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Brick’s voice was getting weaker.

He was scarcely whispering at the end.

“Zoe.” He exhaled her name. “Zoe is the one…” Brick met Nick’s gaze, and now his cracked-crystal eyes were blooming a last crimson flower. “She won’t come with you, you know,” he forced out. “She won’t come. She won’t. She’ll be queen.”

Nick stared down at that handsome face.

His eyes were changing in other ways now. The crimson flower at their center was dying, turning a dark purple, then black, then gray.

Nick watched as the light leached out of those eyes.

He watched as his sire died, and then as his body began to fall apart.

He watched the skin turn from ghost white to gray. It darkened more as Nick watched, turning the color of burnt ash. It began to collapse in on itself, then to break off.

The smell started to bother him.

It shouldn’t have smelled, the process of Brick dying the way he was, but somehow it did. Not of human or vampire rot or death exactly, but of burnt skin, burnt flesh and bone, like Brick’s body was being incinerated from the inside out.

It struck Nick that Dorian had not died like this.

Dorian had exploded, so maybe that was part of it; he’d left blood and stringy guts and gore all over Angel’s house in San Francisco. It’d taken Nick and Jem and Angel hours to clean it all up afterwards, and to scrub Dorian off the ceiling and walls. Nick had been forced to replace whole segments of Angel’s foyer because he couldn’t get the bits of Dorian out.

He’d bought new sheetrock and repainted everything and ever rebuilt and re-hung shelves and bought Angel a new hall table.

Brick didn’t die like that.

Nick had no idea why.

He had no idea what caused the difference, but Brick disintegrated instead, while Nick watched. His vampire body eventually collapsed inside his clothes, like a sand castle drying out in the sun until it fragmented to powder under its own weight. It happened so shockingly fast, so weirdly fast, Nick couldn’t make himself look away.

The vampire’s skull collapsed last.

His cheekbones broke down while Nick watched.

His lips, his teeth, his ears, his eyes, all of it turned to powder.

Soon, the only thing left were Brick’s expensive, designer clothes, and inexplicably, his long, dark-auburn hair. Soft, gray powder covered the floor, left in lumpy, untidy piles that vaguely resembled a human shape.

All other trace of the vampire king had gone.

* * *

Nick didn’t knowhow long he crouched there.

His mind must have fuzzed out for those few minutes, to the point where he wasn’t even yet thinking about what Brick had actually said to him.

He just crouched there, staring down at the piles of fine ash.

He jumped a foot when a voice over him spoke.

“Did he say anything to you?”

Nick’s eyes shifted up.

Zoe stood there, on the bottom few steps, her hand rested lightly on the metal railing. Her eyes met Nick’s when he looked up, then returned to the ash-dusted clothes, and the odd, fan-like halo of dark auburn hair.

Nick thought about how to answer.