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“Is it whatever the hell she’s got inside her brain?” he asked, blunt. “Or did Luc create someothersuper-illegal gizmo that’s not supposed to exist?”

The silence that time was practically physical.

It also told Black exactly what he’d wanted to know.

Fuck.

There was a good chance he couldn’t affordnotto take this.

4

THE HELLO

Nick stood in the kitchen of the beachside house he shared with Jem, gazing out a picture window at sun-kissed ocean, with high sand dunes breaking up most of his view of the beach. It seemed like only a few minutes had passed since he’d watched the colors change as the sun rose in the east behind him.

It had been a long night.

Definitely a longer night than he’d thought it would be.

He’d been home for hours now, but he hadn’t finished thinking about what he’d learned, or what he would do with that information now, particularly in terms of who he would tell. The last thing he wanted was to create a new wave of vampire paranoia and hysteria.

That was particularly true given the P.T.S.D.-like crap Black had been going through since he’d transitioned back to an ordinary seer. Black was in the shit again with his trauma issues around Brick and what Brick had done to him in that prison in Louisiana.

No one had told Nick that, of course, but he had eyes. He’d been in the military long enough to know the signs, and he knew Black hadn’t been sleeping well.

The reality was, Quentin might not be able to deal with bad vampire news right now.

Nick also knew he might be using Black at least partly as an excuse.

He didn’t really want to deal with it either, frankly.

He didn’t really even want tothinkabout last night’s encounter on the wharf, where he’d been forced into a face-to-face conversation with the very last person he’d wanted to see.

A soft whine interrupted his thoughts.

Nick smiled, looking down at the white, woolly-coated creature gazing up at him from below the level of the cabinets. Nick rubbed the curls of the dog’s dirty white head, cooing to it.

“Hey, pretty girl… I haven’t forgotten you.”

He turned back to what he’d been doing before his eyes and mind pulled him into yet another staring contest with the ocean.

He rummaged through the cabinets, looking for the dog food they kept on hand for when they took care of Panther for Miri and Black. Nick found a bag of dry with maybe a third of its contents left, and two cans of wet food under the sink in the back. He found the bowls down there, too, and grabbed a can-opener out of a kitchen drawer.

A minute or so later, he dumped the contents of a wet can into a metal bowl––also Panther’s––sprinkled in some dry, and placed it on the ground for his and Jem’s new houseguest.

While the dog wolfed down the food, Nick filled a second bowl with clean water from the tap and placed it beside the first one. He stroked the dog a few more times, then went back to leaning on the counter, watching the female dog chew and swallow.

He still had no idea what breed it was.

It looked like a sheepdog of some kind, but it was leaner and not quite as shaggy as most sheepdogs. Also, its hair was softer. Given where Nick found it, it was probably a mutt, but it wasa beautiful dog, in any case, and would be even more beautiful after a bath and a look-over by a vet and probably some de-worming medicine.

The whole thing last night started with the dog, really.

Nick had never been able to turn away a stray dog.

Even in Afghanistan and in some other countries where he’d been stationed, where stray dogs were an epidemic and a daily occurrence, he’d always done his best to feed as many as he could, and get them to shelters where it was remotely feasible. He’d been teased a lot for that, but no one ever screwed with him when it came to dogs, not even when he was human.

It was mind-blowing to him that anyone just let their dogs go like that, but here in San Francisco, dumping a dog was fucking unforgivable. With the hairy white creature by his feet, it could’ve been an accident, but if it had been, they hadn’t tried very hard to get her back. She’d obviously been living on the streets for weeks, just based on how hungry and lean she was, and the state of her coat and paws.