When the Woods Go Silent (Haret Chronicles: Dark Fae #1)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

T ORRENCE

Imagine my surprise when a goody-two-shoes fae prince breaks the unwritten rule to never tell a human about magic.

Standing in the shadows of the forest behind the bookshop, I watch Kier spirit Rose away on those stupid vines of his, but all it means to me is that Ruby is alone in there now. The lights are dark in the building, and I assume she’s sleeping.

I know I should stay away from her - if Kier is showing Rose his magic, he’ll certainly be warning her about mine.

But I’ll be damned if I let a fucking pretty boy like Kier ruin the fun I’m having with Ruby. I want to make up for the mistake of scaring her today. I was unprepared, and I should have never brought up Rinna. Those memories are too triggering, and Ruby’s intoxicating scent offered an escape I couldn’t resist.

I’ve been more careful this time, feeding before I came in order to control myself better.

Arlo calls his humans pets, and Julianna calls them cattle. I’ve never cared enough to call them anything except blood slaves, and I’ve never enjoyed one’s company before, but Ruby is a puzzle. She does the unexpected, surprising me more the better I try to know her, and I find myself thinking of this pretty little kitten way too often.

Perhaps I’ll just take her with me when Julianna forces the exodus to Haret. If I’m the one to show her magic is real, she’d follow me anywhere.

Calling up a bit of my own fae glamor, I shroud myself from their cameras and pick the lock on the back door with a bit of ice magic. From there, it’s easy enough to freeze the security system and sneak silently upstairs to where Ruby lives. Humans love to romanticize magic, but so few of them want to admit how simple it would be to take over their world.

I don’t care about ruling Earth - even a corner of it - but Julianna is right when she boasts that it will be easy.

I follow the scent of Ruby’s blood to her bedroom. She sleeps soundly, her breath flowing softly in and out of that perfect mouth as her eyes flicker behind closed lids. She’s dreaming, and I wonder what she sees there.

Without thinking on it any harder, I slip inside her dream, using my magic to walk through her mind while my physical body settles in a dark corner of her room.

I chuckle when I see a wispy version of myself in her dream, the illusion of me chasing her through the forest as she laughs in the faint moonlight.

So my killer kitten dreams of being hunted...

I follow the scene as dream-Ruby collapses down on a blanket under the stars, and the hazy dream-Torrence looms over her. She toys with the edge of her shirt, teasing and coy. I wonder, will she let me fuck her in a dream? She’s convinced herself in the real world that she wants to wait for some unknown point in the future, and I’ve been playing along because her blood tempts me as much as her body.

But here, in her dream, how far will she go?

Ruby tugs her shirt over her head, and stares up at his - my - face, what she wants written all over her pouty lips. In an instant, I surge into his place, my dreamwalking form replacing the illusion her mind has created, giving me the power to do more than watch.

It’s an odd magic, dreamwalking, and it’s easy to see how someone might grow addicted to the power.

I can live here, playing with her imagined self, or I can stay hidden and watch her ideas play out like a show. Or I can bring her human body along for the ride, asking her to do anything I want in the world beyond dreams. She’s mine for the taking here, in every possible way.

Humans have the superstition that if you die in your dreams, you die in real life - and they’re absolutely right, if there’s a dreamwalker in their minds, writing the dream.

It’s no wonder the magic has been outlawed, but who is here to catch me?

I let my dream-self touch dream-Ruby, fascinated with how our real bodies are several feet apart in her room, yet I can still feel the ghost of her touch. Her dream world is foggy and dark as she arches up to meet me, her breasts spilling from the tiny lace bralette she wears. I wonder if she has one like this in her closet. The magic lets me feel the whisper of her fingers on my real body as she tugs the shirt away from my dream self, and I marvel again at the power of this magic, that can make an illusion feel so real.

I want to make her feel so much.

I let her undress me, and I do the same to her in the dream, playing along with the torturous pacing. Even in sleep, she goes slowly. But finally, we’re naked in the hazy moonlight of her mind, and I spread her thighs, my thumb on her clit as I sink deep inside her.

The heat of her body meets the ice of mine like a cataclysm. She moans, and I hear the sound echo in her bedroom, too.

“Ruby,” I whisper, and I no longer know which one of me is speaking. Her legs wrap my waist as she raises her hips, grinding against me, the inner muscles of her pussy squeezing the length of my cock. I draw out slowly to the tip, and she whimpers, tightening her thighs around me until I plunge back down, pinning her to the dark forest floor.

Again and again we separate and meet, the flush growing on her cheeks as her body heats to a level I can barely touch.

I feel myself melting for her, and I hate it.

My hands twist in her hair, and I take control of the dream, imagining myself pounding harder into her, demanding the dominance that can bring me back to myself.

A soft cry reaches my ears as she comes around me in the dream, her thighs shaking as I rut against her. It takes me too many seconds to realize the cry didn’t come from the dream, but from Ruby herself. A huge effort is needed to pull myself from her dream world and focus my mind on the room where we really are, and when I manage it, I press my hands against my eyes, scrubbing away the lingering magic and trying to bring myself back to the darkness of her bedroom.

Fuck, that was almost too real.

The room even smells of sex, and as I move to stand over her sleeping form, I realize Ruby’s dream orgasm was real. Her cheeks are pink, her lips wet. Her legs press together under the light blanket as her breathing slows. Even with my cock fucking aching to make the dream a reality, I can’t help the smirk that crosses my face.

This pretty little human belongs to me now.

I watch her a while longer, letting her sleep cycles pass until she dreams again. I could force her into one, of course, but using the magic against her body is a good way to ruin her mind. And I quite like that devious midnight creature she keeps inside.

I wonder if I tell her what I am in a dream, if she would screw up the courage to ask me about it in real life. It’s only a matter of time, now that Rose is being shown fae magic. These two share everything.

The thought sobers me. My magic is just as powerful as Kier’s, but gobbelins are very different from fae. Ruby wants magic to be real, but I doubt she’s imagined all the different kinds of magic that Haret contains. Will she still want mine, when she sees what other magic she could choose?

My temper surges as I imagine her preferring the glittering fae court over me.

What do I really have to offer her, in the face of all that luxury and spectacle? Gobbelins live like warriors, not kings. Ruby is a romantic. She would want to be a princess of the forest, not one of dark caves and mountains made of ice.

The thought of her choosing a fucking fae over me brings all of my magic to a head, both gobbelin ice and fae fire. Her bedroom floor heats, even while the windows crystallize with frost.

Ruby stirs, and I struggle to rein in the magic. This certainly isn’t how I want her to see it. See me. Out of control and incensed with anger. I bite it all down, clamping an iron will over my temper. And it works, until I sense her .

Ruby is beginning to dream again, and the sweet musk of dreamwalker magic is filtering through the bedroom.

This time, it isn’t mine.

I dive into Ruby’s dream, finding myself back in the forest. But Ruby is different now. She’s a child, chasing a glittering woman through the trees, laughing and calling for the magic to see her, to wait for her.

Ice and rage shoot through my mind as I understand.

Julianna was here. Is here, right now.

Something stirs in Ruby’s bedroom, and I yank myself from the dream. Ruby is sitting up in bed, her eyes open and glassy. I watch in growing horror as she swings her legs over the side of the bed, stepping carefully over her shoes and scattered items as she moves toward the door.

The dreamwalker magic pulses around her, pulling her gently along like filaments of silver. If I wake Ruby now, her mind could splinter. If I enter her dream again, Julianna will see me there, and meddle to find out why. I can’t let her have that leverage.

The only way out of this now is to find Julianna, wherever she’s casting her magic, and stop her there.

I dodge around Ruby as she steps lightly toward the stairs, rushing to get ahead of her and into the forest. I don’t know why my mother is trying to draw Ruby to her, but I have to stop her now. I speed through the forest, tracking the ice and floral sweetness of the woman I hate most in the two worlds.

All the while, trying desperately to think of how to stop her, without giving away my own interest in Ruby.

There. I catch a glimpse of her ahead, sitting in the crook of a tree with a soft smile on her face. Her own eyes are glazed and filled with the fog of magic as she weaves her spell like a spider, drawing Ruby closer and closer with each passing moment.

I slow my breathing and approach casually.

“Hunting again, Mother?” I call up into the tree. Julianna hisses down at me, her eyes clearing like clouds blowing away from the moon.

“You know better than to interrupt my work,” she growls, the strands of magic hovering in the air as if frozen. I picture Ruby somewhere in the forest, pausing mid-step like a puppet waiting for the next tug of the strings.

“There are plenty of blood slaves for you in the mines, you know. Don’t you trust me to fill your soldiers’ bellies before I leave this world?”

She smirks at me. “I trust you for that. But not for other things. You like them too much, Torrence. It isn’t natural to be so fond of the beasts you feed from. It’s the fae weakness in you.”

I snort. Only a gobbelin would call a fae weak. It’s time for a different tactic. “I didn’t realize you needed the practice, is all. Carry on, if your dreamwalking magic has grown so rusty.”

Julianna snarls some nonsense I don’t even listen to, but she drops the magic as she jumps down from her perch. She lands in a horror-film pose of unnatural angles and bared fangs, but I don’t flinch away. She doesn’t scare me any longer, this woman. I see her aging, clawing to keep the power she needs so desperately.

She’s still stronger than me - than any of us. But for how much longer?

“Did you even scent the fae prince here, in the forest?” I ask, realizing exactly how to distract her. Her eyes flash with something I can’t identify as she takes a deep breath, finding the scent of Kier’s magic.

“What is he doing here?” she asks sharply.

“He’s courting a human,” I answer, giving her a pointed look. “Kier is showing his pretty flowers to a human girl right this minute, Mother. Why did he choose her, and why now?”

I stumble backward as her ice lances into my chest, freezing the air in my lungs. I grit my teeth through the consuming pain, unwilling to give her the satisfaction of gasping for air.

“These questions are for you to answer, you worthless flesh of mine! I should have killed you when you were born. Weakling.” Julianna continues to growl insults under her breath as she crashes through the forest, and as she gets farther away, her magic fades from my lungs.

I watch her go, knowing she’s unlikely to attack Kier. Not here, with so much riding on filling the mines. She’ll see Rose, but she’ll forget Ruby.

Making my way back through the trees until I find my midnight kitten, I gently guide her home and back into her bed. She falls into the sheets and curls into a ball, sighing so sweetly that I know I’m in fucking trouble. I have to figure out how to keep her safe from my mother’s delight in cruel destruction.

I began this experiment to gain a bit of power from Ruby’s blood, but the beast I am has begun to crave so much more from her. Things I’ve never dreamed of wanting before.