Dead and Horny 3
Copyright© 2026 by Annabelle Hawthorne
Chapter 12: Singularity
Erotica Sex Story: Chapter 12: Singularity - When Dana was killed and resurrected by a necromancer, she didn't know what to expect. She didn't expect to be handed a list of magical items that might cure her if she can find them. She definitely didn't expect the house succubus to come along to service her dangerous needs. And she definitely didn't expect to go head to head with an international organization dedicated to keeping magic out of human hands. One's dead, the other's horny. Expect the Unexpected.
Caution: This Erotica Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Fa/Fa Consensual Lesbian BiSexual Heterosexual Fiction Fairy Tale Horror Humor Mystery Time Travel Paranormal Magic non-anthro Vampires Were animal Demons Anal Sex Analingus Cream Pie Double Penetration Masturbation Oral Sex Violence
The house groaned as the gravity in the room shifted. Ingrid slid across the floor toward the far wall away from the painting, keeping her eyes squeezed tight as she did so. Somewhere up above her, she could hear the tearing of fabric and a whooshing sound that reminded her of the ocean. Ingrid slid against the wall and opened her eyes, making sure not to look up at the painting itself.
Lily crashed into the wall not far from her, clutching her head and screaming. She was staring directly at the painting as her body shifted through several different forms at once.
“It’s looking at me!” she screamed. “It’s looking, it’s looking it’s—”
Ingrid stared past Lily to see Tasia’s unconscious body slam against the wall, followed shortly after by Dana. Jenny came tumbling next, the doll bouncing off a piece of furniture before coming to a stop. A shimmering spectral form appeared, huddled up and crying with her arms around her legs.
“Jenny?” Ingrid crawled a bit closer and recognized that the spirit looked different. “Janey.”
Janey looked up at her and held a finger to her lips. “It can hear you.”
“Fuck it,” Ingrid said, and then the air filled with a bass note so powerful that everyone cried out. It took everything in Ingrid’s power not to absolutely shit her pants in blind fear.
Dana stared directly up at the thing in defiance, causing blood to gush from her nose and ears.
“How are you doing that?” Ingrid asked.
“No emotions,” she replied, her eyes still glowing. Ingrid noticed now that the zombie’s stomach was bulging out from all the food she had consumed. Dana looked down at Ingrid. “Nothing for it to latch onto. It gives me brain damage, but I’m all juiced up right now, so it repairs pretty fast.”
“You can look at it?” Ingrid asked in disbelief.
Dana nodded. “For a few seconds,” she added. “The painting is still intact, if you can believe it. The thing inside is looking at us right now.”
“It’s not even outside, yet?!?”
“Nope, but it’s trying.” Dana winced as another bass note blew, causing the whole house to rumble. “I think that it’s only a matter of—”
Eulalie slammed into the ground in between them, her whole body shuddering as she tried to crawl toward the exit. “It’s too much,” she whimpered, trying to cover her ears and eyes at the same time. “Somebody stop it!”
Dana looked up again and flinched. “It’s reaching for us,” she said. “But we’re too far away. It just pulled in chunks of that dead soldier, too.”
“What do we do?” Ingrid had crawled over to Janey and picked up her doll. “There’s gotta be a way to contain it.”
“As long as it’s in the painting ... oh!” Dana snapped her fingers. “The Collector trapped it in the painting and transported it in a tube. I think as long as it can’t see or hear us, it might be docile. So we just need to roll the painting up and then stick it inside something dark and quiet.”
“I left my canvas tube in my other ... coat! My coat!” Ingrid yanked at her garment. “It’s very dark and quiet inside! Maybe we can fold it up or something?”
“That’s a solid idea.” Dana looked at the others, then back at Ingrid. “If I can get close, I can stash it in your jacket.” She looked at the others. “Eulalie, I need your help.”
The Arachne screamed and tried to walk, but couldn’t. Lily was crawling toward the door, but kept getting sick and vomiting up smoke. Another bass note sounded, and the room started to shift again.
“It’s hungry,” Janey whispered in terror. “It wants to devour the living.”
“Fucking hell,” Ingrid muttered as she tried to shrug out of her coat. The gravity in the room had shifted toward the ceiling, causing loose furniture to tumble all around them. Something crashed into her from above, smashing her against the ceiling. She looked up to see it was a footstool and grunted as she slid out of her coat.
An object clattered on the ground, having fallen out of an interior pocket. Ingrid picked up the pocketwatch she had stolen from Anthony and shoved it into her pants pocket. If the coat was a lost cause, she felt that she should at least return this.
She had brought it in case she needed to track someone. Wincing, she tried to throw the coat in Dana’s direction with her good hand.
“Don’t look,” Dana warned as she moved toward the coat.
“Oh, trust me. I’m—” Ingrid’s stomach lurched and she popped up in the air as gravity attempted to completely flip. “Aware,” she groaned.
“Can you get the others out of here?” Dana asked.
Ingrid laughed and shook her head. “I can barely get my ass toward the door, much less the others.” She looked up at Eulalie and realized that the Arachne was still stumbling about. “Eulalie, what’s wrong?”
“Disoriented,” she mumbled. “Feel like I’m falling.”
“But you can still move, right?” Ingrid tried to crawl toward the Arachne. “With your feet?”
Eulalie closed her eyes and nodded.
“Okay. I need you to get some of your webs around me and the others. Help secure us before—” The room tilted and everyone started to slide.
Tasia tumbled against Eulalie’s body. The Arachne snatched up the unconscious woman and rolled her body in front of her, creating a silken cocoon. It was rather eerie how fast she moved.
“I’ve got Lily,” Dana said, picking up the coat. She launched herself across the room and dodged the succubus’ flailing tail, then picked her up by an arm and tossed her toward the Arachne. “Catch.”
Eulalie snatched Lily in both arms, then wrapped her up in a similar manner. The room lurched again, and Dana started sliding into the corner.
“No, no, no, no,” Ingrid wailed, clutching at the ground. A bass note sounded, and she retched as she neared the corner of the room.
Eulalie stumbled vaguely in Ingrid’s direction. Dana was already in the corner of the room, and she looked up toward the outsider.
“Don’t look,” she said to Ingrid. “It can just barely reach up here.”
Ingrid slammed her eyes shut and crawled toward Lily’s mutterings. As she did so, neon colors bloomed behind her eyelids and formed into angry mouths that gnawed at the air.
“Where?” Eulalie demanded, and Ingrid gasped as an Arachne foot stomped on her arm.
“Here!” She grabbed onto the Arachne’s leg and cried out as the world inverted around her. Soft hands deftly wove loops of silk under her arms and around her chest as she suddenly swung out into open air. Above her, she heard the Arachne gasp, and then felt herself fall.
“Shit!” Eulalie cried, and then Ingrid jerked to a halt. She looked up and cracked open one eye to see that the Arachne was now holding tight to strands of webbing, each of them dangling from her grasp.
The room groaned as it stretched. The mage shut her eyes tight and tried to think about anything other than the ominous whispers that formed inside her ears.
Dana slid across the floor, her legs kicking out at debris as it moved with her. Up above, the others now dangled from Eulalie’s webs, far away from the grasping tentacles of the painting.
One of the tentacles shifted in her direction. There was no linear movement, it was almost like seeing a laggy video game suddenly catch up. As Dana watched the outsider move, blood vessels burst in her eyes and brain, blood flowing freely down her face as her body rushed to repair the damage.
Repair was probably the wrong word. Her cells were trying to revert themselves to the moment they had been frozen in upon her death. The room around her stank of the color yellow, and the numerous eyes that erupted on the tentacles stared at her in oil-skin vest.
Dana shook her head and backed away from the walnut, her thoughts running like a tennis ball on a sunny boat. Growling in frustration, she closed her eyes to limit her senses, scooting backward until she was far away from the thing.
“Dana!” Ingrid called out to her from up above. “Are you okay?”
The room groaned as the outsider shifted, but Dana didn’t dare look again, not until she was back in her right mind. Once she felt like the word salad had passed, she chanced a look into the air and blinked in amazement.
Some of the debris in the room was floating, as if frozen in time. Others were stuck on repeat, falling down and smashing apart, only to reassemble themselves, reverse into the air and fall again. Thin silvery cracks had appeared in the air as the flow of time was so disrupted that it was somehow generating friction against itself.
At least, that was Dana’s take on it. One of the silvered cracks was close enough to her that she picked up a table leg and swung it at the temporal disruption. The leg split cleanly and without resistance, leaving the piece that had broken off to hover in place.
Okay, so the silver light was a bad thing, a literal edge of time capable of trapping Dana in a temporal pocket or slicing her to ribbons. Even now, those cracks were appearing and spreading out much like Lichtenberg Figures. Dana did a quick visual sweep of the air in the hopes of predicting their patterns, but they seemed to be random by nature.
Also, the cracks were spreading up towards the others, who still dangled helplessly from Eulalie’s webs. The Arachne was no longer screaming, but was now whimpering with her eyes closed.
Lily had become a human pinata of chaos, the succubus changing shapes every few seconds as she gibbered madly up above. She wasn’t going to be any help, and Tasia was still unconscious. If she were to open her eyes right now, she’d be looking straight down at the painting and her mind would break.
Dana needed to hurry, but how? She picked up her swords and tried to avoid looking at the outsider. Even recalling her memories of the thing filled her mouth with the taste of dust as mothy thoughts tried to beat their way out from inside her skull.
Moving carefully, the zombie only made it a few feet across the room before freezing in place. Her super enhanced senses were picking up an odd smell in front of her. She knelt down and picked up a chunk of rock, then tossed it forward.
The rock started moving in slow motion as it eroded in the air and turned into sand.
“I can’t get close!” Dana shouted, taking a step back as a tentacle swiveled in her direction.
“What’s wrong?” Ingrid asked. “I can’t look without microwaving my brain.”
“There are weird time pockets,” Dana said. “Time is running backwards in some, and super fast in others. I can’t see them, and--” She leapt backward as the tentacle swung through the space she had just been occupying. Clearly, the temporal pockets weren’t a problem for the outsider’s tentacles, which had remained intact despite the extreme fluctuations.
“And what?” Ingrid asked.
“They could cut the coat,” Dana replied. “Or me, frankly.” Suddenly, there was a very real possibility that she might take three steps forward and experience hundreds or thousands of years, frozen in place with nothing but the sweeping arms of a shoggoth to keep her company. “I need a way to see where I’m going.”
Ingrid groaned in frustration, then lifted her head in Dana’s direction. “Hold on a second. Time is all fucked up down there, right?”
“I believe I already said that.”
“This is so crazy, it just might work,” Ingrid muttered, then stuck a hand in her pocket. She opened her eyes and stared directly at the wall, then slowly tilted her head in Dana’s direction. “Let me know if it’s about to move where I can see it.”
“Not something I can do,” Dana replied. In fact, the outsider was now reaching up toward Ingrid as the painting hopped up and down on the wall. “It’s reaching straight for you right now.”
“Hold up a sword so I can better see you where you’re standing,” Ingrid replied, her voice suddenly calm. She held something in her right hand. “I need to know where you are. Make sure you catch this.”
Dana obeyed, and the mage tossed something across the room toward her. The zombie actually held her breath as a silvery crack appeared in the path of the projectile, but the object went just above it, the trailing chain severed at the halfway point.
Dana caught the object in one hand, then turned her attention to it.
“A pocket watch?” She frowned, then nodded. “Oh, I get it. I can watch the hand and see how it’s moving to gauge temporal fields.” It was better than nothing.
“Don’t use it for that,” Ingrid replied. “It’s supposed to show you where you’ve been. Or, rather, where your target has been. But if time is being weird, maybe it will--”
“Show you where you will be,” Dana replied with a nod. It was a desperate ploy, but far better than her plan of hoping not to get bifurcated by the physical manifestation of time itself. “How does it work?”
“You need some of the target’s blood,” Ingrid replied, then winced when the outsider roared. The whole room shook, and plaster fell loose from the walls. Some of Eulalie’s legs ripped chunks out of the wall, causing the group to drop a few inches before the Arachne righted herself. “You put it in the back compartment and wind it!”
Nodding, Dana considered the watch and opened the back. She slid her thumb along the edge of her sword and pressed it into the cool metal of the pocketwatch, then clicked it shut.
When she wound the watch, a pulse of magical energy moved out from her in a circle and she watched as a replica of herself moved in reverse. It certainly was odd seeing her past play out like this, but she was disappointed when it didn’t work like Ingrid had hoped.
The outsider’s tentacles lashed out in the direction of Dana’s image. Coiling like a snake, it circled the magical image’s waist and squeezed.
Dana was yanked violently from behind, and was suddenly in the outsider’s tentacles. Her nurse’s coat withered under the creature’s touch, allowing the outsider’s false flesh to touch her own. Pain radiated throughout Dana’s body as she realized that the watch was no longer in her hand.
The creature had somehow interacted with the past image of herself. Growling, she stabbed at the fiend and was unable to wound it.
“Dana!” Ingrid was up above, back where she had been before the outsider had roared.
“I need the pocket watch!” Dana replied. “The one in your pocket!”
“How did you know—”
“Throw it toward my voice!” Dana grunted as she was slammed against a wall, then yanked toward the painting. Using both of her swords, she jammed them into the wall and managed to catch them on a stud, the magical coat fluttering away from her. Snarling, she held firm, even though the ligaments and muscles in her shoulders were being stretched past their limit. “HERE!”
The pocket watch sailed toward her and missed by about four feet. Dana folded herself in half and opened her mouth wide to bite into the outsider and pierce its flesh.
Could such a being even feel pain? She wasn’t sure. But she wasn’t trying to hurt it. What she really needed was a few drops of its blood for the watch, and for the damned thing to let her go so she could use it.
Two of Dana’s teeth broke before they sank into the tentacle. A hot, black fluid rushed into her mouth and she coughed half of it out of her nose and swallowed the rest.
The world came screeching to a halt as time held its breath.
At first, she couldn’t move. It was only her mind that was free to ponder its own existence. It felt like a thousand razorblades were traveling through her veins as she began to shiver in her own skin. That yawning void in her stomach snapped shut, as if afraid to process the outsider’s blood any further.
But that wasn’t how her body worked. Like a fire slowly roaring to life, her body processed the unearthly delights now sitting in her gut. The edges of reality blurred around her as time unfolded away from her like a paper accordion.
This wasn’t what she had intended. All Dana had wanted to do was put the outsider’s blood into the watch. As a creature that didn’t experience time, she had been hoping to predict the outsider’s movements, or gain additional insights into the rifts that were forming.
Now, though, she could see the temporal warps as folds in the sheets of time, each moment a separate page. She looked back at the page behind her and met her own gaze, her mind suddenly in both the past and present as she lived two separate moments.
“Don’t talk to that one,” said a different Dana. She looked off to the right and saw several of the pages fold over to reveal a version of herself from several seconds ago, before she had bitten into the outsider. “Her mouth is full, she won’t respond.”
“But so is—” Dana was stunned to discover that her own mouth was free. She didn’t so much move her head, but her entire consciousness as she looked around in every direction to see countless reflections of herself, many of them looking back at her with their own dawning realization.
“Try not to think about it too hard,” said another Dana.
It felt like she was inside the four-dimensional version of a compound eye, the thought of which immediately killed a portion of her brain.
“Yeah, come over here,” said a Dana up above, and Dana’s consciousness fluttered forward. “There you go,” she said to herself.
“Am I ... are we...” asked a Dana with a busted tooth.
“Better not to ask,” said another one. “Time isn’t linear. That requires it to adhere to our current understanding of space.”
“Though they’re technically the same thing.”
Dana shuddered and looked at a version of herself that seemed to be melting.
“Yeah, avoid that one,” said Dana. “Possible outcome.”
“That one, too,” said Dana, pointing to a Dana that was on fire.
“Is this the multiverse?” asked Dana.
“Nope. Waveform probability of likely outcomes,” Dana replied. “When you flip the pages, you can normalize the function.”
“Non-euclidean space, non-euclidean rules,” Dana added.
Dana clutched at her head and screamed. She was somehow all of them at once, yet still an individual. The accordion of time stretched even further, and she realized that she was looking at different versions of herself from hours ago, even days.
“We need to focus on folding up that painting,” Dana whispered from nearby. “There’s only so long we can be plugged into something like this before—”
A Dana down and to the left exploded into a mist.
“That,” said several Danas.
“How long do I have?” asked a visibly frightened Dana.
“Forever,” said some.
“Only seconds,” said others.
In that frozen moment, Dana found the strength to grab the thing holding her by the waist and shove. Bones cracked and popped as she slithered free from the outsider while several iterations of her were crushed instead. Scowling at the potential outcome, many others sank their teeth back into the open wound and fed.
Dana felt them all, her mind swiftly organizing the experiences into an order that made sense. It was a feat that would be impossible for anybody else, but her brain was a computer now, able to study these moments at length.
She took a step forward in time and found herself once again snarled by the outsider. A step back found her free once more, and it occurred to Dana that she needed to stop thinking of time and space as something separate.
“She’s beginning to believe,” whispered one of her doppelgangers. Along the boundaries of Dana’s vision, several of her copies had blurred away and vanished, those probabilities no longer viable. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, relishing the fact that this experience was something the world’s smartest minds would kill to achieve.
“It could be arranged,” said a Dana that was missing an arm. “Start eating Nobel laureates and maybe we’ll pick up some of their tricks.”
“Don’t start eating people,” cautioned another. This one was busy stabbing an Arachne. “You are what you eat.”
As if to emphasize the point, a gaunt version of Dana sprinted by, foaming at the mouth and covered in blood.
“That’s the point, though,” One-Armed Dana said. “Achieve a bigger brain by eating the best brains.”
“But genius and insanity are two sides of the same coin,” replied Cautious Dana. “And we have plenty of the latter right now.”
“Skreeee!” shrieked Feral Dana.
Dana took another step and her field of view shifted to the laboratory where she had been vivisected. The moment stopped her in her tracks as she realized she had stepped backward in time by several hours.
“It’s all in the wrist,” one Dana said as her hand crawled across the floor. “Your soul is stretched, remember?”
“That doesn’t help me find that painting,” Dana replied.
“Or fold it up,” said another Dana who was standing nearby.
“I’m starting to think Lily has it easy,” said a third, and then everyone heard the succubus scream from every direction at once. The field of view shifted to reveal Lily dangling from the ceiling, Lily laughing in the car, Lily standing naked in a cave, save for her boots.
“Okay, so maybe dragging you into an acidic lake was stupid of me,” said the succubus.
“That’s from too long ago,” Dana muttered.
“I don’t really remember that,” said another.
“Heavy metal poisoning.” One-Armed Dana had caught up again.
“Could you all be quiet?” Dana glared at all of them. “Why are we so chatty?”
“To make up for all the versions of you who aren’t.” This came from a Dana who was still in the labcoat, which was intact again. “Honestly, half of us aren’t even here. Auditory hallucinations.”
Everyone paused and watched as Feral Dana ran by and was promptly snatched up by a tentacle that Dana hadn’t seen lying in wait. The zombie bit at the tentacle, but was promptly crushed and pulled toward the painting.
“Not this way,” One-Armed Dana said, pointing in a random direction. All of the Danas pointed now, causing Dana to sigh and pick a random direction. Together, they spread out, realities collapsing behind those who wandered into their doom.
On several occasions, Dana wondered how long this strange, timeless effect would last. Those who walked with her reminded her that time was relative. Others pointed out versions of Dana still eating the eldritch being, their skin turning black as they became something else.
Dana saw her futures unfold before her. In several, she turned to dust on a dark, lifeless world. In others, she moldered beneath the ground, trapped under rubble. In far too many, she roamed the blasted landscape of Earth as the dead hunted the living all around her.
Eventually she found herself standing in a dark room with a solitary figure in the middle dressed in white. This future version of Dana had cut her hair into an edgy bob, was wearing an intact, appropriately-sized labcoat and held a blueprint in her hands. Despite being nearly identical in appearance, this one felt more mature, somehow.
She looked up at Dana with a raised eyebrow, as if expecting her arrival.
“Where is this?” Dana demanded.
“Nowhere you can get to if you don’t turn around,” Mature Dana replied, the smile on her lips somehow blossoming into her glowing blue eyes. “You have a full, amazing life ahead of you, but only if you go back and take care of business.”
Dana frowned and looked back. Thousands of iterations of herself were involved in similar conversations with different futures. She rubbed at the dark blood leaking from her nose and nodded as those events all collided in her mind. There were so many things happening right now. Was this how the outsiders lived? Past, present, and future, all at once?
“I’d ask how to fold the painting up, but I’m guessing you’ll give me some bullshit about the future affecting the past.”
Mature Dana laughed, her cheeks acquiring a rosy glow to them. “You gotta grab it by the corners and fold it in half,” she replied. “The outsider will be stuck that way, forced to push against its own body. Super easy, actually. Fold it a couple of times. Then wrap it up in that coat for safe transport.”
Dana made a face. “It can’t be that easy,” she replied.
“It was quite hard, actually.” Mature Dana waved a hand dismissively. “Now get going, or this future won’t happen.”
“Wait.” Dana licked her lips. “Can I ask you something?”
“Two somethings,” Mature Dana replied. “And that was one.”
It was a dumb joke, so Dana rolled her eyes out of habit. “Are you ... we happy where you are?”
“Insanely so. Now get.” Mature Dana rolled up her drawing and smacked Dana on the head with it. “Before you mess up my timeline.”
Dana turned away and found herself looking down a dark corridor that terminated in a distant light. The pages of time rippled as she flipped through them, watching all her possible futures fold themselves back up nicely. Timelines collapsed as she found herself back in the room with the painting, surrounded by the versions of herself that were currently imprisoned by the tentacle.
When Dana tried to stop, time kept flipping, as if she had gained temporal momentum. She watched events play themselves out in reverse as she tried to stop, even going so far as to slam her swords into the ground.
However, she was moving solely through time, and the swords did nothing. She watched her life unfold in reverse now, saw herself consuming the Nirumbi, fighting Tristan Edge, meeting Tasia for the first time, going out on a date with Alex. This one struck her particularly hard as she stared at her former girlfriend’s face for the first time through dead eyes that would remember every little detail forever.
Alex Winters, the love of her life. Brown skin with warm undertones of red and orange and dark eyes that made Dana think of twilight, just before the first stars came out. Past Dana and Alex were standing on the balcony of a little apartment, looking out over the ocean.
The two of them held hands as Alex put her head on Dana’s shoulder. Two mugs of hot chocolate sat on a nearby table, the steam dying out as the liquid cooled.
“I never expected to feel this way about someone else,” Past Dana said, hugging Alex to her side. “Not this early in life.”
“You peaked in college, Sparks.” Alex squeezed her girlfriend and laughed. “All that’s left is graduation, marriage, and getting old while critiquing each other’s flannel.”
“Bitch. Don’t knock my flannels.” Past Dana gave Alex a shove and they both laughed. Past Dana went quiet for a moment, then cleared her throat. “Do you ... really think we’ll get married?”
“Why wouldn’t we?” Alex looked at Dana like she was the only person in the world. Dana had forgotten that look, and she quickly tucked it away under lock and key in her mind, to be safe forever.
“Cause your parents suck.”
Alex sighed. “Yeah. That part will be tricky. But I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with them. Only you.”
“No more,” Dana said, trying to move forward in time again.
“Did you say something?” Alex asked as the page turned, letting Dana move back toward the present. Now she stood in a vaguely familiar kitchen, her body tied down on the dining room table as a man stood nearby, reading from a tome.
It was a variant of Latin, a nasty one. The lights in the room dimmed as he read from his book, his golden eyes thrumming with power. An undead servant stood watch at the door, oblivious to Dana’s existence.
It was Daryl, the man who had made her what she was. Dana tightened her grip on both swords and took a step toward him, eager to strike.
“I wouldn’t,” cautioned a version of her standing in the corner of the room. She was crumbling into ashes and drifting away on an unseen breeze. “You can’t change what has already happened. There’s a high price for doing so.”
Dana glared at the necromancer, then looked down at his implements. Her other self was right. She couldn’t change the past. But maybe, if she watched the ritual, she could influence the future.
The body on the table gasped in pain as Daryl threw a net made of light over her and pulled a ritualistic dagger out of his coat. He hummed pleasantly to himself as he slit Live Dana’s wrist and placed a bowl underneath her hand.
“It’s only until you’re dead,” he said with a grin, then patted Live Dana on the head condescendingly and left the room. “Wonder if that old bitch has any leftovers, I’m starving.”
Dana watched as the past version of herself mumbled in her sleep as the blood drained from her body. Despite being the size of a cereal bowl, the implement collecting Live Dana’s blood never overflowed.
She was about to die, quietly and alone. Dana moved to her own side and took her former self’s hand and squeezed it gently. Live Dana whispered a single word in response.
“Alex,” she said with a smile, then let out a sigh of relief as she passed away. The net made of light flickered as something golden bounced against it. Daryl came out of the kitchen with a sandwich in his hands and rolled his eyes at the scene, still oblivious to Dana’s presence.