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CHAPTER1

THE PAST

It all happened so fast.It happened so fast, Nick couldn’t piece any of it together until days later, talking it out with Dalejem on the shores of a pristine beach overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, their feet bare, under the shade of a tree so Nick wouldn’t burn in the morning sun.

In the moment, though, it was like a nightmare.

In the moment, it was like accidentally firing a gun only to find you’d killed someone with the bullet.

In this case, he’d aimed the gun at himself.

Nick watched the cave wink out in front of him.

He’d been struggling, fighting to free himself from Brick’s iron-like arms, both of which cinched tightly around his chest. He’d kicked hard against the ground, a dim thought of slamming the other vampire into the cave wall…

His mind hadn’t been quite right, so that was some of it.

Fuzzed from venom and vampire tranquilizer drugs, both administered against his will by his fucking sire, Nick had been totally off-balance, not himself. It made him miscalculate where he was, how close they stood to the portal. It threw off all of his usual, pinpoint, vampire, spatial awareness and lightning-fast reflexes.

It made him stupid, too.

His last memory, his last thought, his last image from the world where he’d been born, where his parents lived, where all his best friends lived, where he’d worked and lived and died and dreamed––it all converged into a single, echoing snapshot.

That image would stay with him for many, many years. The faces of his friends, the horror reflected in them and in his mate, would stay with him even longer than the exact mechanics of how he left his own world behind.

The imaged stayed until he gave someone permission to forcibly erase it.

A dark, craggy, high-ceilinged space.

Hissing green and yellowyissotorches.

The worried faces of his friends.

Miri, Black, Cowboy, Angel, Dex, Jax, Kiko…

The seer child, Aura, her blue-green eyes wide and horrified.

Jem’s face, more clear than all the rest.

Jem, already moving, already running towards him…

…They all vanished before his mind worked well enough to realize what he’d done.

Gods, he’d done this.

He’d done it.

It was all his fucking fault, and he couldn’t undo it.

The guilt that crashed over him, the horror, the shame…

But that was fleeting, too.

All that remained was the aching hole where his family had been. All that remained was the grief he’d felt for years, for decades, for centuries––the loss of his home, his planet, and everyone he loved, everyone he’d suffered and struggled and laughed with.

Well.

Almost everyone.