Dark Side of Dawn: The Nightmare Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page A

paper in my darling little loo—it evenhad a shower!—and that it was tidy and clean.
    I was unpacking my laptop when Bonnie knocked and came in with the files. “Here you go. Your first two appointments.” She paused and gazed around the room. “You know, this is nicer than most apartments.”
    I grinned. “We lucked out with this space, Bonnie.”
    She rolled her eyes. “You’re not kidding. Hey, you want to do lunch today?”
    I did, and I told her so. She left after we agreed on a spot. Bonnie was a welcome distraction, just as my clients would be—I didn’t like calling them patients. They came to me and talked about issues they had in their lives. We talked a lot about dreams. Most of my clients were bothered by nightmares—traditional ones, not ones like mine—or disturbing dreams of one sort or another. I helped them work through the issues that caused them, and taught them to use their dreams to their own benefit. Dreams can be fantastic therapy if we as humans can make ourselves face and understand them. That’s the hard part.
    So I was glad that my first appointment would arrive soon. Left on its own for too long, my mind either drifted to thoughts of poor Amanda and her bloody scalp, or Verek and the announcement that the Nightmare Warden wanted to see me.
    Wanted my head on a platter was more like it.
    It was no secret that there were many in the DreamRealm who didn’t like my father or his ways of ruling the land. They didn’t like me or my mother either. We were looked upon as evidence of my father’s “weakness.”
    Did I mention that I’m not supposed to exist? A lot of people in my father’s world wish that I didn’t. And I was beginning to get a little paranoid that maybe someone was trying to make that wish come true.
    Before I was born my mother lost a child. She was overwhelmed by grief, and in her depression slept a lot. Morpheus was apparently struck by her sadness, and her pretty face. He began doing things to try to help her and they became lovers. My mother wasn’t the first human to attract the Dream King’s attention, but she was the first to give birth to a child of both realms. The only one of my kind, the Dreamkin tend to either be in awe or fear of me. And they despised my mother for making Morpheus vulnerable.
    Really, shouldn’t someone wonder what it was about her that made her capable of having his child? How was she capable of getting pregnant in a dream ? No one knew the answer. Morpheus had lots of theories—the best of which was that somehow he had made my mother’s dreams so real to her that she managed to make them a reality. Therefore, she wanted to have a child—his child—so badly her body made it happen.
    Makes you go, hmmm, doesn’t it?
    While they were at it, shouldn’t someone wonder whyshe had managed to stay asleep for more than two years, her body in stasis in Toronto, while she lived the life of a “desperate housewife” in the Dreaming? Obviously my mother wasn’t a normal human anymore than I was.
    Okay, maybe she was slightly more normal than I.
    And what about me? I used to think I was immortal, but now I wasn’t so sure. I can die in this world—I think. But in the Dream Realm I would have to be “unmade” to knock me out of existence. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to think that someone other than my father might be able to make that happen. Keep myself on my toes, so to speak.
    I didn’t know for sure that someone wanted me dead, and I had some confidence in my own ability to defend myself. I also was having one of those moments when I realized that my life could be worse. I’d take my lumps from the Nightmare Warden because I had to. I would probably survive it with a lot less trauma than Amanda was suffering through right now.
    I opened the first file. No way was I going to fill my head with images of Amanda before seeing a client. That just wouldn’t be fair. My good intentions were thwarted, however, when the phone rang.