Sleep did not restore Andi. As a nightshift nurse, she considered herself a connoisseur of sleep—a sleep sommelier. She knew precisely the right drugs to take, the right temperature to keep her room, and the right weight of blinds and blindfolds—all the better to help her rest, but for the past week, everything in her dreams had been betraying her. She kept running down long hallways chased by something she couldn’t understand, and that was bad enough, but worse than that…she was painfully alone. In her dreams, there was no one coming to save her—only more nightmares hunting her down.
She got a glimpse of the thing chasing her once. It looked like a skinless dog, all glistening muscles and white bone. It was huge like Damian’s wolf friends had been, only her skinless-dream-one seemed endlessly cruel. Her dream-self was smart enough to realize that there was no true way she could ever outrun it, that it had to be just fucking with her, but it wouldn’t stop, and she was still too scared to turn around. She woke up before her alarm at six p.m., gasping for air, all of her penguin-covered cotton sheets kicked to the floor.
It…this…wasn’t like her. She sat up in bed, panting like she’d run a marathon.
What the hell was wrong?
Andi looked at herself in the narrow, full-length mirror balanced against her wall. All the bruises from her wild night with Damian had faded—which was good. She did not want to explain anything remotely like that to her uncle. But there was still the slightly darker welt beneath her left breast, from where a monster’s Unearthly blood had burned her, and she thought that it might scar. Between that and the bruises she had on the inside…she shook her head. It wasn’t every day you were almost killed repeatedly, witnessed the utter destruction and then magical renewal of your workplace, and had the best sex of your life before having to dump the dragon responsible for it all before he could dump you…again. What it was, was whiplash, and maybe all of her crazy dreams were like an emotional concussion.
She got out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom. Maybe she should try to take some time off and be nicer to herself. After all, as a nurse, she could make a very convincing sick call. And then she could try and relax and eat too much ice cream, watching Netflix with Sammy.
But she was too used to working nights, and Sammy had a day job at a garage—which meant that come three a.m., she’d be alone again.
Just like she was every day—or night, rather—and just like she was in her dreams.
Andi frowned and turned the shower on.
Andi talked herself through the rest of her “morning”—everyone else’s evening time—until she emerged from her room looking like someone who you might entrust with your loved one’s well-being on a nightshift, as long as you didn’t know that they thought that dragons were real because they’d seen one.
“Hot date?” Sammy teased from her position on the couch. Her red curls were sproinged every which way, and she was kicked back with a bag of chips, watching yet another true-crime documentary. Andi’d had to tell her some of what’d happened to her last week, minus the monsters and bloodshed. Sammy’d been faintly horrified that they’d had sex inside of a Pagani, and when she’d told Andi how expensive a car it was, Andi’d been horrified too. And while Sammy didn’t understand exactly why Andi wouldn’t keep seeing a billionaire who drove one—more enthused about the car than the man, of course—she was always team Andi, no matter what.
“What? No. Oh, no.” Andi spread her hands down the relatively nice blouse she’d put on for dinner tonight. It wasn’t the dress her uncle had sent her to wear, but that dress had gone home in Damian’s car, which was just as well—she was absolutely sure there’d be no saving the silk after everything they’d done. “Just my uncle.”
As she said it, the door to the apartment rang, and her stomach fluttered. Sammy bounced for the door before she could move—frozen to the spot—and she was both relieved and disappointed to see the man in a driver’s livery standing outside. Definitely not…anyone else who might want to take her somewhere in a fancy car.
She followed the much shorter, much rounder, and very much more human man downstairs and let him open the door up to his car for her before sliding inside.
It felt strange to be driven somewhere again without an app involved. She was sure her uncle’s current accommodations would be nice. She’d never known him to scrimp on himself, but she couldn’t help but feel the same hackles rise as she’d felt being driven by Damian. Who got to live like this? Who just sent people cars…and dresses!...and why? She wanted to believe that her uncle was motivated by love, and Lord knew he’d supported her and Danny enough in all sorts of ways through her childhood, but he was like a bad cat—he never came when you called him. So Andi had gotten used to not calling.
But thinking of calls, her phone beeped. She pulled it out as the driver swept onto the highway, and she saw Damian’s last name flash on the screen. Her traitorous heart skipped a beat, and she thought about asking the driver to go somewhere else entirely—to a castle, where a dragon lived—when she opened her phone, and the message came through.
I need my coat back.
Andi blinked.
Of course, he’d just messaged her a demand. Not even a “hey” or “how’s it going” or a “yo.”
Damian could buy a hundred million coats if he wanted them. So why on earth would he need the specific one he’d given her? And that she’d then bartered to Julian? She frowned at the phone as her stomach churned; she had the familiar feeling that she’d done something wrong. But because she couldn’t put her finger on precisely what it’d been, she swallowed her anxiety down and concentrated on being pissed at Damian.
“Warm enough, miss?” the driver asked, looking back in the rearview mirror, smiling at her with a gap-toothed grin.
Andi sank back into the car, gripping on to the phone. “Yeah. Thanks. I’m fine,” she said.
She turned the phone over and stared at his message. He didn’t deserve a response, but she was going to give him one.
She typed back a single word: No.
Andi frowned deeply at the phone. Why was every man in her life an asshole? She was smart enough to know about lowest common denominators, but she’d never gotten to pick her relatives—so that part, at least, wasn’t her fault.
But Damian had been. A mistake—such a mistake!—and his rude text to her only proved it.
Andi bit her lips and looked outside. He’d looked so…so…anguished when she’d left him. Like she was truly hurting him—a dragon! And she’d spent this intervening week feeling bad about that, because if there was something going on in her life that she possibly could feel bad about, her subconscious was on it, going after her with an internal microphone, shouting, “Remember that time when?” at the least opportune moments.
Now though, after his text—Andi glanced down at her phone again—why had she even bothered? He clearly hadn’t been worried about her in the least.