Nightmares and Daydreams (The Blood Falls Book 4)

I circled the Gatlin Guardsman known as Rever, short for Revenge. He was shorter than me by several inches but made of pure raw power. He was also much older than me, and his years combined with experience showed. I respected the male. The protector in me recognized the protector in him, especially after he was taken into the rift after making sure my sister, Rain, and Kris were all safe.

It’s what protectors did.

I just wish he didn’t have to pay so heavily for it.

“I was so hot,” Rain said. “I began sweating almost immediately.”

“I was cold outside your bubble,” Rhysa replied.

“It was definitely hot where I went,” Rever growled. He had a scratchy voice on the best of days.

“Interesting.” Rain frowned. “Maybe the pockets between Planes create heat from the energy it takes to hold a space that shouldn’t exist. I wish there was some way to map it, get a better understanding of things.”

To my surprise, Ryddyck stepped out of the shadows. “None of it will matter soon. Very soon. Everything is collapsing.”

Collapsing? That sounded…well, fatal.

Rhysa frowned. “Ryddyck has been trying to explain something to me all morning.”

He nodded and came closer. My instinct was to grab Rhysa and shield her with my body. I had no reason to think Ryddyck meant her harm, but every word out of his confusing mouth felt like a threat.

“Yes,” he nodded quickly, “the collapsing.” It was like he was trying to will his thoughts into Rhysa’s mind.

Which only made my urge stronger. “Rhysa?” I heard it that time. The low growl she claimed I made all the time. It made me sound like an animal. An overly possessive animal. Which…was pretty accurate actually. Being near Rhysa turned on all my instincts and made me want to love or protect her with everything I had, no matter how illogical the urge or situation.

So while I initially denied the grunting and growling, now that I heard and understood it, I liked what it represented.

“Collapsing,” she repeated. “Merging. Converging!” Her eyes rounded as she looked to Leena. “My mother said the same thing. That the planes were merging.”

“Convergence,” Leena whispered, her voice cracking as she tried to speak in her full voice, “is mentioned frequently in the old stories. The references didn’t make sense, but we noted the number of times that specific word came up.”

Rhysa held up her hands and threaded the fingers together. “He kept doing this and saying things will be like they were before the Ancient War.”

“Yes, yes this!” Ryddyck got excited. “This.”

“Convergence,” Rhysa murmured, staring at her fingers. “The grista are beings from another Plane made visible to us briefly because of tears in the fabric of our Plane of existence. The fabric has been severely weakened.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “But what if it’s more than that. We have always been able to interact on both this physical Plane and the metaphysical one. Humans can’t.” She passed her fingers together again. “It’s like two Planes existing in the same place at the same time, but invisible to each other. So what if there are entirely different Planes? Planes that we have no idea exist at all? Planes where ghosts exist. Or monsters and mermaids.”

“Or dragons,” I said simply.

Her eyes locked with mine. “Or dragons. What if once, a long, long time ago, we weren’t separate?”

“Yes! Finally, she sees it!” Ryddyck grinned. “What was before is returning. They are,” he passed his fingers together, “compressing back to before the Dark Times. Before the War.”

Or converging. I rubbed my forehead because my entire brain hurt. What were we fighting? Ghosts or damned dragons? Or something I had never imagined in my life before? “Why now?”

“The door was breached. Destiny changed,” he said simply. “The connection was reestablished.”

The day my parents died kept turning out to be more important than I’d like. “You make it sound an awful lot like they were waiting for the chance.” Whoever they were.

Ryddyck’s gaze shifted to Gigi as she entered the library. “They have never stopped trying. Not ever. Some of us are born to be tools to open these doors.”

My hackles immediately went up. “Us? Is that why you’re here? To open these doors and let the monsters through?” I would kill him right here and now if that was the case.

Rhysa grabbed my forearm and whispered loudly at my ear. “Listen first. Don’t jump to conclusions.”

“Well?”

Ryddyck blink-twitched but didn’t otherwise show any fear of me. “It was why I was born but not why I am here.” Ryddyck and one of his famous riddles.

“Do you ever just say what you mean?” I snarled. “Why. Are. You. Here?”

The male’s gaze remained locked on my sister. “Like you, I was born one thing but became another. She is the key to the lock. We are the answer.”

Rhysa dragged me down to the meadow early. Apparently I was “causing problems.” Not really sure what she meant. All I wanted were answers.

And to tear Ryddyck’s head from his shoulders. I didn’t see where the problem was.

“We’re never going to get the full story if we keep coddling that samhain wannabe,” I growled.

Rhysa sighed and put her hands on her hips. “Calling him names that may or may not be derogatory is not going to make you feel better. Whatever you think, today was progress. Big progress. Let things shake out.”

“There’s no time!” I yelled so loud my voice bounced back at me. “And we aren’t ready for any of this!” All this advice to be calm and see where things led sounded pretty but it was fucking stupid. Time was not on our side. Every second we wasted “letting things shake out” was a second we lost to the grista and whatever came with them.

Rhysa, annoyingly, remained perfectly calm.” You’re right. We aren’t ready.”

“So let’s go back and extract the information we need from Ryddyck by any means necessary.” Perhaps removing his skin would freshen his mixed-up memory.

“Fuck, Dray.” She threw her hands in the air and glared at me. “Are you really so desperate to ignore your own problems?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Rhysa and I didn’t fight much, so this was weird and new, and I didn’t like it at all.

“You are a male who can’t control his dragon half. You are as big a problem as Ryddyck. Maybe more so.”

That stung.

She kept talking. “You’re angry and you’re powerless to stop this war from coming, which is only making you angrier. You want to put all the frustration somewhere it will actually do some good?”

She was right. I hated how right she was. Torturing Ryddyck would feel good, but it wouldn’t get the results we needed. “Yes.” I gritted out.

Rhysa lifted her chin. “Channel that frustration into making progress with your own damn problems, Dray. Make peace with who you are. Learn to harness the power hidden inside you. When you can do that, we’ll truly have a weapon we can fight with.”

Ignoring my reality for decades wasn’t paying off so well at the moment. “I’m working on it.”

“Work faster. Today. Just you, me, and your dragon.”

I bared my teeth because the idea repulsed me. “That’s unwise.”

She shrugged. “Do you really need Sun to watch your every move?”

“He’s here for your protection as much as mine.”

“I’m fine.”

I knew she was doing this on purpose, riling me up, but I had enough anger coursing through my veins that I didn’t care. “What is it you think we’re going to figure out? That one day, with enough work, I’ll be able to shift at will?”

“Yes,” she said simply, “and to control both halves of yourself in your mind, even when I’m not at your side.”

She had no idea. None. The dragon inside me was more powerful than anything I’d ever encountered in my life. More than any bear or wolf or witch. No magic could match it and no animal could compare. Not in this Plane of Existence anyway. Controlling it took everything I had, which was why I never shifted, never allowed the monster inside me any freedom. It was too strong and too easy to lose myself to it. She saw what it did to me, had to use her own gifts to help me escape. Why didn’t she understand?

I had to make her see reason.

So I entered her mind, something that got easier and easier to do. When we first met I told her I couldn’t read her thoughts. At the time it was true. I had some of my mother’s psychic gifts, but not this. This came from the dragon. The Dragon and his Mate. A mental link that grew stronger each day.

She gasped, head tilting up and back as my thoughts flooded hers. “This isn’t some moody shit, Rhysa. There’s not a happy side and a sad side. It’s not an anger problem.” There was a darkness in my mind that had always been there. It was separate from the rest of me. The dragon lived in there. I let her see it. “There’s him and then there’s me. It has nothing to do with control.”

Instead of backing away in fear she stepped closer, examining the darkness, probing my mind. “You believe that, don’t you?” she whispered.

“I wouldn’t have said that if I didn’t.”

She closed her eyes. “You see your dragon as another being altogether. You’re scared of it.”

“That thing isn’t me.” I avoided the dark box at all costs. Having to open it every day scared the shit out of me. What if one day I never came back? What if instead I was the one locked in the black box while the dragon took full control of me?

“Oh Dray. You have it all wrong.” Her touch became tender. “You aren’t two separate beings living in the same body. You are the dragon.”

“No.” When my parents died and Destiny changed—changed me—the dragon came to live in my mind. It wasn’t me. It was an invader.

“Your young mind didn’t know what to do with it when you changed. So you concocted this story to keep your mind safe. Is Bo a bat? Leena a cat? Are they separate beings like a spirit double?  No, they are simply parts of Bo and Leena. And your dragon is part of you.”

“No,” I said again because I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want to be a dragon. I didn’t want to be some concoction of this world and another. A monster.

Like Ryddyck. Fuck.

She probed my darkness. Like a mental caress. A stroke over a part of me that had gone numb. I could almost feel it.

“See? It’s part of you, Dray.” She kept stroking and probing. It sent a shiver down my spine that almost felt good, which was an odd sensation considering everything about the dragon made me feel bad. Especially being the dragon.

I couldn’t let him out. Not with Rhysa so close. I grabbed her wrist. “Stop.”

“I’m sorry,” she said immediately, leaving my mind.

I let her go. “Don’t apologize. I started it. I shouldn’t have pushed into your thoughts like that.” It was one thing when it happened against our control, but I knew what I was doing when I entered her mind without asking and made her see the darkness where the dragon lived. It was getting easier and easier to forget that wasn’t normal.

She frowned. “No, I needed to see it.”

My stomach turned. “I would do anything to keep you away from that part of me.” Just the thought that one day I might hurt her because of it destroyed me. “I would send you away if I could.”

“I wouldn’t go,” she whispered back. “You won’t hurt me, Dray. I know you won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do. You won’t hurt me.”

“But it’s not me!” I roared. I hated myself.

“Yes it is!” she yelled right back. “You might not like it and you may not understand it, but that’s because you refuse to face it! You are the dragon, Dray. I have been with you all this time and never, not once, have I ever felt that I was with anyone else. You won’t hurt me because you are the dragon and when you get over yourself and face this fact, you’ll learn to fully control all of you. Problem solved.” She wiped her hands and shook them away.

She couldn’t be serious. “Are you insinuating that I’m too scared to face myself?”

“Yes.” She stared right into my eyes without blinking. “You are terrified that it’s true. All of it. That you are a dragon of unimaginable power. That you can kill and destroy. That the darkness you feel really is you and not the dragon. Right now you can blame it, you can put all your problems on it. But once you accept that you are the dragon, you’ll have no one else to blame for your sadness or the pain that lives deep inside you.” She came closer, putting her hand over my heart. “You didn’t lock away the dragon. You locked away your grief. You couldn’t deal with it and you had a job to do, so you hid it and now it’s grown into the monster that lives inside you. You’ve got to face it, Dray. Or your parents sacrificed themselves for nothing.”

“Fuck you!” I couldn’t believe what she was saying. Or the anger I felt when she said it. My Rhysa. My lover. How could she be this cruel?

The dragon pushed through the door and took over. A shiver raced down my spine, through my bones, into my veins, taking over, shoving me aside. I transformed with a roar.

“There he is.” Rhysa shook her head at me.

I blinked, my vision very different now. I saw her and a whole other color spectrum around her. The Plane shimmered in places. I towered over her tiny body. She was fragile and stupid to be standing so close to me like this. I roared in her face, blowing back her hair.

She folded her arms and cocked an eyebrow. “I’m not scared of you. And I still believe you’ll never hurt a hair on my head.”

I circled her, snarling and huffing in the most terrifying ways possible. The ground shook under my weight. If I could just scare her enough to leave, to take her things and go back to school forever, it would be worth it.

“I can hear your thoughts, you know. That’s not a stranger’s mind at work. That’s you, Dray. Also, I’m not going back to school.”

The fire in my veins slowed enough that some of the rage in my mind cleared. Cleared enough for me to realize that she was right. I was fully in control of my mind even though the dragon had taken over my body.

“I’m going to say it again and maybe you’ll hear me this time.” She reached out and cupped my chin, sliding around to my left eye. “You and the dragon are not separate beings. You are the dragon. You are this powerful beast.” Her voice dropped an octave and took on an almost purring sound. “You’re in full control.”

I could smell her arousal, which put my mind in overdrive. The usual impulses crowded out most of my thoughts. Instead instinct took over. The urge to hunt and kill, to destroy surged through me, but so did lust. The need to take and master.

“That’s it,” she cooed. “Don’t block that out. Embrace it. The dragon can sense things a samhain cannot. Feel it. Accept it.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Then don’t,” she replied, sliding her hand down my neck, over my shoulders, to my groin. “You’re in control. Stay that way. Prove to yourself you are fully in charge.”

The darkness oozed out of the box where I kept the dragon, filled with so much energy, all of it angry. Rhysa moved around me, up my right side. Her touch made the pain of the emotions a little easier to absorb.

“I’m sorry you lost your parents, Dray. I’m sorry they left you in charge and you had to grow up so fast. I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.”

I needed to hold her. I let the dragon go, returning to my body like it was the easiest thing in the world, and took her in my arms. “You’re here now.” She was so soft and warm against my newly naked body. “I love you so much.” Her hair was so soft against my hand that I gave into the urge to make a fist and take a long, deep kiss.

“You did it, Dray. All by yourself.”

Yes, I shifted into the dragon and back without any help, and I never once felt out of control, but even more importantly, I didn’t fight any of it. “I’m not in pain.” Normally the dragon took everything from me and triggered my healing process into overdrive, but this time I just felt normal.

Rhysa pushed out of my arms and walked around me, touching my back. “There’s nothing. No cuts, no blood. It’s as if you didn’t transform at all.” She came back around and took my face in her hands. Every soft touch shook me to my core. Rhysa was my opposite in so many ways. Soft where I was a monster, quiet when I roared, calm when I was angry. She made me feel whole for the first time in my life.

No more so than now. “I hope you know what happens next because I have no fucking clue.”

“What do you mean?”

I lowered my forehead to hers and breathed her in, felt our minds connect every bit as much as our bodies. “So far you’ve been there with me, but mostly as a bystander. A helper. If this is really the way things are supposed to be, that everything I just felt is going to happen from now on, what will you be able to do now that I’m not in the way?”

She froze, blinking up at me. I felt her heart rate spike and her breath quicken with surprise. “If I’m not helping you…”

“You can fight. With Dreadnought.” This would free her to fight on her own. We would be two linked fighters on the ground and in the air. “Or from my back.”

“Ride you?” she whispered, nodding slowly as she nibbled at her lip.

“Ride me,” I growled right back.

“I don’t know if that would be helpful or complicated.”

I circled her, the idea of fighting with Rhysa, working as a team, felt right. It turned me on. “We could go for a ride. See what it feels like.”

“A minute ago you didn’t want me near you.”

“A lot happened in that minute.” I would have to process my grief now that I knew what was really hidden in that black box in my mind, but that would take time. As for my dragon half, it was like being scared to pet a dog and finally getting up the courage, only to discover it’s a cuddly little pup who just wants to play.

And my dragon definitely wanted to play.

“If you’re comfortable then I’m more than comfortable,” she breathed.

I let the dragon out. It was so easy now. Effortless. I tortured myself for decades for no reason at all. What a fool I was.

Rhysa climbed up and onto my shoulders, her thighs squeezing me as she found a good balance between our bodies. “I’m good. I think.”

I took two running leaps and then we were airborne. Her legs squeezed me even tighter and I felt her lean down to hug my neck. Seeing through both sets of our eyes was confusing at first, especially since she kept closing hers, but it got easier when she sat up and took in the views from my back.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

She gave me another squeeze. “Scary, but yes. Beautiful.”

The connection between us flowed easily now. We were one. A combined fighting force. Her happiness seeped into my unconscious, infecting me with her feelings. I took her on a tour of our quiet valley, over the Blood River, past the House of Nala, and then back along Sato lands, before landing in a secluded meadow.

“Get down. Let’s see how it feels to separate.”

She pressed a kiss to the back of my neck before sliding off, her feet landing with a soft thud. “It’s like having an aerial view. I can see what I see, plus everything you can see. Even all the different colors and stuff.”

“This will be very useful, Rhysa. Very.”

“Agreed. It’s so easy now. Like we’ve always been like this. I can even turn off parts of my mind I don’t want getting in the way. Rain was right.”

I wasn’t sure what Rain had said to her, but she was right. I was in control of which parts of my mind were being shared with Rhysa.

“I should have given that speech weeks ago,” she chuckled as she wandered into the nearby trees.

“Speech?”

“I’ve been trying to find a way to kick you into gear. You’re a very stubborn male, Dray.”

I growled and snarled a little. I wasn’t stubborn. “You think you could have made this happen faster?”

“Probably not,” she conceded. “But I wish it were true. My mind is clearer than it’s been in weeks.”

Mine was as well. And I felt a sense of peace, of rightness, that calmed me. That constant state of urgency finally faded into the background. It was still there, but it didn’t echo in my head and body like an alarm blaring anymore.

“Dray.”

“Love?” I couldn’t see her, but I could see what she saw. She had walked through the trees to another clearing with a small boulder.

“We should celebrate this amazing achievement.”

“We celebrated pretty hard already.” I wasn’t forgetting our dinner party any time soon.

“But this is even bigger. And besides, I can’t think of a better way to celebrate our new relationship.”

What was she up to? I hopped over the trees, finding her naked, leaning over a boulder, waiting for me. “Like this?”

“Yes, Dray. Just like this. As Destiny made us.”