplace in case some answer popped out along with fire flakes.
Brooding was still full on when footsteps approached, too damn quiet for anyone else in the house. Dorian entered, all in black as always. Instead of the three-piece suit, though, he woreblack jeans and a black button-down shirt with the top buttons undone, like some sort of villain on a very enjoyable vacation.
Hunter was still trying to decide ifthisdomestic version of the most terrifying being in existence was scarier than the wine-swilling demon he’d known for millennia when Dorian handed over the beer without a word. Then he saw the bruise, and one perfectly black eyebrow rose. “It’s indeed a very nice shade of purple.” He took the armchair opposite, crossed one leg over the other like they were about to have tea instead of an existential crisis. “Do I need to know?”
