Dream King by Elise Knight
8
Eventually, he came to me and sat in the clearing. The raven flew down and landed on his shoulder as he whipped up a fire from nothing. The light bonds around my arms were one thing, but watching him conjure up fire was just fucking weird.
“What are you going to do with me?” I demanded.
He didn’t even bother to look up at me, and I wondered if he even knew. He’d pulled me back in his world for a reason. I needed to know why.
“Hey, Dipshit. Care to tell me what I’m doing here?”
He flicked his eyes upward to me, then lowered them again and pulled out a knife from his boot. Boots that I’d not seen before. He’d been barefoot in the real world. I sucked in a breath as his eyes once more traveled up to mine. They reflected the orange glow of the firelight reminding me of Lucifer himself. Yet again, I wondered if I’d actually died, and this was my own personal hell. If I was dead, then a knife couldn’t kill me, I reasoned, though the sight of it was enough for my heart to quicken with anxiety.
I let out a breath as he picked up a stick that had fallen from one of the trees and began to whittle at it.
“You don’t want me here!” I shouted out, wondering if he could hear me at all above the crackling of the fire. He was certainly acting as though he didn’t. “Oy. I’m talking to you.”
“So you are. It’s tiresome, and I am already out of patience with it.”
“Well, fuck you too,” I managed, wondering why I was even trying with this guy. He didn’t care what I said, nor that I didn’t know anything. He was probably getting off on having me tied up at his mercy. This whole charade was probably one big turn-on for the jerk.
I wanted to see what he was carving, but the flames were too high for me to see as low as his hands. Instead, I watched him as he worked, an intense look about him. The firelight danced on his face, creating an orange glow, making him appear more human than he normally looked. It occurred to me I’d never seen him in daylight. The first time I’d seen him was in the dim light of the sleep clinic. I’d then seen him in my bedroom, where the curtains had been closed so I could block out the daylight and sleep. And here, in this perpetual twilight where he looked pale and otherworldly. I still didn’t know what he was. The devil himself had run through my thoughts more than once, but in no part of my imagination could I conjure up the thought of the devil whittling. Whittling human flesh from bones possibly, but not carving something from a stick.
“You can’t just keep me here,” I said, hoping to sound at least authoritative because the truth was he could keep me here. Could and was doing. “I have friends who could kill you without batting an eyelid. They’ll come looking for me.”
He was up and over the fire before I could blink, and now, the knife was at my throat.
“Didn’t I tell you to shut your infernal jabbering?”
“Actually, you said you’d lost patience with me. You didn’t actually tell me to stop.”
“So stop. I’m telling you now,” he growled, his face full of menace.
God help me; I should have stopped. The feel of the blade on my flesh should have been warning enough, but it wouldn’t be me if I did the sensible thing.
“Tell me why I’m here.”
He threw his knife down where it landed blade down in the dirt beside me. His eyes searched mine as though he was the one looking for answers. A cruel darkness descended over his features. One I’d seen before when he’d first brought me here. “I don’t have to answer to you. You don’t have any friends to come looking for you. Your one friend would balk at killing an insect. And just like an insect, I could crush him with my bare hands.”
As though he needed me to understand, he grabbed the fleshy part of my arm and squeezed it tightly, all the while looking directly into my eyes. I death-stared him back, trying not to linger on his beauty. This was not the time to be ogling a man who was trying to maim me, if not kill me.
“Fuck you,” I spat out, causing him to tighten his grip until I cried out in pain. He let go, and I thought that was it, but he was merely freeing his hand to grab my neck, this time at the back. He pulled me down and forward, contorting my body into an unnatural position until my face was once again in the dirt
“You are here because I have not killed you yet. You are alive, not because of my mercy, but because I have yet to decide the depths of hell I want to send you to and then test the pain limits your body will allow until it breaks.” He pushed down until my face was so far into the ground that I could no longer breathe. At that point, he whispered in my ear, his voice chillingly cold. “Remember that it was your choice to come looking for your worst nightmare. Well, now you’ve found me.”
Only then did he let go, satisfied that I’d gotten the point. I was silent for the rest of the night.