“Dreamer, you shouldn’t be here,” the man from earlier said. “Go!”
“Who are you?” I stepped even closer, trying to identify him in the sea of wriggling bodies.
“My name is Gilgamesh, and you have to trust me when I tell you that you need to leave now.”
My eyes widened. I spotted him up in the tree, a few feet above my head. He had long, dark hair that fell in knots and matted strands over his chest. His face was dirty, and his clothes were one with the bark and the leaves. The way his body was angled… I shuddered. He looked like he was crucified.
“Gilgamesh. I thought you were dead.”
He laughed bitterly, but it came out as a croak. “Dead? I wish I were dead. But there is no death in this place. No life, either. Death would be so sweet.”
“What happened?”
“You have to go!”
“No. Not before you tell me how I can help you. All of you. I’m not leaving you here.”
“You must.”
“Well, I’ll come back for you. But you have to tell me how I can release you from this… nightmare.”
“If you don’t go now,” Gilgamesh insisted, “it will come back and put you in this tree, with us. It knows you’re here. It can smell you, sense you. It wants you.”
“It? What’s ‘it’?”
“It, it, it,” the others started chanting.
“Does it have a name?”
“We do not speak its name,” Gilgamesh whispered.
I stole a glance around me. I was shaking like a leaf, and my body was about to go in full fight-or-flight mode.
“It collects dreamers. Humans and hybrids, because we’re the only ones who can dream, who have this one thing in common with it. All it wants is to merge with us, to make us part of it and its world. And the only way it knows how to do this is by consuming us. Over and over. We cannot die, so we exist, and we are consumed for eternity. You cannot save us. Leave and don’t look back. Go before it’s too late.”
“Mother!”
El materialized right behind me. She grabbed me by the shoulder and tried to pull me away from the tree of decaying, writhing bodies.
“We have to go.”
“No…”
“Snap out of it!”
“Take her away, child,” Gilgamesh told El. “Don’t let her ever come back.”
El didn’t even look at him. She pushed something in my hand, and when I squeezed my fist, I realized it was dry, dusty soil.
“We’re jumping back now.”
She placed both her hands on my shoulders, and before I understood what was happening, we were at the point of neutrality. Relief washed over me. My knees stopped trembling, and my body slowly regained its strength. But I was terrified beyond belief.
“I told you not to stray from the path.”
“Those people need our help. Gilgamesh is alive!”
“Mother, no.” She took my face between her warm palms. “We can’t help them. They are lost forever. You have what you need. Let’s go home and put this behind us.”
“El, I can’t…”
She shook her head and jumped to our home dimension, pulling me with her.
* * *
I opened my eyes. I was breathing heavily, almost hyperventilating. There was something heavy pressing down on my chest. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Sleep paralysis. I was terrified, my eyes darting from Seth to Davien to Adrian.
“Oh crap,” Davien said. “We literally saw you float through the wall with a bunch of flowers in your arms, and then you merged with your physical body and the flowers materialized like out of thin air! Oh shit!”
I tried to communicate with my eyes, but it was useless. Neither Davien, nor Seth understood what was going on. They couldn’t see that I was trapped.
“Move!” Adrian pushed them aside. He grabbed the huge batch of Akkadia Aeterna and threw it at Seth. The sphinx caught it and looked for a good place to store it. Meanwhile, Adrian touched my face, my hair, my arms. “Yolanda, can you hear me?” I blinked. It was all I could do. “Oh God, she can’t move.”
“What? Why? What’s wrong with her?” Davien was starting to freak out.
“Sleep paralysis. It’s like she’s trapped between worlds. The same thing happened when she first jumped to the cosmic network.” He shook me gently, but my body remained limp. He noticed I was squeezing something in my fist. “Krause, get a jar.”
Davien ran to the open-space kitchen. “How am I supposed to find a jar? Who keeps jars anymore?”
“A cup! A bowl! Something.”
“Idiot,” Seth mumbled as he grabbed an empty glass, made sure it was dry, and handed it to Adrian. “Here you go.”
Adrian placed the glass under my fist and slowly and carefully started to unclasp it. The black soil El had collected for me fell inside the glass.
“Seal it somehow,” Adrian ordered Seth.
Davien was back, hovering over me, trying to push Adrian away to see what was going on.
“Stop it!” Adrian yelled. “Can’t you see she can’t move?”
“What did you do then? We’re her guardians. We should be able to help her. So, what did you do when it first happened?”
Adrian clenched his jaw. He looked into my eyes as if asking for my permission. I pushed as hard as I could. I moved my lips, and the first few times, no words came out. I tried harder, gathering all the strength I had in me, and finally, the words came out.
It was a whisper, it was feeble, it was all I could manage. It would have to do.
“Make love to me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
They were frozen in shock for at least two minutes straight. To me, it felt like forever. Not wanting to confront Seth and Davien, Adrian didn’t take his eyes off me.
“Is this how you two first slept together?” Seth asked.
Adrian didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. It was obvious, and it was just taking Seth and Davien a while to wrap their heads around the fact that yes, the surest way to pull me out of sleep paralysis was to have sex with me.
“I… I don’t know what to say,” the sphinx eventually concluded. “I don’t know. I’m lost.”
“Well, she’s asked us to…” Davien tried. “She can’t move, but she gave her consent.”
“It’s still creepy as fuck.”
By now, I was almost certain that they weren’t going to do it. But then Adrian leaned in and captured my lips in a long, passionate kiss that I couldn’t respond to. He lied down beside me, pulling me into his arms and kissing a trail from the corner of my lips to my jaw and my neck. That snapped Seth and Davien back to reality. Seeing Adrian take control of the situation didn’t sit well with them. Adrian was down to my chest now, and he was gently removing my shirt. I locked eyes with Seth, and when Davien made a move to climb onto the bed, the sphinx pushed him aside and sneered at him.