bringing life to the grey. Venturing closer, I notice symbols. Names have been painstakingly etched into the surface. The letters so worn it’s hard to make most of them out. Nightmares is beside me observing solemnly. A veil of sadness hangs over his wide shoulders, his head bowed.
“What’s this?” I ask him voice hushed.
He answers in his strange language making me none the wiser.
Foreboding creeps along my spine. Ghosting my fingertips along the rough letters, I move to follow them around. Surprise has my steps faltering.
Morpheus lays unconscious in a bed of spongy green moss. After leaving me in a dungeon all night, being so hostile, I’d rather run from him. There’s no way I want to return to that basement.
For a moment, I think he’s pasted out drunk until I see his ashen face. Chest barely moving his breathes come in stilted shallow gasps, as if his lungs sit idle.
I recognize the signs. They throw me into an instinctual automatic response. “Shit, what’s he taken?”
Dropping to my knees beside him, I check his thready pulse. He doesn’t look like he’s swallowed his tongue, but I need to get him into a recover position.
Nightmares lifts an arm to point at something gleaming in the light. Vials. Two. Both empty.
“He’s over-dosing.” The words have barely left my lips before the ragged sound of struggling breathing stops all together. Attention returning to the man on the ground, I find him turning blue.
8
Morpheus
A repetitive noise intrudes on the stillness of the void that suspends me. It’s garbled and loud, only growing in volume. I remain dangling in the nothingness pissed off at the sound. Why won’t it leave me alone? Trying to ignore it gets me nowhere. After a while it starts to sound like someone yelling at me from very far away. They want to take me from the fuzzy, bubble. Why would I want that? My brain fights to understand, half stuck in limbo. I don’t want to go back. The void presses in around me, so empty and motionless.
A tiny thought forms out of nowhere.
Oblivion.
That’s what this is. I’m sliding deeper into a place I’ll no longer exist. Realization comes with an urgent battle. Brain turning back on, it’s not enough. It feels as though my consciousness is mired in syrup. Wading through it is slow and clumsy. I start to slip backward.
Something settles over my mouth. Breath invades my lungs. Once. Twice. A third time. Pressure weighs down on my chest in a quick tempo.
A sharp gasp leaves my oxygen starved body, awareness slams me into sensations I have no wish to feel. I try to raise my eyelids, but they weigh a million pounds. Someone’s calling my name. A woman repeating it urgently over and over. I like the way she says it. The tone of her voice. She’s telling me to open my eyes. To wake up. I’m not sure why she would think I was sleeping; I never do that. Not anymore.
Somehow, I find the willpower to open them just for her. Narrowing them against the brilliant glare of sun, my head throbs sharply with the mother of all migraines.
“What the fuck is the matter with you?” I snap in confusion and anger.
Robin is crouched beside me, her complexion pale. “You overdosed. I gave you CPR until you started breathing again. I wasn’t sure you were going to come back. It’s taken you ages to wake up…”
I’m lying on the soft grass before the run-down building. Duvet wrapped around me; a pillow is wedged behind my head. “How did I get to the house?”
A shaky breath leaves her lips. “Nightmares carried you here. He refused to step onto the porch, so I had to make you comfortable out here instead of inside.”
Turning my head, I see him lurking to the right of us. Arms crossed over his brawny chest, his pissed off glare is boring into my skull as if he hopes to burn a hole in it. Chains dangle from his broken shackles encircling his wrists.
“Because he can’t,” I inform her tiredly. “The wards around the house prevent him and Illusions from entering.”
I had been going to die.
I hadn’t noticed the symptoms of an overdose. Been too busy chasing unicorns in a forest of rainbows in my high. A terrible, dark silence had cocooned me out of nowhere. I’d been aware of my chest hardly rising, only a whisper of breath entering my lungs.
The reality of that is lit up in my head like a