Dream King by Elise Knight
2
“You didn’t!” Chris snorted, his eyes sparking with mirth. Mock indignation followed by a huge grin covered his face when I told him about my ‘gift’ to the happy couple which I’d posted on the way to work. He ran his hands through his perfect red hair, only ruffling it slightly.
“I did,” I admitted, feeling shitty about the whole thing. “I shouldn’t have. It was petty, not to mention disgusting.”
“It was a triumph. A masterpiece of villainy. I think you’re my new hero.” He clutched his hands to his chest in his theatrical manner, eyelashes fluttering over deep blue eyes. Of course, he’d think it funny. He despised David almost as much as David had despised him. They were like chalk and cheese. David with his gym-going body and conservative attitude, who thought that anyone not like him was weird, and Chris who was camp and fun and silly and generous. Pretty much everything that David was not. It was no wonder they hated each other.
I picked up my coffee and took a swig. It was almost as bitter as I was. “I’m not sure.”
Chris leaned forward and covered my hand with his. I noted he’d painted his fingernails orange today. That meant he was in a good mood. I always could tell how he was feeling by the color of his nails. Orange was happy, Blue was horny, Pink was angry, and black was deep despair, or so he told me the very first day we’d met on the job. “Darling. He completely screwed you over. I think a little petty revenge is exactly what is needed. It’s good for the soul.”
It didn’t feel good for my soul. It felt like I was dragging myself down to David’s level. The level that was lower than an ant’s testicles. My soul felt well and truly wretched.
“Yesterday, you said Rege-Jean Page was good for the soul,” I sighed, wishing I didn’t feel so bad about the whole thing. Up until this evening, I’d prided myself on my maturity. However much I wanted to throw a brick through David’s car window, I’d refrained. Now, I didn’t even have that to console myself with. I was single, broke, and acting like a fucking child.
Chris sighed melodramatically and stared off into space with a sickly sweet look on his face. “Rene-Jean is God himself.”
“He’s an actor in a Netflix series,” I reminded him. “I’m not sure God would deign to be in a historical romance TV show.”
Chris turned his eyes to me, narrowing them. “Bitch, please. You’ve not even watched it. Don’t talk shit about what you do not know.”
I ignored him and looked at the sleep subjects who were now all asleep or at least close to it. I didn’t want to admit I couldn’t even afford Netflix anymore.
* * *
“I swear to god.I saw a guy.”
I swirled the dregs of my coffee around in my paper cup and leveled my gaze at Chris. He raised both perfectly coiffed eyebrows, waiting for me to shoot his weird theory down. The weird theory that he’d seen some kind of hot guy in the sleep chamber in the two minutes it had taken me to use the bathroom. I didn’t even bother to shoot a glance through the one-way glass. I already knew who was in there, and not a single one of them could be described as hot. Rich, old, maybe too much in the way of cosmetic surgery in the case of one of them, but nothing remotely resembling hot.
“Wishful thinking much?” I finally said. Chris liked to regale me with his sexual escapades, which were both extensive and mostly gross, but imagining a hot guy was a bit much for him, even if he was going through, in his words, ‘a dry spell.’
A dry spell for him was two nights without sex. My own version of a dry spell was akin to the center of the Sahara Desert in the middle of summer.
“Jealousy doesn’t become you, Ana,” Chris replied, quirking his lips into a frown. “He was super hot. You know the type. Brooding. Sexy. Dangerous.” His eyes misted over temporarily as he remembered the scene. The scene that he had most definitely imagined in that torrid mind of his.
“Uh-huh. Did he look like Rege-Jean Page by any chance?”
Chris examined his nails before batting his hand at me. “If only! No, this guy was pale. Freakishly so. Still smoking hot, though.”
“Freakishly pale is not on my top ten wants in a man.”
Inside the sleep chamber, twelve people dozed, each tethered to machines that checked their heart rate, their breathing, and what stage of REM sleep they were in. Taking a quick look through the one-way window, I saw that all was quiet apart from the odd snore from the participants.
“Fine, don’t believe me,” Chris huffed, standing up from his chair and pouting. “I’m going to get us some real coffee; that stuff you drink is dogshit.”
He wasn’t wrong. Despite the sleep clinic being packed out for months with a waiting list so long, it would keep us above capacity for years, the boss, Gerald McGee, was still a cheapskate, which meant our only source of coffee was a drinks dispenser in the main part of the clinic which dispensed what could only be described as watered down witch-piss.
“Go to the place on the corner,” I called after Chris as he left the small viewing room. “It’s open until two and has the good stuff. I’ll take an espresso.”
“Good luck with that, bitch,” Chris called, throwing me a cheeky wink as he closed the door behind him, leaving only me in the small observation room. I extended my middle finger, but he’d already gone. The lights were off, but the low blue glow from the sleep chamber plus the light from my monitors were enough to see by. A glance at the clock told me it was close to two AM. Only four hours to go, plus the hour needed to print up the reports, and I could go home and actually get some fucking sleep.
The low hum of the computers was the only sound. The speakers connected to microphones in the sleep chamber were all turned off as they usually were. No point in spending eight hours listening to chronic snorers. I finally cast my gaze through the one way mirror to the sleep chamber. There was no way that Chris saw a guy in there, not beyond the eight that were currently sleeping. Nor could he have mistaken any of the women for one. All twelve subjects were deeply asleep. The computer monitors reflected that. But...it wasn’t like Chris to see things. Crazy and over the top though he could sometimes be, irrationality was not one of his traits. He must have seen something in the few minutes I’d nipped out to use the toilet, but what? The door had been locked at ten pm, just as it was every night. No one without a key card could open it, and the only four people with a key card were McGee, Chris, Alexis, and me. However much Alexis hated me, she wouldn’t pull a prank and mess up her father’s income, which was also her only source of income. Plus, she wasn’t a hot guy.
And, of course, there was no way on this earth McGee could be described as sexy, even to a sex-starved, cranky, sleep-deprived guy like Chris.
Still, I looked anyway. Twelve people. All sleeping peacefully. Most were lying on their backs which was how we’d told them to try to stay, but a few had curled up into their favorite sleeping positions. The guy on the end had kicked his thin blue blanket to the floor, where it lay in a heap of low shadows. Nothing unusual. I pushed the button to turn on the speakers to make sure and heard exactly what I expected to hear. Some light snoring, punctuated by the loud snore of the blanket kicker on the end. A year ago, we’d have diagnosed him with sleep apnoea and sent him on his way. But that was a year ago before the big sleep. No one cared about sleep apnoea anymore. Not since the day when the whole world fell asleep only to wake up seven days later.
I moved to turn the speakers off again when something pricked my ears up. Footsteps. Barely noticeable above the snoring, but definitely there. Another quick look in the chamber. Again, no one was out of bed. Turning the sound level up, I heard the sound again.
“Chris?” I called out, wondering if he was already back and the speakers were picking up ambient noise from the rest of the clinic. They weren’t supposed to, but there was no other explanation for the sound.
When he didn’t appear, I decided to go into the sleep chamber to check on everyone. Strictly speaking, Chris and I weren’t supposed to go in there unless there was an emergency. Just our presence in the room could affect the readings, but the footsteps were intriguing me. I needed to know what the sound really was. A faulty machine, probably.
Just my fucking luck!
A faulty machine meant having to start everything again, which in turn meant leaving late. Something I really didn’t want to do.
Opening the door to the observation room, I headed out into the corridor and took the few steps to the entrance to the sleep chamber. The corridor was painted white to make it feel clinical and sterile, but in the low glow of lights, it just came across as creepy. A quick tap of my key card and the automatic door opened silently. It felt weird and wrong to be going into the room even though I’d just spent the last four hours watching these strangers sleep. Going into the room with them felt more intimate somehow. I mentally berated myself. They’d signed up for this. They’d paid a lot of money to be checked out, and they were told we’d have access to the room. Still, my heart rate increased slightly as I took a step inside and let the door close behind me.
I couldn’t hear the footsteps anymore. Whatever it was had stopped. Thank fuck! I picked up the blanket and gently placed it over Mr. Collins, careful not to touch any of the wires attached to him. Wires I’d placed on him mere hours ago.
I was almost back out the door when I heard a sound. Turning quickly, my heart nearly seized completely when I saw him. A man. He wasn’t there seconds before. I’d have seen him. But he was here now. My mouth fell open as I tried to process this creature in front of me.
Well fuck! Chris wasn’t joking. He’d just failed to clearly articulate just how breathtakingly beautiful the man was. Beautiful: check, brooding: check, dangerous: double check. He should come with a warning label. I was momentarily paralyzed by him, both by his breathtaking beauty and partly by the fact he wasn’t supposed to be here and hadn’t been here just a moment earlier.
Long black hair cascaded over his shoulders, partially hiding tattoos down his arm and his muscular chest, which I could see because he was only half-dressed. On his bottom half he wore tight black pants and no shoes, and on his head sat a golden crown. An actual freaking crown! The dim light cast him in all shadows and highlights. But it was his eyes that drew me in. So dark that I couldn’t see where the pupil ended, and the iris began, cold calculation in his gaze. He was so fucking beautiful, it was all I could do to breathe. And then I couldn’t...
A bird of some kind (a raven maybe?) flew over my head, and a wave of pleasure washed over me, making my whole body tremble so hard that I had to grab the bed of the old man at the end to stop from keeling right over with the brutal force of it.
What the fuck was happening?
I took a deep breath to push through it, struggling to keep my eyes open as the strange man turned his eyes to me.
His eyes widened as he took me in, not that I could pay much attention. I was too busy trying to breathe through the ripples of pleasure as they finally began to wane. I was barely breathing with the force of what just happened to me, and I had to take a moment to find my equilibrium.
His black eyes met mine. The moment of surprise he’d shown earlier had already faded from his face to be replaced by something else? Revulsion maybe?
As I stood staring at him, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do, he jumped onto the nearest bed. Right onto one of our clients, a local widow by the name of Mrs Rose who just happened to own half of Vancouver.
I screeched out a strangled noise as he landed right on her middle, but the second his feet touched her blanket, he’d gone. Completely disappeared into thin air.
My brain struggled to understand what I’d just witnessed, and my heart was pounding so loudly that I was sure the microphones were going to pick up on it
I took a deep breath and ran to Mrs. Rose, expecting her to be injured, if not dead, but she was asleep, breathing deeply. As I watched, her lips curled up into an indulgent grin, and her eyes moved rapidly under her paper-thin eyelids. She was dreaming. A doozy of a dream going by the expression on her face.
A flap of wings wafted my hair, taking my attention from her face. The raven! I’d almost forgotten about it, what with everything going on. It flew toward Mrs. Rose’s middle, right where the mysterious man had disappeared.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I hissed, grabbing out quickly, squeezing my hand into a fist. The raven, its leg caught in my hand, began to squawk in desperation to get away. There was no way I was letting it go. It came with him. And I was sure that I’d finally done what months and months of sleep studies had failed to do. I’d finally found the cause of the sickness, and it wasn’t a what. It was a who.