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“What?” That sounded bad.
“His Nightmare essence is gone,” Nic repeated himself. “I wasn’t even sure it was possible to survive without it.”
“Yes, gone,” Dio murmured. “Had to protect the essence. If they get it all, everything is lost.”
“What did you do with it, Dio?” Nic tightened his grip on his brother.
“Hid it away. Safe amongst pretty sparkly gems of light.” He smiled, as if remembering something pleasant.
“Gems of light?” Geraint said. “What does that mean?”
No one had an answer, and it seemed Dio was done talking. I even tried touching his skin again, but he remained locked in that distant smile.
“Shit, that’s weird,” I said.
“Yes,” Robby agreed. “Very.”
“So, what do we do?” I glanced around his room, then frowned as a half-seen shine caught my eye. “Could this be on camera?”
“Oh, shit,” Robby muttered. “Damn humans.”
“Nothing to be done about it now,” Nic replied. “We should reserve any further discussion for later.”
Robby nodded, passed his hand in front of Samantha’s face, and she came alert with a confused squint before her previously cheerful expression returned.
“He’s not very responsive, I’m afraid,” she said.
“Yeah, well, we wanted to make sure he was being cared for. We can’t fault his surroundings,” Robby replied.
I felt sick and couldn’t bring myself to try and come up with anything positive to say. Fortunately, Robby had everything under control.
“We’re just leaving him here?” I whispered when Samantha led us to the door.
“For now,” Nic replied just as quietly.
The hair on the back of my neck rose, and my shoulders knotted. It felt like at any moment someone was going to detain us, but we made it to the main security door with no issues. Samantha let us out. We said a brief goodbye to the receptionist and then headed out into the hot afternoon humidity.
Robby hit the remote start on the van, so it wasn’t a million degrees inside when we climbed in.
When I opened my mouth to pepper the guys with questions, Robby held up his hand.
Annoyed, but trusting that they knew what they were doing, I stayed silent.
The too-tall cornfields felt especially ominous when we drove through them, but we pulled out onto the main road without incident.
“That was fucking weird,” I said.
“Yeah,” Geraint agreed.
“So what’s going on?” I glanced at Robby.
“Not sure, Princess.”
“It appears to be a pocket of space where the conscious and unconscious realm overlap. The two people we encountered were human, near as I could tell, but there was a great deal of energy of the Dream realm in that place. Not Dream essence, per say. Just the feel of Dream,” Nic explained. “I wasn’t aware such places existed.”
“Wow,” I murmured. “So, what’s up with the creepy-ass cornfield?”
“Protection, most likely,” Robby said. “Or a deterrent. Even the twins, and the tooth fairies avoid going into the Nightmare cornfields. It might be similar here.”
