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He needed to know where she was. Even though he told himself he was better off not knowing, he still wanted to know. He knew it wasn’t safe. Given how the Stranger seemed to have some twisted window into Nick’s mind, it wasn’t safe at all. Nick knew that. He’d known it instinctively, even before he got more evidence that it was true. It’s why he told the kid to go away with Wynter without telling him where they landed.

Even with all that, Nick wasn’t sure how long he would be able to stay away from her.

He at least needed some definite assurances she was all right.

He couldn’t ask Morley about it.

He couldn’t ask St. Maarten without being overheard on the comms.

The only way to deal with it now was to go to the River of Gold in person. He needed to talk to St. Maarten in person, find out where she’d hidden them away.

Because St. Maarten knew. Of course she knew.

Truthfully, Lara was the only person Nick knew forcertainwould have precise knowledge about exactly where his wife was, and who she was with.

Shoving the thought out of his mind with an effort, Nick glanced gazed out the half-fogged windows at the East River as they passed over on the Williamsburg Bridge. It struck him as strange, not for the first time in the past few weeks, that just about everything would be named the same on this world and on the world where he grew up.

How was that even possible?

How and when had these worlds branched off from one another?

Or did they really spring up along similar trajectories out of whole cloth?

Either explanation made his head hurt.

Then again, he didn’t know exactly when the parallel histories diverged. Maybe they hadn’t discovered vampires on this world until much later than they did on Nick’s… or maybe they’d discovered them centuries earlier.

Thinking about that, he frowned.

Maybe that was the difference.

Black had done something, hadn’t he? Something to make everyone forget?

Nick fought to think, to remember.

He couldn’t remember, though.

Tai’s seer brother, Mal, told Nick that his memory would likely come back now that he was with Wynter again. Mal didn’t seem to have any idea what the timeline would be for that. Days, months, years… decades. But the odd, cheerfully confident, prescient seer with the mismatched eyes seemed to think it was inevitable now.

Nick would remember the large segments of his life he had previously erased.

Eventually.

He shook that off, too.

He needed to find this fucker. They needed to stop him, now.

Nick couldn’t go near his mate until that happened.

Especially not with this many eyes watching him.

He refocused on the windshield as they descended from the bridge and into Brooklyn.

More than any other borough perhaps, this part of the New York Protected Area struck Nick as utterly surreal. Brooklyn itself was strange. Queens was stranger. Apart from a dense, brightly-lit corridor of shops, restaurants, clubs, and arenas, serviced by the train from Manhattan, most of the land mass had been allowed to fall back into swamp and wasteland.

The area that started roughly where Brooklyn and Queens ended, which everyone had just gone back to calling “Long Island” was possibly the strangest of them all. From the last train stop at Belmont all the way to the Hamptons out by the edge of the dome, most of the land had been allowed to go back to pure wilderness.

The houses that remained were huge.