Chapter Nine
A scream ripped through the night air. It took Gabriel a moment to realize it was him screaming. He pressed a hand to his aching chest, his breathing labored and unsteady.
Gabriel racked his brain, trying to catch snippets of his nightmare. Something had scared him, terrified him. A dark presence in his dreams. Ominous. He had been positive he was about to die, the air squeezed from his lungs.
It had been so real.
He—Gabriel screamed and jumped when the bedroom door crashed open.
“What’s wrong?”
“Chay?” He blinked rapidly when the bedroom light flipped on, blinding him.
“Sorry.” Chay flipped the overhead light off then walked over to turn on the lamp on the nightstand. “Are you okay? I heard you scream.”
“Nightmare.”
Chay sat down on the side of the bed. His brows were drawn together. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Gabriel shook his head. He didn’t want to relive a single second of his nightmare. He’d prefer to forget he’d ever had one. But… “There was this dark…presence, I guess you could call it. It was like touching evil,” he found himself saying. “I felt like it was sucking all the air out of me, and I couldn’t breathe.”
“You know you’re safe here, right?”
Gabriel nodded, but he wasn’t so sure. His physical body was safe enough, but what about his mind? “Do you believe astral project is real?”
“Like an out-of-the-body experience?”
“No, more like dream projection.”
“I suppose so. Why?”
“Because I’m not so sure that dream wasn’t real.” Gabriel swallowed hard as he stroked his fingers over his throat. “It really felt as if someone was sucking the air out of my lungs.”
Chay’s frown deepened. “Like, choking you?”
“No, like sucking the air out of my lungs.” How much clearer could he get? “Like someone had attached a vacuum cleaner to my mouth and was sucking the air out of me.”
Chay’s eyebrows lifted. “How is that possible?”
“Aldrik had mentioned something about this war being about magik. Maybe that has something to do with it. He said my family had very powerful magik, and that magik existed, pure and simple. It was up to the user wielding it whether it is good magik or bad magik. And the ones who tried to take out my family used bad magik to do it.”
“I don’t know much about this magik Aldrik was talking about. I’ve not had experience with it.”
“You’re a shifter, aren’t you?”
“I am. I told you that. I’m a falcon.”
“Isn’t that magik?”
“I…” Chay frowned again. “You know, I’m not sure. I’ve never actually questioned what gave me the ability to shift. It just always was.”
“Then it could be magik?”
“It could, yes.”
“So, if that’s a possibility, then it’s possible that someone really did attack me in my sleep, right?”
“Yes,” Chay growled as if he didn’t like that idea at all.
