Lycinder wandered the darkened halls of the quiet house, alone with his thoughts for the first time since he'd crossed the veil. He looked down at his hands, flexed his fists, and extended and retracted his claws; it was good to be flesh again. The opportunity to cross, that music, it had come so quickly and unexpectedly that he hadn't given it even a moment's thought. He hadn't needed to.
He feared nothing on this side of the aethral veil, so he'd given little consideration to the deal he'd just struck with his new mistress. In the end, it mattered not who she was, what had happened to her, or what her petty human desires might be; he would use this opportunity to reacclimate himself to the world and then sweep in like a hurricane, snap a few necks, and claim her soul in a blink.
What he would do with his prize, however, was another matter.
Arched brows furrowed in thought, Lycinder glided soundlessly down the hall to find a door to the back garden. He blended into the shadows and then became one, himself. Sliding up a drainpipe, he made his way back to the little hidden egress window Dalli had showed him earlier, and slipped inside his lady's workshop.
A pair of wide, amethyst eyes glowed from the shifting black mass of shadow that was only identifiable when it crossed the beams of moonlight describing window panes on the hardwood floor.
He returned to his body and examined Dalli's scribbled notes, trying to make sense of the equations. There were ways to call the various creatures of the Aethral Realms, but what Dalli had done was different...
Lycinder grimaced, annoyed that he couldn't find anything in her notes to give him any clues. What he could read of them, anyway: it wasn't that the mathematics were beyond him, but her handwriting was simply awful. It began legibly, but quickly deteriorated into scribbles like she couldn't get the characters down fast enough.
Irritating though it was to puzzle out, this brought a smile to his face as he shook his head at her cramped, spidery scratchings. He couldn't have said why.
Lycinder moved on to the mess of instruments and equipment on the long library tables that looked like the aftermath of an earthquake in a mad scientist's laboratory. He picked up jars and vials of liquid, holding them to the light and removing their stoppers to sniff their contents, but nothing struck him as unusual.
He wondered what Dalli had done with the little vial he'd seen her replace into her handbasket when they left the tower. Yes, perhaps the most efficient way to figure out exactly how she'd summoned him would be to get his hands on that basket...
Suddenly, a spike of cold, unadulterated terror gripped him so strongly that he nearly dropped the vial in his hand.
He couldn't breathe!
Shaking hands managed to get the vial back to the tabletop without cracking it, but the fear only built higher and higher. A cold sweat broke across his brow and his stomach roiled like it wanted to escape his body. Wide-eyed, throat-closing panic had Lycinder utterly paralyzed.
That is, until he remembered that he didn't need to breathe. And that he didn't get cold sweats or nausea, either; his body wouldn't do anything he didn't order it to do. Order. Now it became clear to him: Dalli was in danger. He was feeling her panic through the piece of him that was now a part of her.
Why hadn't she called him? No matter, this was half the purpose of their bond; if she couldn't call for him, her soul would.
Listening to the part of himself that she held, he used it to narrow in on her location and, quicker than thought, he was incorporeal and slipping two stories below.
When Lycinder came back to his flesh, he did so battle ready, with fangs and claws fully extended, his center of gravity low and his eyes scanning for his mistress and whatever threatened her.
However, instead of a fight, he found himself in the midst of a large, dark, and near-silent bedchamber. This was Dalli's room. He could tell, because her scent of raspberries and sweetened cream, verbena and violets lingered in the heavy fabrics of the draperies she'd fingered, the thick rugs across which her bare feet had padded, and the large, canopied bed where she slept.
He straightened in confusion, retracting his claws and letting his fangs recede, the usual hyacinth light of his eyes driving back the black.
A muffled cry came from the other end of the room. Appalled, Lycinder rushed over to Dalli's bedside, only to find her asleep. A fan of long, auburn curls was spread over the pillows and her delicate brows were pulled into a harsh frown of distress, her breaths puffing too quickly through trembling pink lips and punctuated by the occasional mewl of dread.
A nightmare, Lycinder realized. He was relieved to find her physically alright, but he was completely at a loss as to what to do about her internal upset. Should he wake her? He suspected she'd be less than thrilled to find him in her room unbidden, but he could feel her fear and pain. While, selfishly, he certainly didn't want to continue to do so, he was surprised to find that he didn't want her to keep suffering, either.
That decided him.
Lycinder had only slept a handful of times in his life, and then only for the novelty of it, so he had little experience to guide him in guessing the protocol for waking humans.
He poked her.
That didn't work.
He sat carefully on the edge of her bed by her waist. "Young mistress," he urged quietly, for she did look very young in that moment, and very innocent in her white muslin nightdress with blue silk ribbons threaded through its scooped neck and the gathered edges of its capped sleeves. "Wake up. You're dreaming," he informed her in what he considered to be his most helpful tone.
She failed to comply.
Lycinder frowned. He gently put his hands atop her shoulders, palms resting lightly against her bared collarbones, and shook her softly but urgently.
"Lady Dalliance, wake up!"
This garnered some effect, just not the effect he was hoping it would. Instead of waking, Dalli's head started whipping from side to side, garbled imprecations and whined "No's" tumbling past her lips.
He shook her again. "My lady, it's just a dream! It's alright, wake up!"
Now, she started to thrash.
Lycinder wasn't expecting this. How could humans move so much, and so violently, and stay asleep? He was taken completely by surprise when Dalli's claw-like fingernails raked across his jaw and then tangled in his long, black hair, which had been hanging right in the path of her swinging limbs as he leaned over her upper body.
Asleep as she still was, acquiring a handful of his silky strands had absolutely no impact on her flailing about, and Lycinder winced and snarled when she yanked him halfway across her body by the hair while kicking him squarely in the hip. In reflexive response, he seized both of her wrists, wrenched them above her head, and held them there, swiftly pinning her hips in place with his own so that she couldn't kick him again.
"No!" Dalli screamed.
However, whether it was the real-world resistance against her limbs, the weight of her daemon pressing her down, or just the proximity of his palpable aura, something finally made her eyes pop open.
The look in them speared through Lycinder, freezing him in place as surely as he held her pinned. Outright terror turned to recognition in a microsecond, and then blissful relief shifted the color of her eyes from a raging thunderstorm to the soft light of the moon filtered through a dove's wing. He knew he was feeling her emotions again, and not his own, but the speed and magnitude of her reaction at seeing him there when she woke still left him breathless.
But, then, before even a second had passed, Dalli felt the pressure of his hold.
"Wh-?" Dalli's eyes flicked up to where Lycinder had her wrists pinned to the headboard, and they grew instantly wide, their whites showing as they rolled in renewed terror. "N-n-no, no! No! No! No!" she shouted, trying with everything she had to fight his grip.
Startled, Lycinder was again frozen.
"Let me go! Let me go! Get off, get-off-get-off-get off!" Dalli shrieked, tossing and writhing beneath him as best she could, head again thrashing from side to side, eyes screwed shut, practically drooling in terror.
Appalled, Lycinder immediately shot backwards halfway across the room, quickly releasing her.
"I'm sorry, mistress, you were having a nightmare!" he rushed to explain. "You called me- well, I felt your acute distress- and I came to see that you were alright, and then you were flailing about like a rag doll. I only wanted to wake you."
Dalli, coming back to herself, sat panting against the pillows, regarding him in shock. She glanced down at herself, taking in the disheveled state of the bedclothes and the way her nightdress had come askew. Blushing, she pulled the sleeve back up into place before returning her gaze to Lycinder.
"You can feel it if I'm upset?" she asked. "Nothing in the research suggests that daemons can do that," Dalli added, confused and more to herself than to him.
"You hold a piece of my soul within yours, mistress," he reminded her. "That means I can feel in some small part what you can; the more intensely you feel something, the more I will respond to it," Lycinder explained.
"So, it isn't a daemon thing. It's a you thing," Dalli noted. "Oh."
It was clear that she wasn't sure how she felt about that. Lycinder watched her thoughts play out across her face: it could seem an invasion of privacy, but on the other hand, it was extremely comforting to think that he would know when she needed his aid, even if they were apart. "Well, I suppose that's useful," she decided.
"Yes," said Lycinder, "It is. Usually."
Dalli blushed. "I-I'm sorry. I didn't mean to 'call' you. It was just a bad dream," she explained rather redundantly.
"That's alright, my lady," said Lycinder, returning to her left bedside and sitting down gingerly. He did so at a much more judicious distance this time, however. "I'm glad you're alright. Does this happen frequently?"
Dalli looked away and chewed on her lower lip. "Sometimes," she said. "Since I've been home."
Lycinder frowned. "That can't be healthy, mistress. Perhaps we should seek out a healer tomorrow-"
"No doctors!" Dalli interrupted. "I don't need a healer," she snapped. "What I need is vengeance. I'll stop having nightmares when I can watch the light die out of the bleeding eyeballs of- mmph!"
Lycinder's hand shot out, covering Dalli's mouth. His eyes scanned the darkened room.
"My lady, are you expecting company?" he asked, removing the pressure from her lips just enough for her to speak.
"What? No, I-"
Lycinder pressed his palm back to her mouth again, stopping the flow of her words.
Dalli's eyes flashed indignantly and her hands came up to tug at his extended forearm, which, to her total incensement, had about as much effect as a kitten batting at a tree trunk. He didn't even seem to notice it as his narrow-eyed gaze continued to sweep her bedchamber.
Suddenly, all three sets of double doors to her left and both windows on the opposite side crashed inward in a boots-propelled rain of shattered glass.
* * *
A/N: Oh, my! How cruel of me to leave you there 😋 Don't worry, the wait won't be long; the next few chapters are already written. Did you enjoy this bit? It was kind of nice (for me haha) to see Lycinder being the one out of his element, for once. There are a lot of shadowy hints in this chapter, particularly early on, so drop me a comment and let me know if I gave you any ideas! Or if you just want to chat about what happens as you approach the event horizon, or tell me how Necco wafers are made, or discuss why turtles were never revered, even by civilizations who thought the world rode on a giant one's back... Any and all thoughts are welcome! Here's the obligatory please vote/comment/follow/add/etc. message, and thank you all so much for reading!