Page 9 of The Filled Vessel (Cambric Creek After Darkverse #4)

Chapter ten

Corviss

T he cat proved to be more of a challenge than he had anticipated.

The girl would need to close the connections she had open. The incubus would be returning in a matter of days, and if the doorway remained open, she would be at the beast's mercy. Although they both came from the shadowrealm, Corviss was only a nightmare and had no power over demons and devils. He would not be able to banish the incubus himself.

He decided he would call upon the cat, go directly to the source of all this trouble. He did not like this weak, soft center he had developed, but Corviss did not know how to rid himself of it. The thought of putting the girl through something that she would find unpleasant made his stomach twist and his feathers raise, his fingers snapping in irritation. No, he would not send her back to the man's store. He would need to deal with the cat himself.

It had not been easy.

He had been able to find the cat man through the girl's dreams, following him home from the shop she had visited to a garden-level apartment on a tight alley of a street. Corviss waited until the sky within the waking world was black, counting on the residents of the apartment to be asleep.

It had been a surprise to find the man still wearing his human skin. The cat was asleep; sound asleep in his bed beside a human woman, curled at his side. Corviss sensed no magic in the girl. She was a lump of flesh, just like the lump he had waiting for him in a different apartment. Entering this sleeping man's dreams, however, was a different story.

The cat man’s dreamsea was a pitch black vault, not a sea at all. Corviss rustled his wings when the doors slammed shut around him, realizing he was trapped, and that this cat was more powerful than he had originally anticipated. Golden sparks formed a fiery outline of a door, the cat man stepping through, his eyes narrowed, bristling with annoyance.

"You have no power here, Dreamweaver,” he snapped, his voice hard and sharp, giving Corviss no opportunity to explain himself. “Fly away and go squat on someone else."

This was not a dreamscape at all, he realized. The man was there, standing before him on a different plane, as aware and cognizant of what he was doing as Corviss was before him.

"I seek your assistance, cat. You're not at liberty to deny me."

The man had smiled, a smug feline smile, and he knew that this was likely a hopeless situation. There was no cat anywhere who did what it was asked, let alone the first time, and certainly not without threat or punishment.

"You're not really in a position to demand anything of me at all, are you? I serve no master or mistress of your realm and you cannot bend me to your will. As I said — you have no power here, Dreamweaver. Be gone with you."

Corviss was smart enough to know when he was beat. He'd flown away that night, had brooded in his cave in the Stygian mountains. The man was right. He could not impede upon another's magic in such a way . . . But the cat was not without vulnerability. The girl who slumbered in the bed beside the cat man was a liability, and he would ensure the feline understood that by the end.

The girl, once he’d followed her home, flying through the shadows behind her, was a sweet thing. Sweet and anxious. Like his lump of flesh, she had convinced herself that oddities and cheap knick knacks were a good use of her time and space, wore too much eyeliner, and dressed in monochromatic black. She lived alone, only spending a few nights a week at the feline man’s apartment, giving him ample time to peck into her dreamsea.

He grinned from his perch atop the girl, feathers puffing up. She thought she liked horror, but she did not know what horror was. If it would aid in closing the open connection caused by the cat man’s trickery, Corviss decided he would make sure she learned.

This young woman was a stranger to him, but he had been creating nightmares from the memories of strangers all his life and it did not take long to strike into the root of her terrors. Her fear was acrid and smoky, and he inhaled it greedily. A fire in her car, a fire in her childhood home, a fire in the cat's apartment. Tires and chemicals, burning mattresses and screaming children. He burned her and the cat in their bed. Sometimes she escaped and listened to his screams, while other times she made it to the windows, the clean air and the cool of outdoors only inches away, unable to force them open. He sucked in her fear greedily, striking the match within her mind again and again until she was left screaming. Eventually, she stopped sleeping at the cat's apartment altogether, deciding that something there must have been haunting her.

She wasn't wrong, Corviss thought gleefully, the irony of the situation delighting him.

For a full week, he settled into the new routine. He tormented the young woman first, filling her nightmares with smoke and screams, taking wing to Tara’s apartment after the girl woke screaming, seeking the comfortable solace of her softness, burying himself into her, body and mind.

Corviss had always fancied himself an artist, and over the course of his dalliance as an incubus, Tara had provided him an empty canvas and a treasure trove of memories upon which to work.

Every person who had been cruel to her was punished in her dreams, over and over again until he was satisfied and she had begun to view them as not worth her precious feelings. There were certain dreams he was positive she enjoyed — the semi truck smashing into a teenage crush who had jilted her, a relative she did not like being flattened like a pancake. And then there were others that aroused her fear, sharp and delicious, and those too he revisited over and over. He had put her on that plane more than once, made her witness the gruesome end of one of her neighbors who had the stink of a predator all over him.

He put her in dark alleys and abandoned parking garages, terrified her to her very core, seeking vengeance on those who had ever done her harm. He’d not realized the unintended consequence of the dreams he threaded would be a change in her demeanor in the waking world, but it delighted him all the same. She walked a little taller. Took up more space and seemed happy to do so, and his feathers puffed out in pride each time he dipped into her eyes to review her memories from the previous days.

Between her change in demeanor and the terror he extracted from the cat’s human companion, he was feeling positively decadent, practically bursting from the indulgence of his feast. The night he entered the cat’s apartment to find himself back in that black vault, he was practically preening in malevolent triumph.

"What is it that you want?"

The feline man's voice was tired and irritated, but Corviss could tell he was ready to acquiesce.

"I thought I had no power here? Eh, witch?" The man glowered and then he did preen. "My request is a simple one. Just think, we could have done this a week ago. I want you to send instructions on how to close the door to whatever you had summoned to Tara Perez's apartment. There will be no more tricks from you, cat. Otherwise, there will be no more sleep for your pretty friend. How long are humans able to go without sleep? What is it, a week? Maybe two, before their minds break irreparably?"

"What business is Tara Perez of yours?" the man sneered, but Corviss only shook his head and flapped his wings.

"This is not a conversation, witch. You did this and now you will undo it. The rule of three. Is that not the credo your sort lives by? What you put into the world you shall reap threefold? You had her call up a nightmare, and now the nightmare has come seeking payment for your trickery. Will you close the connection? Or will your pretty friend pay in your stead?"

Tara received the package a few days later, sent directly to her apartment. Clear directions in plain words, unambiguous and straightforward. It was more than he expected from a cat, but he would be lying if he claimed to not be pleased.

The month had reached its end, and his debt was nearly repaid in full. There were only two days left on his balance, and then he would be back to his job, free of this life as an incubus.

He had no intention of leaving the girl. Corviss would sooner peck out his own eyeballs. She was still soft and warm, a tight glove around his cock, sweet smelling and wide-eyed . . . Only now she was active and vocal, pushed back against him, rolled her hips into his own, squeezing and stroking and screaming her ecstasy out like a song. He devoured her desire, fed on her pleasure and the byproduct of their lust, and he had never been so full. He had a quota to fill, but now he no longer needed to worry about filling it to eat. Blow a load and clock out, it's really that simple.

He pecked at the bread she left him each night, wings rustling as she shifted in her bed. Soon he would climb atop her, rendering her immobile and insensible to his presence before dipping into her mind where they were together on her curiously colored sea. No longer black, his sweet lump’s dreamsea was a wash of twilight colors, lit with gold of the fading sun. It reminded him of his home on the banks of the Lethe, buffeted in winking stars, desolate and beautiful.

It was never wise to make deals with devils, but every once in a while, a gamble had a way of paying off.