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Had he really taken so much comfort in that fucking car, in the thought he still had that connection to his old life in San Francisco?

The truth was, he had. It had given him a connection to his past and the people he’d loved that he’d badly needed. Had Brick sensed that? Had his sire given him other little tokens to connect him to the past he’d erased and obscured and lied about?

Why did Nick remember Angel making him promise that he’d take care of it?

Was that more bullshit? Something planted there, or even just suggested to him by Brick? He didn’t have a seer’s photographic memory, unfortunately, so it all just felt smudged and out of focus. It felt like either everything had to be real, or none of it was.

Why did he dream about Dalejem and France and living on the ocean?

Why did it feel like they’d lived by the water in more than one place?

San Francisco, maybe? Or was that all a dream, too?

Why did he sometimes see himself wearing clothing that made no sense for him to be wearing, not from the point of view of either world?

Why did he suddenly remember so many fucking horses?

Nick grabbed a clean towel that one of the attendants had left for him on the bench.

He wiped the worst of the blood and grime off his face.

His opponent had been a decent fighter for a change. The worst sprays of decorative blood happened when Nick broke the other vampire’s nose through the mask. The fucker kept fighting, but yeah, it had been messy for the next however-many minutes the fight lasted.

Nick finally got him to tap out when he broke one of his arms and one of his legs, then stomped on his other ankle hard enough to render him unable to walk.

That had been the end, but it hadn’t come easy.

Nick felt like he’d been run over by one of those drivable lawn mowers he now also inexplicably remembered.

He was beginning to wonder if mere proximity to that portal had done something to his mind. Because he was a vampire and didn’t need to sleep––or, more to the point, didn’t need to dream––these things seemed to be coming back to him in odd flashes instead, like waking dreams. Or really, like hallucinations.

None of it was particularly helpful.

None of it made the sequence of events any more clear, or logical, or believable.

Everything seemed to come to him sans context: black and roan horses, impossibly starry skies, dirty marketplaces, pristine fields, Jem laughing over a stone fireplace, Jem naked in a fur-covered bed, the ocean visible over sand dunes across a busy, familiar street, Dalejem wearing beach shorts, then a blink to see Jem on a horse, wearing silk breeches. Another blink to see him naked, lounging in a hot tub with a beer, his long hair wet, his gorgeous eyes closed.

Some of those images kept returning.

Some of them looped.

Specifically, an image of falling backwards through… something… Brick’s cinched, iron-like arm crushing Nick’s chest.

Fucking lawn mowers.

Outdoor markets filled with people dressed like medieval peasants.

Remembering being annoyed by leaf blowers that woke up Jem on the weekends when he was trying to sleep in a few extra hours.

Throwing Jem an apple as they wandered in the manicured gardens outside a castle. Jem laughing with a woman in an astonishingly high, Marie-Antoinette-style wig, Jem himself wearing an odd hat with a feather and deerskin boots.

The constant, mundane, casual thoughts of Jem brought a hard pain to his chest.

Gaos,he needed his fucking memories back.

He knew he did. He needed them.

But they might just kill him.