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Click. Breathe.
    I stared at his small, white hands, sheathed in wires. I looked at my own hands. There was no resemblance.
    “Is it you?”
    He opened his eyes. They were the color of dirty ice, with a flare of violet around the pinned pupil.
    He smiled.
    “Tessa Isobel.”
    “What are you doing in my dream?”
    My father’s smile widened. “What are you doing in mine?”
    I pointed at the monitors. “Are you dying?”
    “I’ve been dying for almost seven hundred years.”
    “If you need someone to pull the plug, just let me know.”
    He chuckled. “You haven’t got the nerve.”
    “Oh, I’ve got the nerve. I’ll do it right now.”
    “Go ahead.”
    I started unplugging random cords. I flicked off machines. I pressed every red button on every monitor. The numbers flickered and died.
    My father didn’t.
    “You see? You can’t do it.”
    “That’s not fair.”
    He touched my hand. His fingers were warm. Feverish.
    “You tried, though. That’s what counts.”
    I stared at him. A thousand kill-sites revolved within his eyes. Fire gathered within them. I felt it on my face. I took it into my lungs, and it seared all the way down like bourbon, eradicating me cell by cell.
    “I’m going to find you,” I said.
    His hand was soft and gracile in my own. Almost liquid.
    I looked down, and there was nothing but blood, a spreading, silent pool of blood on the bedsheets.
    His face rose out of the stain, like hot wax.
    You are, the blood said. You are going to find me.
    3
    I woke up disoriented, like something had taken me apart during the night and put me back together all wrong. The comforter and sheets were lying in a tangle on the floor, and my pillow was nowhere to be found. I guess that’s what happens when you’re wrestling with demons in your sleep. Particularly demonic relations.
    I never knew my real father. I’d seen him in visions and dreams, a dark, penumbral presence, like a piece of black sky torn from the middle of a storm. La tormenta, in Spanish. Hah. I was learning.
    Sometimes Lucian called me la tormentita, his little storm.
    Kevin Corday was the father I’d known since I could remember anything. Twenty-six years ago he was just a stranger on his way home at night, taking a shortcut through Oppenheimer Park. He found my mother lying unconscious, bloody and broken. He brought her to the hospital, and from that moment onward, he was always a part of our lives. Even then, I was a tiny seed growing inside of her, the product of a violent assault. My mother said she didn’t remember anything about that night, except for Kevin holding her hand in the hospital room and, afterward, the pain of recovery.
    But I wasn’t so sure. I can’t see how you could forget something like that.
    And in my vision, she’d recognized him. My “real” father. She’d stared into his ancient, reptilian eyes, and she’d known him.
    I could see her, holding her athame with its pearl hilt. Standing before the creature who’d nearly torn her apart years ago, numb to her screams.
    You won’t see her. As long as I live, you won’t ever know her.
    But that promise couldn’t be kept anymore. I needed to know him, to know it, the pureblood demon who’d sired me. He was in my dreams more and more, whispering from some dark, wrecked place within my mind. He could see me. Like a tourist from another world, he was watching me fumble and fall down and try to get through each day without having a complete mental breakdown. And he was enjoying himself, disporting himself and taking his pleasures.
    If he was going to reach out and meddle with my life from another world, at the very least I’d get some answers from him.
    Of course. All you have to do is find him, and figure out a way not to get killed while doing it. Simple as putting together furniture. Connect h-bolt to c, and then shoot yourself in the head, because it’ll hurt far less than what he might do to you.
    I stood up. The blinds were half-closed, and