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Brick sighed.

It was another long-suffering, life-is-so-intolerable kind of sigh that somehow felt completely personal in its dig at Nick.

It also made Nick’s teeth grind.

“Gods below… why must everything be sodramaticwith you, Naoko?” the older vampire asked. “We are perfectly safe here. Your wife is perfectly safe. As for any plans we might have to rid the world of this creature… well they have only grown increasingly simple now.”

The older vampire paused, possibly for effect.

“You see,” Brick went on a beat later. “He made it clear to me, even in San Francisco, that he knew the location of an interdimensional portal. He had sensed it somehow, he said. He felt it ‘calling’ to him. He told me he intended to go through it to find his ‘real’ world, and his ‘real’ family. He considered the family here to be some kind of timeline mistake… something that needed to be corrected. I suspect it was his way of wiping out any evidence that he was born to this world. That he actuallydoesbelong here. His family was living proof of that link, and I think with his determination to deny any possiblepersonalconnection to this world, he couldn’t stand to leave them alive. He wanted them all gone… erased.”

Nick felt faintly sick.

He could feel the truth in Brick’s words.

It disturbed the fuck out of him.

“And me?” Nick said. “Who does he think I am?”

Brick let out another annoyed sigh.

“Oh, for the love of the Source. Who cares, Naoko? You are missing the point. We could notkillhim before. Not until we found the location of the portal… or at least determined whether he was lying about knowing where one was. But we don’tneedhim for that anymore. As you so helpfully pointed out, Mal has found it for us instead.”

Terian smiled through the line.

He made a flourishing motion with one hand, a kind ofvoila.

“So you see? You don’t need to go chasing your nasty doppelganger into the woodsaloneanymore, Nick. We can call your police friends. You can send in the dogs, and let them clean up this mess. In the meantime, you can join us here. We are not far from where the portal is depicted. We can all hide here together until––”

But it was too late.

Nick had already seen it.

He had already seen in his mind exactly where they were.

He saw the building.

He saw the road leading up to it.

He saw all of them sprawled around a living room with stone walls and an enormous fireplace: Brick, Mal, Tai, St.Maarten, Kit, Zoe…

His wife. He saw Wynter there, gazing out a window at a forest and field behind the house, and a mountain in the distance beyond that.

Nick felt the exact instance when he recognized all of it.

He felt the exact instance when his understanding of their location locked in.

Then he felt something else.

In the back, dark reaches of Nick’s mind…

…he felt him.

He saw him there with his dark hat, his cold, vampire eyes, the bandaged side of his face. Nick stared at him, horrified and afraid and for the first time almost sorry for him.

Then the spell broke.

The other version of Nick felt what Nick knew.