Chapter 177: Welcome Back, Luv

Chapter 177: Chapter 177: Welcome Back, Luv

By afternoon, she hated everyone.

Not personally.

Mostly.

The woman sitting across from her during lunch had spent nearly ten minutes complaining about a Court position she believed should have belonged to her, and somewhere around minute six Isolde discovered that too little sleep made pretending to care considerably more difficult.

"You understand what I mean, don’t you?"

Isolde looked up from her plate and found the woman smiling hopefully at her.

"No."

The smile faltered.

Isolde took another bite of her food, and the conversation ended shortly afterward.

Classes were worse.

By evening, the headache behind Isolde’s eyes had become impossible to ignore, and even Bellringer’s planned broadcast no longer sounded entertaining enough to justify keeping herself awake.

When she returned to her room, nothing felt strange. There was no unseen presence, no shift in the air and certainly no reason she should have been standing beside her own bed wondering whether sleeping had somehow become a bad decision.

Isolde stared at the mattress.

"This is ridiculous."

Her wolf remained unsettled, which was slightly less reassuring than she would have liked.

Eventually, exhaustion won.

~~~

Rain tapped gently against enormous windows while Isolde turned another page.

She was curled sideways in an armchair large enough to disappear into, bare feet tucked beneath her and a plate of pastries balanced dangerously near the edge of the table beside her.

Books covered almost every other surface, but none of them were Marchmont records, Court rankings or correspondence she was expected to answer.

They were hers.

Most of them were terrible.

A stack of Bellringer notes sat openly beside a collection of letters from listeners, several apparently written for the sole purpose of complaining about previous broadcasts.

Isolde was reading one now.

She reached the third paragraph and laughed.

Apparently Bellringer’s comments regarding a particular Ashbourne student’s hairstyle had caused a family disagreement severe enough that someone’s mother had become involved.

Excellent.

She reached for another pastry and stopped.

Someone was standing near the doorway.

Her stomach dropped.

The same man.

Everything pleasant about the room vanished at once.

He stood just inside the doorway as though he belonged there, and once again Isolde couldn’t properly see his face. This time, however, he didn’t remain still.

He began walking toward her.

Isolde slowly lowered the letter and rose from the chair while her wolf came awake beneath her skin.

The man approached without urgency, passing between the shelves as though he had all the time in the world. When he stopped several steps away, he smiled.

"Welcome back, luv."

Cold moved through her.

Isolde stared at him.

Different place. Different dream.

Same man.

"You."

His head tilted slightly before his smile widened. "You can see me, can’t you?"

Her pulse accelerated. "I have no idea what you’re talking about."

"Of course you don’t."

The amusement in his voice irritated her almost as much as the fear.

"Who the hell are you?"

His attention moved over her with uncomfortable interest before he murmured, "Interesting."

He paused.

"Most people don’t notice me this quickly."

Isolde’s fingers curled against her palms.

The library had become too quiet. Even the rain against the windows no longer sounded quite real.

When the man stepped closer, her wolf snarled inside her and Isolde moved back instinctively.

He noticed.

"Oh, don’t worry." His voice remained almost gentle. "You won’t remember any of this when you wake up."

Something inside Isolde went cold.

Not because of the words themselves, but because of how casually he said them, as though this was ordinary, as though he had done it before and there was nothing she could possibly do about it.

The room around her suddenly made sense in the worst possible way. The festival hadn’t simply been a nightmare, and neither was this. Somehow, the same man had found his way into both.

Isolde stared at him for another second before her lip curled. "Eat shit."

Instead of reacting, the man laughed softly.

"Again?" His smile widened. "You noticed me the first time. I was curious whether you’d manage it twice, luv."

Something in his voice changed as he stepped closer.

"Unfortunately, noticing me won’t help you."

The words had barely left his mouth when pressure crashed into her mind.

Isolde staggered as pain drove behind her eyes sharply enough to blur the room. Shelves bent strangely around her while something pushed against thoughts that had belonged entirely to her a moment before.

Her breathing broke, and panic rose quickly with it, but Isolde caught it before it could take over.

She dragged air into her lungs and forced herself to breathe again.

The fear was still there, tangled with the pain and the instinct screaming at her to run, but Isolde forced herself past it and reached deeper, searching for something steadier. Something familiar enough that no one could twist it into something else.

Her wolf answered almost immediately, and Isolde latched onto that presence with everything she had.

The man’s laughter stopped.

The pressure bearing down on her intensified until the library itself seemed to bend around them, the shelves trembling as her knees threatened to give way. Isolde locked them anyway and held her ground.

"No."

Something foreign pressed against her thoughts again, pushing where it did not belong, but this time she recognised it the moment it touched her. She knew the shape of her own mind well enough to feel what wasn’t hers.

So she pushed back.

Her wolf surged with her, and the force of it drove the man half a step backward. For the first time since he had appeared, the amusement vanished from his face.

Isolde bared her teeth at him.

"Get the fuck out."

He pushed harder with a curse.

Pain exploded through her skull as the room warped around them, shelves stretching impossibly high while books tore themselves apart in the air.

Isolde held on to herself and to her wolf, clinging to the simple certainty that whatever had forced its way into her mind did not belong there.

The pressure kept building until it felt as though something inside her would give first.

Then the dream cracked.

The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once as the room split around them, shelves warping, walls breaking apart and the entire dreamscape tearing open beneath the strain.

For the first time, the man’s expression changed.

Then he screamed.

Isolde woke with the sound still in her ears.

She shot upright and grabbed her head as pain hammered behind her eyes hard enough to make her stomach turn. For several seconds she could still hear that scream, even as the dream faded and the familiar shape of her room slowly settled around her.

Her room.

Actually her room.

Isolde forced herself to breathe through the pain until one thought from several days earlier surfaced.

Dreamwalkers.

She went still.

Raven.

If a Dreamwalker tried to interfere with someone carrying your ability, what would happen?

"Oh, shit."

Isolde threw the blanket aside.

~~~

The library was nearly empty at that hour, which suited Isolde perfectly.

She had stopped caring what time it was somewhere between the fourth useless record and the first one that made her stomach turn.

Dreamwalkers had existed. That much she had already known.

What she hadn’t known was how consistent the older accounts became once she stopped reading the dramatic stories and started paying attention to what victims actually described.

Dreams that felt completely real. Familiar places altered around them. People appearing where they shouldn’t. Memories disappearing. Thoughts and suggestions remaining after waking without the victim understanding where they had come from.

Isolde sat back slowly.

Raven hadn’t been curious.

The realization was painfully obvious now.

She had known.

Maybe not who the Dreamwalker was and perhaps not everything he could do, but Raven had known enough to ask exactly the question Isolde now desperately needed answered.

Her gaze moved across the books spread over the table before another thought surfaced.

Raven had been spending a suspicious amount of time in this library herself.

Isolde had noticed, of course. She noticed most things. She simply hadn’t cared enough to investigate what Raven Rivers did with her evenings when there were more entertaining things to broadcast.

Now she did.

It took considerably less time than expected to work out which sections Raven had been using.

The records surprised her.

Alpha Queens.

Isolde frowned at the first title before opening another volume beside it.

An hour disappeared.

Possibly two.

At some point, the Dreamwalker research sitting beside her stopped being the only reason she remained awake.

Four elemental affinities. Unusual bonds. Repeated accounts of multiple mates drawn from powerful bloodlines.

Isolde read one passage twice before slowly leaning back.

The Blackthorn twins.

Both Raven’s mates.

Strange enough by itself.

Then Cass.

Her expression changed.

Isolde knew Cassian better than Raven realised, perhaps better than Cass would appreciate her claiming aloud, and whatever was happening between him and Raven was not normal.

Then there was Dante Prymont, whose interest in subtlety appeared to have died the moment Raven arrived at Valerius.

And Raven’s wolf.

The reactions and the timing.

The impossible girl who had entered the academy wolfless and somehow become increasingly difficult to explain with every passing week.

Isolde looked down at the open record again.

"No fucking way."

She kept reading.

By morning, the idea no longer felt ridiculous.

It was not certainty, not yet, but it was possible.

Possible enough that Isolde very much wanted to see Raven’s face when she eventually asked.

Unfortunately, another problem mattered considerably more.

She still hadn’t slept, and every time exhaustion dragged at her, the memory of that faceless man smiling inside her own dream returned.

Welcome back, luv.

So Isolde stayed awake.

She missed her first class, then the second, and by afternoon she had stopped pretending she intended to attend any of them. Instead, she remained in the library, moving between Dreamwalker records and the material Raven had apparently been researching before her.

The longer she remained awake, the less sensible everything became, and Isolde knew it.

She also knew she would eventually have to sleep.

That frightened her considerably more.

By the time she finally left the library and went looking for Raven, two nights had passed without anything she would call proper sleep.

She knew enough to believe a Dreamwalker was inside Valerius, and she had developed a completely separate theory about Raven Rivers that she intended to enjoy testing when she had the opportunity.

~~~

Isolde stopped speaking.

For several seconds, the infirmary remained quiet while Raven sat in the chair beside the bed and simply stared at her.

Eventually Isolde shifted beneath the attention. "What?"

One of Raven’s eyebrows rose slowly.

Isolde immediately had the unpleasant feeling that she had made a mistake somewhere.

"You fucking liar."

She blinked. "Excuse me?"

Raven leaned back in the chair, disbelief gradually overtaking the exhaustion on her face. "That was how you knew."

"Knew what?"

The look Raven gave her made it clear she found the attempt insulting.

"The Alpha Queen."

Oh.

Isolde pressed her lips together.

Raven pointed at her. "You sat here acting like you were suddenly putting everything together. The twins. Cassian. Dante. My wolf."

Raven paused. "You put it together my ass."

"I did put it together."

"In the fucking library."

The corner of Isolde’s mouth twitched.

Raven stared at her for another second before realization hardened into accusation. "You already suspected."

"I wouldn’t say I knew."

"You smug bitch."

That nearly broke her.

Isolde looked down, but the smile escaped anyway. When she finally glanced back at Raven, there was little point pretending innocence anymore.

"I had a theory."

Raven’s eyes narrowed.

Despite how exhausted she was, Isolde’s smile only widened.