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He fed on the other two girls next, the young cousins of the other two.

Nick remembered how they’d tasted.

He remembered how each one of them smelled. He knew their ages, their emotions while that sick fucker drank on them. He remembered the way their faces looked when enough of the vamp’s venom hit their system to make them compliant. He remembered how the youngest one smiled at that piece of shit right before he took his last drink.

The worst part though, was the taste.

They’d tasted good. They’d tasted really fucking good in Nick’s dream.

They’d tasted good enough to that Shadow-fuck to give him an erection, to make him groan while he fed. Nick remembered hearing those groans in his ear. He remembered the enthusiastic sucking and smacking sounds as he drained them down to the marrow.

The sick fuck ate more slowly on the eldest child, the only boy.

He’d been sixteen years old.

By then the vampire had been full from the others, but he still wanted the boy. He still wanted to drain him down to death.

He’d enjoyed the taste of the boy’s fear.

He’d made the boy watch while he consumed his sisters, then his two cousins. He hadn’t venomed him for it. He’d wanted him to watch. He’d gotten off on the boy watching, and by the time the vampire came to him, the poor kid was terrified out of his mind. He couldn’t even scream. He could scarcely breathe.

By the end, Nick had never wanted to kill another creature so badly in his life.

He wanted to erase his brain.

He wanted to scrub it out with bleach.

Fighting away the images and sensations even now, he closed his eyes, choking back a wave of nausea. The nausea wrapped into his rage, blinding him to the room.

Jesus Christ.

He knew the feeling of revulsion, of horror, was maybe less vampire than the other feelings he felt in those dreams. Maybe those more human feelings were even as delusional as the Stranger seemed to think.

They didn’t feel delusional to Nick, though.

They felt a lot more like the real him than the other.

He never, ever, wanted to base his sense of self or identity on those baser, more animal impulses. He didn’t give a damn if it was “more vampire” or not. Both sets of feelings still felt like Nick, and part of being alive meant having a choice.

He chose to be the better parts of himself.

He chose not to succumb to that grosser, easier version of life.

Still, as much as he hated it, Nick felt both things inside himself. He knew he couldn’t dismiss the vampire part of his nature entirely. All he could really do is hope to channel it in less sociopathic ways. He could try to use it for good.

Just like a human.

Humans had some pretty nasty sides to themselves too, after all.

The realization was both comforting and disturbing to the point of unease. But Nick’s core beliefs remained. He refused to believe that a less-conscious part of himself that acted like a rabid animal was somehow more “authentic” than the parts of Nick that gave a damn about other beings. That might be true of that evil fuck, but it wasn’t true of Nick.

Not yet, at least.

The fact that he could still feel that, that he could still get overwhelmed by disgust at the thought of feeding on children, of being turned on by young blood… it was enough to snap him out of comparing himself to the male vampire who had done this.

It also helped to pull Nick out of that fugue of the dream.

It reminded him that, dream or no, it hadn’t been Nick who’d done this.