Page 2 of Dream Lost (The Fae Universe #12)
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B ridget Hawkyns had experienced a lot of bad dreams in her twenty-five years of life. She had learned to control them, but there wasn’t any controlling this.
One minute, she was arguing with the hot Irish stranger who kept on rudely turning up in her mind library, and then next, there was a dark creature, a push, and she was on a bare wooden floor with blood pouring from her brow.
This was a nightmare she recognized because she had lived it. Now, she just had to let it play out before she could break free and wake up. She tried to steady her breath through her cracked ribs.
“You aren’t going anywhere, you ungrateful, brown bitch,” her stepfather’s voice hissed through the ringing in her ears.
She had been trying to leave. She was almost eighteen, so legally, she was old enough. But he would never let her go. He needed her to look after the house and the baby. Free labor and someone to kick about.
His manicured hands gripped her around the throat. “It hurts me to have to do this to you, but you need to learn to respect the head of the house.”
These were words she had heard from the first time he had hit her with his fists when she was thirteen. He had been married to her mother for three months and had already slapped Bridget around harder than a parent should.
Her mother had never intervened, already too enamored of the powerful, rich man whom she had met at yet another party.
He was a good man, her mother had told her, who would take care of them from now on . Bridget had to be good to him at all times, or he would leave, and it would be her fault. It didn’t matter that her new white stepfather hated that his new white wife had a light brown child. Her mother ignored Bridget’s bruises, and if she acknowledged them at all, it was her fault. Always her fault.
Some nights, when Bridget lay curled under her bed, hiding, she had thought her mother was worse than him. Bridget remembered being loved a little bit by her at one time. But that was before George and the perfect white baby he had always wanted.
That fateful night, baby George had been crying in his crib as George the elder had laid into her. Bridget’s arm snapped under his polished shoe, and her vision had gone white. There was screaming, and she realized it was her.
Then her stepfather had been ripped off her, and something huge and powerful had stood over her. It looked like an ancient Celt from one of the history books that she read at school. He had black braided hair and was covered in blood and woad. He looked down at her and then at the screaming baby.
“He is not your father,” the man had said in heavily accented English.
George the elder was struggling in the man’s grip.
“No shit,” Bridget had whimpered through a busted lip.
An equally wild-looking woman joined them and lifted the baby from the crib.
“This is the one that is owed,” she said and placed baby George into a sling made of fur. She noticed Bridget climbing up off the floor, and she looked back at her stepfather. “You dare hurt a child this way?”
“Justice is owed,” the wild man declared and offered a knife to Bridget.
“You stay away from me, you little bitch. I’ll fucking kill you all!” George the elder had screamed.
“You are dead either way,” the woman said coldly and nodded to Bridget. “Justice.”
“Justice,” Bridget repeated and stabbed her stepfather in the chest.
Bridget jolted out of the nightmare, her heart pounding. Her mouth tasted of her stepfather’s blood, and she quickly downed the stale water by her bedside.
Some people liked to say that the world ended when the fae returned to England. For Bridget, it began. It had been years, but whenever she had the dream, her arm throbbed where it had been broken that night.
“Fucking asshole,” she grumbled, rubbing the ache which she knew would ease up when the memory’s claws on her did.
It was a nightmare only up until the fae had kicked in the door. These days, there were memorials for the people who had died in the invasion, but the only time Bridget had wept was when she had been sitting in a lawyer’s office two weeks later when she was told that she was the sole heir of her stepfather’s considerable fortune. She was the only survivor in her family that night. The fae had killed her mother and hung both parents from a tree next to the Thames River.
For the lawyer’s benefit, Bridget had wept and pretended to be heartbroken over the death of her beloved stepfather. Really, they were tears of joy. She hoped George knew that the ‘brown bitch’ had gotten his money.
Bridget had waited until the money had landed in her account and then got the fuck out of London, where none of George’s meddling friends or fake church members could get to her. She had moved to Dublin and never regretted it, not even when the ancient goddess Morrigan had run havoc in the streets. She knew the fae would stop her, and they had.
Bridget didn’t worry about the infant brother the fae had taken either. In her opinion, the fae had saved him as much as her. He was better off with the fae who would cherish him as child-wealth and raise him better than his asshole father and gold-digging mother would have.
“No dwelling,” Bridget said out loud to herself and climbed out of bed. She wasn’t that beaten-down girl anymore.
Bridget walked through her flat’s tiny kitchen and brewed herself a strong coffee. She needed to get to work soon, but considering work was downstairs, she didn’t hurry.
Her apartment never failed to cheer her up. Piles of books sat on every surface, and a punching bag dummy of a man’s head and torso stood in one corner.
One of the first things she did when she moved to Dublin was take self-defense classes, Krav Maga and MMA. It had been better than talk therapy to get out her pent-up feelings of helpless rage that sometimes overtook her.
She still had phases where she couldn’t tolerate being around people too much. Dating was a farce at the best of times. She liked being alone with her books, and a lot of those were about consciousness, astral projection, and just about everything else to do with the mind.
When George the fuckwit had been beating her, she had always let her mind take her somewhere else. She had been dissociating for as long as she could remember. Her last therapist had told her that it was a trauma response, but Bridget loved being able to slip into the worlds in her head.
That was why she had always loved reading. They were like visiting other people’s mind palaces. Now, she had someone visiting hers and wasn’t sure how she felt about it.
“What if Bas of the hot accent is right, and it’s in the astral plane?” she asked out loud. She had a bad habit of talking to herself, but she had no one else to talk to about the random guy who had turned up again.
She knew a few facts about him: the sexy accent was Irish; his name was Basset; he was tall with a great set of shoulders, and he knew all about astral projection.
He wasn’t someone Bridget had made up. He had felt too real . He was weirdly familiar, like she had met him before but didn’t know where. He could also turn into a dragon.
Bridget snorted and stirred sugar into her coffee. Turning into a dragon was a bit extra. She chose a hawk because it was smaller, and she was drawn to it because of the surname she had chosen when she had left England. A dragon form would have taken an immense amount of mental energy to create.
What a show-off . Bridget wondered if Bas would turn up again or if she should invade his space and see how he liked it. He had said something about wards, but she didn’t know what he was talking about. She had never felt unsafe in her own mind, and she didn’t know how to use magic.
The coffee caught in her throat as she remembered the dark shadow man that had come into her mind library. Basset had gone full dragon before she had been sucked into her nightmare. He had acted like they were being attacked. Were they?
Bridget was still brooding as she went downstairs twenty minutes later, unlocked the door, and turned the open sign of ‘Whitmore’s Book Exchange.’ It was a gorgeous old store with a historical front of glass and stone. Inside were antique chandeliers, Tiffany lamps, velvet chaise lounges, and shelves upon shelves of dark oak. Everything was warm, cozy, and smelled of rose incense and paper.
Bridget had been there so often in her first weeks in Dublin that the elderly owner, Marge Whitmore, had offered her a job and the empty flat upstairs. It was a good deal that kept both women happy.
Bridget hadn’t had a job up until that point, but she knew all about books, so she wasn’t qualified for much else. She had plenty of money in high-interest savings, and she could live off the retail wage easily. The biggest perk was that she could read when there weren’t any customers. Bridget thought it was the best job in the world.
Today’s reading time would become her thinking time because Bridget didn’t like nerdy strangers strolling about in her head, no matter how hot they were. Bas, the Stranger, was worse than hot. He was smart and intriguing. Bridget never met a mystery in her mind she didn’t want to solve. Only this time, the mystery was a man.
“First time for everything,” she muttered to herself. She turned on the shop’s laptop and got busy deep diving ‘what to do when you meet someone in the astral plane’ and hoped she found something useful.