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Aleksy upended the pot. Coffee, hot and black, poured out onto the table. He held it there to make his point, and then returned it to the percolator. With a rag in hand, he took his seat back. "If you see her too often, the world will start changing around you," he said, wiping up the coffee. "I can tell when people have seen her, or been to the other place. I am never out of coffee." He tossed the rag over into the bucket it came from.

"Any questions?"

"I always know," said Aleksy. "At least you still look human. You don't want to know what she looks like to me."

He ruffled the hair at the nape of his neck, sighing. "I don't think she would eat your heart," he said. "I've never seen her eat anything. I'm not even sure she can." But that was besides the point. "She would enforce the... contract. Unfortunate."

"She didn't do that to help you," said Aleksy. "She did that because she gets off on making people afraid."

Though if Jeremiah wanted to assign altruistic motivation to something that was probably more than human, Aleksy wasn't going to fight him too terribly hard. "I hope that's a straightforward promise," he continued, "but I doubt it." He had been raised on Russian mythology, stories of people making unwise deals, and so he had always avoided giving Sunny any kind of foothold on his soul; but others were less lucky, or less superstitious, or... something. "If the children are in the other place, then... I don't think anything could survive there long. Not without becoming something less than human."

Aleksy nodded. "It's here. Once you start to develop powers, you can end up in it at any time. Like... stepping from one room into another." But, like, without the courtesy of a doorway to let you know what you were doing. "The problem is finding a way out," he said. "The only person who can do it without fail is my boyfriend. With a month, I'm sure it could be done, so the children must be... somehow detained."

Aleksy nodded, but his forehead was creased with a frown, lips pressed thin. "You don't want to go there," he said. "Even to find them. You'll just get stuck, too."

Aleksy shook his head more emphatically. "Going in there alone is asking to get dead," he said. "Which benefits no one. I'm sure that that would count as breaking your promise for Sunny's purposes, too." Probably she'd eat his dead heart just as willingly as his live one, if that was a thing.

******** you start having shittier dreams than usual, come talk to me," said Aleksy, crossing his arms and slouching still further into his chair. "'Cause if you're going to see it for true then you're going to be like me. And I'd rather no one else have to deal with this s**t alone, like I did."

"What have you been dreaming about," Aleksy asked, because: there was a difference between nightmares and Ashdown-dreams. He couldn't articulate it, but the change was clear.