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The oddity of seeing Brick visibly lose his balance was enough to freeze Nick in place. If he’d still been human, he would have lost his breath.

As it was, he stared, bewildered, thinking it must be a trick.

It had to be a trick.

Before Nick could make sense of what he was seeing…

…the vampire collapsed onto the cement floor.

CHAPTER23

FATHERLY ADVICE

Nick didn’t think.

He leapt up to the balcony railing, took a step forward, and dropped, not bothering to aim his fall until he was roughly halfway down.

He landed lightly on his feet about two feet from St. Maarten’s dead body, and less than that from where Brick now sprawled on his back, his cracked-crystal eyes glazed as he stared up at the ceiling above the stairs.

Brick didn’t breathe, of course, so he wasn’t breathing now.

He wouldn’t have a last breath.

He wouldn’t spit up blood, or gasp, or choke out a death rattle.

Even so, Nick could feel it.

He closed the gap between himself and Brick in one stride. Once there, he slid down to a crouch so that he hung directly over his sire’s face. His eyes flickered over the other vampire’s body. He could guess what had happened now.

She’d shot him in the heart.

It was more than that, though; something smelled off in the wound.

Whatever she’d shot him with, it must have been loaded with the same vampire toxin the H.R.A. used on Nick. Now that Nick could smell it for himself, in a non-hallucinatory state, and smell what it was doing to his sire, Nick had his doubts he would have survived being left under that truck after all. He probably should tell Wynter and the others that, and thank them, and Malek, when he left there.

Right now, however, his eyes shifted to Brick’s.

Absurdly, his sire was smiling at him.

Blood was visible at the meeting point of his pale lips.

“Bitch… had a gun…” he managed, his lips slipping on the blood. “…in her sleeve. Didn’t smell it. Not until it went off…”

Nick could only stare down at the vampire king.

However he thought this night would go, he’d never once considered thatthiswould be one of the outcomes. Dalejem had once asked him, long ago, why Nick had never just killed Brick himself, removed his presence from his life the surgical way, the permanent way. Truthfully, it had never crossed Nick’s mind to do such a thing, not really.

It wasn’t something one did, killing their sire.

Nick had never believed Brick’s fiction to Black and Miriam that he couldn’t survive without his sire, that Brick had “made” Nick in some unusual way that meant Nick would be forever bound to Brick’s blood. He’d never felt bound to Brick in that way, and he’d felt sure he would if that story was remotely true.

Nick initially believed Brick that he’d beendifficultto make for various reasons, possibly due to blood type or genetics or whatever else. But even that struck him as suspect over the years. No, Nick found it much more likely the original blood tests done on him by Black’s team of crack scientists had simply been wrong.

Maybe that traitor seer, Luric, had even rigged the tests.

Whatever the truth of it, Nick had never believed he would die when Brick died. Still, it was strangely unnerving looking at his sire, knowing he was dying now.

The feeling there wasn’temotionalexactly.