The Bite That Kept Nick Here

The east wing did not give Nick a clean victory. He helped fight through the rats. He helped drive the Night Hag away. For a moment, that should have been enough: survive the wave, break the immediate threat, get back to the others, keep moving through the impossible night inside Queef Tower. But the hag left more than fear behind. Necrotic aftermath clung to the room like a second darkness. Nick had made it through the fight, but his body did not. He fell lifeless after the battle, his soul and mind still present, but the body that had carried him through fire, loss, Walter, the Void Realm, and the masquerade no longer able to keep going on its own. That was when I.J. stopped hiding what she was. Her vampiric nature became the answer no one could pretend was ordinary. It was intimate, frightening, and brutally practical. Nick could be lost, or Nick could be changed. The choice did not come in a calm room with time to prepare. It came in the wreckage of a hag attack, while Rice Hands was being destroyed elsewhere and the estate still rang with murder and panic. I.J. bit him. Nick accepted it. The transformation did not erase him. His mind and soul remained intact. But his body crossed a line it could not uncross, pulled back from lifelessness by undeath instead of healing. What saved him also altered him, tying survival to monstrosity and making his relationship with I.J. part of his new condition. When Nick embraced her afterward, it was not only romance. It was recognition. The masquerade had taken the polished language of masks and turned it inside out. Queef Tower had revealed people by force. In the east wing, Nick was revealed too: no longer only Firestarter, no longer only the man who came back through the Creator's portal, no longer only the one carrying PBJ out of the Void Realm. He was still Nick. But now Nick was undead, and I.J. was the reason he remained in the story at all.