Nightmares and Daydreams (The Blood Falls Book 4)

Dray and the representatives from the Houses built a plan for who would take each invasion force and everyone went their separate ways. From there, word would spread to the remaining Houses.

We stayed in the North with the Heida and the Volci. The rifts were the first place they would try to break through and we wanted to hit them hard. If any other location needed help, any one of us could move to that location relatively easily. Only the House of Axl stood back, waiting to be a second wave of defense where needed. Plus it kept Tymothy out of harm’s way. At least at first.

In the meantime, Gigi was eating her way through everything the Heida had. “There was no time. I didn’t even think about eating,” she said with a mouthful before slamming some beer to wash it all down.

“How long did it feel like?”

She shrugged, pausing before shoving another hunk of sandwich into her mouth. “Hours. Maybe a couple of days at most. There was nothing to gauge by. I never saw the sun, if there was one.”

“I wonder how that will manifest during the Convergence. If time moves differently in each realm, will they sync up?”

She chugged the rest of the beer and sat back, rubbing her belly. “Ryddyck said that it depends on a few things, but mostly time feels out of whack. Like we’re moving really fast to them.”

Like watching a video at two times the normal speed. “That’s interesting. I got my visions of you in chunks. Like it all had to happen where you were before I could get the download.”

“You know what’s weird? I’m more scared than ever. Not of these creatures or the war or any of that. I’m scared I’ll never get to live the life I dreamed of.” She shook her head, her gaze unfocused and wistful. “If I die, I’m going to be so fucking pissed that I miss it all. Or if they win, I’m going to be just as pissed that they took it away. All I want is to grow old with my family. To watch us all grow old and have kids, and I want to see it all. Every single bit of it.” She sniffed back tears and turned glistening eyes on me. “They better not fucking take it away from me.”

My gut twisted with the same fear. I would be devastated to miss this life with Dray and the Wrens. “I won’t let it happen. We’re going to grow old together, Gigi. Old and wrinkly. Too old to move. Sitting on the porch watching our grandbabies play in the yard.” I took her hand and squeezed it into existence. “We’re—”

A roar ripped through the air and my head filled with Dray’s thoughts.  They’re here.

“Shit. Get your gear!” I jumped to my feet, sword already in my hand, and ran to the tent entrance. I stopped and gaped. The rift now stretched far into the sky with lights rippling out from the tear in reality. The space around it was different. It glowed a dark blue and inside it white, ghost-like creatures flew by.

Everyone ran around in a controlled chaos to get their gear ready. But I was ready, so I ran to Dray, who stood staring at the rift. “You’re wearing your armor.”

He nodded. “Until I know otherwise.”

“They haven’t broken through.” Yet.

Dray must have heard my added thought because he smirked a little. “The veil is very thin, and the Convergence must be close, but not quite close enough. It’s only a matter of time.”

Time. We kept coming back to that. “I’m ready.”

He tore his gaze away from the rift to drag it over me. “I want you as far away from here as possible.”

“I’m sorry I can’t give you what you want.”

He wrapped one arm around and kissed me. “At least stay behind me.”

“I can give you that.”

A moment later he shoved me backward and drew his sword as the first wave of Grista broke through. They swooped through us like a school of fish, but this time they kept going because they had banshees right on their tails. I felt my mother go with them.

“She’s guiding them. All this time on the Plane is being put to use finally.”

“And good luck to her, but we’ve got bigger problems.”

The minotaurs began to push at the barrier between our worlds. They moved like sloths, but their hooves and snouts were definitely probing one space and then another, looking for a way through. Dray and Ender began to bark out orders.

Dray grabbed my arm and turned me around. “We’re moving behind the front line. Let the warriors test them.”

If he thought he was getting an argument from me, he was sorely mistaken. I had no interest in being the first samhain to fight a minotaur.

“We’re going beast to beast,” Dray said as he took up our new position with the Gatlin. “Bears and wolves versus whatever that is.”

One came through, then two more. They were instantly slaughtered, their carcasses dragged off for the Doctor to examine. Gigi quickly joined him, followed by Rain.

“You should go, too.”

I glared at Dray. “I’m not leaving you. We do this together.”

His only answer was a nod. All his attention was on the creatures sacrificing themselves to get through the rift. “Why do they bother? Dying helps no one.”

“Gigi says they study everything.”

“Helluva a case study,” he muttered.

A shiver raced down my spine and a vision began to play in my mind. A wall of minotaurs. A sky full of flying demons. Grista moving like the wind. Two enormous dragons flanking a sorcerer.

“Dray, did you see that?”

“I did. We need to get back to the front. Fuck.” I followed him as he pushed back through. “The dragons are protecting the guy who will try to set the first tether. While everyone else is fighting, we have to take him out.”

“So you’re transforming?”

“No.” He stopped and turned, placing one hand on my face. “I can’t get close that way. We take him out and if we get away, great. If not, that’s when I’ll show them what they’re up against.”

Dray was half their size. “No. We take reinforcements. We don’t have to do this alone.”

He kissed my forehead like it was the last time he would ever kiss me. Delicate. Tender. “We have to surprise them. It’s our only chance.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I saw the same thing you did. Strategically, that’s the play. Now, let’s get our asses in position before the Convergence happens.”

I felt the heaviness of our world’s drawing near. Like the pressure change before a big storm. My head swam a little and my skin pricked. “The rift will disappear when the worlds merge.”

“Exactly. So we’ll come at them from behind.”

My knees throbbed from crouching, but I didn’t dare complain. I knew it was only a matter of minutes or seconds now. The sense of completion was hard to ignore. The same way I could feel a full moon or the beginning and end of an eclipse. The Convergence was almost complete. I knew it in my bones.

The light around the rift began to flicker and suddenly a winged creature streaked across the sky. Huge black wings beating slowly through a darkening light. An army followed it, filling the sky just like in the vision.

“It’s time.” Dray reached out and squeezed my hand. “Follow your instincts. Remember, the Plane wants us to win.”

Minotaurs erupted out of the rift just as it dissolved. The pressure around us increased and the sky turned to a dark blue. The temperature skyrocketed. I turned my head to look for the dragons and felt like I was swimming through water.

“Time is fucked up,” Dray said slowly.

Nothing moved smoothly. Our army rushed the minotaurs and then slowed. The minotaurs became statues. Then our army suddenly began moving faster than normal, slaughtering every minotaur it could. Demons fell out of the sky one second, then flew at double speed the next. Shifting would be tricky at best.

“Protect yourself from the slow pockets,” Dray said as he watched it unfold. “Like waves in the water. Watch for the right times to move. We want to stay faster than them.”

The dragons and the sorcerer materialized just where they were supposed to. He immediately began waving his arms and chanting something in a tongue I would never know.

“You ready?” Dray asked.

“No.” I was so tapped into the Plane that I could feel it talking to me. The whispers I heard all my life now swirled around me.

Wait, wait, wait. Time is ours. We know the ways. Wait. Wait.

“The Plane,” I explained, “is talking to me.” No more visions or dreams. I didn’t need them and perhaps they no longer existed in the converged state of our worlds.

Wait, wait. Just a little longer. The sorcerer is strong, but he is not smart. He will fail. Go!

“Now!” Go, go! Go quickly and surprise him. He is slow and he is cocky.

Dray stayed low and kept his movements to a minimum to draw as little attention as possible. I mimicked him in every way I could. The dragons were enormous, but they were slow. Like giant pyramids. Maybe they were caught in a slow pocket or maybe their size made them slower than the minotaurs. Either way, I didn’t want to find out.

We slipped between their tails, but it was still a hundred yards to the sorcerer. A hundred yards for a demon to see us. The dragons could twitch a tail and flatten us.

Shift! Shift! The space here is safe. We will keep you safe.

“Dray,” I whispered. “Shift.”

He nodded once and we moved as one using the Plane to place us directly behind the sorcerer. He looked nothing like us up close. He reminded me of a serpent. He was scaley and had a long tongue. The creature didn’t notice us as he chanted and a dark tentacle began to emerge from his chest.

Dray swung Dreadnought once, taking off his head, while I ran him through from behind. Then Dray swung around and sliced through the tentacle, severing whatever connection it created between our worlds.

The dragons didn’t move. “I feel like I’m standing in the shadow of the Great Sphinx. Why aren’t they doing anything?”

Stuck! Stuck! They are stuck in time. But not for long. For long. Go! Fight while you can!

Dray scowled. “If they’re stuck in time, we should find some way to hurt them.”

“What would hurt you?”

He glanced up at one of the beasts. “That.” He handed me Dreadnought and slipped out of his armor. Then he transformed into his dragon form and took off without a single word or glance back at me. He breathed fire on them from a safe distance, slowly cooking them to death.

“Dray,” I spoke into his mind. “The demons have noticed you.”

A swarm of them changed direction and started for him at the same time a minotaur and a different creature changed course and came for me. I ditched Dray’s armor and brought up Dreadnought. It was time to see how much I learned and how good this sword really was for fighting.

They hit a time pocket and were suddenly right in front of me. The minotaur creature was enormous. Like a bear. Much taller and broader than me and made of rippling muscle. He had black eyes and he smelled like death. Even though his hide looked impossibly thick, Dreadnought sliced through it with ease.

The problem was that he was fast and powerful and highly trained to fight. So while I could do damage, first I had to hit him.

The other creature was just as deadly. His body was similar to a powerful cat of some kind. Maybe like a lion. Muscular legs and huge paws. But his head was not like a lion at all. He had a beak. A very sharp beak that did significant damage to my armor.

I was no match for them alone. Not even with Dreadnought in my hands.

Feel. Feel us. The Plane screamed at me. Do not fight us!

I was trying so hard to be faster, smarter than the creatures attacking me, that I had blocked off the Plane almost entirely. So I took a deep breath and let the flows of energy move through me. The Plane took control. Moving me and using my body in ways I hadn’t thought of. The minotaur went down and I had just wounded the other when Dray appeared beside me, grabbed my sword from the pile with his armor, and cut off its head in one go.

“Whoa.” He stared at the sword in his hands. “I didn’t think that would happen like that.”

I was surprised, too, but we didn’t have time to stand over the bodies and ask questions. “I think time is starting to stabilize.” There weren’t so many sudden jumps taking place. It still moved differently from one place to the next, but it was smoother and less scattershot.

“No matter what happens, these guys aren’t going anywhere.” Dray nodded to the dragons.

They stood smoking and statuesque. “I can only imagine what else has entered our world.” I was starting to believe every old myth and legend was based on the last Convergence.

“I need to get back in the air. We don’t have enough Argo up here to fight in the sky and the banshees moved on. Put on the armor.”

He helped me into it then took to the sky with me on his back. Linked like we were, I was able to fight the demons from his back, or leap through the air when needed. Dray caught me every time. The Plane flowed between us like an invisible partner.

In the end, we “won.” There were more of them that were dead than us, and no more came to back them up. For now.

I spit some blood onto the stained tundra, then pulled off the heavy armor. “Now what?”

Gigi stared out at the horizon, her gaze floating over the corpses. “We’re doing this wrong.”

“We’re doing something right. We’re still alive and they aren’t.” I found a hunk of bread in a turned over cooler and devoured it like a starving cavewoman.

“I mean, we shouldn’t be fighting as Houses. We need to fight together.”

Dray groaned as he tried to loosen his shoulders. “How are we going to do that with five different fronts?”

She growled with frustration and thrust out a hand. “Look! Don’t you see? All these beasts died differently. Some are slashed through like we hit them with a laser beam and others had to be hacked to death.”

That was true, but I didn’t understand what that meant. “So what made the difference?”

Atsila held up his hands. “It took everything I had to fight them…except the minotaur creatures. I could tear them apart easily. And they could do the same to us.”

Dray’s head jerked to attention. “Like what happened with that lion creature. Remember, Rhysa? I sliced through it like butter. And it wasn’t with Dreadnought.”

It all hit me at once. “Wait, so all this shit actually means something?” The House swords and animals and even the colors. They all mattered now.

Gigi nodded slowly. “The House of Wren’s animal is the griffin, Dray. A creature with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. And House of Heida’s is the bear, but when you look at the ancient symbols, it doesn’t look like any bear I’ve ever seen.”

“They’re linked somehow.” The answer to everything was right on the tip of my tongue.

But based on Gigi’s smile, she already had it figured out. “Each House must have taken on a creature or two to study. To perfect our ability to fight them using our samhain gifts. It must still be coded into our DNA. We have to fight together because each of us has the ability to fight these creatures better than the others. That’s how they won the Ancient War and it’s how we’re going to win today.”