Page 145 of Ex Somnis

“Everything’s fine, darling. I’m sorry Ridge woke you. Nevan scared him.”

I’m about to protest, but then she heads toward us with her eyes not fully open to navigate, and I reach out to grab her hips before I’ve decided to when she passes me.

When I pull her onto my lap, the smallest gasp leaves her lips.

“Where are you going, hmm?” I murmur against the back of her neck, feeling the shudder go through her before she’s even finished processing what happened, but then she relaxes into my hold, making my heart skip a beat.

She smells like sleep, warmth, lemon, and something sugary that I’ve come to learn is her skin. I breathe it in and press a kiss to the side of her neck.

Mine.

She shivers again and puts her arm over mine.

Crunch.

Lennon frowns and follows the sound, looking over at Nevan, who is still munching on his cereal, unbothered by all existence. “He’s sleepwalking?”

“Yep.” I plant another kiss on the side of her neck because I can’t help it.

“I really hope he’s up in his clouds somewhere,” she whispers. “Just eating dream cereal.”

“I’m sure he is,” Paul says.

She tilts her head back against my shoulder to look up at me.

Those eyes.

“How did it go?” I ask, breathing her in. “Your mission.”

“The tea helped.” She gives me a small smile. “Derek held the lucidity long enough that we could actually go somewhere together. From his dream space to mine.”

“Oh?” My eyebrows shoot up because, damn, that is a big step from not even being able to hold lucidity for more than a few moments.

Maybe I need some of that tea.

She slumps harder against me. “But we didn’t find Tessa. Couldn’t even get to the beach. I called for her, but she wasn’t there.”

“Or she didn’t want to be found.”

That would be reasonable. The whole point of her fleeing into her dreams was to get away from Derek.

Paul makes a sound that isn’t quite agreement. “Or someone made sure she can’t be found.”

I think again about the information Lennon came home with and about the crystal hanging around her neck, which was apparently Seraphine’s.

I hook a finger under the moonstone, brushing my thumb over the smooth surface, warm from her skin.

I’ve spent enough time lurking in strange corners of the internet to know about charged objects, cursed objects, blessed ones, anchors, and talismans. It’s lore that serious practitioners take seriously while everyone else files it under interesting if it were true.

I’ve always been on the side of interesting, which is not the same as believing.

I look back at Lennon’s eyes. They are almost the same color as the flashes inside the moonstone when it’s moved against the light. She learned to lucid dream in weeks, dream share, build, and navigate spaces that should have taken years to understand. Every impossible thing I was told required training, discipline, and experience.

At some point, coincidence stops being coincidence.

I move a strand of hair from her face, but she doesn’t react. She’s watching the movie with a distant focus, telling me she’s only dedicating about twenty percent of her attention to it. The other eighty percent is somewhere else, probably trying to save everyone again. It’s something I should find annoying. Instead, I catch myself smiling.

“Do you think This Man is just evil?”