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He was on the couch. He was lying on Wynter’s couch.

What the fuck was he doing on the couch? How in the hell had he fallen asleep? Wasn’t he supposed to go to the city? With the kid? He and Tai were supposed to go to the city on the train, and meet Wynter there later at one of the beachy resort places downtown.

How much time had passed?

Had Nick really passed out?

The last thing he remembered was talking to that thing on the couch.

Nick remembered that thing on the couch talking to him.

He remembered those vampire eyes, the weird hat, the gloves, the bandaged shoulder. That thing had been sitting right where Nick sprawled now, half-tangled in the kid’s fuzzy blankets and pillows. Nick looked down the length of his body, but nothing and no one else shared the couch with him.

A stuffed bunny perched on his legs next to a stuffed elephant.

A smiley-face pillow lay halfway under his feet.

What the fuck happened? Where was the kid?

What the hell was wrong with him?

The last time he’d felt anything at all like this was when he and Wynter had been starting to bond. He’d been in a super weird headspace where he kept dreaming about her, about Dalejem, about memories he’d forgotten until the dreams started up once more. He’d slept for the first time in something like two hundred years. He’d had weird, waking dreams, and wanted sex pretty much all the time.

But none of that felt anything like this.

None of it held a candle to this.

At the time of his and Wynter’s bonding, Nick sometimes felt guilty about those dreams, particularly since a lot of his dreams about Dalejem were sexual… some of them deeply, disturbingly sexual… and familiar, and intensely emotional. They evoked reactions in him that made him feel almost like he was cheating on her.

He felt like he was living some kind of double life in his dreams, where he was married to someone else… a male seer Nick remembered with a shocking intensity.

As it turned out, that male seerwasWynter.

Once Nick knew that, his guilt vanished.

And eventually, the dreams faded, too.

Even at its worst, absolutely none of it felt like this.

None of it filled Nick with dread like this.

He didn’t even know if he was awake or asleep.

Had he been dreaming again? Had that whole thing with the man on the couch just been another dream? He’d been there with Tai, talking to Tai… when suddenly a vampire was there, on Wynter’s couch. That couldn’t have been real.

There was no possible way that had been real.

So was this real now?

Nick focused his eyes with an effort.

He felt himself rise with painful slowness back to full awareness of who and where he was. It felt like swimming for light, like some part of Nick strained for the light after being sunk under a deep, dark ocean. Slowly, painfully slowly, the rest of the living room came into focus. As it did, a pain reached his heart.

This was his house now, too. He lived here. For some reason he couldn’t quite understand, he hadn’t been fully admitting that to himself, but he could feel it. He could feel it all around him as the living room sharpened behind his eyes.

Was he really awake this time?

The plaster-covered ceiling looked right… but it also looked the same as before.