A House of Cloaks & Daggers (The Gift War #1)

12. Little Pink Pills

Chapter twelve

Little Pink Pills

S leep was waiting for me in Faerie.

Like it had known that I was coming.

It welcomed me in an all-consuming embrace as my head hit the pillow, kicking my shoes off at the same time as I yanked the blanket out from under me, and I was unconscious before my boots clattered to the floor.

Lucid dreaming, my psychiatrist had said, would occur when the person became aware they were having a dream. Sometimes, it included an element of control. My dreams had been so vivid that they felt real, despite knowing that I was not within the bounds of my normal reality, and they had continued to plague my thoughts even during the day.

She had given me a sedative to start with—which didn’t work—and encouraged me to talk about the dreams.

I explained to her that I couldn’t, not that I didn’t want to, and I told her that they were less like dreams and more like visions instead.

She didn’t believe me.

Nobody believed me.

Everyone was worried and caring, but nobody believed me. They thought the dreams were so wrong and twisted that I was ashamed to admit to their contents. When I realised, I couldn’t cope anymore.

I had a breakdown.

I snapped. I screamed, cried, and shattered a vase the day I told the psychiatrist that I wanted to tell her about the dreams, but I was not allowed to tell her. Or anyone.

She’d asked me who had said that, and I’d fallen to my knees on her office floor and spit onto her carpet and shrieked as a searing heat burned my tongue.

At the end of the session, she’d handed me a prescription for an antipsychotic medication.

I filled it.

I swallowed the pill every morning.

Four weeks later, on the night before my twenty-first birthday, I had woken screaming at midnight from my very last nightmare.

After that, the dreams just stopped. Like they had never happened.

But I hadn’t taken one of those little pink pills in days.

And on my first night in Faerie, I remembered what the dreams had been about.

The glass wall rising up before me, shimmering with my own reflection—the gateway into the Court of Light. The mysterious, sentient woodland with diamond lights—the Forest of Eyes and Ears. And then the dungeon—where my prisoner was tortured every single night as he had been for three long months, left scarred, beaten, and burned.

Burned.

By iron-tipped whips, bars, and blades.

Wren couldn’t touch the iron key in Dante’s Bookstore. Iron was the choice of every weapon in the dungeon, and wielded with hands clad in black leather gloves.

My dreams were of Faerie.

My prisoner was High Fae.

And I was travelling through it, in real life, towards the cell in which the beautiful, tortured body from my dreams was being held captive.

Wren was leading me right to him.

One by one, the pieces fell into place.

Wren was the invisible force holding me back every night when the torture was completed with that impossibly strong and disarmingly familiar grip. Even his scent had been familiar, though I’d mistakenly relished in the cologne, not realising who he was. Until then.

I was dreaming of Faerie, but this time I was also in Faerie.

I’ve made it this far.

And so I screamed louder than I ever had before, until my eardrums buckled against the decibels and my throat turned dry.

“Lucais!”

And then I woke up.

Two arms, tense with corded muscle, lifted me from the bed.

“Aura. Aura, wake up.”

I was trembling all over, my head lolling against something warm and hard. My eyelids fluttered against the sleep glue that had stuck them together, straining to burst open. But it was dark in my dreams, the moonlight retreating from the cell as if I’d scared it away, and I was still searching for his face…

His fingers brushed the hair away from my eyes, tangling in my sleep-tossed curls. He lifted my head with that hand while his other arm curled around my waist and my legs, pinning me to his chest.

“It’s okay,” he murmured. It was like I was underwater, hearing him call out to me from above the surface. “It’s just a dream.”

Lucais.

Lucais was here . I’d found him. I’d passed through the gateway, made it out of the Forest, and he had escaped from his cell.

I had no idea what was supposed to come next, but I opened my eyes.

It was not Lucais holding me on the bed.

The face staring down at me belonged to his keeper. My keeper.

Wren .