Page 143 of Ex Somnis

She points at Jasper.

“He knows. I told him. I’ve told him so many times. But that’s my curse, isn’t it? I don’t remember in waking life, and he, he doesn’t remember in dreams.”

She abruptly turns, walks back to the couch, and settles back in front of the television, as if she’s just returned from checking the mail.

Holy shit.

Jasper closes his hand around a black stone pendant on his chest with a panic-filled expression.

“Jasp—”

“My mom is stuck in my dreams.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Ridge

Horror movies are not designed to be watched with every light in the house turned on.

There’s a reason my office looks like a cave, and I do my best work between two and four in the morning, when the building makes sounds it doesn’t make in daylight.

Atmosphere is not decoration. What you can’t see is doing almost all the work.

Paul’s aggressively well-lit living room at whatever hour this is, with every lamp blazing down on all seventy-eight emotional support plants, isn’t letting the movie we’re watching be anywhere near spooky.

“This isn’t scary.”

“I find it quite tense,” Paul replies from the end of the couch, not looking away from the screen.

“It’s not tense. It’s atmospheric. And the atmosphere is being murdered by all the…” I gesture vaguely at the room, “… visibility.”

“The lights stay on.”

“I know the lights stay on. I’m just saying it’s the equivalent of reading my books at noon.”

He glances at me. “Which says more about your books than my lights.”

Five years is both a very long time and almost no time at all, depending on what you’re measuring.

Five years of not being in the same room as him? Considerable.

Five years of knowing exactly what he sounds like when he’s pretending not to be affected by something? Apparently no time at all.

I can still read his every tell. The slight tension at the corner of his jaw. The fact that his left arm hasn’t moved in twenty-three minutes. How he’s pretending to be interested in a bowl of decorative fruit every time something scary happens.

He’s not scared of the movie.

He’s simply scared.

Lennon came home hours ago carrying enough new information to collapse several existing belief systems.

Seraphine is trapped in Jasper’s dreams.

We took it apart from every angle, including dream mechanics, soul mechanics, the difference between a 4D dreamscape someone else built, and 5D. Paul did most of the real-time analysis, while I tried to find answers in online forums.

Nobody has heard of someone being trapped in someone else’s dreams before.

Nevan got quieter as the conversation went on, and at some point, he went completely still, which was my cue to send him to bed. He needed sleep, and we needed him to stop looking at us as if he were calculating the distance to the nearest window.