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Precious as this moment of peace was, it was suffocating in here.
The oppressive darkness didn’t help, but we had to conserve the battery light on the torch, so we’d turned it off when I’d arrived. Besides, we didn’t want to draw any unwanted attention to ourselves by lighting up the boat. I thought my eyes had semi-adjusted to the blackness, but I couldn’t see anything in here, and the ceiling was too low for even Grace to stand in the cabin, let alone the rest of us.
I needed to get up, to go check on Dare and Riot, and make sure they were getting some rest too. Getting some restandkeeping an eye on Arsène. He seemed like a decent enough daimon—and being a Pothos was a fucking curse—but out at sea in his boat, we were completely reliant on him with nothing but Vasileios’ word to reassure us.
While I distrusted Vasileios marginally less than other people, I’d rather depend on myself. Before both the sky and all forms of communication had gone dark, I’d been able to get in touch with a few Keres daimons I knew from my travels through Europe, and I’d been confident we were on the way to having a decent network of our own, rather than just Vasileios’ empire built on sex and favors. None of the Keres I knew had turned me away—they’d all seen me on the livestream where Grace approached the temple. Even at the peak of my fighting career, I hadn’t been this popular.
And now I had no way of contacting them, even to confirm they were alright. That was an even harder pill to swallow when it came to my Milton daimons. I knew Onyx would do her best to look out for them, but Underworld really wasn’t set up to provide emergency housing. A mistake on my part. I should have equipped them better for disaster relief.
I should have done a lot of things differently. Prepared for a far worse scenario. I, more than anyone, appreciated how capricious the gods could be.
There would be time, I told myself. We’d fix all this, con some rich fuck into letting us use their private island indefinitely, and we’d take some time, just the five of us. I’d get to know Dare better, and Riot and Bullet would get their friendship back to where it had been. I’d do whatever I had to do to bind Grace and Bullet so closely together to me that they couldn’t imagine us being apart.
That was what I wanted.
However, I had to trick Grace and Bullet into being as obsessed with me as I was with them, I’d do it. If only it was as simple as sex. Fucking, I could do. I could make them both feel great without a second thought, but Bullet and Grace wanted more than that from me. They deserved more than that.
My beautiful bonded shifted in my arms, her hip pressing painfully against my morning wood—or at least I thought it was morning—distracting me from my musings. Grace nuzzled into my chest as she slowly woke up, and I stroked her back, telling my dick to stand down.
“Good morning,” Grace mumbled, attempting to lift her head, but melting underneath my hand as I pushed her down before she cracked it on the ceiling. “Or good afternoon. Good evening? Did you sleep okay?”
I nodded, a total lie, before remembering she couldn’t see me. With some effort, I focused my intent through the bond, pushing some sort of vaguely content emotion toward her.
Grace made a frustrated sound, wriggling around as she reached for the torch—flashlight,as they all called it—in a way that was definitely not helping my dick situation.
“Sorry,” Grace whispered, flicking on the light and angling it away from us, filling the small cabin with an almost blinding glow. She blinked down at me as our eyes adjusted, her dark hair a tangled mess obscuring half her face. Despite the long sleep, Grace still looked exhausted. The bone-deep kind of exhaustion that not even the best rest could fix.
I smoothed her hair back before disentangling my hands enough to sign.
‘Happy dreams?’I asked, never entirely confident where Bullet was taking Grace in the dreamscape, and it was frustrating that I never knew if I’d seen them or not, or what we’d discussed if I had. She frowned, glancing over at a still-sleeping Bullet.
I heard the murmur of quiet voices in the main cabin next to us, a small sliver of light shining through the cracks in the door, so it appeared that Riot and Dare were still awake.
“No dreamscape last night. Bullet didn’t visit me at all.” Grace leaned over, still mostly sprawled over my body, grabbing Bullet’s forearm and giving it a light shake. “Hey, wake up, sleepyhead. You know if I don’t get dreamscape assurance that you’re okay, I freak out.”
Bullet continued to sleep deeply, and Grace’s panic spiked almost instantly. I sent her waves of calm through the bond as Riot ripped the door open, Dare standing over his shoulder and shining the flashlight in Bullet’s direction.
“He’s not waking up,” Grace said frantically, shaking Bullet’s arm again. I rolled Grace off me so she could get closer to him, laying on my side next to them both. “Bulletalwayswakes up. He knows in the dreamscape when we wake up.”
He does?
I was trying to stay calm for Grace’s sake, but I wasn’t calm. I didn’t feel calm. My vision was going hazy at the edges, bloodlust rising up to meet whatever the threat facing me was. Except this wasn’t a threat I could rip apart with hands and weapons, it wasn’t a threat I could beat into submission. I couldn’t doanything. I was completely helpless.
Come on, Bullet. Come back to us.
“Bullet!” Grace army crawled onto his part of the mattress, carefully straddling Bullet’s still form with her upper body bent low to avoid the ceiling, and cupping his face in her hands. “Wake. Up. Wake up! Why aren’t you waking up?”
Her voice cracked, and even if I could speak, I wouldn’t be able to around the sudden tight pain in my throat.
“I’ll get a wet cloth, see if the cold wakes him,” Dare suggested, handing Riot the torch before dashing out of the room.
It had to. He had to wake up. This couldn’t be the end. But Grace had said that Bullet couldn’t see his future after Dare showed up…
No, no, I refused to accept that. Bullet was young and full of life. His Oneiroi gifts had weighed him down his entire life, but now he’d been cut off from them, surely he’d heal? I hadn’t heard of any other Oneiroi being forcibly weaned off their ability to see the paths of the future by the Fates or La Nuit before. They favored him, they wanted to help him.
He was going to befine.
“Wild,” Grace whispered hoarsely, looking up at me over Bullet’s head, tears streaming down her cheeks. “He’s not waking up.”
