“That’s a solid yes.” Hunter took a long sip of beer. “The lucid dreamer you assigned me?” He pointed to the bruise with the neck of the bottle. “That’s her work.”
Dorian stilled. “Excuse me?”
“Lower the shield and let me in.”
Dorian gave a nod, and Hunter pushed the memory through. Everything from the moment he entered the dream to the second Daphne’s fist collided with the face he’d been wearing. Her father’s face. And the moment he realized, hours later, that the bruise hadn’t faded from the human skin he wore.
Of all the reactions Hunter expected–sarcasm, fury, disinterest, a very reasonable freak out–he hadn’t anticipatedthis. Dorian tilted his head, fingers interlaced, staring like he was triangulating stars in Hunter’s skull, saying a whole lot of fucking nothing. It was unnerving. “Anything you want to share with the class, boss?” Hunter drawled.
Dorian didn’t move. “You didn’t come to me the second it happened because....?”
“Becausewhat the fuck, man. None of it makes sense.”
Dorian exhaled slowly. “It might.”
Hunter blinked. “Uh?”
“She might not be simply a lucid dreamer, then. There are people, very few, whose mind intersects directly with Dreamscape architecture. She might be one of them.”
Hunter frowned. “I must have a dumb day because, what?”
“I’m saying she didn’t just hit you. Sherejectedyour emotional projection so violently, it left an imprint on your chosen form.”
“The one I use to pass as human.”
“Yes. The one that’s the closest to you emotionally.”
“That shouldn’t be possible.”
“Indeed,” Dorian muttered. “Unless her trauma is so deeply embedded it’spunching holes through dimensional boundaries.”
Hunter stared at him. Then took another drink. “So what? Is she dangerous or something?”
“Perhaps.” Dorian leaned back in the armchair, his pale blue eyes flicking to the fire, his voice calm and cold. “This shouldn’t be happening. There’s no model for this, no framework. What she did is not dream logic; it’s a breach behavior.”
Hunter took another drink, the bottle suddenly heavier because he was starting to understand. “Her mind is unique, and her trauma is buried and kept contained with enough strength to warp the system around her. And that combo has never happened before?”
Dorian stood and walked to the fireplace, gaze unfocused. “There was one similar case ages back, before the Dreamscape was formed, before you, so it was just me with some other Devil. A walker left a mark on a Devil. We monitored her dreams for a while after, but she died before I could understand what it meant. We knew it was connected to trauma, that much was plain. But the rest?” He exhaled through his nose. “It slipped right through our fingers.” He turned slightly, firelight catching the sharp angle of his jaw. “Looking back, I reckon the realfailure was never bothering to see what her life looked like beyond the dream.”
Hunter shrugged. “Why would you? We do take that into account, obviously, but scanning an entire life is not a thing.”
“But without understanding thewhole human context, it’s like flying blind. Her trauma wasn’t just background noise. The tear in the dreamworld was rooted in the trauma but anchored to the waking world because she was, in fact, part of it. You can’t have one without the other. I never pulled that thread because I assumed I didn’t need to, that only what was relevant in a specific moment in life translated in the Dreamscape.” He turned, his eyes a glacier. “This might be something else, but I’m not making that mistake twice. We need to understand the connection, and that means we need someone inside. Embedded not just in the dreams, butin her world.”
Hunter gave him an incredulous look. “So what, you want me to shack up with her and take notes?”
“I want you to know her,” Dorian said, unblinking, his British accent cutting like glass. “Understand her. See how she deals with reality while hiding something so big inside of her. It might give us insights into how she does...” He waved an elegant finger around his eye. “That.”
“I’m going incognito.” Hunter huffed out a chuckle. Last time someone from the Nightmare Division had gone incognito was Dorian, exactly a year back, and he’d ended up cursed and stripped of his powers. “Can’t see how that can end up in shit.”
“This is about containment. Observation. Understanding, possibly. But mostly?” He gave the smallest, coldest smile. “It’s about being there when the next impossible thing happens.”
Chapter 2
Mystic Hollow Public Library
Daphne hated him on sight.
From behind the counter of the one and only Mystic Hollow library, she watched as he strolled inside. Swaggered, more like. Two steps from tripping over his own ego.
