Dream King by Elise Knight
14
Pain ripped through my body as the tightness of darkness lost its grip on me. I was alive. The agony sweeping through my body was enough to tell me that. I groaned with the effort of just thinking, which lead me to another realization. A noise I’d not heard before in the forest—the lapping of waves. For one brief delirious second, I imagined I was on a beach in the Bahamas somewhere, and this had all been some kind of horrible dream.
Dream! I sat up, sending another jolt of pain screaming through my body. The world was dark, just as it always had been, but movement caught my attention—waves. Small ones, but definitely waves of inky violet lapped a shore of black sand. I was completely alone, but someone had brought me here. I’d passed out in the middle of the forest. The forest, I could still see about twenty feet behind me. In front of me, a lake stretched out into the distance ending at the base of a majestic mountain range covered at the peaks with snow. For the first time, I saw the source of the soft blue light here, shielded as it usually was by a canopy of trees. The moon, or at least what I took to be a moon, shone brightly, glinting off the small cresting waves like diamonds. The wide-open space filled me with awe and reminded me of all the open spaces near Vancouver. The mountain trails and parks with views that stretched on for miles. A pang of homesickness hit me as I took in the sight and the millions of stars in the sky. A quick look around told me that wherever my savior was, he or she had left me. They had left me naked, or at least half-naked. My blood-soaked bra was still in place, but my shirt had been taken off to use as a bandage for my leg. It was difficult to tell if the blood on it belonged to me or to the nightwalkers that I’d killed. Probably a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. I let out a soft moan as I touched it lightly. The blood was dry, at least, which meant I was no longer bleeding so profusely. It hurt to fuckery, though, with the slightest pressure. I gritted my teeth and jammed my lips together, letting my breath out through my nose as I eased myself into a sitting position. My jeans had been taken off too, but they were nowhere to be seen. The last I’d seen of them was when they were torn to shreds by the claws of the nightwalker.
There was no way to tell how long I’d been out. In the real world, I’d have been able to check the position of the stars or the sun. But as there was no sun, the moon was nothing like any moon I knew, and none of the constellations were ones I recognized. Knowing the time of day was impossible. It felt like an eternity, but with the weird, dreamless sleep I seemed to have here, counting the hours was virtually impossible. If only I wore a watch, but I hadn’t worn a watch since the day I got my first smartphone and no longer needed one to tell the time.
The knowledge I was completely alone, injured, unknowing of where I was or if I was in danger from more nightwalkers or other such creatures sat like a weight in my stomach. It had never occurred to me that there were worse things than Dream to be scared of in this world. He was monstrous enough without adding mental stress to that particular thought. Dream. A wave of sorrow hit me unexpectedly, though I didn’t know why. He was a vile piece of shit. Worse even than the nightwalkers. At least their intentions had been clear. They only wanted what any other bloodthirsty monster wanted. To stave off their hunger. Dream had never once let slip what his intentions were with me. I wasn’t even sure if he knew himself what he kept me for. Not for his own monstrous pleasure, that was for sure. In the short time I’d known him, I’d caused him nothing but annoyance and strife. And yet, he’d done everything he could to save me. He could have left me tied to that tree. An easy snack for the two nightwalkers, but he hadn’t. He’d run with me for hours through that forest to keep me alive. At any point, he could have, quite literally, thrown me to the wolves, but he hadn’t. He’d shouldered the burden of carrying me, eventually paying for it with his life.
A whistling sound caught me off guard. It was the whistle of a merry tune coming closer from the edge of the forest. I narrowed my eyes, peering into the darkness between the trees, waiting to see who it was that had saved my life. Another person to thank in this weird world. My first thought ran to Aethelu because she was the only person I’d met in this place apart from Dream. But if there was one person, it stood to reason that there would be more. Maybe not human, but human-like and not intent on killing me like every other thing in this shithole.
I don’t know who was the most surprised when Dream walked out of the forest.
“You are supposed to be resting with your leg elevated,” he said, dropping the cheerful tune and reverting back to his miserable, bastard self.
“And you are supposed to be dead,” I countered, shooting him an annoyed glance, ignoring the warmth spreading through me at the sight of him. He had saved my life, after all, and I should be grateful, though I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of gratitude. He’d also stripped me down to my underwear. That thought was something I was going to have to unpick later.
“Someone saved my life,” he said, taking a seat next to me on the sand. “I think it was you.”
“Fighting off murderous bastards has become a theme in this place,” I replied airily as he untied my shirt from my leg. “Oh, motherfucking fucker!” I yelled out as air hit the skin, sending searing pains up my leg.
“Why do you feel the need to use that word quite so often?” he chastised as he prodded the skin around the tears.
“Fuck?” I questioned, hissing as more pain shot through me. “It’s my favorite word. I use it all the time when someone thinks it’s alright to prod my obviously ripped to shreds leg. Don’t you have any painkillers here?”
He shook his head, giving me a wry look. “No pharmacists, no, but you have me. I’m not prodding; I’m checking to see if it’s infected. I don’t think so yet, but it’s a long way from healing. I’ll need to keep an eye on it.”
“Great,” I huffed, sarcasm dripping almost as heavily as the blood that poured onto the grey-black sand below, making it even darker than it already was.
“I’ll need to re-tie this shirt to stem the bleeding. It’s not ideal, but it’s all I have.”
I extended my hand to gesture that he should go ahead. Maybe I’d die here on this beach from some disgusting infection. I lay back and watched the stars as he ministered to my leg.
“What exactly does it mean?”
“Hmm?” I took a deep breath to stave off the dizziness that was threatening to engulf me.
“Fuck? I thought it was a word used to describe intercourse, but you use it in strange ways.”
A giggle erupted from my mouth at the absurdity of it all. “Fuck is a wonderfully versatile word,” I mused aloud. “You can use it in pretty much any sentence in any way without messing up the sentence.”
“How so?” He tightened the shirt roughly, causing another hiss to escape my lips.
I propped myself up on my elbows. “Say something. Anything. Just say a sentence.”
He narrowed his brows. “How are you doing today, Ana?”
“How the fuck are you fucking doing today, Ana. That’s the first fucking time you’ve fucking used my fucking name too.”
He cocked his head to one side as though thinking the sentence through.
“It means the same thing, though. Using Fuck, doesn’t change the literal meaning of the sentence at all.”
“Doesn’t need to.” I shrugged. “Just makes it more beautiful.”
He didn’t appear convinced
“You can fucking put fucking 'fuck' pretty fucking much fucking anywhere in a fucking sentence and fucking still fucking be grammatically fucking correct.”
“I don’t see the point.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said, turning onto my side to get more comfortable. The sand beneath me was like a balm to my soul.
He stood and walked to the lake edge only ten feet or so from where I lay. Cupping his hands, he dipped them in the water and brought them over to me. I drank the strange violet-black liquid greedily right from his hands, only just then realizing how dry and scratchy my throat was. It tasted exactly like normal water, despite its dark glittery appearance.
“More!” I croaked, enjoying the coolness and freshness of it. Like drinking a pool of heaven itself.
He made four trips before my thirst was sated, and yet, I let him go back for more. I hated to admit how much I was enjoying the feel of his fingers against my lips. It had been a long time since I’d enjoyed human contact, and though he wasn’t exactly human, the touch of his skin against mine brought back feelings I’d forgotten existed.
He was tender with me in a way David never had been. Not that I’d ever had to kill horned psycho wolf creatures for David, but I had cooked for him, cleaned up after him, And washed his goddamned underwear. Killing murderous beasts suddenly felt more important in comparison, even if it was to stop the killing of the psycho who had held me captive for weeks.
Fuck. What was I thinking? He’d shown me nothing but pain and disdain, and after one moment of tenderness, I was getting all soft and sentimental. He’d saved my life, but I’d saved his too.
We were even, the way I saw it.
“This going to kill me?” I asked as he lay in the sand next to me.
He raked his hand through the sand, then shook his head. “This water here is safe. It will help you heal.”
I raised my eyebrows. Not that it should have shocked me. Why wouldn’t glittery black magic water help me heal?
These questions whizzed through my mind, but none took precedence over the most important one.
“Are there any more of those things in the forest? The Nightwalkers?”
He shuffled onto his side, resting his head on his hand. His long hair dipped into the sand. In better lighting and on a normal beach, I might have mistaken him for an underwear model on a photoshoot. If it wasn’t for the crown that permanently sat atop his head. Not even an attack by a mauling machine was enough to knock it off.
“Nightwalker is an umbrella term for all the creatures that inhabit the forest that come from... another place. Those particular ones were wolveries, and there might be more of them. They aren’t the worst things that could have come for us, not by a long shot. They shouldn’t be here in my forest, but obviously, they’ve wandered away from their homeland.”
I turned this new snippet of information over in my mind. I knew nothing about this place. Dream was hardly forthcoming in the sharing info department. When I’d first got here, it had felt like a small world of just forest and darkness, but I was starting to learn it was more than that. It was a whole world, and I’d only seen a small part of it. It had creatures I knew nothing about and races of people I’d never heard of.
I shifted my weight, trying to lessen the pain in my leg, and mirrored his position, my elbow in the sand, my head on my hand. “What made them come this time?” I had an inkling I knew the answer already, but I needed to hear him say it.
“Fresh meat.”
“Me, you mean?” I asked, seriously affronted by his assessment of me.
He nodded. “I think you had something to do with it. Not that the woveries coming to attack worries me too much. It’s what their sudden appearance means that concerns me.”
I eyed him warily. The way he spoke of our mutual near-death experience was what concerned me most. How could anyone not be worried by the sudden appearance of supernatural killing machines? And what the fuck was so bad that made the wolveries something not to worry about? One of the bastard things dam near ripped my leg off and the other. The other had been completely on top of Dream. I still hadn’t figured out how he’d managed to get out of that one unscathed.
Because he was unscathed. At least the parts of him I could see, which was pretty much everything from the waist up and the ankles down. I remembered then that I’d pulled one of his boots off in the fight. Maybe he’d taken the other off and left it in the woods as it was nowhere in sight. I raked my gaze up and down his chest, looking for any blemish in his skin whatsoever. He was perfect, annoyingly so. How was it my body had practically been savaged to pieces, and he’d come out of it looking even more perfect than he’d gone into it? Life sure as shit wasn’t fair.
“The wolveries are not from my court and are not under my influence.”
“Under your influence. They looked like wild creatures out for blood to me.”
He gazed at me, but his attention was elsewhere as though he was looking through me.
“This is the Dream Court. Something is happening that I do not like. I suspect you are part of it, though I cannot be sure. I will endeavor to find out.”