Chapter 1 #3
Hunter didn’t have anything against his natural form.
Being fog had its perks like infiltration, anonymity, and a fat dash of creepiness.
All the hits. But while existing as sentient vapor allowed him to slip between dreams and dodge literal bullets, it didn’t allow for things like working out frustration.
Or punching a wall. Or dramatically pacing a room with his hands in his hair.
So he defaulted to human. Skin and meat stitched together with willpower, solid enough to break things. Which he did.
After getting decked by a lucid dreamer inside her own nightmare, booted out of it like an unwanted file, and having a frustration fest, he’d hit the Dreamverse Library.
Looking for... anything. Any precedent. Any law.
Any loophole in the rules of dream engagement that might explain why the hell a mortal had landed a clean hit on a Tulpa demon, and it had translated into his human form.
It still didn’t make sense even thinking it.
He came out empty-handed.
He spoke to other Dream Devils. Veterans, specialists, even that one smug bastard who once claimed to have tangoed with a Dreamwalker. Nothing. No reports of injuries. No ejections. No physical consequences.
So he’d hit the gym. Not because he needed to.
He didn’t get stronger, he didn’t gain mass, and he didn’t have muscle memory in the traditional sense.
He decided what shape to be, and he was.
But the exertion, the burn from movement, and the illusion of control it gave were the only things that helped him face the fact that he had no goddamned clue what went down in that nightmare.
Even forgetting the hit–which was, supposedly, impossible–she shouldn’t have been able to cut him off like that.
Lucid dreamers could influence their dream environments.
They could push back and take control, of course.
Even kick a nightmare’s ass if they were strong enough.
But Daphne hadn’t just pushed; she’d disconnected him completely.
Ejected him with force. On top of hitting him, physically, in a form that technically didn’t exist. That wasn’t supposed to be possible, but still had the damn bruise to prove it.
A bruise he could’ve fixed. One snap of focus and his face would be flawless again, but he didn’t want to. He needed the reminder that it had happened and that she had done it, because being delusional would have made more sense.
And now it was Sunday. Which meant roast and questions.
Hunter shifted into fog with a long, drawn-out sigh and reformed at the front door of Dorian and Amelia’s cottage in Mystic Hollow.
He could’ve appeared directly inside, it wouldn’t have been the first time, but Amelia didn’t appreciate surprise apparitions in her living room.
And after that one time he accidentally reformed in on them while they were naked and wrapped into each other in a way that was hard to logistically understand, he had zero interest in catching a sequel.
He rang the bell, stuffed his hands into his pockets, and waited, taking in the scene.
Damn if this town wasn’t pretty.
Snow covered the lawn in a thick, undisturbed blanket that muffled everything, like the world had hit pause.
Christmas lights lined the roofs in warm white loops, and a wreath hung on Dorian’s front door, shedding pine needles.
It smelled like cinnamon, cedar, and something sweet that made his heart growl like he hadn’t just tried to metabolizet two pounds of confusion through deadlifts.
The door creaked open. Amelia stood there, dressed in an oversized flannel shirt and thick wool socks, her hair wet and pulled up in a hazardous hairdo kept in place with a huge hair claw clip.
Her eyebrow arched to the ceiling when she saw the bruise on his face.
“Well,” she said easily, “that’s festive. ”
“Yeah, I felt like decorating something.”
She chuckled and moved aside to let him in. “I’m sure there’s a story behind it that Dorian will love hearing.”
Oh, he sure will, Hunter thought. “Where’s the boss?”
He could’ve just scanned the place and reached out to brush his mind against Dorian’s, but the standing agreement was to keep shields up when Amelia was around. Privacy, boundaries, married couple nonsense. Fine.
They made their way to the living room, and Hunter dropped onto the couch like gravity owed him. A fire crackled in the hearth, warm and steady. The cabin had that unmistakable air of a place built around people who actually loved each other. It felt disgustingly good.
As she walked to the kitchen, Amelia called over her shoulder, “He just got out of the bath. Want wine? Beer?”
“I’ll take a beer, thank you.”
He sat there for a second, staring into the fireplace in case some answer popped out along with fire flakes.
Brooding was still full on when footsteps approached, too damn quiet for anyone else in the house.
Dorian entered, all in black as always. Instead of the three-piece suit, though, he wore black jeans and a black button-down shirt with the top buttons undone, like some sort of villain on a very enjoyable vacation.
Hunter was still trying to decide if this domestic version of the most terrifying being in existence was scarier than the wine-swilling demon he’d known for millennia when Dorian handed over the beer without a word.
Then he saw the bruise, and one perfectly black eyebrow rose.
“It’s indeed a very nice shade of purple.
” He took the armchair opposite, crossed one leg over the other like they were about to have tea instead of an existential crisis. “Do I need to know?”
“That’s a solid yes.” Hunter took a long sip of beer. “The lucid dreamer you assigned me?” He pointed to the bruise with the neck of the bottle. “That’s her work.”
Dorian stilled. “Excuse me?”
“Lower the shield and let me in.”
Dorian gave a nod, and Hunter pushed the memory through. Everything from the moment he entered the dream to the second Daphne’s fist collided with the face he’d been wearing. Her father’s face. And the moment he realized, hours later, that the bruise hadn’t faded from the human skin he wore.
Of all the reactions Hunter expected–sarcasm, fury, disinterest, a very reasonable freak out–he hadn’t anticipated this.
Dorian tilted his head, fingers interlaced, staring like he was triangulating stars in Hunter’s skull, saying a whole lot of fucking nothing.
It was unnerving. “Anything you want to share with the class, boss?” Hunter drawled.
Dorian didn’t move. “You didn’t come to me the second it happened because....?”
“Because what the fuck, man. None of it makes sense.”
Dorian exhaled slowly. “It might.”
Hunter blinked. “Uh?”
“She might not be simply a lucid dreamer, then. There are people, very few, whose mind intersects directly with Dreamscape architecture. She might be one of them.”
Hunter frowned. “I must have a dumb day because, what?”
“I’m saying she didn’t just hit you. She rejected your emotional projection so violently, it left an imprint on your chosen form.”
“The one I use to pass as human.”
“Yes. The one that’s the closest to you emotionally.”
“That shouldn’t be possible.”
“Indeed,” Dorian muttered. “Unless her trauma is so deeply embedded it’s punching holes through dimensional boundaries.”
Hunter stared at him. Then took another drink. “So what? Is she dangerous or something?”
“Perhaps.” Dorian leaned back in the armchair, his pale blue eyes flicking to the fire, his voice calm and cold. “This shouldn’t be happening. There’s no model for this, no framework. What she did is not dream logic; it’s a breach behavior.”
Hunter took another drink, the bottle suddenly heavier because he was starting to understand. “Her mind is unique, and her trauma is buried and kept contained with enough strength to warp the system around her. And that combo has never happened before?”
Dorian stood and walked to the fireplace, gaze unfocused.
“There was one similar case ages back, before the Dreamscape was formed, before you, so it was just me with some other Devil. A walker left a mark on a Devil. We monitored her dreams for a while after, but she died before I could understand what it meant. We knew it was connected to trauma, that much was plain. But the rest?” He exhaled through his nose.
“It slipped right through our fingers.” He turned slightly, firelight catching the sharp angle of his jaw.
“Looking back, I reckon the real failure was never bothering to see what her life looked like beyond the dream.”
Hunter shrugged. “Why would you? We do take that into account, obviously, but scanning an entire life is not a thing.”
“But without understanding the whole human context, it’s like flying blind.
Her trauma wasn’t just background noise.
The tear in the dreamworld was rooted in the trauma but anchored to the waking world because she was, in fact, part of it.
You can’t have one without the other. I never pulled that thread because I assumed I didn’t need to, that only what was relevant in a specific moment in life translated in the Dreamscape.
” He turned, his eyes a glacier. “This might be something else, but I’m not making that mistake twice.
We need to understand the connection, and that means we need someone inside.
Embedded not just in the dreams, but in her world. ”
Hunter gave him an incredulous look. “So what, you want me to shack up with her and take notes?”
“I want you to know her,” Dorian said, unblinking, his British accent cutting like glass. “Understand her. See how she deals with reality while hiding something so big inside of her. It might give us insights into how she does...” He waved an elegant finger around his eye. “That.”
“I’m going incognito.” Hunter huffed out a chuckle. Last time someone from the Nightmare Division had gone incognito was Dorian, exactly a year back, and he’d ended up cursed and stripped of his powers. “Can’t see how that can end up in shit.”
“This is about containment. Observation. Understanding, possibly. But mostly?” He gave the smallest, coldest smile. “It’s about being there when the next impossible thing happens.”