Luke (Bear Shifter) (New World Shifters) (18 page)

My bedroom had always been a thing of beauty, a sanctuary devoted to sleep, a temple that worshipped slumber. I’d even bought an expensive mattress that exactly fit my sleep number or slumber hashtag or whatever they were calling it now. It worked well, and I’d justified the purchase by telling myself that a woman who lived to dream deserved the best.

Needless to say, I was easy to convince.

I knew that the shades were drawn. They always were, and even though it was already getting dark outside it was probably darker in here. Of course, for all I knew, the sun had gone supernova and it was as bright out there as the inside of the microwave for a couple of seconds before everything went splat.

“Lovely, Grace,” I whispered out loud, eager to have some sort of noise in the room other than my own breathing. “That’s exactly the sort of thought you want to fill the mind of a lucid dreamer right before she goes to sleep…”

I took off my clothes and climbed under the sheets, smiling at the touch of satin against my skin. It was luxurious, and I was glad that for years I had decided the only way to sleep was to sleep naked. Nobody had been sharing my bed, but the man that shared my dreams loved my body, and so I did too.

I closed my eyes and got comfortable, wondering what I'd find when I finally got into the dream. Would I find him as a man, or would the Bear part of him chase me away again? Or worse, would I not be able to get away this time?

I dreamed too many strange things to fall for that nonsense about what happens to you if you die in a dream, but this seemed different somehow. More visceral. More real. When that Bear had been charging across the cavern at me I felt real terror, and even though I was experienced enough at this to know that I was asleep the alarm bells had been ringing in my head.

I'd been in mortal danger, and I knew it.

But it wasn't going to keep me away from him. I squeezed my eyes shut tighter and slowed my breathing as I visualized the walls of the cave dropping down gently around me like a stone cathedral. As I drifted, I saw cracks in the walls open up and sunlight filter through the trees in Alaska. I was on my way to him, for better or for worse.

He was there!

Human and shirtless, sitting in the center of the cavern amidst the splashes of sunlight that bathed the ground around him. I gasped when I saw him. It wasn't just that my sight was restored in the dream, it was that he was marvelous to look at. Breathtaking. Stunning.

Broad shouldered and wide framed, I couldn't so much as look at the man and not imagine those powerful arms wrapped around me. Every tiny movement, even his own slow breathing made the fine muscles in his back shift in ways that made my eyes track them. His legs were crossed and his shoulder were slumped, and now that I pushed my lust and my wonder at seeing him once more aside, I could tell by his body language that something was wrong.

“Darius?” I said as I went to him, hurrying across the cave to be by his side. It was nearly impossible not to reach out and touch him, and when I did for one fleeting moment I felt the heat and pressure of his flesh against my palm before he whirled on me and batted my hand aside.

Even as swift as the gesture had been, I could tell that he'd held back. He was always gentle with me, despite his size and strength. Even so, his eyes were blazing with fury and I recoiled, withdrawing my hand and clutching it to my chest.

“What's wrong?” I asked, dropping to my knees beside him and staring up into his clean-shaven, ruggedly handsome face. His brown eyes were sincere, almost sad, and I felt my heart weigh heavy at whatever he was feeling. He looked like he was just as much a prisoner inside the dream as I was outside of it, and I wanted nothing more than to free him.

“Do I know you?” His voice was husky with disuse, and the low rumble of it rolled right through me.

“Of course you do. I’m Grace… We’ve been meeting in this cave for years!” I frowned, gathering up enough nerve to take his hands in mine and lift them to my cheeks. I was surprised to find that I was already crying, but his broad thumbs reached up and swept tears from my face that I hadn’t even known were there. “Don't you know me anymore?”

“I… I'm not sure,” he said at last. “I'm not sure about anything anymore. It feels like I've been sitting in this cave for years, with everything I do and don't know piled on the floor at my feet. It's all a jumble, and I can't separate one thing from another anymore.”

“That doesn't matter now. I'm here. I'll help you.”

He shook his head slowly, and all I wanted to do was run my fingers through his close cropped hair and pull his face against mine. I resisted though. If he really didn't remember me for whatever reason, I had to be careful not to push too hard. “What are you going to do about him?” Darius asked me.

“Who?”

“Against the Bear. He doesn’t want you here.”

I started to answer. At least, I opened my mouth to say something, even though I didn't know what type of reassuring words were about to fall from it. I never got a chance to find out, as the bellow of a huge, angry grizzly tore through the wilderness outside and seemed to shake the very stone around us.

“You need to go,” Darius said. “Return to wherever you came from. Don't come back. It isn’t safe.”

“Of course it is,” I told him, swallowing hard. Maybe if he didn't remember me, he didn't remember what he could do either. “You’re a Bear too Darius. Just change into one and chase him away or roar back at him or something. Show him you're the boss, and he'll leave us both alone.”

The hurt in his eyes was almost palpable. “Not anymore.”

I tried to hold him close, but the roar of the Bear came again and this time something pressed in from the waking world and tore me from my dream with a strength I couldn’t resist.

I woke up in a panic, completely disoriented. For the first second or two, I couldn’t work out what was blocking my vision. Had the power gone out? Even if it was midnight, there still would've been some moonlight drifting in through the blinds…

Then it hit me. I was blind. Sometimes when I woke up it took me a little while to realize what I had lost. That was when it hurt the most. I often wondered if I'd ever get used to the darkness. Would it one day become the norm, or was I cursed to always long for something that I no longer had?

I felt like I’d been dragged out of the dream by the Bear, and just as the thought materialized in my mind I heard his rough growl again, even though I was well and truly awake. I was lying in bed on satin sheets, naked and still dazed, but when the sound came again I worked out that it was just the garbage truck outside. They grumbled down the street every Friday morning, and here it was, probably right on time.

But that couldn’t be right. How could it be morning already? I've been such a skilled dreamer for so long that I found I could usually squeeze an incredible amount into one session. That short conversation that Darius and I have had shouldn’t have taken anywhere near as much time as it did.

Unless the garbage man was early, of course…

There was only one way to settle it. I reached over and fumbled for the special alarm clock that I’d had to install. It had a button that would read me the time, and I pressed it down.

“It is 6:42 on a Friday morning,” it chirped at me, clearly too happy to be alive. Just about anything that ran on batteries or plugged into the wall wasn't fit to be giving me advice, at least not in my opinion.

6:42… That meant I had slept for almost ten hours, and yet even though I’d arrived in the dream right where I wanted to, right next to Darius, I’d been thrown out early by the growl of the Bear.

I shook my head, already frustrated with myself. I hadn't been thrown out of the dream early. My sleeping mind had incorporated the sound of the garbage truck into my dream, which meant I’d still been dreaming when it rolled down the street.

But how was that possible?

“It doesn't matter,” I said to myself out loud. “Get a grip, woman. You’re chasing a guy in your dreams that doesn't even exist, and for what? So that when you finally confess to your shrink just how crazy you are he can get you locked away once and for all?”

It was a chilling thought, to have been stuck in that dream for so long and yet for so little time to have passed inside it. I didn't know what it meant, but I didn't like it. If I was going to be able to help Darius, that was probably the first thing I was going to have to fix. If he and I didn't have time together, then I wouldn't be able to help him, let alone ask him about the crazy things Rachel had said in her email.

I hurt for Darius. I wanted him back so badly. He'd always been such pillar of strength in my life. It was as if all good things in the dream had flowed from him, and the fact that he and I had hit it off so well had meant everything to me.

Which is stupid
, I told myself,
because he's not real. You keep ignoring that fact
.

But perception is reality, and I perceived that Darius needed me.

Even so, he was going have to make do on his own for a little while at least. I didn't know what he needed yet, but I was bound and determined to help him get it.

My phone started ringing. They were apps and special features you could install that would make the phone tell you who was calling, but I could add that to the list of all the things I'd been ignoring that I probably should've done. It wasn't easy owning up to the fact that things had changed for me, but I could see that I was going to have to get into a different mindset if I was planning to do anything more than just rot in my house on my own.

Not very many people called me anymore. I didn’t blame them. I wasn’t any fun to hang around with.

Since I couldn't see the screen to tell who's calling, I answered it.

“Before you try and make an excuse to get off the phone, do you know even know why I'm calling you?” It was Lupe. Her full name was Guadalupe, and she was a take-no-prisoners Latina that had my back no matter what. She and I went way back, but like just about everything that extended into my past I've been doing my best to ignore it these last few months.

“Because you like to annoy me?”

“Well,” she said, and I could picture her quirky little smile and the way she scrunched up her nose whenever she was thinking, “I guess that's partially right. I mean, it wasn't the answer I had in mind, but I’m not going to say you are wrong. But guess again.”

“I don't know, Lupe. Don't you think it's too early for games?”

“That's right!” She practically cheered, her voice rising several octaves and making it sound like I had gotten the question correct in the last round of some game show or something. “You're pretty smart, I'll give you that Grace. I'm calling, and calling early, as you correctly pointed out, because you ignore my texts. You ignore my emails. When I come over to knock on the door, you don't answer it. I figured this way you were practically guaranteed to still be in bed and maybe, just maybe, you'd find it in your heart to pick up your phone for a friend.”

I sighed. Lupe was a master of the guilt trip, and right about now it sounded like she was getting ready to take me on a cross-country one. “Don't get your hopes up,” I told her. “I didn't know who was calling when I answered the phone.”

“Ouch,” she said, though her voice didn't really lose that happy little bubbliness that it’d had since the start. “You wound me, my dear. But maybe you did know, deep down on some subconscious level. I'm going to pretend you did, anyway. It'll make me feel better when I'm asking myself later why my best friend in the world has thrown me to the wolves in my time of need.”

I couldn't help but laugh. It felt good, and I wondered how long it had been since I’d let a sound like that out. I'd been down in the dumps so often of late that I'd almost forgotten how good Lupe could make me feel while I was around her. She was the best type of friend, the sort that you could not be in the room with for weeks or months but when you were again at last, it was as if no time had passed at all.

“Lupe, I'm here for you now. What do you need?”

“Company,” she whined, and in my mind’s eye she was casting her eyes toward heaven and laying the back of her hand against her for head in a classic woe is me gesture. She was a drama queen of the first order, and I loved her to bits for it. “I want to take you out to dinner. I want to hear what's going on with you.”

“No you don't. I'm boring. But I'm also hungry,” I told her with a smile. “And dinner is a long way off. How about lunch?”

“Some of us have to work, need I remind you?” She playfully tsked her tongue at me, but I could already hear the gears in her brain working. “But that's okay. I can shift some things around and catch up with you. Downtown at 12:30, shall we say? The usual place?”

“It's a deal,” I said, even though the thought of going through with it made my stomach twist into a painful knot. I’d rather stay home. I'd rather be dead, if I was honest. The usual place she was talking about was a hole in the wall Vietnamese restaurant. The food was amazing, and the customer service was shit. But it was our place, which meant that I’d be surrounded by sounds and smells that would trigger a thousand sights, for better or for worse.

“Okay,” Lupe said happily, “I'm totally gonna get there early too, so we can get our usual spot, by the window, so we can-” She cut herself off, and I could hear her suck in breath as she stopped the sentence midstream.

“It's okay,” I told her. “Don't feel bad. It's not your fault.”

“Grace, I'm so sorry. I'm just stupid, you know that. I say shit without thinking, and I end up having to put my foot in my mouth, and…”

She let her voice trail off, but I knew exactly what she meant. I also knew what she had been about to say. The only reason we’d picked our spot in the first place was because it was near the big plate glass window set into the front of the restaurant. Perfect for people watching, an activity that had been number one priority at the time. “It's okay,” I said again. I know she didn't mean to hurt me, but unfortunately that didn't mean it didn't sting.

She was embarrassed, and the tone of her voice changed. I could tell she was eager to get off the phone with me. “All right, like I said, I'll see you there. I'm buying, so don't give me any trouble when the bill shows up at the table, either. And I want to hear everything about how you're doing, and don't think I won't know if you leave stuff out.”

“You really are a pain in the ass,” I told her.

“All best friends are,” she admitted. “It's pretty much our jobs.”