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“All right,” she agreed.

He fought not to read anything into the strange look that grew in her eyes as she continued to stare at him.

He knew it likely didn’t bode well for him.

If he got to the truth in the end, he almost didn’t care.

CHAPTER7

THE KNIGHT

He steppedout of the ring, wiping blood and sweat off his face. He barely looked at or heard the screams of fans, or the faces of his handlers as he pushed his way through them.

He remained dimly aware of all of it, of course.

The crowd was massive, and maybe would have been daunting, even, if it had been a different kind of night. As it was, Nick just saw a blur of indistinct faces with his vampire eyes. He saw mouths open, heard a cacophony of screams and yells, some of them hoarse, others shrill, some closer to roars. He saw people jumping up and down in the dark past the lights flooding the fight cage. Confetti rained down, along with popcorn and women’s underwear. He heard the deafening rumble of feet as the crowd stamped their feet and jumped up and down.

The amphitheater groaned under their collective frenzy.

It sounded like thunder.

It sounded like a monster’s heartbeat, if it had one.

Nick didn’t.

He didn’t feel his adrenaline, either, or whatever passed for that in a vampire.

Whatever heat the fight had risen in him, even if it was just a base, reflexive surge of pure survival and defensive instincts, had already started to cool by the time he was halfway down those stairs. He felt like his normal mind didn’t wake up, however, until he was all the way down, and those lights and sounds began to fade for real.

The door shut behind him.

The record seemed to skip.

Then he was just standing there, inside the pit, as the fighters and the staff called it. He blinked around in the harsher lighting of the staging area Farlucci owned below the arena.

His fangs were already retracting as he reached back to unbuckle the mask that wrapped around his mouth and the back of his head. Blood streaked his chest and arms, and specks of it dotted his legs and abdomen so liberally, they seemed to dye his marble-white skin like one of those reddish-looking roan horses.

Horses. Where the hell had that come from?

He must have pulled it from one memory or another, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually laid eyes on a real horse. It must have been several centuries, at least.

His memories had been more difficult to navigate in general lately, though.

They grew increasingly blurred in his mind.

Even while he’d been in that cell, he’d felt confused about events, about what was real and what wasn’t, what he remembered of his own life and what came from the doppelgänger.

His brief contact with the portal seemed to have made all of that worse.

He had so many fucking questions.

Wherehadhis car come from, if it hadn’t been Angel who’d bequeathed it to him all those years ago? Brick was the obvious answer, and by the far the most likely, but something hurt in Nick to realize it had never belonged to his childhood friend.

The thought that he still had her car had softened that hurt, just the tiniest bit.

Knowing that it was just some random fucking antique, unconnected to her or him in any way, made him feel vaguely sick. It also made him miss Angel so badly he felt dizzy.

He missed Miriam. He missed Black?