Grave Visions (Alex Craft, #4)(58)

“Kyran,” I said, recognizing the nightmare kingling.

“At your service, my dear.” He gave one of those elaborate hand gestures where he rolled his wrist, pantomiming a bow, even though the rest of his body didn’t move. He leered, a small secret smile at the edges of his mouth.

The first thing he’d said, about my outfit, finally registered and I looked down. I was wearing only the shirt and panties I’d crawled in bed wearing. No boots. No pants. No dagger.

“Shit.” I pulled at the edges of the shirt, trying to tug it down, but it was a fitted top, hitting right at my hipbones, and there wasn’t any stretch in it.

Kyran laughed, a boisterous full-bellied sound of mirth. I glared, which didn’t quiet his laugh at all. Well, glad I could amuse him.

“So I guess you can chalk this up to being one of those awkward dreams when you show up to work naked?”

“Why am I here?” I asked, trying to decide which was worse, trying and failing to cover myself better, or just saying screw it and pretending I didn’t care I was in my underwear. Tugging at the shirt was gaining me nothing, so I went for the latter, crossing my arms over my chest and ignoring the heat in my cheeks—the ones on my face, that was. The other cheeks were a little chilly.

“You’re the one who asked to see me, my dear.”

True. But . . . “I asked you to meet me at the Eternal Bloom—not drag me off to this creepy nightmare realm.” And speaking of the nightmares, where were they? The darkness around me was unending, but nothing seemed to be moving inside it. That was good, but how long would that last?

Kyran made a dismissive sound and lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “Why fuss with all that political red tape when you come here nightly?”

Nightly? The first time I visited the realm of dreams and nightmares I’d been having trouble maintaining my shields during sleep, and as I’d already been in Faerie, my planeweaving had caused me to literally fall into a recurring nightmare, landing me physically in this realm. But, the way he’d worded his sentence . . .

“Do you mean this is a dream?”

“Of course. I simply pulled you out of the mundane imagery your exhausted mind typically conjures.”

I looked around at the endless, empty landscape. “If this is a dream, that means I can direct it, doesn’t it?”

“What, like lucid dreaming? Don’t do that. It’s annoying. You know that actually steals magic back from this place. Plain frustrating.”

Which didn’t mean I couldn’t do it. And that meant I didn’t have to stand here half naked. I imagined the black pants I’d been wearing before I’d gone to bed, the way they looked, the softness of the leather. The sand crawled up my legs, which was a totally weird sensation, but between one blink and the next I went from half naked to wearing pants. Well, mostly. Something was wrong with the pants that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The way things are sometimes just off in a dream. Like I was looking at them through distorted glass. Still, at least I wasn’t half naked anymore.

I looked up to find Kyran frowning at me. He’d taken his legs off the arm of the chair and rotated forward, focused. “Didn’t I say not to do that.”

“What? You do. Or are you going to say that intimidating throne that follows you around isn’t made completely out of dream sand?”

“Yeah, but I live here.”

Point. I bowed my head, acknowledging that I was in the wrong, but I didn’t apologize. I’d needed the pants, damn it.

“You asked for this meeting. Surely it wasn’t simply to leach away magic from my land,” he said, propping both elbows on his knees and managing to sound both annoyed and bored. I wasn’t sure if he was agitated that I’d manipulated his realm or just that I knew I could.

But he was right—I had asked to meet. Not in these circumstances and I sure as hell would have preferred a more neutral ground, but I was here now. I looked around for a place to sit. There was, of course, nothing besides the throne where Kyran perched and the sand. I briefly considered dreaming up a chair, but I didn’t want to piss off the kingling right before asking for information. That likely wouldn’t go over well.

So, I shoved my hands in the back pockets of my dream pants and stood.

“The nightmares are stuck here without a door, right? They can’t be conjured up in the mortal realm?”

Kyran’s brow pinched, and he studied my face, clearly wondering where this line of questioning was headed. “You mean waking dreams? The kind where the dreamer drags his nightmares home to haunt him long after he leaves his bed? That was one of the High King’s fears. Nightmares growing too strong and walking out into the waking world in the mortal realm. It was why he severed this realm from the rest of Faerie. In its current state, nothing escapes without a door.”

I started to nod, and then stopped. I’d opened a door to the mortal realm the last time I’d been here. I’d had no other choice. The citizens of Nekros had rather vivid nightmares that night, but no unusual deaths had been reported. I was pretty sure he was implying that without a door like I’d opened, the nightmares were stuck. But implication left a lot of wiggle room.

Were there other ways to open a door? I knew Glitter was made from distilled glamour and that somehow fears were manifesting. Could the users become doorways?