Page 11 of Prince with a Chance of Darkness (Grimm Cove #7)

Chapter Eleven

Mina

As I drifted off to sleep, my mind ran the cave events over and over again—a never-ending nightmare I couldn’t stop or wake from. It’s part of why I hated falling asleep. Sleep often brought with it an endless reminder of what Willa and I had lived through. Of our aunt’s betrayal.

But this time, the dream was different. It included the horrible ordeal in the cave but instead of waking when Helen stabbed me in the chest, I saw more—saw myself being pushed out of the cave by Willa. I saw myself being caught by a beautiful woman with long dark hair—a woman Willa had told me was one of The Weird Sisters.

The dream continued, giving me flashes of someone I didn’t remember being there.

Another man.

Different from Naked Wolf Guy. While I wasn’t a super fan of the man, looking at him naked had been no hardship. The guy had an amazing body. And if you didn’t mind the fact he ran around with The Weird Sisters and may or may not have led my sister and I to what could have been our death, he was a ten.

The new guy somehow managed to outdo that. I caught flashes of the new guy that didn’t make a lot of sense. He wasn’t in the cave. He’d been outside of it, in the rain, above me—holding me in his arms. Lightning flashed behind him, giving me a glimpse of his powerful frame—his long, wet hair, obscuring his face from my view.

“Pay him no mind, uciga?a mea mic? de mon?tri .”

The stranger’s deep voice echoed in my mind. He had a heavy accent— Eastern European maybe. And he sounded hot. If his shadowy outline was an indication, he was a twenty out of ten. I really, really hoped this dream would show me him naked.

I stirred slightly, teetering on the edge of waking.

Any other time, I’d have welcomed the chance to think about anything other than what happened in Romania but the new guy changed things. Suddenly, I found myself wanting to remain, wanting to see his face. Okay, I wanted to see all of him, preferably minus clothing.

If only real men came that way , I thought, grinning a little as I let myself relax into the dream state more.

I wasn’t going to turn down the potential for a hot sex dream, even if it did spawn from memories of the worst night of my life. Maybe having a few dreams that included a mysterious hottie would help keep away the ugly memories of the cave incident.

So what if I was inventing the guy and he didn’t really exist?

I’d earned the right to fantasize, hadn’t I? Maybe this was my brain’s way of processing the trauma. I doubt it was therapist recommended but if I walked into a shrink’s office talking about demons in a cave and my aunt wanting to take things back to the days when slayers slayed and demons demoned, I’d be in a straight jacket.

No thanks.

Dream sex sounded like a much better option. I just hoped the dream went that way.

I did my best to get lost in the moment, hoping beyond hopes the dream morphed into bedroom territory. The dream changed quickly. It went from being outside the cave at night in a thunderstorm to being in a stone cell.

I found myself going at someone, attacking them with raw fury consuming me. I couldn’t focus. Everything was chaotic. I caught brief glimpses of the other person in the room with me. He was large, well over six feet tall, and incredibly toned. The kind of body hours and hours in a gym provided. I waged an inner war, part of me wanting to attack him and kill him, the other wanting to lick him all over.

I struggled to focus on his face—a face that didn’t want to come to me. It was as if someone had taken the blur feature used on television to hide explicit content and put it over his face.

Weird.

It would have made more sense for them to put it over his groin, which I could clearly see the outline of through his dark pants. They were that tailored to him and he was that fit.

The guy was hung.

Weirdest sex dream ever.

Not that I was complaining. Sex was something I craved all the time since Romania. Just one more thing on my list of strange urges I’d woken with. I tried my best to channel it all into pummeling supernaturals with my fists, not my hips, but even I had limits. Willa thought I was reckless and boy crazy. She might be right, but it was that or go mad.

“ Lumini?a mea .”

Dream Guy’s voice filtered over me. Whatever he’d said left me going toward him, but not in an aggressive way. Everything was jumbled, and when it cleared enough for me to focus, I found myself being held by the man, my mouth pressed to his neck. As I opened my mouth to bite him, I jerked away fully, my heart racing.

My hand flew to my mouth, where I found my fangs—a lovely gift from Romania—were out.

Panic filled me, and I hurried from the bed, out of the room and to the bathroom. Thankfully, it was unoccupied. I rushed in and opened my mouth, looking in the mirror.

Yep.

My fangs were out.

They weren’t as big as the vampires I ran into and slayed, but they were fangs all the same. And I’d just dreamed I’d used them to bite a guy.

My eyes widened.

Nope.

Never in a million years would I do that.

There was a knock on the bathroom door, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“One second!” I said, my voice shaky as I stared in the mirror again, trying to will my fangs to go away. They didn’t.

“I’m going to pee my pants!” shouted my sister.

Relieved it was her and not one of our other roommates, I tossed the door open.

She shot by me and ran for the toilet.

I closed the door and faced her. She proceeded to sit on the toilet and peed, because nothing was sacred between us. She glanced up at me, adjusted her glasses (that she didn’t need in wolf form, thankfully) and narrowed her gaze on me.

“Are you fangy?” she asked.

I groaned. “Can we call it something else?”

“Dental erections?” she offered.

I flipped her off and spun to face the mirror again. I touched my right fang. “It won’t go down.”

“Why are they even out?” she questioned, finishing up on the toilet.

I thought about lying to her, but gave in and told her the truth. “I was dreaming, and when I woke up they were out.”

She flushed and then pushed by me to wash her hands. “What kind of dreaming? Tell me you weren’t going on a murder rampage or something. We have enough issues with me once a month.”

I tapped the end of my fang and blushed. “Uh, nope. Not a murder rampage.”

She watched my expression by way of our reflection in the mirror as she dried her hands on the towel near the sink. “I’ll ask again. What kind of dreaming?”

“The semi-erotic kind,” I confessed.

Her eyes widened. “Holy crap, dental erections are right!”

“I don’t like you,” I shot back.

She laughed—hard. “You love me, and you know it. Who were you dreaming about? Let me guess, that one guy you met at the Frank’s Weiner cart thing.”

I grunted. “The hot dog stand is called Frank’s Weenies, and no. Not that guy.”

“The one from the library that you were all hot and heavy with a couple of weeks ago?” she asked before loading my toothbrush up with toothpaste and handing it to me. “This is said with love but brush your teeth. You have sleep breath.”

I snatched my toothbrush from her hand and made a face at her, letting her know what I thought of her commentary. “Your morning breath is no picnic there either, sweetheart.”

She got her toothbrush out and slathered toothpaste on it. “I know. Now, continue. Was it the library guy?”

I shook my head.

“Was it the dude you hooked up with from the lacrosse team?” she asked before she started brushing her teeth.

“No.”

She spit in the sink and looked at our reflections. “Help me out here. Your list of hookups is kind of long.”

“It’s not that long,” I stressed, but we both knew that was a lie. Though it had been shorter in the last few months since I’d started hooking up with my professor. Typically, I used a guy for sex but was still left wanting more. It didn’t matter how good they were in bed. It was never enough to take the edge off the hunger I felt. A hunger I couldn’t explain. But with the professor that changed. He didn’t totally take away the hunger but he filled it more than the others. “And it’s none of them. This was a new guy. A different one. Some dreamed up guy.”

As I thought about the man from my dreams, the hunger started. Like always, it started in my gut, like actual hunger pangs but it never stayed there. It always moved throughout my entire body demanding I see to its needs or else…

She grinned and waggled her brows. “Was the dream guy hot?”

“Oh yeah. At least from what I could tell,” I confessed, moving up alongside her to start brushing my teeth too.

“I want all the details,” she said as she finished brushing her teeth.

I took a second to spit and then grunted. “Me too. It was all jumbled up, and I couldn’t see his face. He had a killer accent though, and his body looked delicious. Funny enough, he had a scar that was similar to mine.”

She watched me closely. “What do you mean?”

I tapped my chest. “He has a matching one. Kind of. A decent size one like mine and then smaller ones there too.”

“You dreamed up a hot guy with matching scars?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I guess. Oh, he tasted great too.”

Her eyes widened. “You went down on him in your…”

“I bit his neck. I’m not talking about a blowjob,” I corrected.

“Wrong that a blowjob would have been less awkward to discuss than you going all fangy?” she asked.

I snorted. “Hey, don’t forget about tonight.”

She put her toothbrush in the cabinet. “How can I? The full moon is coming, and my skin is itchy.”

“This place will work,” I stressed, knowing that other twenty-two year olds weren’t worried about how they were going to keep themselves from killing others or policing the night for supernatural baddies. We didn’t have the luxury of only worrying about our final exams, graduation and then grad school come fall.

“You said that about the last ones,” Willa added.

I finished brushing my teeth. “I know. But I’m right this time.”

“I need some coffee,” she said, changing the subject.

I cringed and tried to play it cool as I went to the shower and turned on the water, waiting for it to get hot. “Uh, coffee sounds great.”

She eyed me a moment before heading for the door. “You’re being weird.”

I bit my lip, debating on confessing what I’d done—broken the coffee pot. She’d lecture me about my anger issues—again. I’d been in a hurry, overstuffed it with grounds and when it wouldn’t close, I’d hit on the side until it surrendered, which was also known as died a horrible death.

A second later a huge rottweiler came rushing into the bathroom nearly knocking me over as he jumped up on me. He licked my cheek and I wrinkled my nose and laughed. “Buy me dinner first, Torid!”

The dog belonged to Astria and had serious boundary issues as well as flatulence problems. I wasn’t sure what she was feeding him, but sometimes, his farts smelled like he’d been eating roadkill. I’d gotten into a scuffle with a group of zombies on the north side of the campus last semester and they’d smelled better than some of the farts Torid ripped.

Poor dog.

“Torid!” yelled Astria as she rushed into the bathroom and tried to pull him off me. She grunted, her gaze meeting mine. “Sorry.”

I snorted. ‘He’s fine.”

She backed up slightly. With her bright purple pixie style haircut and delicate features she kind of reminded me of a woodland Fae or something ethereal like that. Not that I’d ever met a Fae in person—that I was aware of. I’d seen drawings and paintings of them in the library that had been in my family’s home.

The library had contained information on just about every type of supernatural creature you could think of. Or, at least, it had. The years leading up to Helen’s betrayal left the pickings in the library becoming slimmer and slimmer. My guess, she’d been selling off the rare tomes of information to fund whatever hairbrained idea she had going at the time.

“Hey, there is a poetry reading at Demon Grounds next weekend,” she said. “Want to go with me?”

I eased Torid’s front paws from my chest. He got down. “This is said from a place of love, but I’d rather chew off my own arm than sit through one more second of anything to do with Poe. That high-school music you forced us all to attend with you was more than enough for me.”

“Fine, but you’ll be missing out,” she said, grabbing Torid by his collar and walking him out of the bathroom. A second later, she poked her head back in. “Oh, Snow mentioned something about a costume party happening tonight. She asked if you knew. Then she said something about Professor Jekyll agreeing to be there. Is there a reason she’d want that passed on to you?”

My cheeks heated. “No!”

She pointed at me and laughed. “I’ll let you be for now but know I don’t believe you.”