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Drama addict,Nick thought, annoyed.

Still, his mind continued to turn over Brick’s words.

CHAPTER12

THE MACHINE

“I thought you had a new job.”Lara looked up from where she perched on a high stool. She mechanically stirred a glass mug of hot tea with a silver wand. “I was told you were taken straight from the fight pit to a job on the Upper West Side. Is that not true?”

She barely masked her annoyance to find Nick in her kitchen.

She barely masked her annoyance to find Nick inside her apartment at all.

Nick didn’t really give a shit.

He’d already checked downstairs, and, as expected, since it was nearly seven in the morning before he found a vampire-safe taxi that would bring him here, he’d found the place empty. Wynter had already left for work.

Tai must have gone with her.

Hell, they’d likely left over an hour ago.

Nick looked around the top-of-the-line, yet uniformly sterile and bizarrely uninviting kitchen, and tried to decide how much he wanted to get into things the Archangel C.E.O. right then. Especially given, one, how unlikely she was to tell him anything, two, his newfound dependence on her, and three, having already had his patience tried to the limit by Brick.

He wasn’t exactly in the mood to get in another sparring match with a manipulative sociopath, not so soon after his back and forth with his sire.

Also, he wondered how much the two of them were working together, even now.

Clearly, Brick had wanted Nick to know he was still in St. Maarten’s confidence, given his dropped remarks about Nick’s attempt to retrieve his lost memories.

Yet he’d also told Nick not to trust St. Maarten, that she might be behind some anti-vampire bullshit going on behind the scenes.

Knowing BrickandSt. Maarten, both statements could be part of another long-con, bullshit gaslight being conducted by both of them. That, or Brick just wanted to get his claws in before Lara could, and pull Nick’s confidence closer to him and the White Death.

Whatever the precise truth, Nick couldn’t help feeling like he was being tag-teamed.

He also couldn’t help feeling like their coordinated campaign was already having at least one of its desired effects: namely, exhausting him to the point where he didn’t particularly feel like arguing with either of them anymore. He certainly wasn’t up to spending a ton of his brainpower trying to decide which of the two of them might be lyingmore.

Not today, anyway.

He knew there was an element of resignation involved in that, and it bugged him.

Fuck. He needed to snap out of this.

Whatever this was, whatever messed-up headspace he’d let himself fall into after that portal closed, he needed to find some way past it. He needed tomove on.

He couldn’t afford to just sink into anger and depression.

Moreover, he knew some of his unease around that thought was what Brick told him about the war. His own apathy and indifference bothered him.

Had he really just gotten drunk while the whole planet burned?

Was this dystopian hellscape at least partly his fault?

He tried to shake it off, but the thought persisted.

When he finally left his place by the kitchen doorway, it was to walk completely past Lara St. Maarten, and towards a long, chrome and copper machine that stood on her freakishly clean counter. The machine was large, monstrous even, for a kitchen appliance, and took up a full section of the red and gold tile. The backsplash to either side glowed and hummed, obviously containing virtual components. Those components likely turned every surface into a screen, or possibly switched the entire kitchen into a full-blown, augmented-reality mode.

The machine in front, however, was clearly some kind of antique.