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THE DREAM

N ick didn’t always sleep.

As a vampire, he didn’t have the same relationship to sleep as a human, or a seer, for that matter. When he’d been a newborn, a newborn vampire, that is, he’d thought vampires didn’t sleep at all, that maybe they even couldn’t sleep. Now he knew better.

Still, he didn’t sleep a lot.

He tended to sleep the most with Jem. He sometimes slept without his mate, but the vast majority of the time, he engaged in what he thought of as “sympathetic” sleep. His mate slept, so Nick would go with him to that unconscious, dream-filled place.

That has started back when… well, back at the very beginning.

Nick had no idea why he’d fallen asleep this time.

Maybe he’d been thinking about his mate again.

He’d definitely been waiting for him, and maybe Jem had fallen asleep on the plane, so Nick had gone down with him. Black dismissed Nick from the last meeting so he could focus on Holo and Alisha, who’d be handling the tech and medical side of their trip to Prometharis. Nick would be on security. He’d also possibly help them control Gorren and any other implanted humans shielded from the seers, if pushes didn’t work on them.

Black was fairly certain pushes didn’t work on Gorren.

Either way, Nick’s role was pretty straightforward, so he went to their old apartment in Black’s building, and stretched out on the couch to wait for Jem.

He didn’t have time to go home, which was a bummer.

He wanted to go pick up his dog. He wanted to introduce her to Panther, see if the two of them got on as well as he thought they would. In the end Nick called their neighbor, Bill, and asked if he would mind using his key to go in and feed her, and to take her for a few walks, or at least let her go out in the backyard.

Once he knew the dog was being cared for, Nick came here, to the old apartment.

He’d lived here for a while before he got turned into a vampire.

He’d shared the apartment with Jem for a short time, too. That was before they bought the house, obviously, while things were still pretty new, but after the group had more or less accepted him again, and after Angel got tired of him and Jem sleeping in her spare bedroom, and particularly tired of Solonik screaming bloody murder from her garage.

They hadn’t lived here for almost a year now. It no longer felt like home, but Nick still snuck in here occasionally when he wanted a break.

He folded his hands on his chest, and blanked his mind.

If he’d thought anything, it was that he’d lie there and meditate for a few minutes, calm himself down before Black’s private plane landed at SFO and the helicopter or one of Black’s company cars brought Jem back to the city.

Jem had never called him from New York.

Something was wrong.

Something was wrong, and Nick didn’t know what it was.

It was one thing for the seer to be angry with him.

They fought sometimes, absolutely. They’d had drag-down, full-blown shouting matches. Nick had slept on the couch, and there had been at least one night when Jem didn’t come home. But usually, they didn’t do that. Usually, they laughed and went to the beach and went hiking. And the few times they had done it, it was short-lived, only ever lasting the one night. The next day, both were apologetic. They talked, worked it out, and they made up.

Whatever was going on now, it felt more serious.

They hadn’t spoken at all since Jem more or less accused Nick of screwing around on him, on a night Nick spent dealing with his psychotic sire, and falling in love with a stray dog. The idea that he could’ve been out prowling for sex was so damned bizarre, Nick had trouble even taking it seriously. He wasn’t even insulted exactly. He was baffled.

Jem was usually the more even-tempered of the two.

Nick could admit that. He was the hot-head.

He was the paranoid one. He was more prone to bouts of insecurity.

Jem was usually the calm one, the less explosive one, the less reactive one, the one who felt utterly confident about who they were to one another. He had his days, sure, but his were fewer and Jem was usually more self-aware. And he never held onto his anger for long. Jem didn’t hold grudges, or seethe with resentment, or keep score.

But this… whatever the fuck this was… seemed to contain elements of all those things.

Nick’s more paranoid and self-absorbed thoughts made it about him, about them, about something the seer could no longer stomach about Nick being a vampire.

But the reality was, Nick didn’t know what the fuck was wrong.

He had no idea what changed, what he’d done, why Jem seemed so angry and short-tempered with him all of a sudden. He didn’t know what was making Jem act differently, or even what that difference consisted of exactly.

He’d tried to make sense of it, in his own, logic-based way.

His mind struggled to put words around it.

Volatile.

No… changing.

He wouldn’t be volatile.

He wouldn’t be strange.

And then he would be.

He’d be the regular Jem, the, at times, maddeningly Zen, weirdly accepting fucker Nick first got to know in Russia. Then he would change suddenly, out of nowhere, and with no specific trigger Nick could work out.

Once it happened while they were in the middle of sex.

Nick had been on the verge of a damned orgasm, when Jem abruptly stopped what he was doing, and without a fucking word, he’d gotten up from the bed, got dressed, and just… walked out. He’d disappeared for hours. He fucking walked right out of the house.

Nick never did get an explanation out of him, or any information about where Jem had gone after that. Weirder still, Jem seemed confused by the question. He’d told Nick he was crazy, that he hadn’t gone anywhere, that he must have been in the next room… which was not only bullshit, it was intensely weird bullshit.

Their house across from Ocean Beach, while huge compared to any other place Nick had ever lived, including when he was a kid, wasn’t that big. Not only that, Nick could smell him. He could smell him intensely, unmistakably, even compared to most seers.

Another time, they’d been at Jem’s favorite brunch place in the Lower Haight. Again, Jem had simply gotten up and left, no explanation.

Nick thought he’d gone to the bathroom at first, and waited.

And waited.

And fucking waited.

He sat there for nearly two hours before he realized his mate wasn’t coming back.

When Jem got home, some six hours later, he again acted like he’d done nothing at all strange, or fucked up, or wrong… or even mildly rude.

The one that really tipped Nick over the edge, however, had been when they’d been night surfing, something they both liked to do. Not only had Jem gotten out of the water without telling Nick what he was doing, he’d fucking left Nick there, all the way down at the Santa Cruz Lighthouse, some ninety minutes from their place in San Francisco.

When Jem returned to their house that afternoon, it was like every other time.

No explanation. No apology for fucking leaving him there, and with all of their gear, including both surfboards and the wetsuit Jem apparently just shucked off in the lot and left on the asphalt by their car. It was fucking unbelievable.

Nick ended up having to call Kiko.

He hadn’t wanted to. He’d wanted to handle it privately, just with Jem.

But when he walked to the nearest big hotel he could find in town, and tried to get them to call a rental car company to come get him at two in the morning, they’d basically laughed in his face. So in the end, he’d been forced to call Kiko, or risk the rest of the California Street building knowing what had happened, including Miri and Black.

Having to explain to just Kiko was humiliating enough, not that she hadn’t been cool about it. Her reaction to Jem’s behavior was to be worried about Jem––versus being smug about Nick being treated like garbage by the guy who’d thrown her over, or smug because Nick was the piece of shit who nearly killed her while he was a newborn vampire, or relieved she’d made a narrow escape from both of them.

However much Kiko might still harbor some resentment towards Jem or Nick or both of them, she knew Jem.

She knew it wasn’t like him to do something like that.

In the end, Nick had to talk her down from putting out some kind of company-wide bulletin to find his fucking mate. He ended up having to tell her, again with some embarrassment, that it wasn’t the first time Jem had done something like that to him recently.

He also asked if she’d keep it to herself for now.

Talking to Jem himself, when he’d finally returned to the house, had been as much of a waste of time as every other one of Jem’s bizarre disappearing acts. Jem acted surprised Nick hadn’t known he’d gone. He acted surprised Nick “felt he’d left him there,” like that was just some subjective feeling Nick had about what happened. Jem acted like Nick was the crazy one; he accused Nick of having a temper tantrum because Jem left early.

Nick fought to get mad about it, to get mad at Jem.

He wasn’t mad, though, not if he was being honest with himself.

He was fucking worried.

Maybe not for the same reasons Kiko had been that night, but he was definitely worried.

He even wondered if Jem had something physically wrong with him. A brain tumor? Did seers get those? Was it some kind of early-onset Alzheimers? Did seers get that? Was there some seer-specific disease Nick knew nothing about?

Fuck, was it something he had done to Jem?

Did it have something to do with him feeding on Jem, as part of their fucking kink with one another? Had he somehow poisoned his mate? The thought worried him a lot. He’d been worried about something like that happening pretty much from the beginning of his relationship with Jem, but Jem always insisted Nick’s venom didn’t affect him like that, and from what Nick had seen, that had been true.

Even now, Jem wasn’t acting like a vampire venom addict.

Nick had seen venom addicts, and they didn’t act like this.

Hell, they acted pretty much the opposite of whatever this was.

A venom addict would sooner stab themselves in the eye than leave “their” vampire anywhere, particularly in a way that might risk that vampire’s health. They would never do anything to risk their relationship with the vampire whose venom they’d grown addicted to, or even risk offending them, not if they could possibly help it. Venom addicts were obnoxiously submissive. They were hyper-focused on their partner’s every mood, whim, word, facial expression. Really, they acted more like slaves.

Whatever was going on with Jem, it sure as fuck didn’t look like that.

Nick had just made up his mind to talk to Miri about it, and probably Black, too, since Black knew a lot more about seers and their quirks, when Black sent Jem to New York.

He probably should’ve talked to them, anyway, while Jem was still on the East Coast, but then they’d found that girl, and everything else got sidelined while they tore Rucker’s place apart and Miri spent the rest of the day babysitting their new charge.

Nick was still thinking about when he should try to pull Miri aside…

When he must have fallen asleep.

J ust like when he was human, Nick didn’t know he’d been asleep until something woke him up.

Unlike when he was human, it was harder for Nick to wake up as a vampire.

Maybe he got more disoriented because of that.

Maybe he was slower on the uptake, too.

He was definitely easier to throw off balance.

That was doubly true when he woke up smelling seer all around him.

It was even more true when that seer felt familiar, and safe.

For all of those reasons, and maybe a few more, it took him a few seconds longer than it should have to connect his being awake to his very hard cock, the realization he wasn’t alone, that this wasn’t a dream. There were hands on him, actual physical hands. His mind immediately went to Jem. It took him a few seconds longer to realize there was something off with those hands, even as he realized they were undressing him.

Then, all at once, he was awake.

He was really awake.

He sat up sharply, moving so fast, his upper body was erect before those thoughts had meaningfully gelled. He stared down at a pair of blue-green eyes, a soft but nearly heart-shaped face, small pale hands that had already unfastened most of his shirt and unbuckled his belt. She had her hand on his cock and he was horrified to realize he was hard, that he hadn’t dreamed that part, and he still hadn’t moved away––maybe in shock, maybe in some lingering hope he was dreaming, that something would indicate for certain that none of this was real.

She smiled at him, eyes liquid and pupils black, and something finally jolted him out of whatever the fuck had paralyzed him.

“Jesus fuck…”

He blurted the words out as he threw himself up and backwards. He half-vaulted over the armrest of the couch and fell over the other side, in what was maybe the least dignified thing he’d done physically since becoming a vampire.

He crawled backwards as she moved, snake-like, towards the same armrest to peer over at him on the hardwood floor. He was breathing too hard, now dazed, and staring up at her… at the face of a seer child … feeling like he would probably be throwing up if he had the physical constitution of a seer or a human.

As it was, he felt sick, disturbed, revolted.

He crawled backwards, his eyes on her warily.

Once he was back far enough, in his muddled mind, at least, he flipped over and got back to his feet. He immediately began to button up his shirt. He had it done up and was shoving it back into his pants and buckling his belt as he continued to back away.

“How the fuck did you get in here?” he growled.

She didn’t speak.

She watched him with those shocking, blue and green eyes, eyes that were somehow both older and younger than they should be. Something about the way she looked at him made him feel like he was losing his mind. It wasn’t only the blown-out pupils, which were disturbing enough on a damned child… no, there was something familiar in that look.

She stared at him like she knew him.

Worse, she looked openly hurt, even heartbroken, by his rejection.