4. Chapter 4
Chapter four
“Ow!” I rubbed at my sore tailbone where my ass had bounced off the stony ground.
A wrinkled hand reached in front of my face, sending fear rippling through me. “What the fuck?” I shouted, scrambling backwards.
In a flash, I went from irritation to complete and utter panic. My heart thundered in my chest, and I could feel a thin sheen of sweat beginning to coat every inch of my skin.
It wasn’t the cantankerous old man from the mirage leaning over me that had thrown my anxiety into overdrive. No. It was what rose up behind him. The castle. The one from the hologram. Except it wasn’t a hologram. It was real, and I was staring right at it.
My eyes darted around as my chest heaved, flicking from the purple rose bush beside me up to the two suns in the sky. Two suns. How were there two suns?
I was inside the fucking hologram which… maybe wasn't a hologram at all. I whipped back to Dey in time to see him step toward me.
One step. That was all it took, and suddenly he wasn’t in the real world anymore. He was here with me inside this illusion.
The older man shuffled past Dey and waved his hand through the air. The clearing I stood in moments before vanished into nothing as the blue light folded in on itself.
I shot to my feet. “What did you do to me?" It had to be drugs. He slipped me something, and now I was hallucinating.
I backed away from the two men, my eyes searching frantically for something familiar to latch onto. Something I could make sense of. But there was nothing.
The tightness in my chest grew unbearable, and my vision blurred as I succumbed to the full weight of my panic attack. I had to get out of there. Had to get away from them.
I bolted, blindly sprinting toward the copse of oak trees at the edge of the garden. I needed to get somewhere safe to take my Klonopin. Then maybe I could hide out until the drugs wore off. If I could just get to those trees…
I saw my path coming to an end and hooked a sharp left to keep running.
Which is when I collided with something hard and warm.
I bounced off Dey’s chest and flew backward, landing smack on my tailbone again and likely adding yet another bruise to my already injured ass.
I stared up at him, my whole body trembling. “Please don’t hurt me,” I begged.
The last thing I saw was Dey reaching out to touch my cheek, then darkness swallowed me whole.
Groaning, I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting off the bright light that tried to pull me from sleep. I should get up and close the curtains, but the pillow under my head was warm and comfortable and…
My pillow twitched.
I bolted upright so fast it hurt my neck. I was not in my small but comfy bed in Jersey. I was in a rose garden. And my pillow was Dey's firmly sculpted chest.
Scrambling to my feet, I eyed him warily as he observed me from the stone bench where apparently I had been cuddling him.
Between one heartbeat and the next, everything came crashing back into me. The hologram that wasn’t a hologram. The castle that still loomed over me. And my desperate attempt at an escape that had clearly failed.
“What did you do to me?” I demanded, panic knocking on the door to my mind.
In one impressively smooth motion, Dey swung his legs around and popped to his feet. I threw up my hands and stumbled backward, making it all of three steps before the cool stone of another bench pressed against the backs of my legs.
Dey lifted his hands in a placating gesture. “I simply helped you to sleep for a short while. You had succumbed to hysterics, and I feared you would injure yourself further without intervention.”
“You helped me to sleep? You mean you drugged me!” Panic no longer knocked but instead kicked the door down.
“You slipped me some kind of hallucinogen in the bar, didn’t you? Then you brought me here and drugged me again to knock me out. Shit, I don’t even know where we are.”
No. It couldn’t be… Was he…?
“Am I being sex-trafficked?”
Before he could even respond, I shot forward, grabbed his shoulders, and kneed him in the balls as hard as I could.
He pitched forward, groaning, and I used the opportunity to flee.
I barely made it around the first corner of the maze before Dey's muscular arms circled me from behind, scooped me up, and deposited me back on the bench as if I weighed no more than the yowling alley cat that I sounded like.
Crossing my arms, I glared at him, wondering how he had possibly recovered so quickly. “You’re gonna regret this,” I hissed.
If my declaration phased him at all, it certainly didn’t show on his face which now vacillated between exhaustion and frustration. He knelt in front of me and placed his hands on the sides of my face. I tried to jerk away, but his grip held firm.
The instant his eyes locked on mine, every trace of anger vacated my body. A soothing warmth blossomed under my skin, penetrated my muscles, and nestled into my chest.
“What did you do to me?” I whispered.
It was the same question I asked earlier, except this time I knew Dey wouldn’t hurt me. Why did I ever think he would? There was a perfectly good explanation for everything.
He straddled the bench to face me, his hands sliding down to cup mine. “I am so very dismayed that things played out this way,” he professed. “It was my intention to educate you back in the Other Realm so bringing you over would be less of a shock. Unfortunately, the rift can only be open so long, and Lorduin was about to seal it off. I had no choice but to push you through despite how much it pained me to do so.”
I turned his words over in my mind, trying to decide what to address first. “What’s an Other Realm?”
His hands gripped mine a little tighter as if afraid I might bolt again. “The Other Realm is the world that you know. The reality that you and humans like you exist in. We use the term Other Realm to refer to any realm other than our own. Lorduin, the male you saw earlier, is a World Walker. He opened the rift that allowed me to find you and bring you here.”
“Ok,” I responded, still strangely unriled by what he was saying. I opened my mouth to ask him exactly where 'here' was when a massive hawk landed on his shoulder.
“Fucking hell!” I shrieked, throwing myself backwards and promptly falling off the bench. Sitting in the dirt, I gaped wide-eyed at the creature that was not, in fact, a hawk.
Dey cocked his head to the side, and the intimidating bird mimicked his motion. “You have now used that word in three different ways,” he said. “Are you entirely sure that you know what it means?”
I ignored him completely, too engrossed with the creature that was now vigorously preening Dey’s hair. It was roughly the size of a hawk with a hooked beak and reddish-brown color, but that was where the similarities ended.
It scurried on four legs from Dey’s right shoulder down into his lap, where gray talons loosely gripped his thigh. Two sets of feathered wings sprouted out of its back, gently beating independently from each other as it traversed Dey’s terrain. The crowning glory of the creature, though, was its chest where opalescent scales glistened in the sun, shifting between purple and deep blue depending on the angle of the light.
It dipped its head at me then bounced around excitedly before hunkering down to rub its face on Dey’s pants.
“You are welcome to pet him,” Dey offered.
Scaled chest, extra wings, four legs. I hit my head harder than I thought during one of my many recent falls because this was not a creature that should exist. An observation that didn’t stop me from extending my hand to see if those wings were as soft as they appeared.
They were.
The creature let out a dove-like coo and arched into my touch as I caressed its back feathers. When I pulled away, it screeched sharply and flew off.
“Oof,” I said with a grimace. "I don’t think your bird likes me."
“He is not a bird, he is a crescia, my bonded companion. And Thorell very much likes you. Though I believe he felt that he was entitled to a few more pets.”
I laughed as we both watched Thorell fly away, then I fixed my attention back on the strange male across from me. “So… other realms exist.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m in one of them.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m not freaking out.” I tapped the bench to confirm it was real and solid. “I feel like I should be freaking out right now. It’s like my brain is fighting itself. One part believes I shouldn't be okay with any of this, or at the very least I should assume this is a dream that will end soon, but another part keeps saying relax and accept what’s happening.” I paused, then added, “I think that part is winning.”
I gazed into his amber eyes, feeling that warm safety blanket wrap itself around my mind. “Why do I trust you?”
Dey gave a long sigh and ran his hand over my cheek. I leaned into the gesture, enjoying how much security came from that simple caress.
“That,” he said soberly, “would be my fault.”