Page 11 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 11

THE BYSTANDER

The older vampire stared at Nick meaningfully.

In the end, Nick ended up being the one to finally crack.

“That’s it?” Nick growled. “That’s all I get? What kind of fucking ‘warning’ is that? What am I supposed to even do with that?”

Brick was already shaking his auburn head. He clucked his tongue at Nick, almost in a seer-like fashion, but not quite. He rolled his eyes dramatically.

“Nick, my darling, difficult, ever-the-most-dramatic, and endlessly intractable child of mine,” the older vampire drawled, a hint of the old Louisiana in his voice. “Listen to me closely. I would be very, very careful with Lara St. Maarten, if I were you.”

Brick sniffed, tugging again at his collar. “I do not know what she’s told you, but I strongly suspect she is the driving force behind all of this.”

“All of what?” Nick stared back. “This ‘change’? The one you still won’t fucking explain to me? You think she’s the reason for it?”

“Yes,” Brick said coldly. “I do.”

“But you won’t tell me what it is?” Nick pressed.

Brick let out another dramatic sigh.

“It is not one thing, offspring. It is many things. It is a different scent in the air, if you will.” Brick returned his gaze levelly to Nick’s. “I do not know what she’s told you in the wake of this most recent incident, but I would approach any promises or assurances she gives you with a great deal of skepticism. If she’s trying to convince you that ‘all is normal’ and ‘all is well’ and that ‘everything will go back to the way it was,’ I would definitely not trust those words… or much of anything else coming from her.”

Nick’s jaw tightened. “And you can’t elaborate on that?”

Brick sighed another dramatic sigh.

When he spoke next, however, his voice had darkened.

“Let’s just say, I think that, despite knowing theoretically about inter-dimensional portals for decades, and that other species have walked through them to this world, causing problems and strain and even war for several hundred years… seeing one now, in the present time period, and inside a well-populated, human protected area, has had a profound effect on not only Lara St. Maarten, but other powerful individuals in the human world. One might even say a profoundly emotional effect… one that is not entirely rational.”

Brick’s voice darkened more.

“…I am telling you, something has changed, Nick.”

Nick stared back at him.

He tried to make sense of what Brick meant him to read behind those words.

Obviously, he thought Lara was lying to Nick.

That, or Brick wanted to turn him against Lara and Archangel. Or, he really thought Lara saw the portal as a threat––even though it had closed all on its own––and she now, what? She intended to do what, exactly?

“Are you saying Archangel has gone full human-supremacist because of one lousy fucking portal?” Nick asked, incredulous. “A portal that’s not even there anymore? What would be the sense in that? More than half of her technological breakthroughs since the war were powered by hybrids or seers in some way. Or do you think it’s only me she wants to get rid of? And any other vampires or seers she finds ‘inconvenient’?”

Brick busied himself by tugging at the cuffs of his shirt, then switching to his jacket sleeves, then his coat, then his belt, arranging his clothes in the endless fussiness he always seemed to display, no matter what he wore.

Nick knew it as a nervous tic, and sometimes as a means of buying himself time.

It never ceased to annoy Nick though, even after hundreds of years.

“Your ability to ignore my very clear statements remains healthy,” Brick muttered.

Nick grunted. “Very clear statements? Of all the delusional, gaslighting bullshit––”

“––This isn’t my world, either,” Brick snapped, his eyes flicking up to stare into Nick’s. “You don’t see me whining about wanting to go back, simply because I happened to be born somewhere else. What could you possibly even want with that place, after all this time?”

Nick blinked at the abrupt change in subject.

Then his mouth tipped in a frown.

“You’re blaming this on me?” Nick asked, incredulous. “You’re actually pissed at me for wanting to go home?”

“I just don’t see the reason in it,” Brick said crisply, tugging at his shirt. “It’s been hundreds of years, Naoko. Possibly thousands on the other end. Everyone you knew there is most assuredly dead. And how do you know you would not return to a far more desperate and broken world than this one? Is it really so terrible here for you that you’d take that chance?”

“Yes, you fucking psycho.” Nick stared at the other vampire in disbelief. “It is that fucking terrible here. And I highly doubt you’re worried it might be ‘worse’ back on our home world. Knowing you, you’re far more worried that it’s not.”

Brick glared at him coldly. “And why, dearest Naoko, would I be worried about that?”

“Because you’re a psychopath,” Nick said without hesitation. “Of course you’d prefer a world as twisted as this one. You’ve had more power here than you likely ever would’ve accessed back home. You fucking love how barbaric it is, how important you are, how easy it is to be corrupt and be king of the vampire underground. Back on our Earth, you had to hide from humans. Here, you get to be feared by them.”

Brick’s expression went back to passionlessly unmoved.

He tugged at his sleeve a few more times, then adjusted his shoulders and faced Nick squarely. His stare reverted to its flat, reptile-like countenance.

“Lara tells me you have an interest in your memories,” Brick said next.

Nick blinked, then fought back another open scoff. “Jesus.”

“Was she telling the truth?” Brick pressed.

“I should have known––”

“I am not here to discourage you in that, offspring,” Brick said, his voice a touch hotter. “On the contrary… I have come to offer my own assistance, as a counter to hers. I openly offer my help, if you would condescend to take it. I doubt Lara has your best interests at heart in agreeing to your request. You would be far safer in relying on your own kind, Nick.”

“Would I?” Nick retorted. “Would I be safer in trusting you, Brick? Because it’s you who always has my best interests at heart?”

“Why would I not?” Brick asked drily.

“I don’t want your help,” Nick growled. “You’ve never once told me the truth about fucking anything, Brick… not unless it directly benefited you in some way. You’ve never once corroborated a memory I actually do remember, so why the fuck would I want your ‘help’ now?” Thinking about that, Nick scoffed for real. “I think I’ll pass on you throwing wrenches at anything I might recover that skirts too close to the truth––”

“You came to me,” Brick cut in, darker. “You asked me to help you remove the memories you no longer wanted. Further, you paid me for that favor in blood. Not to mention years and years of servitude. Are you so sure you would so casually throw all that away?”

At that, Nick hesitated.

He stared at Brick, surprised, in spite of himself.

“I thought you weren’t here to discourage me?” he retorted. “I thought you were the only one I could trust to help me recover those memories? You should at least make a minimal effort to keep your stories straight, father,” he added bitingly.

“Perhaps I am feeling a touch paternal,” Brick shot back. “I admit, there would be benefits to me if you remembered. But I doubt there will be as many for you.”

Nick’s jaw hardened.

He scoffed, but not without anger.

“So do you want me to remember?” he asked acidly. “Or not?”

“I’m simply urging you to think carefully about this,” Brick warned. “Do you really wish to reverse everything you did? Do you wish to know it all again, to remember it all again? Because you were quite desperate not to remember at the time. And believe me or not, I think you remember enough to guess I am telling you the truth about this. You know, deep down, what a steep price you paid. You have not forgotten that much?”

The silence in the entryway grew dense.

Outside those doors, Nick’s sensitive vampire ears could hear traffic picking up. He knew the early morning commutes had already begun. A lot of people still drove from the upper parts of Manhattan down to the lower-number streets for work and school and whatever else. Some even took the train out to other Protected Areas, like Wynter and Tai were doing now.

They would likely be leaving for that train in the next handful of minutes.

The city would be waking up for real by the time she and Tai found their seats on the commuter line.

It was likely already too late for Nick to take the subway home.

He’d need a cab now, one with vampire-safe windows.

But he was avoiding, and he knew it.

“That’s why I joined the White Death?” Nick thought about that, and wondered that the obviousness of it hadn’t occurred to him before. “I thought I joined prior to when you did me that ‘favor’ with my memories.”

“You did not,” Brick stated. “It was a condition of my help.”

Nick’s hands slowly clenched as he turned over the implications of that.

“When?” he asked. “How long ago?”

“Do the specifics matter?” Brick asked. He threw up an indifferent hand. “It was during the war. As a condition of our agreement, I insisted you fight with us for the remaining conflict, and to lead part of the vampire armies. You agreed to that, as well.”

“I wasn’t in the war before then?” Nick asked, frowning.

“No,” Brick answered, a touch sourly. “You were not.”

“Why?” Nick asked, genuinely bewildered.

Brick shrugged. “You chose to sit out the war before then, insisting it had nothing to do with you. You were never what I’d call an enthusiastic participant, Nick, but before our agreement, and your subsequent memory wipe, you were adamantly neutral, and chose to drink away your time during the war, instead.”

Nick frowned. Could that possibly be true?

He felt weirdly guilty at the thought, which made him think it might be.

But why? Why the fuck would he have sat on the sidelines, drunk, while the world was being destroyed? Who even did that?

Brick sniffed, pulling Nick’s eyes back to his.

“When you came to me, you were at your wits’ end,” the older vampire continued, blunt. “Frankly, you were suicidal. You agreed to be an active participant in the war as a condition of my help. And you agreed to help me strengthen and organize the White Death, in the event we were able to bring the war to an end.”

Brick threw up another vague hand, his eyes flat.

“Obviously, I could not say with certainty when that war would end,” he added. “Or even if it would, but there was a specific timetable associated with the second part, assuming we were successful in ending hostilities. You met my conditions. All of them. And then you stayed for additional time after that.”

Nick’s teeth began to ache from clenching. “That sounds like a long time.”

“It was,” Brick affirmed.

“How long?” Nick asked.

“Well over a hundred years.”

Nick nodded, his jaw still painfully clenched. “And how much of that time went well past the terms of our original agreement, Brick?” he asked sourly. “Since I don’t remember making that deal with you, I can only assume I didn’t remember it then?”

Brick shrugged, as if the distinction didn’t interest him much.

“You stayed for the length of your contract with me, and when it was done, I released you,” he said. Brick’s voice grew a touch darker, and significantly more tinged with violence. “And yes. You had forgotten the contract entirely by then, as a function of the work we performed on your memory. I told you when you were free of obligation to me. Is it my fault you chose to stay for an additional few decades?”

“Decades.” Nick stared into the dark area under the stairwell, unmoving. “I see.”

“I could have told you that you’d contracted yourself to me for life, Naoko,” Brick said, his warning colder. “I could have just as easily kept you on forever, with you none the wiser. Instead, I informed you when the contract between us had been fulfilled. I let you decide when to leave. And I did not stop you when you insisted you wished to. I released you freely. Was I thrilled, when you informed me you’d decided to rejoin the human world…?”

His lip curled in distaste.

“I was not,” he clipped. “…Yet I did not interfere.”

Brick’s crystal eyes flushed scarlet as he stared at his progeny.

“I sometimes see that as a mistake now, to be honest,” the older vampire admitted. “But, at the time, I did nothing untoward. I did not get in your way when you decided to leave our protective enclave. I did not prevent you from becoming a Midnight. Nor did I try to intervene when you moved to the Mexi-Cal Protected Area to work for the L.A.P.D.” Again, his lip curled. “I have even largely left you alone since you returned here, to New York. After all, it was you who came to me here, initially, pet. As you are wont to do.”

Nick felt his jaw harden at that observation, but he didn’t speak.

Brick was right.

He had gone to his sire on his own.

Nick had gone to Brick for information, and even for help on more than one occasion.

Brick had, on the surface at least, left him alone.

Still, Nick couldn’t exactly make himself feel grateful.

“And how we got here?” Nick studied his sire’s face, arms folded. “There was no ‘mission’ in South America. Was there? That story you told me, about a cave in South America, about you and I ‘falling through accidentally’ while on some kind of op with Black and Miri? None of that was true. That’s not how it actually happened, is it?”

Brick sniffed.

Again, he fussily adjusted one of his sleeves.

“No,” he conceded.

“How did it happen, Brick?” Nick asked, a touch colder.

Brick looked up, his red eyes sharper. “I thought that was the purpose of your little project with Lara? To discover that on your own? Why would you ask me, when you’ve already told me, in no uncertain terms, that you do not wish my help? When you so very clearly won’t believe anything I say to you? Even when I am trying to protect you?”

Nick frowned.

Again, he couldn’t exactly disagree with any of Brick’s words.

Why would he ask his sire?

Why wasn’t he taking Brick’s warning about Lara more seriously?

Nick surely didn’t trust Lara, either. If he had to choose between them, he trusted her even less than he trusted Brick, and that was saying something.

Yet Brick was also right about Nick not wanting his sire’s help with regaining his memories. He couldn’t believe a fucking thing the older vampire told him, no matter how convincing it sounded.

With Lara, at least he’d have Tai.

And Malek.

And maybe, like Brick, Lara had her own reasons for wanting Nick to remember.

“I will leave you with one thing from our mutual memories, offspring,” Brick said suddenly, his voice clipped. “If you will permit me to share?”

Nick fought not to roll his eyes.

Fucking Brick.

Even if his sire did deign to feed him some meager snippet of truth, Nick wouldn’t be able to tell which parts of it actually were true, much less how it had been twisted to meet some other narrative or emotional pull.

Still, curiosity was a hell of a drug.

“Whatever,” he said, annoyed. “Sure. Fine. Tell me.”

Brick’s full lips pulled into a twisted, highly-untrustworthy smile. “We did not all arrive at the same time.”

Nick blinked, frowned. “What?”

Brick exhaled impatiently.

“We. Did. Not. All. Arrive. At. The. Same. Time,” he enunciated.

Nick frowned, staring into the dark space under the stairs.

When he refocused his eyes, that particular segment of shadow where his sire had stood was empty. Brick had vanished.

The only thing missing was the smoke-bomb old-time magicians used to use, the ones that let out a brief whoosh and a column of colored smoke.

Drama addict, Nick thought, annoyed.

Still, his mind continued to turn over Brick’s words.