Page 1 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 1

THE PAST

It all happened so fast. It happened so fast, Nick couldn’t piece any of it together until days later, talking it out with Dalejem on the shores of a pristine beach overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, their feet bare, under the shade of a tree so Nick wouldn’t burn in the morning sun.

In the moment, though, it was like a nightmare.

In the moment, it was like accidentally firing a gun only to find you’d killed someone with the bullet.

In this case, he’d aimed the gun at himself.

Nick watched the cave wink out in front of him.

He’d been struggling, fighting to free himself from Brick’s iron-like arms, both of which cinched tightly around his chest. He’d kicked hard against the ground, a dim thought of slamming the other vampire into the cave wall…

His mind hadn’t been quite right, so that was some of it.

Fuzzed from venom and vampire tranquilizer drugs, both administered against his will by his fucking sire, Nick had been totally off-balance, not himself. It made him miscalculate where he was, how close they stood to the portal. It threw off all of his usual, pinpoint, vampire, spatial awareness and lightning-fast reflexes.

It made him stupid, too.

His last memory, his last thought, his last image from the world where he’d been born, where his parents lived, where all his best friends lived, where he’d worked and lived and died and dreamed––it all converged into a single, echoing snapshot.

That image would stay with him for many, many years. The faces of his friends, the horror reflected in them and in his mate, would stay with him even longer than the exact mechanics of how he left his own world behind.

The imaged stayed until he gave someone permission to forcibly erase it.

A dark, craggy, high-ceilinged space.

Hissing green and yellow yisso torches.

The worried faces of his friends.

Miri, Black, Cowboy, Angel, Dex, Jax, Kiko…

The seer child, Aura, her blue-green eyes wide and horrified.

Jem’s face, more clear than all the rest.

Jem, already moving, already running towards him…

…They all vanished before his mind worked well enough to realize what he’d done.

Gods, he’d done this.

He’d done it.

It was all his fucking fault, and he couldn’t undo it.

The guilt that crashed over him, the horror, the shame…

But that was fleeting, too.

All that remained was the aching hole where his family had been. All that remained was the grief he’d felt for years, for decades, for centuries––the loss of his home, his planet, and everyone he loved, everyone he’d suffered and struggled and laughed with.

Well.

Almost everyone.

* * *

“What do you supposed happened to them?” Nick asked. He was lying on the grass, gazing up at stars. “The rest of them, I mean?”

He’d asked the question so many times over the years, it was almost a game to them now. It was the unanswerable hypothetical that neither of them could ever possibly know for certain. It was, for all intents and purposes, what might have been called, on Nick’s old world, a thought experiment.

Nick still occasionally felt the need to ask it anyway.

He would ask it, if only to hear any new developments from Jem, if only to know whether his mate’s thoughts on the subject had evolved.

He wore clothes that were normal to him now, that would have made him laugh a hundred years earlier. Luckily, the styles evolved slowly, even more slowly than in the time period Nick had come from. Distances were further, everything still got made by hand. But people still evolved their looks, a longer coat one year, one more tightened at the waist, with larger buttons, bigger cuffs, a higher collar, more gold brocade.

Right then, he wore a dark gray, wool frock-coat and embroidered, dark green waistcoat, a cotton shirt with a starched collar, gray gloves, a green ascot to match the waistcoat, a heavier woolen, black overcoat, shined black leather shoes, gold cufflinks, a gold watch and chain, pressed trousers, woolen socks. A beaver-felt top hat perched on a rock nearer to the door of their modest, two-story house overlooking the ocean.

All of it felt so normal as to be mundane, as did his mate’s similar attire, where he sprawled out on the grass next to him.

There were no contact lenses here, so Nick generally explained away his eyes as an “accident of birth,” one common to his family, and nothing to be alarmed from. It perhaps helped that he did most of his social dealings at night, of necessity.

There was no vampire-safe glass here, either.

There weren’t even any cars.

Getting around on horseback meant either making a spectacle of himself with odd cloaks and scarves and umbrellas… or again, doing most such things at night.

Even then, Nick inevitably had to explain that he could see perfectly well through his “oddly magical eyes.” He had to explain this especially often to young women, who seemed both fascinated, drawn, and frightened by his eyes, his “unusual good looks,” as well as his “overall Oriental presentation.”

And yes, it annoyed Dalejem.

It annoyed Dalejem even more when Nick pointed out what a hypocrite he was.

In their lighter moments, it was sometimes remarked they could have made a fortune on this world as a pair of traveling magicians. Jem often joked that, if the money ever ran out, they could take to the road and tell fortunes and perform tricks to mesmerize the locals.

Perhaps Nick could even demonstrate acrobatics.

Or, more realistically, both of them could end up burned at the stake.

Generally, they had kept a very low profile over the years to avoid that very outcome. Jem also spent a fair bit of time and effort and vigilance checking minds, and erasing anyone who might grow too curious about one or both of them, or curious in the wrong ways.

The good outweighed the bad, however.

As much as Nick’s mind still returned to his home world, his friends, his family, he had to admit, the good often well-outweighed the bad in those early years. If his family had all been with him, if Miri, Black, Angel, his parents, and the rest of them had followed Jem through that portal, he might have even preferred their new world.

It was so intensely quiet, even after all this time.

It was so much quieter than Nick could ever remember from that previous world.

There were so many stars.

The stars were endless here, mesmerizing, blinding in their brilliance and variety, and totally ignored by most humans he met who had grown up under them. Nick and Dalejem had begun stargazing as a hobby practically from their first night here.

Back home, even when Nick had gone backpacking with friends, way out into the woods and away from civilization, walking snowy ridges on high mountains as a human, or far out to sea on large ships, it never had been so quiet as it was now. The sky never held so many stars as what Nick and Jem could see in this simple seaside village in the French countryside.

Dalejem turned on his side, and smiled at him.

His pale green eyes looked faintly mischievous, and knowing, because he didn’t have to ask who Nick meant with his question.

He didn’t have to pretend to answer Nick at this point, either.

He played their little game, their thought experiment, when he wanted.

When he didn’t feel the need for it, he let the question hang in the air.

He let it be their hypothetical, with no need to pretend there’d ever be an answer.

Dalejem was more than a little gray now. Most of his dark hair had turned an iron gray over the past sixty or so years, and Nick found that hot as fuck, but it also worried him. It started off as a few sprinkled strands, maybe eighty years ago, then gradual salt and pepper, but it had been decades now since Nick could pretend either of those descriptions were still true.

Jem was entirely gray now, his whole head of hair.

His body had thickened some, which was somehow stranger.

Nick tried not to notice.

He knew Dalejem knew he did notice, but Nick did his best not to let his mate feel his fear, or the worry that consumed him when he noticed his mate’s hearing getting a little worse, his eyesight a little less than the eagle’s vision he’d had, even a few decades earlier.

Nick did a lot of the shooting now, which should have been proof enough of the changes. No one had ever shot so well as Jem in his prime, not even a vampire, with a vampire’s sight and reflexes and speed. Jem had been terrifyingly good with a gun.

But nothing lasted forever, not even Jem’s unbelievable skill in so many things.

They’d been here for over almost two hundred years.

It was strange to think of.

It felt greedy to fear the end of it, especially when Nick had been gifted such a perfect life, and so much more of it than any human could ever dream of living.

He did fear it, though.

He feared that end so badly he could scarcely think past it when he really let it envelope him. It stared him in the face some nights, as much as he tried to deny it; there was only one way this journey could and would end.

And it would inevitably end.

That would happen whether Nick liked it or not, whether he could handle it or not, whether he lied to himself about its coming or not.

The laws of life and death were ironclad.

Time was inexorable.

Nick knew that, but he couldn’t pretend to accept it.

He feared that train barreling towards them so much, he would wander around the countryside sometimes, late at night while his mate slept. Nick would surf in the waves, with the board he’d made with his own two hands, which he hid at night to avoid making the locals too curious about what he might be doing with it.

The idea of his immortality had never weighed on him until his mate began to age.

Before, their long lives had merely posed a logistical problem.

They’d had to move a number of times over the years, of course.

They’d moved because Nick didn’t age, and Jem didn’t age fast enough.

In the beginning they’d moved because they got restless and wanted something new, or simply because they decided it was time, but now their moves were largely strategic.

They always stuck to the coast, though.

Nick liked the ocean, and Dalejem liked it, too, so they moved all up and down the Cote d’Azur, and watched it change gradually over those two centuries. They watched the ships come and go. They read the newspapers, once they had some to read, and avoided the rougher parts of humanity where they could, everything from bodies piled high from plague, to wars, to peasant revolts and religious mobs, to famines and crusades.

Most days, Nick barely remembered the life he’d had before now.

It felt like a dream, like something scarcely real.

Other days, it felt so clear, so immediate and alive, he’d hear a laugh that sounded like his mother, or Black, or Miri, or one of his sisters and it was like a punch to the chest. He’d turn around and around, searching for the source, searching for that member of his family, even knowing how irrational it was.

Some part of him never stopped looking.

Some part of him never stopped hoping he might stumble upon them here, after all.

It’s why he never left the Cote d’Azur, even as they traveled up and down the length of it and back again, moving homes while always staying in the same rough region of the civilized world. Some part of Nick continued to wait, to leave the door open for the rest of his friends and family to appear.

They never did, though.

He and Jem lived in beauty and simplicity anyway, despite that.

They even took in children here and there over their years, finding faces that touched them among the orphans and the abandoned, the neglected and unloved.

They fed them and taught them what they could, until it was time to send them out into the world, to make their own fortunes with the lives and resources they’d been given.

Some went on to become important people in their own right.

Nick and Dalejem never wanted for resources, and they were generous with the few souls they could manage to bring in and raise.

Some of them came back.

Some came back even as old men and women, and didn’t say too much about Nick still looking exactly as he had when they were children, like he still hadn’t reached the age of thirty, and Jem looking older, but never as old as he should.

Jem was aging now, though.

For a while their story was older and younger brothers.

Then father and son.

Now Dalejem sometimes told humans he was Nick’s great uncle.

Nick had winced at that, but he hadn’t contradicted him.

Jem’s aging seemed to be accelerating the last few years, especially this previous year. It likely would get less and less likely that Nick could even be his son. Jem had joked that he’d be calling himself Nick’s grandfather soon.

Nick pushed it from his mind.

He kissed his husband’s face, and smiled at him, a hint of fang showing.

“Want to go surfing?” he teased the seer.

Jem smiled back, but Nick saw the answer there, in the wariness of his gaze.

“Not sure my knees or hips would thank me for that, brother,” Jem chided.

“I’ll carry you,” Nick offered.

Jem laughed, then smacked him, and both of them laughed, staring up at the dazzling stars, still shockingly clear despite the creeping smog of the early Industrial Revolution, but without satellites still, without planes, without helicopters or drones.

Where they were, the smoke from local fires were all that dotted the sky, and the ocean breeze sucked most of that out to sea.

“Do you remember anything at all, when he let go of you?” Jem asked Nick then.

He’d asked that question a few hundred times over the years, as well.

In the beginning there’d been in-depth discussions, long, meandering theories about where the others in their group could have gone, what might have happened to them, what place or time may have claimed them.

But Nick had no answers now, just like he’d had none then.

“No,” he said truthfully, as per their ritual. “Nothing useful. Nothing specific.”

Still, his mind went back there, and recounted how it all happened, the parts he understood at least, the parts that still felt true after all this time.

Nick kicked his foot into the stone.

He and Brick vanished through the portal.

Brick had been holding him tightly around the chest.

Nick had seen shocking stars, flashing comets, nebulae, exploding planets. He’d seen himself shooting through that darkness as if pushed by an invisible hand.

At some point, Brick had been torn away.

Brick had been separated from him as Nick hurtled through space.

Nick had seen him leave, an arc of light streaking in a different direction through the inky darkness, pulled by some resonance or disturbance in another part of the weave. Nick had felt clearly, then, how their paths had to diverge, how they were not the same, did not align to the same frequency or song.

That sky was all light, all song, all frequency, and in that space, like called to like. That which was different could not be pulled to the same place and time.

Nick had felt the rightness of that.

He’d felt the rightness in where he, Nick, went.

He’d felt the weave of time and space, and how it contained its own truth, its own logic.

He’d tried to explain that to Dalejem, too, over the years.

It was part of what reassured him about where they’d both ended up.

He explained it to him that first night, as they’d stretched out under the stars, much like they were now, with Nick giving Jem his long coat for warmth, and his gloves and even his hat, which he’d stuffed into a pocket, while Nick stretched out next to his mate with none of that, not needing it with his vampire blood and skin.

In the end, after those brilliant lights and darkness, Nick had been brought here.

Not long after, Dalejem had joined him in this place and time.

No one else had followed.

Even after all these years, no one else had ever joined them in this place.

Jem and Nick both wondered if anyone else had followed them through the portal, though. Had they tried to find them, only to fail?

Nick hoped, aloud and to himself, that they hadn’t.

He really, really hoped that.

Selfishly, if he couldn’t have them here, he preferred to think of them back on his home world, waiting for him, like he waited for them.

At the same time, in looking back at his life here, he questioned whether it would really be all that bad for them if they had come after him.

Maybe they would have ended up in a place that nourished them just as much.

Maybe they would have been happier, even.

After all, Nick had no complaints about this strange life he’d been given.

His life was good.

Gaos, his life had been so very, very good.