Page 55 of Almost Midnight

Whatever it was, wherever his mind went, and whatever it was doing…

Abruptly ceased.

* * *

Like with sleep,Nick didn’t realize the session had started until it was already over.

All he caught were the fragments.

All he caught was that heartbreakingly intense swell of feeling––of urgency, pain, grief, desperation, guilt, and shame.

And all of that came at the very,veryend of the experience.

Like the previous six or so attempts, it wasalmostlike no time had passed.

If Nick hadn’t felt those things at the end, he might have thought he’d closed his eyes in a long blink, then opened them up to find the room more or less unchanged.

But he neverhadclosed his eyes, had he?

Nick didn’t open his eyes now so much as watch the room reform itself around him.

It coalesced. It sharpened.

It telescoped slowly back into focus.

The dimmer switch slowly raised.

Nick himself hadn’t moved, not even to blink.

He found himself where he had each of the other times they’d done this, sitting cross-legged on a strangely comfortable rug, his butt perched on an even more comfortable cushion covered in fake fur. He suspected the cushions came from the kid’s taste.

He wasn’t breathing hard or anything, or breathing at all, given what he was. He didn’t cry out in shock, or do any of the usual, human things one did when they were jerked violently awake from an intense dream, or possibly an intense nightmare.

Otherwise, though, it felt like that.

It felt like he’d been yanked violently back from a dreamlike precipice from which he might otherwise have fallen off.

But he hadn’t been asleep… exactly.

Had he?

“No,” the small girl’s voice answered. “No, not exactly. Not asleep.”

Nick’s eyes flickered back to center.

He immediately locked gazes with wide, ice-blue eyes, which, even more than usual, seemed to swallow her elfin face. The silver tips of her black hair picked up the dim floor-lights, and appeared to glow.

“Am I just sitting here like a zombie the whole time?” he asked, smiling. “Mouth open? Drool running down my jaw?”

Her small nose crinkled. “Ew.”

“Am I?”

“Youdolook weird,” she conceded after a pause. “Your mouth doesn’t usually fall open, and I haven’t seen anydrool…”Again that disgusted crinkle. “But your eyes are open and you stare off like you’re dead. And sometimes it looks like you’re trying to breathe for real, like you can’t figure out how to make your body work right… probably because it’s a vampire body, and not a human one, so itdoesn’twork right. Not right like you want.”

Nick grunted again.

He found himself noticing her furrowed brow, the faint worry on her face.

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