Ruler [Blood Magic, Book 3]

Chapter 31: Rude Awakenings

Out of the darkness came dreams.

And on their heels, nightmares of blood and bullets, fire and fangs. I floated among the chaos. Below it, above it, all around it. Absorbed but never making meaningful contact. In danger, but not. Not really.

It was not unfamiliar.

Sorcerer rejuvenation, I told myself, and let myself float. Imagine being underwater with no need to breathe, if underwater was pure blackness, devoid of fish and plant life. Sometimes I wondered how long I'd been floating, if I'd ever break the surface, but most of the time I let the tide of dreams and nightmares carry me. Love and monsters. Blood and hunger. Pain and power. All these things comprised me and yet I was none of them. And still I floated.

With time, the violence and infernos subsided, and my visions developed more limbs and fangs - and tastes began to accompany them, namely the sweet nectar of Keel's blood. I gulped at it with the feverish desperation only his life force called forth within me. And when those dreams vanished - fleeting, everything here was fleeting - I floated once more, wishing he'd return. I wasn't lonely, but the vast expanse felt different when he was here. Richer, more whole. He was sunlight in its darkness. The thought made me laugh or it would have if my dream-shape had a mouth. Keel was the furthest thing from the sun I could imagine.

Yet each time I dreamed of him and the blood, I felt stronger. Sometimes I'd think I'd spotted a crack of light in the dark. Each glimpse brought a worrisome heaviness and beckoned me to pull myself towards it. Not yet, I thought, still too tired.

Despite my refusal to grip on, the tether, that magical something that kept me from floating away entirely, continued to tug. And the dreams shifted once more, becoming more felt than imagined: cold vampiric bodies pressed against me; warm human hands on my forehead and face; more blood, in my mouth and running down my chin. It was as if in the floating place I could exist in multiple times and places at once. I startled then, what if I was dead? Adrift like so many of the ghosts Lucia called out to.

I should have wanted to fight my way free then, but I sensed no peril in floating. A living blanket encircled me. A feast without famine. A vast peace. Nothing to hunt me here, apart from the nightmares, and they were nothing more than insubstantial illusions, lacking the physicality to be a genuine threat.

When the real world started to send more visible cracks through my unconsciousness, calling me back, I tried to avoid them, swimming deeper into the darkness. The comfort of the void made me hesitant to pull at the edges of the dreamworld too hard.

Until the scent came. It smelled like chocolate cake, cheese fondue, apple pie, and BBQ ribs medium-rare hot and steaming and fresh off the grill, and then... it kept shifting and shifting, each time morphing into something more delicious and less describable. I could do nothing but follow it as it drew me up and out. My stomach rumbled, and I became aware of my torso for the first time.