Traeyr
Thoughts of the human pervaded his mind all day. He spent the time distracted and inattentive to his hunt, leaving behind a trail of half-cocked nightmares and nearly absentmindedly crushing multiple unsuspecting victims to death with his heedlessness.
He conjured her into his mind’s eye as she was the morning before. Even her daydreams had mesmerized his senses. The combination of her fantasies and her desire was too great to ignore, heightened by the way she’d crested over the precipice from his mere presence in her bedroom. He knew it had nothing to do with him, but she’d seemed to put on a show especially for his viewing, and that show had burned within him a fire that had him missing his flesh and bones that he may touch her, aid her in her quest of achieving her highest climax.
When she’d returned to her abode with a gloom hanging over her like a swollen storm cloud, he felt a fierce bolt of protectiveness over her thoughts. If she continued to feel dejected, he knew her dreams would weave themselves around the melancholic emotions and drag her under like a starving kraken faced with a grand ship. Knowing the way these things went, he couldn’t help but feel she was being stolen from him. He decided that nothing else, be it demon or her own psyche, was allowed to have that kind of power of this dreamer. Nothing buthecould influence her dreams, be it day or night, good or bad. Her stimulating nectar was his to devour, to taste, and his alone.
The female noticed his presence in her bedroom at last. A flicker of something crossed her exquisite features and her brow creased in recognition. Ah, so she had seen him before, but was it possible she could recall him now? The wild notion made his empty heart cavity thrum with anticipation. Humans should not be able to remember their encounters with night demons except in the vague sense of a fading dream. Regardless, he approached her outstretched hand and poured his influence into her subconscious until she hovered in the land between wakefulness and his realm. She removed her unnecessary layer of clothing and lay on her back this time, allowing him to perch carefully on her chest.
He observed her dainty mortal features with greater intent this time. The way her slight nose rounded at the end, a smattering of faint freckles that discolored her cheeks in a most delightful way, her full eyelashes closing over rich eyes that reminded him of the rare bloom of a speckled brown cattleya orchid.
He felt her nightmare take form around the edge of her sleeping mind and watched her eyes oscillate behind her eyelids. He drank the lapping tide of her bad dream and felt a rising wave of gratification, but it fell short. The faint nibble of her scrumptious nightmare was not enough to solidify him and he briefly wondered why he didn’t allow himself more, but he knew the answer. He wanted to savor her, to take his time with the dreamer and relish the nourishment she provided. He didn’t want to worsen her unconscious experience by taking too much.
Another sliver of her dream delved into him, sending a shockwave of need that pulsed and pushed the boundaries of his control, sending him reeling between shadow and material just as the taste of her hair had.
I must not get carried away.He pulled back and forced the climatic wave down, cinching tight around his power. The pain of restricting himself ached even as it sent thrills through him. He edged closer to the sensation offullness, then backed away, repeating this process while his more corporeal vessel grew in substance and his mind reeled with the continued denial of his release of power. It began to feel like a game, sacrificing a filling meal just to skirt the rim of what he knew would bring him sustenance. He felt as alive as he could only assume he’d once felt before he was transformed into a demon and had the body of a real man.
He hovered above her as he regained control, vigilant against squashing her under his weight, then perched atop her breasts once more to await the next delectable surge. Liquid pooled in the divot of her eye. It gained speed and traced the seam of her tightly closed lashes until the plump drop came to rest above her cheekbone.
Traeyr watched the tear with ambivalence. He’d been too enraptured by his primal urges to realize her nightmare was seeping past his protection and enveloping her soul. As he morphed her dream into a less intimate nightmare, his primal side remained engrossed with the leakage on her cheek.
I shan’t be careless.
With great care, he leaned down to sniff the shimmering liquid. The edges of his semi-corporeal form rippled with glee, his instincts insisting he release control and give in to temptation. Dragging in a settling gulp of air, he slackened his posture in the hope that remaining relaxed would keep him from losing himself. He was old, very old, but centuries of crushing mortals in their sleep and sating himself on their dreams did not prepare him for keeping one of those mortals safe. He was operating on sheer willpower.
With the utmost care, he leaned to the soft curve of her cheek and lapped up the salty fluid.
Oh!Oh!
The taste of her sent convulsions through him, his body bursting outward from his core. The shadowy tips of his claws momentarily solidified, his hands falling to either side of the human’s head to dig into the cotton fabric above her shoulders. Pleasure gripped every fiber of his being down to his lost soul and wracked with relentless waves of bliss. He fought against the swells of ecstasy, but his tempestuous battle was futile until the power died down. His body refused his attempts to tamper it and his knees slid to straddle her chest. He rocked forward unintentionally, driving his passion over the dreamer.
The sleeper’s eyes snapped wide and her mouth opened in a muted scream. Mortified, Traeyr shoved the overwhelming emotion down and forced his power to obey, condensing until her limbs and her scream were freed. With her shriek echoing behind him, he soared through the house and squeezed through the chinked knob with none of the typical sense of pleasure it elicited. The small crevice was nothing compared to the human’s dreams, her essence, her liquid. What had he been thinking? He could have crushed her and all of her spilled fluids, nutritious nightmares, and luscious drowsing sounds would have died with her.
He was not worried she would remember him and go searching for the old legends of his kind. Humans were a forgetful sort, and these centuries they blamed their own minds for afflictions caused by demons and night creatures. No, his fear was internal. An infatuation this strong for a sleeper was inappropriate and damnable. Already he felt empty without the rush of power imbibed with her liquid. If he developed an addiction, it would inevitably lead him to drain the human of her soul, crushing her body, and where would that leave him? Empty and alone, forced to return to feasting on everyday humans with their boring, unsatisfying nightmares, mostly of his own making. Besides, even if he filled up on her power and formed his most solid shadow body, the mass of shadows was a poor imitation of flesh and bone and would never amount to the feeling of flesh-on-flesh that her liquid caused him to crave.
Chagrined, furious, and still reeling with power, he climbed the nearest tree and launched himself into the sky. He sought an escape from the siren song of her nightmare and needed to be anywhere but here, where the smell mocked his senses and attempted to lure him back onto her chest. He soared over a lake and kept going, using his butterfly form to preserve his energy.
When he finally fled to the outskirts of the city and noticed her scent had become a subdued flavor in the air, he allowed himself to touch down. The rural neighborhood would be enough to distract him with its fields of unyielding crops in the form of ripe young minds.
A yellow house with a tall red privacy fence was his first target. The boundary was tall enough to keep away a broad and leggy human, but Traeyr had no problem slinking through a knothole in the wooden board. He allowed the rippling delight to light up his pleasure senses and savored the feeling, reminding himself of the small delights that sustained his existence well enough.
Yes, this is good enough. These small holes are enough,he resigned himself as he forced his way through the aperture in the back door.
The family home had three suitable hosts for him to feed upon; two mature and one a young and malleable soul. The two women sharing a bed dreamed of the same fear, a fear that plucked at a long-hidden part of Traeyr’s essence.
Mothers often dreamed of this nightmare. The first time he’d noticed the trend, it had reminded him of a mother who’d lost her child to a demonic ritual. Since that time, however, he’d grown desensitized and hadn’t thought of that woman nor her son in ages, their names and faces lost to time. He tried to recall her now and instead conjured the muddled faces of centuries of women dreaming the dream she must have lived through all those centuries ago. The only features he was certain of were her sharp, pointed ears, the signature mark of a species equally lost to time as her.
Traeyr stood at the edge of the bed and stared down upon the worried faces of the mothers, wondering if the woman in his memory also had lines creasing the corners of her eyes. Did she have lines around her lips from laughing? Did she have a crease in her brow from worry?
Ugh!Frustration undulated through his shadows. He grew weaker from the spent energy, wasted on fragile poetry from a lost life. What had snuck its way into his bitter black core that compelled him toward such futile emotions?
He rushed out the seams of the window before he could do something foolish like easeanotherhuman’s dreams. Especially after he’d already absurdly been caught, he did not want to make this night even worse.
Luckily, this was not his first time in a human inhabitance laid out like this one. Alleyways and paved roads sailed beneath him until he reached a three-story building with individually housed humans less likely to have children and the worries they carried. He would feast on their dreams tonight and not allow whatever was in that cursed dreamer’s tear to keep him from his fill of nightmares.
A portly man with his hand fully immersed in a bucket of fried chicken lay slack on a stained green couch. His dream was bland and offered nothing of value, but Traeyr perched cross-legged on his chest until the sleeper coughed and turned pale under the weight of him. He sent an explosive burst of power into the sleeper’s soul. From his omniscient view of the dream, Traeyr watched the corners of the scene blacken until a swirling mist circled the man, who was eating chicken even in his dream. The emaciated mist turned all it touched into boiling bubbles of blood and it rushed toward the drumstick the man gnashed in his jaw.
Fear leaked from the sleeper and seeped into Traeyr’s power. He left the human there to wallow and moved on to the next; a woman next door who dreamed of her new job. Simply removing her clothing would allot him some power, but the basic anxieties of the overused dream sounded dull and dreary compared to the power he was trying to forget from the alluring dreamer’s tear. Instead, he turned her boss into the devil himself with eighteen sets of eyes and a split head, tentacles flowing from the seams of his pressed clothing. Traeyr drank the mortal’s nightmare with a smile and licked the familiar taste from his fangs as his semi-corporeal form began to take shape.
