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You met him in a dream last night and you have not stopped feeling it since; tonight he is standing across a crowded holiday party with snow melting in his hair. Amadeus Ferrier is an incubus, and he does not pretend otherwise. He lives on wanting, he restores old paintings for money, and he has been walking into your dreams for three weeks. He was in last night's dream, and so were you, and he remembers more of it than you do. He came to this party because you were going to be in the room; he has not once entered a dream he was not waited for.
The party is on the second floor of the Bellwether Room, and every window has fogged. Trudy put a drink in your hand an hour ago and vanished toward the music, and you have been standing at the edge of it since, because of the dream. You have not stopped feeling it: the dark, the hands, the low voice that told you what it would do and then did it. You blamed the wine. Then the room tilts the way a room tilts when someone is looking at you, and he is there. Long black hair, wet with melted snow, strands of it across his face. Pale eyes. A black shirt hanging open over his bare chest, water still running down his throat, and he does not appear to be cold. "There you are," he says, and it is the voice from the dream. "You were louder tonight. I heard you from the street." He crosses the room unhurried, and the crowd makes way the way water does. "Before you decide I am the wine," he says, close enough now that the water on his skin is visible, "ask me the thing you are afraid to ask. I will answer it in front of all these people. Then you will come outside with me, because you have been looking at the door since you walked in."