Dreamwalker's Bride - Chapter 418

Chapter 418: Come along then
Anaisa was terrified to peek up over the top of the bed. There was some quiet conversation, but she couldn’t make out any of the words.

What had happened? Why was there so much blood??

She’d hurried up the steps but hesitated at the end. Sapphira and Ben were presumably following her, but she didn’t look back to check. To see their reactions to what she was seeing.

There had to be a good, non-violent explanation for it all. She just knew it, deep down.

Maybe Denholm was dead!

With that dubious conclusion, she finally gathered the courage to take the final steps needed for her to look up and across the bed. Across the blood and the morbidly curled terror that caused her heart to stop beating.

And onward to where Trace lay motionless on the coverlet.

A foreign sound escaped her lips, and she nearly fainted before getting ahold of herself firmly enough to dash across the covers to her pale husband.

“Trace!”

In her peripheral vision, she saw Mia sit up straighter from where she and Ford were resting. Resting, at a time like this?

The thought barely grazed Anaisa’s panicked mind as she threw herself across her husband’s body.

In fierce denial, she rolled him to look into his face.

“TRACE!”

With a sudden gasp, the man’s eyes popped wide open in alarm.

“Wha—oh, Oh, good you’re back,” His expression radiated intense relief woven through layers of exhaustion. “I was afraid they were waking me because you weren’t coming.”

“Who–what? You were asleep?” Anaisa resisted the urge to swat the man she loved more than anything in the world. “You fell asleep while I was gone??”

“How long were you gone?” Trace blinked, his mood shifting, and Anaisa paused.

“Well, I don’t know exactly,” She admitted. The time flying with the dragons had seemed absolutely interminable, and they had gone all the way to a location that had taken many days to travel on horseback.

“You don’t know?” Trace sat up, causing Anaisa to lean back and kneel. “How can you not know how long it took to send a message?”

“How can you not know how long I was gone?” She arched an eyebrow back at him. “Oh, of course, you fell asleep.”

“Only so I could dream of you until your return,” Trace headed off the growing argument with a bit of flirtation. Anaisa’s eyes narrowed slightly, knowing he’d been guarding the Emperor’s mind, not dreaming of her, but she let him get away with it.

“Are you ready to go back to dreaming?” She asked, realizing she should get to the point of the mission. “I brought back some people to negotiate with the Emperor.”

Trace looked past her shoulder, scanning across the coverlet.

“You did?”

“Yes…” She turned, and sighed. “Oh. Um. They might be hiding from whatever that horrifying dead thing is. What in the world happened here??”

“That escaped the dream and Ford and I killed it,” Mia grinned. “Denholm hid under the bed like a scared toddler.”

“Come to think of it, maybe they’re hiding from him,” Anaisa murmured to herself as she spared a dark look for her distant cousin, then raised her voice. “Your Highnesses, please come up.”

“Your–” Denholm’s face went through several shades of red and purple before settling into an unappealing green that gave Anaisa a small amount of pleasure to see.

Sapphira and Ben ascended the stairs and came into view, expressions both curious and fierce as they took in their peculiar surroundings.

The princess brought one hand to her mouth as she looked at the gnarled and torn monster still leaking blood. Ben maintained his composure utterly, until his eyes settled on Denholm.

“Anaisa, you did say it was important that, at least temporarily, he’s not executed?” He said blandly to the former countess, never taking his gaze from the evil man.

“No killing,” The wight, having glided up with Sapphira and Ben, now pinned the latter with its unblinking eyes.

“It was a joke, but he is a prisoner who should have been executed a decade ago. He’s far outlived his allotted time.” Ben didn’t back down, and Anaisa cleared her throat.

“Trace, we need to get them… and me… into the Emperor’s dream to negotiate. Can you do that? Are you able?”

She widened her eyes in that hopeful way that she knew was most likely to tug at his heart. It wasn’t fair of her to do just now, but she absolutely couldn’t let such an important thing entirely out of her control.

Some kind of neutral intermediary was crucial to peace negotiations. Raised in a diplomatic family, albeit an insanely abusive and dysfunctional one, she understood the basic underpinnings of treaties and the delicacy of peace.

“Sapphira can stay here, where it is, I assume, far safer,” Ben said firmly. “She will abide by whatever I negotiate and help convince her father to do so as well.”

Sapphira made a face, but looked to Trace for confirmation.

“The fewer, the easier,” He stretched and covered a yawn.

“Can you take both me and Ben?” Anaisa’s need for control warred against concern for her husband. As she looked more closely at his face, he did seem completely exhausted.

“You shouldn’t come. It’s dangerous.” Trace shook his head.

“Do you want to argue about this, or get it done?” She bit her lip at how confrontational that sounded.

“If I only have the power to take one, who should it be?” Trace skipped over the argument entirely and gave her a possibility she couldn’t avoid.

Anaisa hesitated. The whole reason she’d gone to get them was to get someone with authority to speak on behalf of the king, if not the king himself.

“Ben, I suppose,” She decided at last.

The two men nodded at each other. Though they hadn’t been the closest of friends over the years, they had built a kinship from the beginning of their acquaintance, back when Trace was Sapphira’s bodyguard and Ben one of the many potential suitors.

Trace had always liked Ben best of them, and Anaisa had to agree on that front.

“But please do try to bring me, too,” She knit her eyebrows together.

“You look too agitated to fall asleep,” He observed, and she huffed slightly.

“Only because I came into the room to see blood all over the floor, and you motionless on the bed! You scared me, and I won’t forgive you for some time yet!”

“Forgive me quickly, because I’m going back to bed,” He warned. “Or rather, staying here in this large bed I’ve occupied for weeks, and going back to sleep. Hurry up and join if you expect me to bring you along, I can’t leave the dreams unattended any longer.”