Chapter 6

Ifelt the moment my bride closed her eyes—at long last—to enter the realm of dreams. Normally, I would have waited endlessly for her to finally cross the Veil once she’d conquered her ever elusive sleep. But not anymore. My brand on her acted like a lifeline that I could simply yank to bring her to me the minute she surrendered to the lure of the Veil.

I had gorged on many Beasts on my way back to my domain inside the Mist Plane. It was odd to be here while the portals to the other side were opened. However, it was the only way for my mate and me to play without jeopardizing her safety.

I watched her running, terror etched on her face. I inhaled deeply, savoring the taste of her fear. Fuck, how I had missed it! Even though my body buzzed with an insane amount of energy, each delectable wave of her despair only fueled me further. For the first time, I didn’t care about the power my woman was giving me. The scent of her fear no longer reeked and repulsed me like it had earlier.

Upping the ante to enhance her experience, I made the terrain before her even more uneven, with knotted roots and brambles to make her trip. For a moment, I considered making the ground sticky, or muddy to make it even harder for her to advance, while accelerating the speed of the Beast, but it felt like an overkill. Still, a bit more spice was needed to truly push her over the edge. First, I thought of making the trees come to life and attempt to grab her: a classic that never got old. Then I thought creepy shadows with glowing red eyes cutting her path, as they emitted a haunting, inhuman laughter. And then I got it: a decomposing swarm of seahorse fairies nipping at my Naima while the Beast closed in on her.

And then I would yank her to safety, seconds before the Beast would get her.

This time, she will want me to console her.

As much as I loved and got off on her terror, the intimacy of appeasing and comforting her after the fact had always been my favorite part of our encounters. After today’s trauma in the real world and the one I was currently subjecting her to, Naima would inevitably ache for consoling. And I would gladly give her all she needed. I never quite understood why my mate’s subconscious had stopped wanting those tender moments while demanding darker encounters. I had disliked that path. But now was our chance to get back on the proper track.

Naima once more stumbled on a gnarled root, but this time, she fell to the ground. The Beast roared again and picked up the pace. Just as my woman was scrambling back to her feet, zombie fairies screeched in the distance. Lightning crackled between the radioactive specks of their pixie dust.

Instead of screaming and trying to run in the only two directions that temporarily offered an escape route, Naima froze, trembling in a complete state of shock. I frowned at that unusual reaction. My bride was stronger than this and a fighter. Had she weakened over our years apart?

She looked at her surroundings, and an odd sense of calm descended over her. More confused than ever, I explored her emotions. All that I got from her was a peaceful certainty that everything would be all right.

What the fuck is going on?

“ZAIN! HELP ME!” Naima suddenly shouted.

My brain froze. I was her stalker, not her rescuer. Why would she ask me to aid her? In the eighteen years since I’d become self-aware, shortly after her thirteenth birthday, Naima had never consciously called me to her. She’d always tried to push me away while her subconscious insisted that I relentlessly pursue her. I’d felt bipolar at times trying to juggle my woman’s twisted desires.

“ZAIN!” she called out again, snapping me out of my daze.

I didn’t know how to respond. A part of me was exhilarated to have her consciously wanting me. Yet, another was terrified. If she no longer feared me, she would also no longer need me, whether to chase or comfort her. I would lose her, become no more than an abandoned dream, wasting away, until I became insane.

I hesitantly came out of my translucent state, allowing her to see me from the distance I’d been observing her. A relieved and happy smile stretched Naima’s lips and her beautiful, hazel eyes shone with a joyful glimmer that took my breath away. The wave of emotions that slammed into me had never been more powerful… more delicious. Images of me killing her boyfriend in the Mist then dispatching the Cthulhu Beast that had ensnared her flashed through Naima’s mind.

Reeling, my instinctive urge to rush to her was crushed by a little voice in the back of my head, keeping me locked in place. I was her stalker, not her rescuer as she appeared to start believing. She needed me to feed her fears, not appease them. Naima’s love for me was bound to my ability to terrorize and punish her for her wrongdoings, then comfort her so that she could face another day. I couldn’t lose her.

“Zain?” Naima whispered questioningly when I failed to come forward as the Beast and the fairies closed in on her position.

“Run, Naima!” I said tauntingly, although the words felt bitter in my mouth instead of exhilarating as they normally would. “They are catching up!”

My bride’s face fell with the sudden realization that I wasn’t going to protect her. Naima shook her head in denial and took a step back as if she couldn’t tolerate being in my presence. The betrayal on her face and the hurt she broadcast towards me cut me to the core. A pain like I’d never felt before, in this realm or hers, flooded directly into me through my brand connecting us. It felt like acid eating me from the inside out.

“Fuck you,” Naima hissed almost in a whisper filled with pain, tears rolling down her cheeks. The look of hurt and disillusion on her beautiful face struck me like a thousand daggers. “I’m not playing your stupid games anymore.” She angrily wiped the tears glistening on her cheeks with the back of her hand. “You want your monsters to kill me? Then enjoy the show, you sick fuck!”

Turning her back to me, Naima spread her arms wide, tilted her head back, and closed her eyes while waiting for death to come claim her.

Terror, a feeling I had never experienced before, slammed into me at this reckless display. I raced towards my woman, while summoning countless trees before the Beast. It had gone into a hungry frenzy as he carved himself a path to Naima, now that she had surrendered her life to him. With a wave of my hand, I dispelled the zombie fairies that had been less than fifty meters away from her.

I swooped in and snagged my bride before flying away in all haste. Naima yelped in surprise, and fear, thinking I was one of the creatures stalking her, then instinctively wrapped her arms around my neck, shock and confusion visible on her face. The Beast roared in fury, having been denied his prize with less than twenty meters to go. It gave us chase, but I was too fast for it as I flew through the defensive walls that defined the perimeter of my domain in the Mist. The wall would kill the Beast if it attempted to trespass.

Even now that she was in safety, my head spun with the overwhelming lingering fear that still wanted to choke me. At the same time, anger at my female’s recklessness bubbled inside me with the need to erupt. I landed in the empty clearing that surrounded the immediate vicinity of my wall. Putting Naima on her feet, I gripped her shoulders in a bruising hold while glaring at her.

“What the fuck do you think you were doing?” I shouted, furious.

“Refusing to be a puppet in your twisted mind games,” Naima hissed, lifting her chin defiantly in a way that left me speechless. She’d never stood up to me in the past, always cowering in fear instead. “You wanted to see me get eaten by a Beast. I was giving you satisfaction while getting out of this farce. Why are you so upset? Unhappy your prey didn’t want to play by your rules,” she added in a mocking tone.

“What you did,” I hissed back in her face, “was nearly commit suicide! That Cthulhu Beast was not a summoned illusion like the fairies. It was a real Mist Beast I had lured here.”

“So what?” she retorted with an irritated expression. “This is a dream. MY dream. The Beast kills me, I wake up, and I’m out of this bullshit scenario!”

“NO, YOU STUPID FEMALE!” I shouted, giving her a single shake. “This is not a dream. You are not sleeping. You are walking awake in the dream world. When you sleep, a sliver of your consciousness crosses the Veil. On its own, the human mind isn’t powerful enough for a full walk like you are currently doing. That’s why you don’t remember your dreams in the morning. That’s why you can die in your dreams. But when you do, that part of you in the dream dies! Your people usually awaken before it, but the few times you don’t, a part of you is lost forever. There’s a reason humans say that if you die in your dream, you die in the real world.”

Naima froze, a horrified expression descending on her features. “Are you saying I would have died in the real world if that Cthulhu had eaten me?”

I heaved a sigh and let go of her shoulders. “I’m saying that the part of you that is here with me right now would have died. Unlike us, humans cannot do a full transfer of consciousness unless their body dies. There is a fraction of you left in your body in the Mortal Plane. Had the Beast killed you here, only that tiny fragment of you would have remained. You would have technically been brain dead, stuck in a coma that you would never awaken from.”

“You exposed me to true death to play your sick games?!” she said in an accusatory tone, while taking a few steps away from me.

“I created the thrilling experience you crave,” I argued defensively. “How the fuck was I to know you would do something so reckless? You always ran! You’ve always loved being hunted down.”

“I hated it! I hated it then, and I hate it even more now,” she shouted back, taking a menacing step towards me. “I spent two years in therapy to learn to stop being a victim, to learn to block you out. I’ve been at peace for the past nine years, and I’m not falling down that rabbit hole again. You’re done getting your rocks off by terrorizing me.”

Every single one of her words cut me like a blade. I had felt her slipping away from me during those two years. It had been painful. But the last nine years had been sheer agony. She had not called for me, not dreamed of me. I would see her in the distance as she sparked new Wishes that didn’t involve me. I’d been so enraged, felt so betrayed that I’d killed them all.

“I gave you what you wanted,” I said.

“I never wanted to be terrified. You imposed your will on me,” she snapped.

“No, Naima. YOU dictated what happened during our time together,” I countered. “Your conscious mind may have said no, but your subconscious shouted loud and clear that you wanted pain, that you wanted to be punished for destroying your home. But you did not respond well to pain so, I chose to give you terror instead. And that, you couldn’t get enough of.”

Naima gaped at me for a second, and a strange expression crossed her beautiful features. She shook her head and looked at me with discouragement before running her fingers through her puffy, curly hair. It had felt so soft beneath my touch when she rested her head on my shoulder as I consoled her after I’d ‘punished’ her. How I hungered for those moments again.

“Those were the twisted reveries of a heartbroken child,” my woman said in a sad and tired voice. “My parents were constantly fighting. And when they did, it escalated quickly. They never hit each other, but Dad would throw things at the walls, and Mom would break dishes and whatever else she could get her hands on. And whenever it started getting out of hand, one would try to physically stop the other, which usually ended up with Dad pinning Mom against the wall, and Mom trying to bite him to break free. So, he would hold her tightly by the neck until she calmed down.” Naima hugged herself and exhaled a shuddering breath. “Eventually, Mom would break down crying. Dad would then hug her and tell her he loved her, and they would apologize to each other.”

My woman turned her back to me and walked a few steps inside the clearing surrounded by a wall of Mist that we were standing in.

“My parents adored each other, but they just couldn’t live together. They thought having me would help fix their issues, it only made things worse.” She shivered, then turned to face me. “All those years ago, the little girl that sparked you wanted someone to punish her for destroying her parents’ happiness with her complicating presence. But she was wrong. She was never to blame. I was never the cause.”

A part of me had known this but refused to face that truth. Acknowledging it also implied acknowledging that my entire existence had been premised on a lie. I refused to accept that and what it could mean for us going forward. The few hours since I had at long last reconnected with Naima had felt like an eternity. And my addiction with my creator—my obsession even—had returned with a vengeance. I would destroy anything and anyone that would stand in the way of me finally having a life with my bride.

“Is that why you always wanted me to strangle you all those times you wished me to play the slasher-stalker?” I asked, my chest constricting with an unpleasant emotion I didn’t want.

“Did I?” she asked, slightly stunned.

“Yes. You wanted me to chase you, and at the end, pin you down on the ground or against a wall, then strangle you while speaking evil things.”

Naima snorted then shook her head again with a sad expression. “If I were to psychoanalyze that response, I would say that I was obviously reproducing what I’d seen in my own home. But, Zain, while the confused little girl unconsciously wanted to be punished, what I’d really wanted from you was what my Dad was doing to my mother.”

“And what was that?” I asked in a whisper.

“Showing her that he loved her. No matter how angry he got, even when she tried to hurt him, holding her neck was his way of saying ‘I will not let you hurt me, but I’m also never going to hurt you.’ Instead, I conjured up one nightmare after another, then repeated the same pattern in real life. The boyfriends I ended up with that liked pinning women against walls and holding their necks, also liked leaving bruises everywhere.”

I watched her slowly approach me, her determined gaze boring into mine. The pain in my chest expanded. I braced for the next words she would speak. They would hurt, badly. But I wasn’t letting her go. She needed me as I needed her.

“I don’t need fear or abuse in my life,” Naima said in a firm and unyielding tone.

“You need me,” I said just as firmly.

“I don’t need someone who takes pleasure in my pain and misery and goes out of his way to put me in potential danger,” she continued, as if I hadn’t said a word.

“You need me!” I reiterated more forcefully.

“No, Zain. I don’t need a Nightmare haunting me.”

Silence settled between us, so thick I could almost touch it. I felt faint with pain. I could feel her emotions and clearly read her thoughts in my realm. She meant it.

“You created me, but you no longer want me,” I whispered.

It didn’t make sense. In two more days, after the Mist ended, we were supposed to be reunited once I’d crossed over. Had I spent all those years becoming what she wanted—what I believed she needed—only to be cast aside now? Even if I wanted to—not that I did—I could no longer change who or what I was.

“No, Zain. I do want you,” Naima said in a soft voice.

A bolt of fire exploded in my chest. I gazed at her with disbelief to have finally heard the impossible words I’d so often dreamed would one day spill from her mouth.

“BUT I do not want you the way you think I do,” she specified.

I glided forward, invading her personal space. She didn’t step back, didn’t flinch, and didn’t appear scared or worried.

“How do you want me, my Naima?” I asked in a soft voice.

She lifted her chin defiantly. “I want you the way you have been the three times we have physically or consciously met. I don’t want you to be my Stalker, but my Savior.”

I recoiled, taken aback by such an unexpected request. “Your Savior?” I asked, utterly confused.

“When Jared tried to kill me, you saved my life,” Naima said, her voice becoming more pressing. “When that Cthulhu Beast was hypnotizing me in the Observatory, you tore it to shreds. And just now, you spared me from true death.”

“But such instances will be extremely rare,” I argued. “There’s no fucking way you’re leaving me in the shadows again only to be called upon once every blue moon.”

“Not anymore,” Naima countered. “Nightmares are taking over my world in human form. They are leaving a trail of death behind them. No one is safe anymore. I am not safe anymore. At the end of every Mist, more of them enter our world and grow insanely powerful by feeding on my people.”

Naima cupped my face in her hands, hope shining in her beautiful hazel eyes. The warmth of her touch sent the most exquisite shiver down my spine. She had never voluntarily laid her hands on me in such gentle fashion. I barely repressed the moan of pleasure rising in my throat.

“You are a psychopath, my psychopath, hungry for the fear of others, for power, for dominance. You can kill without hesitation, without remorse, and even derive pleasure from it,” she continued. Her voice was not only devoid of condemnation but also filled with an excitement that awakened a sense of thrill within me. “I don’t want to change that in you. I want you to use your powers to stalk those Nightmares who threaten humans. Cross over and become humanity’s champion.