Page 212 of Ex Somnis

Lennon

“Nevan, now!” Paul’s voice tears across the dark, and the world disappears into clouds.

My hand slips from Lucien’s as they populate out of nothing in every direction, thick, gray, and damp, swallowing the light, the floor, everything. I have one second to think, the useless clouds Ridge made fun of before something slams into my chest.

It hits me dead center and lifts me off my feet, driving me backward through the fog. I slam hard against another body, and an arm clamps across me while we slide back another few feet together into the dark and stop.

“Take them back, Nevan,” Paul yells again, this time from somewhere ahead of me.

The clouds vanish all at once, sucked away as fast as they came, leaving the hard circle of light snap back into place, and I can see again.

I twist to find out who’s holding me.

Tessa. Or a Tessa, and for one disoriented second I don’t know which one, and then I look down.

There’s a plant around my waist.

A green stem, thick as a wrist, wound twice around my middle and twice around the Tessa behind me, lashing the two of us together and back, away from the center of the light.

The Tessa’s grip tightens when I pull against it. “Don’t even try it, sweetheart.”

“Ridge,” I breathe out. “Let go.”

“Never again.” Tessa’s voice, Ridge’s words. “You do stupid shit when I let you.”

I look up to where I was standing, thinking of what Ridge saw.

But then Paul steps right into my place, where I just was.

Not Paul-Tessa. Paul. He’s let the face fall—the gray-streaked stubble, no glasses, but every inch of him him—and he’s standing between Lucien and me with his feet planted and green erupting all around him.

Lucien throws what looks like rose stems at him, every thorn on them the size of a thumbnail, and they fly at Paul like a fistful of barbed wire. Paul moves and literally folds sideways, faster than anyone should be able to, and the thorns shred through where he was. He answers with a wall of green that slams up out of the floor, but Lucien is somewhere else when it lands, behind Paul now, and the thorns come again from a new direction.

It’s not a fair fight. I can see that even through the panic. Lucien builds in a blink what takes the rest of us a few seconds. He’s here, and then he’s there with no time passing in between. There’s a faint smile on his face, and it looks like he isn’t even trying very hard.

But Paul fights like a man who, after having this exact nightmare for five years, has had a long, long time to study his opponent. Every time Lucien moves, Paul is already turning toward where he’s going to be, because he knows him.

He knows him.

He has been pinned, paralyzed, and tortured by Lucien in his sleep so many times that it looks like he has memorized the rhythm of him, and he uses it, ducking and weaving, giving ground, baiting.

Lucien gets careless, even laughs mid-strike as if this is the most fun he has had in years, but then he overreaches and steps exactly where Paul has been herding him for thirty seconds, when the green comes up.

Plants come around Lucien from the floor, vines thick as my arm, winding up his legs, his chest, locking his arms to his sides, hauling tight until he’s standing rigid in the center of the light, bound upright.

Pinned.

The most dangerous thing any of us has ever met looks down at the plants holding him in place, and then up at Paul, and his green eyes go wide.

Lucien obviously can’t quite believe it. I guess no one has ever managed to do this to him, and he genuinely did not think the even-tempered psychologist in a cardigan was the one who would.

Paul is breathing hard. There’s a line of red opening along his forearm where a thorn caught him.

Shit.

We have to help him, we have to.

“You want to go to elsewhere forever?” Paul asks, cutting off my thought. “Then let’s go.”