Page 13 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 13

EVEN IF IT KILLED HIM

Emotion slid through him. Cloying, thick, heartbreaking, overwhelming.

Utterly unable to be reasoned with.

A feeling of import lived there.

Or just of devastation, maybe.

The overwhelming sensation struck Nick as one of intense urgency. Whatever was there, it was insanely important to him. It was the most important thing, the most unable to be lost. The taste of pain, of pleasure, of want… of fucking need … it erased everything else.

He couldn’t bear to be parted with it again.

He couldn’t bear it.

He couldn’t bear to let it go.

Grief spiraled there, not just in the thing that lived on the other side, but an intense grief that he’d forgotten it. He’d forgotten something so important to himself, it felt like the worst kind of sin, the worst kind of betrayal. How had he let himself forget? How had he given away something so precious, so uniquely his?

How had he tossed aside something no one else could ever know?

It felt like murder.

It felt like he’d murdered someone. Maybe more than one someone.

He couldn’t reach the actual memories, though.

He couldn’t see them, or even get close enough to imagine them.

Nothing about what he felt had the tangible weight of understanding or remembrance, or even of make-believe fantasies of what he’d wished his life could be.

It was still too far away.

He was still too blinded by those gaps, unable to see what lived beyond them.

He could feel the intensity of it, the need to hold onto it, the need to understand, the grief at its loss. But whatever it was he grasped at, it turned to smoke as soon as his fingers closed, as soon as he stretched his arm out far enough to reach it. He strained harder, trying to get there, to pull it back to him, to leave with it clutched in his fingers.

He couldn’t.

Whatever it was, wherever his mind went, and whatever it was doing…

Abruptly ceased.

* * *

Like with sleep, Nick didn’t realize the session had started until it was already over.

All he caught were the fragments.

All he caught was that heartbreakingly intense swell of feeling––of urgency, pain, grief, desperation, guilt, and shame.

And all of that came at the very, very end of the experience.

Like the previous six or so attempts, it was almost like no time had passed.

If Nick hadn’t felt those things at the end, he might have thought he’d closed his eyes in a long blink, then opened them up to find the room more or less unchanged.

But he never had closed his eyes, had he?

Nick didn’t open his eyes now so much as watch the room reform itself around him.

It coalesced. It sharpened.

It telescoped slowly back into focus.

The dimmer switch slowly raised.

Nick himself hadn’t moved, not even to blink.

He found himself where he had each of the other times they’d done this, sitting cross-legged on a strangely comfortable rug, his butt perched on an even more comfortable cushion covered in fake fur. He suspected the cushions came from the kid’s taste.

He wasn’t breathing hard or anything, or breathing at all, given what he was. He didn’t cry out in shock, or do any of the usual, human things one did when they were jerked violently awake from an intense dream, or possibly an intense nightmare.

Otherwise, though, it felt like that.

It felt like he’d been yanked violently back from a dreamlike precipice from which he might otherwise have fallen off.

But he hadn’t been asleep… exactly.

Had he?

“No,” the small girl’s voice answered. “No, not exactly. Not asleep.”

Nick’s eyes flickered back to center.

He immediately locked gazes with wide, ice-blue eyes, which, even more than usual, seemed to swallow her elfin face. The silver tips of her black hair picked up the dim floor-lights, and appeared to glow.

“Am I just sitting here like a zombie the whole time?” he asked, smiling. “Mouth open? Drool running down my jaw?”

Her small nose crinkled. “Ew.”

“Am I?”

“You do look weird,” she conceded after a pause. “Your mouth doesn’t usually fall open, and I haven’t seen any drool…” Again that disgusted crinkle. “But your eyes are open and you stare off like you’re dead. And sometimes it looks like you’re trying to breathe for real, like you can’t figure out how to make your body work right… probably because it’s a vampire body, and not a human one, so it doesn’t work right. Not right like you want.”

Nick grunted again.

He found himself noticing her furrowed brow, the faint worry on her face.

It wasn’t all from his comment about vampire drool.

She still looked about ten or eleven years old to him, or maybe an old-looking nine, or a very young-looking twelve.

He couldn’t help but see things in terms of human ages, even now.

Vampires didn’t age at all, and seers aged very slowly and strangely compared to humans, with very few wrinkles and shockingly pristine teeth, which they regrew or regenerated every few decades, so maybe it was just easier to the stick to the frame of reference he understood.

Human was simple.

It was also the first aging system he’d ever known.

Plus, he’d never really watched a child seer age until now.

Still, occasionally she looked older, like now, when she appeared to be genuinely concerned about him.

The depth and sincerity of her emotions still had the power to throw him.

She adjusted her seat where she sat cross-legged on a furry, purple cushion about four feet from where Nick sat cross-legged on a furry, green cushion of identical size, shape, and furriness. Her dark hair was back to how it had looked when Nick first met her at that park in downtown Manhattan. It hung straight in that way he used to associate with Asian hair back home, and she’d dyed it ice-blue-silver at the tips, including on her bangs.

The dye almost exactly matched the color of her eyes.

It couldn’t match the depth of her eyes, or the light he could see in them, that eerie, fairy-like light that lived only in some full-blooded seers’ eyes.

But the effect was still neat.

The rest of her hair, she’d returned to its natural, raven-wing black.

The exact same color as Nick’s own hair.

The same color as her brother, Malek’s, hair.

It was too easy for Nick to see her and her brother as part of his family, for a lot of reasons. The odd biological similarities just made it a tiny bit easier.

“When did you do this?” he asked, gruff.

He leaned a little closer to gently tug her hair.

“Yesterday,” she said promptly. “Do you like it?”

When he nodded, she smiled, but the smile faded when he didn’t say anything more. Her voice grew impatient, and strangely younger-sounding than it had before. She might as well have crossed her arms, and stamped her foot.

“You could say more than that!” she said. “It took me hours!”

“It’s lovely, Tai,” he said sincerely. “It’s still my favorite way you do you hair.”

Mollified, she relaxed her shoulders and the heat in her eyes diminished. She looked him over with that scrutiny again, and chewed her lower lip.

“Did you see anything at all this time?” she asked. “Or was it like before? Just a big blank? Malek thinks you’re all blank again,” she added, a touch sourly.

Nick’s eyes shifted to the mirror directly across from him, and directly behind her.

He knew it was only a mirror on the one side, and that on the other, Malek sat inside the observation booth, possibly on yet another colored cushion. He wondered if St. Maarten sat in there with him––

“No,” a male voice said over the loudspeaker.

It sounded like he was right in the room with them.

Nick rolled his eyes. “Well, then why don’t you just come in here and sit with us, weirdo? What possible reason is there for you to hide behind that mirror? Or are you getting off on the power-kick of viewing someone else as a lab rat for a change?”

The overhead speaker fell silent.

A few seconds later, the door opened, and Malek walked in, looking strangely uncomfortable. It struck Nick that he’d embarrassed the young seer.

“I was only giving you shit, you know,” Nick muttered, apologetic, and now embarrassed himself that he’d been harassing an adolescent seer, simply because he’d felt self-conscious. “You can do whatever you want. I don’t mind if you’d rather stay in there.”

Malek shrugged.

He walked over with his long, lanky limbs.

He looked like a young colt.

He stopped when he stood right next to where his sister sat.

After looking around for a moment, he walked away again, found another fluffy cushion against the wall, this one dark red, brought it back over to his sister, tossed it to the carpet, then sank into a cross-legged position next to her.

His lean forearms landed on either side of his lap.

The left arm, which Nick hadn’t thought to look at in some time, was decorated in colorful, detailed tattoos of bird feathers and bones. The other arm had mostly seer symbols, including a few Nick recognized in such a personal way, they were difficult to look at.

The sword and sun. Earth balanced on the back of a turtle. A dragon. Markings in Prexci he somehow now remembered came from seer religious texts.

He saw another image then, one he hadn’t noticed before. It was also seer, but Nick vaguely remembered it had something to do with a bird.

Was it a phoenix? A seer equivalent, perhaps?”

The bones and feathers were generally what drew people’s eyes.

Jack Bird.

Nick had nearly forgotten the kid who used to go by that, back when Malek and Tai primarily lived in the Cauldron, and Malek had been highly suspicious of Nick.

Talk about someone who’d been forced to grow up way too fast.

Malek was practically the poster boy for kids burdened with adulthood too soon.

The lanky seer smiled, tossed his head to get a chunk of his long, black hair out of his eyes, and smiled wider. That disarming, boyish grin still managed to catch Nick off guard, every time he saw it.

“It’s okay, Nick,” Malek assured the vampire. “I was embarrassed, but it’s not a big deal. I should have just worked from in here, like you said. I thought maybe it would be weird to have both of us staring at you. And I know my eyes can be… disquieting.”

Nick scoffed at that, hiding his relief badly.

“They’re not ‘disquieting,’ whatever the fuck that means,” he said.

“You know precisely what it means,” Malek responded evenly. “And they unnerve some people. You know they do.”

Nick focused on the young man’s eyes.

One of those eyes shone a pale turquoise; the other was so dark, it nearly swallowed the pupil, and shone an opaque black. In color, the darker eye matched his long hair, which had grown out from where he used to shave it on the sides. His hair was a wild mane now, thick and dark and far less straight than his sister’s. It had a bit of curl to it, and accented his high cheekbones. He was shockingly handsome, and growing more so as he aged.

Still, despite the seer’s near jaw-dropping features, and Nick’s uncomfortable awareness that Malek was currently having sex with Kit every chance he got, the overwhelming feeling he got as he looked at the lanky seer, was just how damned young he looked.

Nick forgot sometimes, that Tai wasn’t the only child between the two of them. If Malek were human, Nick would have pegged him at roughly eighteen, twenty-two or three at most, and only depending on the day and how he happened to be dressed.

For a seer, Malek was still obscenely young, whatever Lara St. Maarten wanted to believe. Even if Malek was closer to thirty than twenty in actual, solar years, he was still extremely young for one of his race.

Anyway, the year thing was deceptive too, from what Nick knew.

Dalejem had told him, long ago, that seers matured emotionally much closer to how they looked, which made Malek even more young to Nick’s jaded eyes. It was strange to think that, to most humans, he and Mal looked relatively close in age.

To Nick, that distinction felt closer to centuries.

“It might be centuries,” Malek conceded calmly.

“Right,” Nick said.

He tugged at a stray, metallic thread on one sleeve. He still wore the clothes he’d thrown on after his shower at the fight arena, which included black pants, a green, long-sleeved T-shirt he normally only worked out in, and a warmer shirt that might have been called a sweatshirt on his old planet, but here was made of dense, metallic fibers. It was everything he’d worn to the crime scene apart from his boots and his long coat.

He might get reprimanded tonight, for not wearing his uniform yesterday. He might at least have to write up the reason why he hadn’t. But only if one of the street cops said something, or one of the drones clocked his outfit and reported it in.

“Do my eyes really not bother you?” Malek asked.

“They’re beautiful eyes, weirdo,” Nick said, matter of fact. “Of course they don’t bother me. Maybe some people stare because they find them fascinating?”

“Thank you, Nick. And no, that’s not usually why they stare, but I appreciate the thought. And your attempt to make me feel less strange about them.”

Nick fought not to roll his eyes.

Malek was such a funny person sometimes.

Nick wondered if that was due to the prescience the kid had been cursed with at birth, or something even more fundamental to his nature.

Whatever it was, Nick loved him for it, now that he knew him. He also understood Malek’s words as coming from a place of heartbreaking sincerity, an utterly guileless honesty he couldn’t seem to help, no matter what they were talking about. For the same reason, Nick didn’t doubt for a second that the kid meant them all literally.

If he hadn’t known that, he might’ve thought Malek was fucking with him.

The mismatched eyes continued to study Nick’s. “You really don’t remember any of what we saw just now?”

Nick frowned, then slowly shook his head.

He glanced at Tai.

He knew she was even more of an anomaly than her brother, for a lot of reasons. One of those was that she could read his mind, even though he was a vampire. Most seers couldn’t read vampires. They got nothing from vampire minds at all.

Nick still wasn’t entirely certain if Malek could read him, too, or if he was simply so connected to his sister that he picked up everything from her.

He suspected it was more the latter.

“Yes,” Malek said agreeably. “I suspect this, too. But it can be hard to tell, to be truthful. If it helps, I only hear you easily when the three of us are together, so there is circumstantial evidence to suggest I’m hearing you through Tai. If I can hear you on my own, it’s certainly not as well, or as consistent.” He cleared his throat. “And she can’t hear all vampires so well, you know. She is particularly attuned to you. Other vampires can be difficult for her.”

Nick nodded. “Gotcha.”

“You don’t want to talk about your experiences just now?” Malek asked perceptively. “Is that why you keep thinking about other things, Nick?”

Despite what he’d been thinking about Malek’s disarming honesty only seconds before, Nick scowled at the young seer. As tended to happen when he was feeling particularly stressed and avoidant, he found Malek’s unearthly calm and even more unearthly insight slightly aggravating the moment it got personal.

“I told you, I don’t remember anything,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean you experienced nothing at all,” Malek pointed out reasonably. “Anything you can tell us might be helpful in getting you to remember more.”

Nick gave the young seer a flat look.

“What did you see?” he asked, a touch aggressively.

Malek frowned. He exchanged looks with Tai, whose brow also furrowed.

Then Malek’s blue and near-black eyes returned to Nick.

“Would it really be useful for us to tell you that?” Mal asked, again with maddening reasonableness. “Will it mean anything to you, Nick, when you can’t remember it yourself? Or is talking about things you still can’t remember simply a way to avoid the feelings that are obviously coming up for you around the things you are starting to remember?”

Nick felt his fangs extend a touch.

For the same reason, he didn’t answer at first.

He didn’t want to scare the kid.

He also didn’t want Malek to think he was pissed off at him.

He wasn’t pissed off at him, not really, and he could admit that to himself, too.

In the end, Nick sighed, and combed a bruised hand through his own straight, black hair, which was longer than usual, but still much, much shorter than Mal’s.

“Can you tell me this?” Nick asked, gruff, after another beat of silence. “Those flashes of things I’ve been seeing… what I told you about, with the espresso machine, the houses by the beach, both in San Francisco and Europe, dreams I’ve had of living in the 1700s or whatever, the peasants, the farming, horses, the castle and gardens… Jem getting old. Was any of that real? Or is it all bullshit? Shit my mind made up for some other reason?”

Malek just looked at him, his expression unmoving.

Nick felt his jaw tighten.

He might not be a seer, but he could see the answer in those eyes.

For some reason, that answer made him irrationally angry.

“Are you going to tell me––?” he began in a growl.

“You don’t need me to tell you,” Malek interjected calmly. “You already know what I would say, if I answered that question. Which tells me you might not be experiencing the memories from these sessions directly, but it’s trickling through into your conscious mind, anyway. It’s why you’re so emotional, Nick.”

Nick felt his fangs extend a bit more.

Malek paused, his eyes looking from one of Nick’s crystal-colored irises to the other.

The way he did it made Nick think his eyes were likely turning red, too.

“Maybe you can’t see it all at once,” Malek suggested next. “Or maybe you can’t process it all at once. Maybe this method of flashbacks and dreams is your mind protecting itself? It’s possible you would overload yourself otherwise, Nick. You should probably trust that process and just let it unfold the way it wants to unfold.”

Nick glared at that calm gaze, but couldn’t quite bring himself to hold it. Maybe he knew how childish he was behaving. Or maybe he was avoiding, like the kid just said. Maybe he didn’t really want to hear more, not until he could see it for himself.

Or maybe he didn’t want to hear more at all––some part of him, at least.

Maybe he was hoping the kid would tell him it was all bullshit, and if Malek wouldn’t do that, or even couldn’t do that, Nick didn’t want to know.

Or maybe all of this what-did-Nick remember-and-not-remember b.s. was just an excuse. Maybe Brick was right about the danger of prodding memories so painful they nearly killed him the first time. Maybe Nick was stupid to be digging all of this shit up again.

Maybe he should have let sleeping dogs lie.

But it was too late to second-guess the decision now.

Nick could feel that somehow, too.

It was already too late.

Maybe it had been too late the instant he reached out his hand for the glowing and morphing portal, practically touching his old life and the person he had been.

Maybe it had been too late as soon as Wynter walked into his life.

Maybe he’d never forgive himself if he walked away from it now.

Maybe the “too late” crap was another excuse to do what he wanted.

Whatever the truth of Nick’s annoying fucking brain, he knew he would keep going.

He would remember who he was, even if it killed him.