I slept through the night on Wednesday.

I didn’t notice at first. I just woke up to my alarm, which never happened, because I was always awake long before it. I lay there blinking at the ceiling in the grey dawn light, feeling strange and heavy and rested, and couldn’t work out what was wrong.

Then I realised. No nightmare. No gasping awake at three in the morning with my heart slamming and my sheets soaked. No lying in the dark until dawn.

I’d just slept.

I told myself it was a fluke. Exhaustion catching up with me. Then I slept through on Thursday too. And Friday. And Saturday. By Sunday, I’d had five full nights in a row for the first time since that winter, and I’d stopped being able to pretend I didn’t know why.

Your nightmares smell very loud.

On Sunday night I lay in bed in the dark and stared at the ceiling, and didn’t let myself fall asleep.

It was hard. My flat was warm and quiet, my body was heavy, and for once my head wasn’t full of things I didn’t want to think about. But I pinched the inside of my wrist every time my eyes started to close. I counted the cracks in the ceiling in the orange glow from the streetlight. I listened.

At ten past three, I heard it.

A soft, dry whisper of a sound. Like something heavy sliding very carefully over floorboards. It came from beneath me.

Then my bed creaked. Just slightly. As if something underneath it had settled its weight.

I lay perfectly still.

The silence went on for a long time. Then a low, deep sound rose up through the mattress. I felt it more than heard it. A slow, steady rumble, like a cat purring in another room.

It was humming.

I rolled over, very slowly, onto my stomach. I edged across the mattress until my face was right at the edge. Then I let my head hang down over the side, upside down, my hair brushing the floor, and looked into the dark beneath my bed.

Two huge golden eyes looked back at me.

They went very wide.

“Hi,” I said.

The humming stopped dead.

There was a long, frozen pause. Then that low, gravel-deep voice came out of the dark, sounding absolutely mortified.

“You were supposed to be asleep.”

“I noticed.” I propped my chin on my folded arms, upside down. “Five nights, Vesper.”

“I know.”

“You’ve been in my flat for five nights.”

“Under it,” he said. “Technically.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. His eyes narrowed in the dark. Embarrassed, I thought.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have asked. I just— I could smell them. Your nightmares. From across the city. Every night since the storm.” A long, rumbling breath. “They were so loud, Ivy. I couldn’t sleep for the noise of them. I kept lying in the dark, thinking about you lying awake alone. And on Wednesday I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

“How did you even find me?”

“I followed the smell. We can move through the dark under things. From one bed to the next. Like stepping through a door.” A pause. “It’s my first time doing it. Properly. I ended up under your neighbour’s bed first.”

“Mrs Petrakis?”

“She snores,” he said darkly. “And she dreams about her late husband’s moustache.”

I laughed so hard I nearly fell off the bed.

When I’d calmed down, I hung there upside down, looking at the glowing eyes in the dark. My face was warm, and not just from the blood rushing to my head.

“What do they taste like?” I asked. “My nightmares.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Bitter,” he said. “Like burnt coffee. Like cold metal.” His voice went low. “The boy’s taste like wet socks and closing doors. Yours taste like something that hurt you a very long time ago, and never stopped.”

My throat went tight.

“I won’t ask,” he said gently. “I don’t need to know. I just want them gone.”

I didn’t trust myself to speak. So I let my arm hang down over the side of the bed instead, my hand open, fingers trailing towards the floor. Into the dark.

The golden eyes went very still.

Then, slowly, something reached out of the shadows. A huge, long-fingered hand. I couldn’t see it properly. Just the faint grey shape of it in the streetlight, and the gleam of curved claws. It stopped a breath away from my fingers.

It was shaking. Just slightly.

“I’ve never touched anyone,” Vesper said, very quietly. “Not like this. Only blankets. Only to tuck them in.”

“Then touch me,” I said.

His fingertip brushed mine.

It was warm. That surprised me. I’d expected him to be cold, like a shadow. But his skin was warm and dry and faintly rough, like a cat’s tongue. He turned his hand over, slowly, and laid my hand in his palm.

It swallowed mine whole. His fingers were longer than my entire hand.

We stayed like that for a long time. Me hanging off the side of the bed, my hand resting in his in the dark, both of us breathing. I could feel his pulse in his palm. Fast. Faster than mine.

“Come up,” I said at last.

He went rigid. “What?”

“Out from under the bed. Come up here.”

“I can’t. The streetlight—”

I reached up over my head without letting go of his hand and yanked the curtain fully closed. The thin orange glow vanished. The room went black. Properly, completely black, so dark I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face.

“Now you can,” I said.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then the bed creaked.

I felt him come up out of the dark. It was like feeling a wave rise. The mattress dipped and dipped again as his weight came onto it, more and more, until the whole frame groaned and I rolled helplessly towards the middle. Something huge and warm settled along the length of my body. I felt the heat of him. The size of him. His breath, warm and faintly sweet, stirring my hair.

He was enormous. I couldn’t see any of him. But I could feel him filling the bed, curling around me, careful not to touch.

“Ivy,” he said. From right beside my ear.

I reached for him in the dark.

My fingers found something smooth and warm. His chest, I thought. Broad and hard and faintly furred, like the softest velvet, rising and falling fast beneath my palm. I felt him go utterly still under my touch. I felt his heart. It was hammering.

“You’re scared,” I whispered.

“Yes.”

“Of me?”

“Of doing it wrong.” His voice was rough. “I’ve watched people through the walls. On the television. I’ve read the books people keep under their beds, the ones with the shirtless men on the cover.” A short, mortified pause. “I’ve never done any of it. I don’t know how to touch you so you’ll want it.”

Something went warm and soft in my chest.

“Then I’ll show you,” I said. “Give me your hand.”

He gave it to me. I lifted it, careful of the claws, and laid it on my body.

His palm covered my whole stomach. Hip to hip, ribs to the waistband of my sleep shorts. The heat of it sank right through my thin cotton singlet. I felt him draw in a sharp breath at the feel of me.

“You’re so soft,” he whispered. “You’re so warm.”

I moved his hand up. Slowly. Over my ribs. Until his palm cupped my breast through the cotton. His thumb was bigger than my whole nipple. When it brushed across it, I gasped out loud in the dark.

He froze. “Was that—”

“Good,” I said breathlessly. “That was good. Again.”

He did it again. Then again. Slow and careful and curious, learning the shape of me, listening to every sound I made. He couldn’t see me any more than I could see him. So he learned me by sound. By touch. By the hitch of my breath and the arch of my back. And by scent — I heard him breathe in deep, against my throat, and make a low, wondering sound.

“You smell different,” he murmured. “When I touch you there. Sweeter.”

My face burned in the dark. “That’s— yes. That happens.”

“I like it.” He breathed in again, his nose trailing slowly down the side of my neck. “I like it much better than your nightmares.”

I laughed, shaky and breathless. Then I pulled my singlet off over my head and threw it somewhere into the black.

He made a sound like I’d struck him.

I took his hand again and laid it on my bare skin.

After that, he didn’t need much showing.

He touched me everywhere. Slow and reverent and hungry, his huge warm hands sliding over my bare breasts, my ribs, my belly. His claws grazed my skin so lightly that I shivered all over. He found my nipples with the pads of his thumbs and rolled them until I was squirming. When I arched up into him, he made a deep, rumbling, helpless sound and did it again.

Then I felt his breath move lower.

His face. Somewhere in the dark, his face was moving down my body. I felt the warmth of his breath across my sternum. My stomach. The edge of my sleep shorts. He stopped there, breathing hard, and I felt the scrape of something across my hip — teeth, I realised, or the edge of a jaw, long and strange and nothing like a man’s.

“Can I—” he asked hoarsely.

“Yes.”

I shoved my shorts down and kicked them away. And then his mouth was on me.

I cried out into the dark.

His tongue was long. Much longer than any human’s. Warm and slick and impossibly agile, and it moved over me slow and wondering, as if he were tasting something he’d been hungry for his whole life. It slid along the whole length of me. It curled. It found my clit and circled it, once, twice, and my hips came right off the bed. He held them down with one hand. One hand, spread across both my hips.

“There,” I gasped. “Vesper, there—”

He stayed there. He learned exactly what I liked, the way he’d learned everything else that night — by listening. When I moaned, he did more. When I whimpered, he slowed down. When I clutched at him in the dark, my fingers sliding over warm velvet and the hard ridge of what might have been a horn, he growled against me, deep enough that I felt it in my spine.

Then his tongue slid lower. And pressed inside me.

It went deep. Deeper than I’d thought a tongue could go. Warm and thick and curling, filling me, moving inside me with a slow, rolling stroke that made me see sparks in the pitch black. I lost all sense of anything but the feel of it. The heat. The long, slow, relentless stroke of him inside me, and the brush of his breath across my clit with every one.

I came so hard I screamed. Right into the dark. My thighs locked around his head and my whole body shook, and he didn’t stop, didn’t let go, kept stroking me through every wave of it until I was sobbing and pushing weakly at his head.

He drew back. Slowly.

For a long time, the only sound in the room was my ragged breathing. And his.

Then I felt him rise back up the length of my body. He curled himself around me, huge and warm, and drew me into his arms. His chest was hot against my back. His heart was racing. One enormous hand spread over my belly, holding me close.

“Did I—” he began.

“Yes,” I said, before he could finish. My voice came out wrecked. “Yes. Gods, Vesper. Yes.”

I felt him laugh. A deep, rumbling, astonished sound that shook the bed.

I lay in his arms in the dark. I could feel his body all along mine — the strange, vast shape of him that I couldn’t see. The velvet fur. The ridges and the long limbs and the faint scrape of claws against my hip. And I wanted, suddenly and fiercely, to see him. Just once. Just to know what had held me like this.

My hand drifted towards the lamp on my bedside table.

His hand caught my wrist.

Gently. So gently. But very, very firmly.

“Please,” he said. “Not the light.”

I lay still. His hand stayed wrapped around my wrist in the dark. I could feel his heart hammering again against my spine. Not with want, this time.

With fear.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I just wanted to see you.”

“I know.” His voice was very quiet. “That’s what frightens me.”

He didn’t let go of my wrist until I fell asleep. And for the first time in years, I didn’t dream at all.