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Nick felt his jaw harden.

He wished he could fucking remember.

Brick’s words sounded familiar to him.

He had some memory of Charles, Miri’s biological uncle. Nick vaguely remembered Charles being some kind of demagogue figure with impressionable, violent, anti-human seers as his followers and sycophants. Nick had even vaguer memories of domestic terrorism, of street gangs, of bombs going off, of San Francisco burning… but there were too many gaps.

There were too many things he couldn’t make sense of.

“Was there a war on our own world?” Nick asked. “With this Charles?”

Brick sighed.

That sigh sounded distinctly tired.

Even compared to other vampires, Brick’s sighs were pure, dramatic affect, generally accenting multiple insults and disappointments at the same time.

“I’m not going to give you a history of the seer and vampire races on our world, Naoko, as fun as that sounds. Suffice it to say, the bad seers got sent away to the bad place for being bad. Some of them, for perhaps obvious reasons, ended up here. When you and I fell through that portal, we sadly got pulled here, too… possibly due to some resonance with those same seers. Possibly out of sheer, stupid, happenstance. Possibly karma. Possibly because your wife would eventually end up here. Pick your poison. I’ve never known.”

Nick frowned. “An accident.”

Brick grunted. “You don’t reallythink,Naoko, I would have come here on purpose?” Exhaling in more frustration, he waved away smoke. “It was an accident. We were working a little job for Black. Chasing something for him, in fact. In a jungle in South America. We chased that something inside a cave… and poof. We ended up here.”

Nick frowned. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. I was as disappointed as you.”

“But there were already vampires here?”

“Of course.”

“Was Zoe with us?” Nick asked. “When we came through?”

“Of course.”

“Others?” Nick pressed.

“There were five of us originally, yes.” The vampire king sighed, still sounding bored, like explaining how Nick’s whole life went down the shitter was the most boring thing imaginable. “Zoe. You. Me. There were two others: Ana and Sebastian. Both were killed in the war. You, Zoe, and myself are all that remains from that place.”

Brick gave Nick a harder look through the headset’s virtual portal.

“So you might understand why I get a littleannoyedwhen my only remaining son from my home world refuses to visit me. Or even call me.”

Nick could not roll his eyes hard enough.

He didn’t even try.

“So he came to see you,” Nick growled. “The other me. The psychopath. When? When did you run into him the first time?”

Brick exhaled. Nick could see him in the monitor again, tapping his lip with one long fingers, his eyes rolled up in thought.

“I honestly thought he was dead,” the vampire king mused. “I thought that version of you was like that version of me… never turned into a vampire, and therefore dead of a normal, human age. All the records had that version of you listed as dead. All the records hadall threeof us as dead: you, me, Zoe. Since the histories here are a few hundred years ahead of our world in most things, Zoe’s human doppelganger died perhaps three or four-hundred years ago. Mine died closer to five or six hundred years ago. Yours I thought somewhere in the four hundred range, like hers. Dead long before we got here. But I was wrong.”

Night fought to take that in, to make sense of it.

This whole conversation was bringing his headache back.

He needed to understand though.