15. Sebastian #2
But in his worry, his unconscious had started his voice box phonating without any input from his brain, and this is what had spewed out. It was haunting, thrumming with a kind of menace that spoke deeply to Sebastian.
Rick calling him powerless while threatening Justin had awoken a deep, rumbling rage in him.
In a second, the spirits were on Sebastian. His friends, his ambassadors of chaos. Quicker and stronger than they’d ever been before. He wondered if it was due to his singing or because his mate was in danger. But regardless, the unruly wisps flocked to him.
To Sebastian’s eyes, the air was thick with them, although he knew others couldn’t see them. They appeared gray, with sparks of color electricity in their small bodies of spiritual mist and fog, like tiny sentient thunderclouds.
They were whispering to him, so many, all at once.
Need? Let us break. Mischief. Luck.
The chaos spirits weren’t the most intelligent of the entities witches could have an affinity with, but their childlike glee suited Sebastian. He directed them wordlessly, encouraging them toward Rick.
Being a chaos witch was a double-edged sword. He was at the mercy of his fickle spirits. On the other hand, when they were decided, they didn’t hold back.
Rick was advancing on him now, his fangs sharp and shining, and Sebastian’s heartbeat pounded in his ears. All around him, his spirits vibrated in place. Were they charging their energies? He’d never seen anything like it, but his focus was on the giant vampire moving toward him.
“You’ll regret this, witch.” Rick laughed, a harsh and ugly sound. Taking a loud step forward, his black boot came down hard on the wooden floor.
Which, at the urging of Sebastian’s spirits, gave way underneath him.
His foot broke through the boards like they were made of paper, and he growled in frustration. The hole wasn’t large, and Rick stopped falling as his muscular thigh stuck in the opening.
It was slight, but Sebastian caught the tiniest bit of movement, the sides of the hole tightening on the vampire, the boards squeezing to keep him motionless.
“What the fuck?” Rick struggled, pushing himself up with his one free tree trunk leg, but to no avail. The boards would not release him.
Justin stood, the daze of Rick’s attack finally wearing off.
“What did you do?” The question wasn’t accusing, but curious. “And where are we? Rick has been dead for almost two years!”
“Guess I’m trying out a new kind of spellwork.” Sebastian grinned, unable to contain his surprise and excitement that his song had worked.
“Both of you are dead!” Rick screamed. He was starting to look strange now, like his body was having difficulty maintaining its shape. “You can’t stand against her.”
“Stand against who?” Sebastian crouched slightly to get closer to the floundering man. Rick said nothing. Sebastian pushed out an image to his spirits, hoping the goodwill he’d bought with his song hadn’t already expired.
Rick’s face whipped to the left as the strike of Sebastian’s strong slap rang out in the room. The gleeful spirits flickered in Sebastian’s eyes, bouncing up and down with a mischievous delight. He puzzled over how aggressive these chaos spirits were.
“Stand against who ?” Sebastian repeated.
“Your sister,” the man forced out.
Sebastian nodded and waved at Rick dismissively.
With that, there was a loud splintering sound, like the house was coming apart.
The hole opened up, and Rick fell through.
He grabbed at the sides to stop himself from descending, but the wood cracked again, and the vampire’s handholds disintegrated in front of his eyes .
With another desperate scream, he was gone. Sebastian peeked down after him, wanting to observe the floor beneath them. He wished he hadn’t.
It was the abyss.
Rather than the first level of the house, there was a great darkness, a total absence of light that hummed with cruelty and malice. It was nothing but a hole, but Sebastian could sense a personality there. It wasn’t happy.
A crackle of deep purple lightning flashed as Rick fell into the darkness. Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone, the floor repairing itself with the help of a few scattered chaos spirits. Sebastian was bent over at the waist, catching his breath.
“What…what was that? What is this place? Rick is dead . I saw his body.”
Sebastian sprang forward, holding Justin’s head in his hands and staring into his eyes, looking for any sign of trauma or pain. Instead, there was a curiosity there. He released his grip.
Glancing around the space, he noticed several strange anomalies.
“You see how that desk doesn’t belong in here? It looks wrong. And the shroud is peeking through where the walls and floor meet.” The dull silver was hard to catch, but once he’d noticed it, he couldn’t help but be aware.
“Yes, but what does it mean ?”
“This is a dream. We’re in a dream.”
Justin hugged himself, shivering, as he glanced around the room, searching for what Sebastian was looking at. After a moment, he nodded slowly.
“How? ”
Sebastian swallowed. This wasn’t good news, that Veronica had been able to reach him in the Circle’s house.
“My sister must have a dream witch on her team. Who knows where she managed to find one. They’re very rare, and if she was willing to reveal an ace like that in an attempt to get to us, I’m worried about what else she has up her sleeve.”
Justin crouched down, running his hand along the grooves of the wooden floor. He caressed the places where the planks met, his brows furrowed in consternation.
“This is fucking creepy.”
Sebastian stared at him for a moment, confused. What was he even talking about? Then he understood. Justin’s vampire sight meant he could zero in on the space between.
“Can you see the shroud?”
Justin nodded. “It’s like the whole place is held together by a metallic gel. I don’t know what I’m looking at.” He stood, his eyes scanning the room. “What do we do now? How are they doing this?”
“Witches with a dream affinity are a hot commodity,” Sebastian said. “One in a thousand witches are born with the ability to communicate with dream spirits. I shudder to think what Veronica traded away for the sake of an alliance with one. The bill will be steep.”
Sebastian moved to a wall, smacking his hand against one of the logs. The impact resounded throughout the bedroom.
“This witch is good,” he said, scrunching his nose in annoyance. “I’ll search for a crack in the construction, but it may take me a long time. It’s more likely my mother will realize something is wrong before then and pull us out. ”
“So…we might be here for a day? Or more?” Justin’s voice quivered.
“Possibly. For the moment, it seems the witch hasn’t noticed the trap they set wasn’t effective, and we’re both still alive. Soon, though, they’ll realize something is wrong and craft more obstacles for us. Monsters. Or worse, monsters with the faces of our loved ones.”
“Shit.”
Running his fingers along the wall, Sebastian slowly made his way along the barrier, feeling for anything unusual in both the physical and magical construction of the room.
“What are you looking for? Can I help?” Justin’s eyes were wide, the vulnerability stirring up a strong ache in Sebastian’s chest.
“Sure. You won’t be able to feel magical anomalies, so look for any strange physical properties. Soft spots in something that should be solid. An item that’s the wrong color. Anything out of place.”
The vampire went to work, picking up items in the dream-cabin and inspecting them. Sebastian wondered if the rustic house had some kind of significance to Justin, some resonance the dream-witch had tapped into.
As he searched, Sebastian started to lose hope. It had been at least three hours—although time in a dream was notoriously unreliable—and every piece of this constructed world seemed to fit in perfectly.
“This was done by a powerful witch,” Sebastian said, startling Justin out of his meditative inspection of a pile of dusty books. The vampire was sitting cross-legged on the floor, going through the tomes one by one.
“How do you know?” Justin’s voice was quiet. Sebastian worried his mate had given up hope in some way .
“The dream is perfect.” Sebastian shrugged. “There’s some kind of weakness somewhere, that’s the nature of it, but whatever it is the witch has hidden it well.”
“I hope we…” Justin’s voice trailed off, and his head snapped back to the still-locked door.
“What is it?”
“Do you hear that?” Justin sprang to his feet, his tone more urgent now.
For a few seconds, Sebastian heard nothing, waiting for whatever noise Justin had heard to finally reach his human ears. If it hadn’t been for the unsettled expression on Justin’s face, he would have thought it was nothing.
Then it came, faint at first, but steadily growing. A roar, almost like a lion’s, but deeper and harder-edged, full of rage, with a tinge of otherworldly malevolence.
As it gained in power, the log cabin shook, the furniture shifting as the intensity of the earthquake matched the beastly sound. Justin ran to Sebastian’s side, who wrapped him in his arms. He would keep his mate safe against whatever this was.
It was unbearably loud now, and the air pressure in the cabin increased, like they’d descended to the depths of the ocean. As the atmosphere pushed against Sebastian’s skull, something turned over in his stomach, a sensation of rightness and connection clicking into place.
Sebastian laughed, his voice barely cutting through the now-overwhelming volume of the roar. Justin looked up at him from within his embrace.
“What? What is it?”
“That’s Pavel. That’s our mate.”