“Roy.”
“Ghosts and ghouls are vastly different, Lady Roy. One would require the collecting of a corpse for consumption and while it is my honor, my pleasure, my most sacred duty to serve, fetching the freshly dead is not one of the tasks I particularly enjoy doing.”
Horror doesn’t hesitate to hop onto my expression.
“Okay, you’re not helping,” A.D. murmurs as he crosses the room to the footless person.
“I wasn’t aware you required additional assistance, Master Draak,” the servant innocently states.
“Not what I meant, Gene.” Before the house attendee can say another word, A.D. nimbly swaps our pile of wet clothing for the bottle of vodka and biggest bag of M&M’s I’ve ever seen. “Please wash and dry these immediately.”
“Of course, Master Draak.” He begins to back out of the room yet offers me a curt nod of farewell. “Lady Roy.”
The instant A.D. shuts his bedroom door behind him I ask, “Do you know how he pulls off the floating trick?”
“It’s not a trick,” the man in matching silk gold pajama bottoms announces enroute to me. “He’s a genie.”
“Like in-”
“For Dragons Sake, don’t say like in Aladdin.”
“I was gonna go with Wishmaster.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“The horror movie?”
He slowly shakes his head.
“Fuck, okay. Um…what about something cuter and PG?” The thought almost instantaneously pops into my mind. “Oh! Oh! Oh! I Dream of Jeannie!”
A.D. flops down on the cushion at the opposite end of the sofa. “He doesn’t like that reference. He hates the way it makes light of the sexual servitude some of his kind are forced to endure.”
Bafflement sends my jaw plummeting.
“Gene is an actual genie. Those pointed ear bastards I roasted were elves. And I’m a dragon.” The bag of candy is dropped into the small space between us. “An Ancient Elemental to be more descriptive. Gold to be precise.” He twists off the lid to the Blue Beluga vodka and tips the bottle my direction. “Shot?”
Skepticism has me sassily snipping, “I think you’ve already had plenty.”
A.D. shrugs off my comment, presses the object to his lips, and gulps down a mouthful.
“Look, you don’t wanna break the ‘magician’s code’ and tell me the truth about the floating trick, fine. Say that. But don’t try to bullshit me.” Transferring the bag of plain M&M’s to my lap is followed by me snapping again. “I fucking hate being lied to.”
“You have been lied to your whole Sleeper life.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
He momentarily hesitates prior to tipping his chin to the treats in my possession. “Take one of those out.”
I open the resealable object and pull out the first one that touches my grip. The fact it’s yellow for some reason make us both grin.
“What do you see?”
“An M&M.”
His eyeroll is instant. “Right but pretend for the sake of this conversation that you don’t know what an M&M is. That you were born under a rock in the middle of Antarctica, and this is your first time coming across the candy.”
“How do I know it’s candy?”
“Because I told you it was.”
“How do I know what candy is?”
“How do you not know what candy is?!”
“You said I was born under a rock!”
Huffs of frustration escape him alongside small puffs of glittery gold smoke from his nose.
Huh.
How does he pull off that trick?
Did I really see him John Wayne Gacy that asshole who was trying to rob the store, or was it a starvation induced illusion further proving my oldest brother’s insistence that I quit living off of dented cans of ravioli and almost expired cream soda?
God, it’s not like I want to have the diet of a poor college freshman at thirty-three.
Hell, what I want rarely seems to matter in my own life.
That’s the whole luck hates me thing living up to its fullest potential.
A.D. has another swig from the bottle before running his fingers through his beautiful, blond locks to calm himself down. Afterwards, he tries again. “Let’s start over.”
“Okay.”
“What you, a Sleeper – someone who is not tethered to the magical realm, although you are technically now – sees on a daily basis is the outside of an M&M.”
My gaze remains focused on him.
“However,” he takes the piece of chocolate from my hand and bites it in half to flash me the contents, “there is a whole other world hidden just on the other side of the coating.”
The analogy successfully captures all of my attention. “Why haven’t I ever seen it before now?”
“Sleepers live in the candy coating or The Fog, which is what it’s actually called. It’s basically that feeling you get when you’re really tired and no matter what you do, you just can’t seem to wake yourself up, but on a much bigger fucking scale. It’s that drowsy, lethargic shit that no matter what you do you just can’t quite…,” A.D. tosses the other half of the snack into his mouth, “snap out of it. That’s what The Fog is for Sleeper creatures.”
“People.”
“People. Alpacas. Brine Shrimp.”
His list receives another bewildered expression.
“The Great Ones created The Fog as an attempt to allow the two versions of existence – those who see the candy coating and those that know there’s also a chocolaty middle – to coincide peacefully.” A.D. flinches at the phrasing. “Well, more peacefully. I don’t know that there will ever be a time where all Sleepers can live in an Awaker form, which is what you’re seeing me in right now, which is what you are also now that you can see magical shit. My Awaker form looks completely human yet underneath the surface it’s not. Most of us choose this form because it’s easy to do most of the shit we really like doing in it. Do you need some socks?”
Perplexity is instant. “Huh?”
“Your tiny toes,” he does his best to keep his gesture towards them casual in spite of the worry that’s swirling around his hazel stare. “Are they cold? They look fucking cold.”