6. The Stranger
Chapter Six
The Stranger
L ast time she had a monster in her closet, I enjoyed torturing him for months.
I hunted him until he had nowhere to hide in all the realms, nowhere he could go to escape my anger.
Months of terror I gave him in exchange for the years he had forced upon her.
Now she’s wasting away in front of me. Her eyes are sunken, with dark circles etched permanently beneath them.
If she dies, the realms will follow. I will not let anyone live in a place where she does not exist. As if they could ever deserve such a thing. As if I could ever deserve such a thing.
So, I’ll be in her dreams. I’ll demand she fights, demand she lives. Because I won’t go back to what it was like before.
My heart stopped beating over four hundred years ago.
After I’d stopped the hearts of so many others, it was fitting that mine had slowed to become barely perceptible.
It never raced, never hammered, never?.?.
. lived. I was as dead as the corpses I’d left behind me, fitting for someone known as the Hand of Life and Death.
Then I saw her, and my heart thudded so loudly that I thought there had been an explosion nearby. I will not go back to that walking death, and I will not allow her to stay in this place of agony and regret.
Lying back on my bed, I relax and reach for her in dreams, searching for the sense of her through the void.
I jolt up when I feel nothing . No, no, no.
My once-dead heart slams against my chest as I wave my hand, pulling up the security spells I have around her house.
I flip through them to find her, exhaling softly in relief when I see her sleeping with her vampire.
They are curled together, and one of them is snoring loudly.
Why can’t I access her dreams? She can’t have learned to keep me out in a single night. That takes years of practice. So why?—
I curse foully, seeing the bottle on her bedside table. Fucking alchemy. I appear in the bedroom with my avatar, grabbing the bottle to glare at it. Dreamless Draft . So stupidly reckless. These are extremely addictive. If she starts using this as a way to avoid me and the nightmares?.?.?.
No.
Without waking either of them, I vanish to the alchemy lab.
The avatar makes it easy to blend into the shadows cast by the various venomous plants and poisonous flowers.
It is a simple thing to slip past the night caretaker who tends to the night blooms. It’s not a night bloom I’m after.
My eyes narrow on the Latoon bush, and a rune burns on my arm, igniting a ball of flame in my hand.
The whitethorn plant is essential for a dreamless draft and requires the specialized environment of this greenhouse to grow.
My eyes flash as I ignite the bush at the roots, encouraging the flames to grow up the branches so that by the time the night caretaker finds the burning bush, it will be too late to recover it.
Back in my bedroom, I pace back and forth, wearing the carpet thin. The truth I won’t admit to myself is that I no longer know how to truly sleep. I haven’t in years, and now that she’s sleeping and dreamless, I’m alone with my own thoughts, my own pain, my own loss.
Absently I touch a raised rune on my arm. The old ways once dictated my life, and it took far too long for me to realize how they created a regime of terror. They fostered an endless cycle of those on top crushing those beneath, and an indoctrination of the youth into the same beliefs.
I refused to be a tool for others to wield, and I broke that cycle a long time ago.
You had no choice but to become what they made you. Magic is freedom for some, but it’s a shackle for you. The chains wrap around you so tightly you mistake them for your own skin. What are you but the bonds that hold you to this life? To this path?
Words from a lifetime ago echo through my skull.
They were spoken by a man long dead by my own hand, yet they still resonate within me.
What am I but what he made me? A weapon to strike through armies, to force them to kneel at just the threat of me being dispatched.
I was nothing but a killer armed with the power to make nations fall and realms tremble. A monster dressed as a dream.
I glance again at the spell showing her sleeping peacefully, dreamlessly, and I know it is something I’ll never achieve without her.