What I kept remembering felt like the aftermath of a war, where courageous medics fought to save a dying soldier, with the grim air of people who knew they were laboring in a lost cause. The frantic voices, the running feet, the excruciating pain had all said as much, even before Agnes’ harsh comment. Yet here I was, looking, if not normal, at least no worse than I had plenty of times before.

What the hell had happened?

It wasn’t a stranger’s hand that gripped mine, but one with a pattern of calluses so familiar that I could have mapped them in my sleep. But that couldn’t be right. I must be dreaming.

You’re not real, are you? I thought, my fingers moving in that familiar hold. Just another of the tricks the brain plays on us as we lay dying. To smooth the transition—

“You’re not going to die.”

It wasn’t a whisper that time, and the voice was instantly familiar. And so loved, so wished for, that it made me doubt myself. “Pritkin?”

There was no response, at least, not in language. But something was happening. The hand covering mine guided it downward, to where a wound on my hip was a searing white flame. We pressed into it, and it hurt, a blinding flash of agony like nothing I’d ever experienced—for a moment.

But then it began to cool, and as it cooled, it contracted. I felt it shrink beneath my fingertips, growing smaller and smaller until it was gone. With nothing left behind but soft skin shivering under that familiar touch.

The hand smoothed back and forth over my new flesh for a moment, as if in as much disbelief as I was. Then it moved upward again, guiding me to a line of deep burns down the middle of my stomach. They hurt, too, but not like before. The pain was distant now, a vague background noise, his touch acting like the best kind of drug.

“Am I doing this right?” he asked, as rough, torn flesh knitted back together, smoothed out, and was made anew.

“Don’t you know?”

“No. I’ve never done it before.”

I frowned. “Then how are you doing it now?”

“I’m borrowing an ability from the vampire. He knows how to heal.”

“I didn’t think that worked for me. My hand—”

“Not everything is automatic. Some abilities must be called for.”

“And you know how to do that?”

“I am learning.”

I snapped out of another memory, my limbs shaking and my throat swallowing convulsively, because that hadn’t felt like one. I knew memories and I knew visions, and what I kept experiencing was something in between. As if someone was prompting me to remember, which… yeah.