"What do you mean, not entirely human?"
The words came out as a whisper. I was gripping the edge of the dining table so hard my knuckles had gone white, but I couldn't seem to let go. Everything about this night had been surreal, but somehow that simple sentence had pushed me past the point where I could pretend any of this was normal.
Damien stood up and walked to the far wall, where a collection of paintings hung in ornate frames. At least, I'd thought they were paintings when we'd first entered the dining room. Now I could see they were photographs.
Photographs of me.
"I think it's easier if I show you rather than tell you," he said, turning one of the frames so I could see it clearly.
It was me at sixteen, walking out of my high school in the same outfit I'd worn the day my parents died. I remembered that day perfectly - the phone call from the police, the rush to the hospital, the devastating news that they hadn't survived the car accident.
But I didn't remember anyone taking photographs.
"How do you have this?" I asked, standing up on shaky legs.
"I have all of them." Damien gestured to the wall, and I saw there were dozens of frames. Photos of me at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. College graduation. My first day at the FBI academy. Candid shots of me at coffee shops, walking down the street, sitting in my apartment.
Ten years of my life, documented by someone who had no right to be watching.
"You've been stalking me." The accusation came out flat, emotionless. I was too shocked to feel angry yet.
"I've been protecting you."
"From what?"
"From the same thing that killed your parents."
I laughed, but it sounded hollow even to me. "My parents died in a car accident. There was an investigation. I saw the reports."
"You saw what we wanted you to see."
Damien moved closer, and I instinctively backed toward the door. But when I reached for the handle, my hand passed right through it. Like it wasn't really there.
"What the hell?" I tried again, but the door felt like it was made of mist.
"We're not entirely in the physical world anymore," Damien explained, his voice calm. "I thought you might be more receptive to the truth if we met somewhere... neutral."
The dining room was changing around us. The elegant furniture was fading, becoming translucent, while the walls seemed to stretch upward into darkness. The only things that remained solid were the photographs and the two of us.
"You're doing this," I said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes. This is what I am, Aria. What we are."
"We?"
But he didn't answer. Instead, he walked to another photograph - me at my parents' funeral, standing beside their closed coffins with tears streaming down my face.
"You were sixteen when they died," he said. "Old enough to start asking questions. Old enough to begin manifesting abilities that would draw the wrong kind of attention."
"What are you talking about?"
"Your dreams, Aria. When did they start? When did you first realize you could slip into other people's sleep?"
I wanted to lie, but something about this place - this space between worlds - made deception feel impossible.
"The night they died," I admitted. "I kept having nightmares about the accident. But then I started having other people's nightmares too. I thought it was just trauma."
"It wasn't trauma. It was awakening."
Damien touched the frame of the funeral photo, and suddenly the image began to move. Like a video instead of a still picture. I watched my sixteen-year-old self sobbing as the coffins were lowered into the ground.
"They died to protect you," he said. "To keep you hidden until you were old enough to defend yourself."
"Died to protect me from what?"
Instead of answering, Damien gestured to the wall again. A new image was forming in one of the empty frames - not a photograph this time, but something that looked like a window into another place.
Through it, I could see a dark room. My parents' bedroom, the way it had looked the night they died. But this wasn't the sanitized crime scene photos I'd seen in the police reports. This was something else entirely.
Something real.
My mother was standing by the window, but she wasn't alone. Dark shapes moved around her - tall, impossibly thin figures with too many joints and fingers that ended in claws. Their faces were wrong, like someone had tried to draw human features from memory and gotten the proportions all wrong.
"What are those things?" I whispered.
"Void feeders," Damien said. "They hunt in the spaces between dreams and reality. They're attracted to power like yours - the ability to cross between worlds."
In the vision, my mother was fighting. Light blazed from her hands in ways that should have been impossible, cutting through the dark creatures like a sword. But there were too many of them.
"Mom could do what I do?"
"Much more than what you do. Your mother was one of the most powerful dream walkers ever born. And your father..." The image shifted, showing my dad standing in the doorway with something that looked like a gun but fired bolts of silver light. "Your father was her guardian. Her protector. Like I am yours."
"You're not my anything."
But even as I said it, I was watching my parents fight and die to protect something. Someone.
Me.
"They created a barrier around you that night," Damien continued. "Used their own life force to hide you from the void feeders. It should have lasted until you turned twenty-five."
"Should have?"
"Your power is stronger than they anticipated. The barrier started breaking down two years ago. That's when the feeders began hunting again."
The vision changed, showing me the coffee shop from this morning. But now I could see what had really been there - dark shapes lurking in the corners, invisible to normal eyes. All of them focused on me.
"The women who've been dying," I said, the pieces clicking into place. "They weren't random victims."
"No. The void feeders can't touch you directly while any part of the barrier remains. But they can feed on people who've been in contact with your power. Women whose dreams you've touched, even briefly."
I thought about Sarah Mitchell, about the other victims. Had I been in their dreams? Even for a moment?
"The trauma cases," I whispered. "The victims I've been helping. I've been marking them without knowing it."
"Every time you use your ability, you leave traces. The feeders follow those traces back to their source."
"Then I have to stop. I have to stop using my power."
"It doesn't work that way. You can't just turn it off. And even if you could, it's too late. They know where you are now."
The vision showed me more scenes - dark shapes following me home from work, lurking outside my apartment building, waiting in the spaces between sleeping and waking.
"So what am I supposed to do?"
"Learn to fight back. Learn what you really are."
Damien walked to the center of the room, where a new image was forming. Not a photograph or a vision this time, but something that looked like a family tree. Names and dates going back hundreds of years, with lines connecting different branches.
At the top was a name I didn't recognize: Eleanor Voss. Below her, dozens of other names, including my mother's.
"Your mother was part of an ancient bloodline," Damien explained. "Descendants of the first humans who learned to walk between worlds. But Eleanor was the first. The source."
"Was?"
"Is. Eleanor is still alive, though she's... changed. She's been fighting the void feeders for over a thousand years. The effort has cost her most of her humanity."
I stared at the family tree, trying to process what he was telling me. "You're saying my grandmother is some kind of immortal dream warrior?"
"Your great-great-great grandmother, actually. And she's not just a warrior. She's a queen. The ruler of the nightmare realm that exists parallel to our world."
"That's insane."
"Is it? You've been walking through dreams for ten years, Aria. You've seen things that shouldn't exist. How is this any crazier than what you already know is true?"
He had a point. But accepting that my ability was real was different from accepting that I was descended from some kind of supernatural royalty.
"What does Eleanor want with me?"
"The same thing every parent wants. To see her child come home."
The room around us was shifting again, the walls dissolving completely until we were standing in what looked like an endless library. Books stretched up into darkness, their covers written in languages I didn't recognize.
"This is part of Eleanor's realm," Damien said. "The Archive. Every dream that's ever been dreamed is recorded here."
"Why are you showing me this?"
"Because you need to understand what you're choosing between. Eleanor wants you to claim your birthright, to take your place as the next ruler of the nightmare realm. She believes it's the only way to keep you safe from the void feeders."
"And what do you believe?"
Damien was quiet for a long moment, staring up at the impossible shelves of dreams.
"I believe you should have a choice," he said finally. "I believe you deserve to know the truth before you decide what kind of life you want to live."
"And what are my options?"
"You can go to Eleanor. Learn to use your full power, become what you were born to be. You'll be safe from the void feeders, but you'll have to leave the human world behind."
"Or?"
"You can stay here. Keep fighting, keep learning to control your abilities on your own. It's more dangerous, but you get to remain who you are."
"What about the third option?"
"What third option?"
I turned to face him fully. "The one where I stop all of this. Where I find a way to end the threat to innocent people without becoming some kind of supernatural queen."
Damien smiled, and for the first time since I'd met him, it looked completely genuine.
"That," he said, "is exactly what I was hoping you'd say."
The library began to fade around us, and I could feel myself being pulled back toward normal reality. But before the vision completely disappeared, I saw something that made my blood run cold.
In one of the books - a massive tome bound in what looked like human skin - I caught a glimpse of a page that showed my own face. But it wasn't me as I was now. It was me with silver eyes and marks on my skin that looked like ancient writing.
It was me transformed into something that wasn't quite human anymore.
"Damien," I said, grabbing his arm as the dining room materialized around us again. "That book. What was that?"
"The Book of Transformations. It shows what happens when someone fully embraces their supernatural heritage."
"Is that what Eleanor looks like now?"
"No. Eleanor's transformation was... different. She chose power over humanity a long time ago. What you saw was what you could become if you chose a different path."
"What path?"
"The path of balance. Keeping one foot in each world."
We were back in the physical dining room now, but everything felt different. The air was thicker, charged with energy that made my skin tingle. And I could see things I hadn't noticed before - shadows that moved independently of their sources, lights that flickered in patterns that almost looked like writing.
"The barrier around me," I said. "It's completely gone now, isn't it?"
"Yes. From this moment forward, you're visible to everything that hunts in the spaces between worlds. The void feeders, Eleanor's agents, and things much worse."
"Great. So I'm basically a target for every supernatural monster in existence."
"Not every monster wants to hurt you, Aria."
There was something in his voice that made me look at him more carefully. "What are you, exactly? You're not human either, are you?"
"No. I'm what you might call a guardian. Created specifically to protect your bloodline."
"Created by who?"
"Eleanor. About three hundred years ago, when she realized she couldn't protect all her descendants personally."
"So you work for her."
"I was made by her. But I choose who I serve. And I choose to serve you."
The words sent a shiver through me that had nothing to do with fear. There was something in the way he said them, something that spoke of devotion that went beyond duty.
"Why me specifically? Why not my mother, or one of the other descendants?"
"Because you're the strongest. The most likely to survive what's coming."
"What's coming?"
Damien walked to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. Outside, the perfectly manicured gardens looked normal in the moonlight. But I could see the shadows now, the way they moved with purpose instead of following the laws of physics.
"War," he said simply. "The void feeders are getting stronger, more organized. Eleanor is preparing to seal the barriers between worlds permanently - even if it means trapping humanity in a reality without dreams."
"And that's bad because?"
"Because dreams are how humans process trauma, fear, hope, love. Without them, your species will go insane within a generation."
I sank into one of the dining room chairs, my head spinning. An hour ago, my biggest problem had been catching a serial killer. Now I was apparently some kind of supernatural princess caught between a war that could destroy humanity.
"This is too much," I said. "I need time to think."
"Time is the one thing we don't have," Damien replied. "The void feeders know where you are now. They'll be coming for you tonight."
"Tonight?"
"They're strongest in the hours just before dawn, when the barrier between sleeping and waking is thinnest. You have maybe six hours to decide what you're going to do."
"And my options are become a nightmare queen, stay and fight impossible odds, or watch the world end?"
"Those are the big picture options, yes. But right now, you have a more immediate choice to make."
"Which is?"
"Whether you trust me enough to let me teach you how to defend yourself."
I looked at him - this man who had been watching me for ten years, who had just turned my entire understanding of reality upside down, who claimed to be my supernatural bodyguard.
"If I say yes, what happens?"
"I show you how to access the power you've been suppressing. How to fight things that exist between worlds. How to become who you were always meant to be."
"And if I say no?"
"You face what's coming alone."
Outside, the shadows were definitely moving now, sliding across the ground in ways that defied the position of the moon. And in the distance, I could hear something that sounded like hunting calls.
They were coming.
"Teach me," I said.
Damien smiled, and this time there was something wild in his expression. Something that reminded me he wasn't entirely human either.
"Let's begin."
End of Chapter 4