Dream King by Elise Knight

6

“You dare come into my realm again!”

It wasn’t a question. A cleverer person might not have taken it so and known when to keep their mouth shut. Unfortunately for me, I’d never been that person, and even though I knew my smart mouth was going to get me into trouble, I couldn’t help myself.

“You dragged me here this time.”

His hand clasped around my bruised throat, almost but not quite cutting off my oxygen while flames of anger danced in his endless black eyes. While I struggled to fill my lungs, he glared at me, not disguising the contempt he felt for me. The pain was indescribable, exacerbated as it was by the bruising he’d already caused me hours earlier.

“Despite my better judgment I allowed you to live, but you tried to get back in here. I killed the last human that set foot in this realm,” he growled. “Tell me why I should treat you any differently.”

If he was waiting for me to be impressed with his macho bullshit, he was going to be waiting a long time. Plus, there was the fact I couldn’t talk now if I wanted to. Instead, I used what little oxygen I had left to keep my head up and my eyes on him. If he wanted to kill me, so be it. I felt the onset of darkness creeping into my peripheral vision, and I knew it was nothing to do with the dark scenery but with the lack of blood getting to my brain. I was going to pass out if he didn’t let me go soon, and I had no way to stop it. He was a brute of a man, and his strength far outweighed mine. He was a beautiful monster.

I choked out a word, but it was undecipherable even to me. It was my death knell, but nothing more. The darkness closed in until there was but a pinprick of light, and then it was gone entirely.

* * *

I awoketo find myself tied in a sitting position against the tree I’d hidden behind the first time I’d been there. The bastard was nowhere to be seen, but his bird was nearby, keeping its beady eyes on me. Close enough to see but not close enough to kick the little fucker.

I soon learned that struggling against my ropes was impossible, not because they were tied tightly, but because the asshole had tied me up using something I’d never seen before. It glowed with a deep purple light and moved as though it was alive with tiny sparks of purple light emanating from it and fizzling out into nothing.

The raven squawked when it saw I was awake and flew up to a nearby tree branch, settling about ten feet away and six or seven feet up.

“What kind of loopy shit did your boss give me?” I asked it because there was no way I could really be here, tied up with whatever this purple bullshit was. I was probably drugged at the last one of Chris’s parties and taken to one of his perverted friends’ sex dungeons. That might explain it. Unlikely, but a damn sight more likely than what I was seeing with my own eyes.

The raven turned its back and ruffled its feathers as though talking to me was beneath it. Not that it could talk...probably.

I craned my neck to look at the doors. From this angle, all I could see was the back of one row and parts of the other row through the gaps. To my relief, the red door was still there, exactly where it had been before. Of all the doors, that one was the only one that didn’t seem to move. It represented freedom, my way home. The whole place was surreal. Surreal and silent, just as it had been before. The only sound was my breathing which sounded louder to my ears than it ever had, owing to the lack of sound elsewhere. Every movement I made rustled the crisp dead leaves under my ass and legs.

At least this time, I was dressed, and though I wouldn’t say it was cold, the black jeans and boots I wore protected me against the sharp edges of any branches that might have fallen. My arms were firmly strapped to my side, but my legs were free to move. I made circles with my feet to keep the blood flowing to them.

I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. The blue light of twilight looked exactly the same as it had when the bastard had brought me here, but I had a feeling that it was always that way. Wherever I was, if I wasn’t drugged by some psycho party boy and in his basement, it was perpetual night. Or at least the hour before night when the sky isn’t quite black. The only color I could see was the purple of the weird rope-thing moving around me, giving my arms a purple glow. In front of me were the ashes of a long-dead fire and a pile of small bones. Scary as shit, but at least they were not human.

Wherever I was, it was clear that I had to plot an escape because whatever the bastard—yes, I’d upgraded his name from Freakshow—had in store for me, it wasn’t going to be good. He’d hinted that he was going to kill me, but that hadn’t happened...yet. Something told me that was only because he had other plans for me. Other plans that would no doubt be worse than a quick, painless death. I didn’t have to wait for long because one of the gray doors opened and out he came.