Cade stares at me open-mouthed. “Who is Fraser? I thought she was dreaming about this Lance character?”
“Fraser is my husband,” I say to him. “Now go away.”
“Husband?” he asks, more confused than ever.
“Aefre,” Constantine says to me, overly concerned.
“My name is Emily. Emily Campbell.” I turn to them both and Shift. “Now go away and leave me. I want to be with my husband.”
He takes a step towards me, but I turn away from him again and put my head on the pillow, willing myself to go to sleep agai
n so I can be with him.
“You can’t let her go to sleep,” Cade says. “I know what it wants. It wants her in the dream. It wants her to stay in the dream.”
“But why? How?”
“By creating the perfect life for her. For whatever reason, it was Lance but now it is this Fraser. I assume he is… you know….”
“Yes. They were married over two hundred years ago.”
“Don’t talk about him,” I say. “I don’t want you to talk about him that way.”
“Liv. Tell me about the last dream you had,” Cade asks me, but I ignore him. He comes around to the other side of the bed. “Emily. Will you please tell me about the last dream you had?”
I beam up at him and say, “It was wonderful. Fraser and I were together in bed with our daughter.” I hear Constantine choke on that, but I continue, “She was sleeping, and I put her in her crib and went back to him. I wanted him to hold me.”
“Did he say anything?” he presses.
“He asked me never to leave him. I was about to say that I wouldn’t when you interrupted me,” I say, annoyed.
Cade exchanges a glance with Constantine, and I frown at them. “What is the problem?”
“You can’t go back there, Liv, err, Emily,” Cade says. “This power wants you to agree to stay in the dream, so that you do. You can’t say that you will stay. You can’t go back into the dream or you will never come out of it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say and yawn. “It is perfect, and I want to stay. To live the life, we should have had.”
“Aefre. It isn’t real,” Constantine implores me, coming to sit on the bed next to me. “You have to realize that it isn’t real.”
“But it will be if I stay,” I insist. “Don’t you see? I can be with my true love forever. Like we were supposed to be.”
He winces at my words. “I am your true love,” he says firmly. “You belong here with me. Snap out of this,” he says harshly. I just blink sleepily at him.
“If she wants to go, Father, let her go,” says a smarmy voice coming from the corner and we all turn to look. Lance. “You will never end up with her, you should know that by now.”
I am staring at him in terror now, pulling the covers up to my chin as Cade stands behind me, pulling me a bit closer. Constantine stands and faces his dead charge. “Whoever you are, I suggest you go back to wherever the fuck it is you came from.”
“For these purposes, I am Lance. You may address me so. And I am not going anywhere. Not yet, not until she is destroyed.” He looks at me with his cold, dead, black eyes and I forget myself entirely. I am no longer Queen of The Underworld but Lucretia. Broken and damaged, fearful and exhausted.
“I quite like you in that guise,” he muses as he steps to the side so he can see me better. CK turns with him, keeping himself in front of me. “Not as good as the real thing, of course.”
Cade puts his hand on my shoulder, and I find a piece of courage, “Why? Why are you doing this to me?”
“It amuses me to see how vulnerable you are in your dreams,” he says. “Offer you what you want, and you will do anything.”
“I didn’t want a life with you,” I spit out at him and his evil laugh rumbles around the room.
“No, that was perhaps for my own benefit. Taking the life, you want with our sire and replacing him with myself.” CK takes a menacing step forward, but Lance holds his hand up and he stops. “But as I mentioned to you earlier, it was too ambitious. Not that I would do anything differently, mind you. To see you look at me that way, to kiss me and touch me. To make love to me.” He closes his eyes briefly in bliss as I shudder at his words. “Oh, it was everything I wanted. We could have had it if you had just stopped being so stubborn,” he chides me as he would a small child. “I didn’t want to hurt you, Aefre, I love you. But you made me do it. You had to be punished for your behavior.” He sighs and I move further back into Cade, who by now has his arms completely around me.