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“Then again, maybe you don’t love her,” the other Nick said. “After all, if you really wanted to make your wife safe, you probably would have turned her. You would have turnedallthese people… these half-breeds and humans… everyone who could be turned. You would have made them immortal, untouchable, if you gave a damn about them at all.”

Nick stared at him, feeling that heat in him grow.

He was still winnowing down options, trying to decide the best one to pursue.

Then the doppelganger dropped something else.

“Brick told me,” the creature said accusingly. “He warned me you’d never really accepted what you were. That you fought it from day one. That you let yourself be corrupted into believing you were somehow evil or bad––”

Brick. Of course.

Of course that piece of shit was behind this.

It explained so much.

That time, Nick didn’t wait.

He didn’t think.

He didn’t second-guess.

He was done with this.

He was just… done.

CHAPTER21

THE SPEAR

Nick leaptat the other vampire.

He didn’t leapdirectlyat him, not with Morley standing right in front of him. He would have knocked the old man down and maybe killed him, intentionally or not. However many pounds of rock-like vampire flesh and bones, moving at vampire speed, likely would have broken every bone in James Morley’s body.

And then there was Jordan to worry about.

Jordan still had that spear pointed right at his chest.

For all of these reasons, Nick didn’t leap forward.

He leapt up.

Notstraightup, but pretty damned close.

He leapt over Morley.

He launched himself towards the ceiling so fast, so aggressively, he forced the other vamp to look up.

He also did it fast enough that when that other Nick thrust up hard with the spear, intending to kill Jordan with a single blow, Nick snatched the wooden handle out of the air. He jerked the heart-shaped blade sideways and down before it could penetrate his friend’s chest.

It sliced along Nick’s own arm and shoulder in the process, but he barely felt it.

Nick caught the spear’s handle again on his way down.

One downside of the tactic: he hadn’t been crazy about leaving Morley so close to the line of fire, or so close to that psychotic vampire, even for those few seconds. He knew grabbing the spear might mean that vampire grabbed Morley in retaliation. He only hoped to catch him enough by surprise that he could keep that from happening.

As it was, he came down hard.

He managed to land awkwardly with the spear still in his hand, position roughly at the center point between the other vampire and Morley, with Damon at least temporarily out of harm’s way.