Page 17 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 17

THE HINTERLANDS

“Savages,” Nick growled under his breath.

He bent over his mate in the flickering candlelight, using his vampire sense of smell and eyesight to look at the ragged wound in Dalejem’s chest.

“You’re going to have another scar,” he muttered.

Jem only nodded. His long body sprawled on the ancient oak table, his limbs entirely loose, his fingers open, his skin clammy. Nick suspected it was more from exhaustion than because Jem was trying not to tense up under the pain.

Nick hung over the sweating seer with tweezers he’d made himself, using their forge and a few horseshoe nails he’d hammered into the shape he’d wanted.

He plucked out another ball of iron buckshot, and glanced at his mate’s face.

Dalejem looked unnervingly pale, and despite his silence, like he was in a lot of pain.

He gave Nick a weak smile, then tried to joke.

Because of course he did.

“Remind me of this, my brother,” Jem said thickly. “When I complain about the humans from my birth world…”

“No,” Nick said, a touch huffily. “I won’t.” He glared at the other male. “You’ve told me far too much about those fuckers for me to cut them any slack, either… brother.”

Dalejem managed another smile. “Their crimes seem less bad in the moment.”

“I’m sure they do,” Nick grumbled. To distract the other male, he demanded, “Tell me again what made them accuse you of devil-worship this time, Jem? What the hell did you say to them? Or was it just your eyes?”

“No.”

“No, you didn’t say anything?” Nick pressed.

Jem gave an apologetic shrug. “I might have.”

“You might have?”

“I was careless.”

“What does that mean?” Nick moved the oil lamp closer as he switched to a different part of the seer’s wound. He thought he had most of it, but he could tell from the wound’s scent that there was still iron in it, and he wasn’t taking any chances.

In this world, gunshots were more likely to kill his mate from sepsis than from the actual damage they did to his seer flesh and bones. That was true of most injuries here, unfortunately, but especially anything human-inflicted.

They should have moved to Asia.

At least people were fucking clean there.

Dalejem let out a rolling chuckle, but it quickly turned to a pained groan when he moved his wound too much and hurt himself.

“Too true, ilyo,” the seer muttered regretfully around a gasp. “Too true.”

“Are you going to tell me what you did?” Nick demanded.

Jem let out an exasperated sigh.

“I might have warned them not to use the old well,” he admitted. “The one you figured out caused that cholera outbreak in town…”

Nick was already clicking under his breath, his jaw clenched.

“Couldn’t you have pushed them?” he complained.

“I should have,” Jem conceded. “I didn’t realize there were already accusations going around that lepers had poisoned the well. Once they got it in their heads I was part of the same conspiracy, working with the Roma and whoever else… OW!”

He gave Nick an affronted look, his hands now clenched in fists.

“Gaos,” he complained. “Be careful, would you? I’m not made of stone, like you.”

Nick didn’t answer.

He’d known that yanking out that one shard of metal might hurt; it was why he’d been bugging his mate to talk. Now he found another, slightly smaller piece of iron by smell and started to yank it out.

“OW, OW, OW…” Dalejem complained.

Nick didn’t answer that, either.

He scowled down at the piece of buckshot, though. He could practically smell the bacteria on the damned things.

But that was the last of it.

The iron was gone. He could smell that, too.

He picked up the vile bottle of rotgut moonshine they kept around for just such occasions, the one they’d jokingly labeled “Brain Murder.” He showed it to Dalejem and swished it around a little in the container as he met his mate’s gaze meaningfully.

“This part’s really going to hurt, you nitwit. Want something to bite down on? Or would you rather just tough it out, like some kind of cowboy, or––”

* * *

Nick’s eyes shot open.

Pain had awakened him.

His cut thigh had slammed painfully into something hard and jagged.

It hurt so fucking bad, his mind went totally blank.

He tried to groan, but the sound got choked off before he could get it out. It caught in his throat instead, so that he could only make a muffled but significantly quieter gasp.

Groggy, half-conscious, he stared up at the underneath of the metal truck, watching it move dizzyingly over him. His mind swam with the wooden shutters and blown-glass windows of the house he’d just seen in the dream-space of his mind. He imagined the rolling fields outside the white-washed fence, the small forge he’d built with his bare hands over a series of nights, halfway between the garden and the small stable.

At that time, his horse had been Ferdinand, a big black Spanish horse.

Jem’s had been Ardalan, a smaller, dusty-gold Arabian.

His leg smacked into something sharp and hard again, and Nick let out a muffled cry.

He watched as the bottom of the truck disappeared, and a crush of stars set in the dome appeared overhead. He watched the stars blur and focus and blur again as he fought his mind back into straight lines.

Someone was dragging him.

He was being dragged.

They had ahold of his wrists.

Fuck.

He started to writhe his arms and legs, cautiously at first.

“No,” a voice said, quiet but firm. “Don’t fight us, Midnight.”

Nick stopped dead, right before he would have whipped into fighting for real. One of the people there must have seen that on him, the tensing of muscles, the set of his jaw––

Wait. He knew that voice.

But it was more than just the voice he knew.

There was more than one person there.

They’d dragged him out from under the truck.

Before he could make up his mind what he should do, he was completely out from under the metal chassis, even his feet, and the fingers around his wrists squeezed his flesh firmly and meaningfully, but not painfully.

Something in the way the person did that made Nick pause again.

Were these friends? That felt almost… friendly.

Reassuring, maybe.

At least not actively sadistic.

Nick looked up, then tilted his head all the way back. He looked first at the one who’d squeezed his wrist, who also happened to be the stronger of the two people who had ahold of him. They dragged him together over the dirt and grass, but one of them was bigger, stronger, taller, and they smelled more pungently to Nick’s vampire nose.

He saw long, black, shaggy hair with some curl to it.

He saw broad shoulders.

He saw tattoos of colored feathers and hollow bones.

He saw lanky arms, long legs, brightly-colored tattoos.

Then the dark head turned and two different-colored eyes stared down at Nick from a preternaturally handsome face. The person next to the male, who held Nick’s other wrist, was huffing and puffing more than the tall male, but Nick recognized that face, too.

He tried to speak her name, but couldn’t force the words past his lips.

Fuck. What was wrong with him?

“There’s some kind of poison in you,” a quiet voice whispered from near his head. That person wasn’t touching him, but he could smell her. “Something in the bullet I’ve never seen before,” the soft whisper added. “Not the usual toxin Archangel and the H.E.A. use… something worse. We have to get it out of you.”

Nick fought to make sense of the words.

He understood each one of them separately, but somehow the collection of them just turned into muddled gibberish in his head. He wanted to pull them apart and rearrange them until they made sense, but he couldn’t quite manage it.

When he lifted his head next, two more people were gripping his ankles, and two more appeared at his sides.

He recognized all of them.

One of those faces, in particular, he knew so well his chest grew a sharp pain.

She glared at him with absolute fury in her eyes.

Something about that fury was so familiar, so reassuring, it only made him try to reach for her, first with his hand, which he’d forgotten was already being gripped by the wrist, and then with his whole body.

“Oh, no you don’t,” she whispered fiercely. “You just lie there and don’t move, Nick Tanaka, or I might just forget you’re injured and smack you.”

He watched her wipe her eyes,

He watched again, bewildered, when they grew overly bright a second time.

“Just don’t move,” she scolded, still in that vampire-soft, lower-than-a-whisper voice. “Don’t do anything. Close your eyes.”

“I can’t believe you’re yelling at him right now,” a different voice muttered.

The gorgeous woman by Nick’s side didn’t answer.

She never took her stunning eyes off his.

Nick didn’t take his focus off her, either.

He was still staring at her heart-shaped face, her shocking, blue-green eyes, riveting even under the light of the dome’s stars, when his mind slowly fuzzed out.

* * *

“Is that one married? Yer man, there?”

The woman adjusted her corset the tiny amount it would move, smoothing her dress and throwing back her shoulders so that the top of her cleavage instantly became more prominent.

“He isn’t, is he? I’ve never seen him with a woman…”

The hopeful look in her eyes, and the even more hopeful note in her lilting French, would have irritated Nick on its own.

As it was, he found himself annoyed by more than both of those things.

She wasn’t the first young noblewoman to approach Nick, assuming him to be somehow related to Jem and therefore able to speak to his eligibility.

And true, Nick had managed to secure himself a title and lands in the past decade, mostly to keep people at their distance and to stop the marauding pillagers who made their way through the region every few years, but he hated this part of the whole thing.

At least twice a year, Jem announced they needed to make an appearance at one of the royal events, or risk angering the King, something neither of them wanted to have to hassle with. It was one thing to blow off the endless galas, balls, winter feasts, and summer tournaments, but another entirely to not attend the King’s daughter’s wedding when they were specifically invited.

Now, it seemed, they were being eyeballed as possible prospects by a number of parents of young daughters, not to mention the uncles and brothers of young widows, and even the King himself, who’d likely want to marry them off for his own political advantage.

Really, the gaggle of women who’d apparently assumed them both to be old men, when they’d only heard their names and titles and hadn’t yet seen their faces, were really the least of their problems. King Louis had been pulling nobles to Versaille for greater control over the aristocracy for the past decade. Nick and Jem had managed to side-step that by any number of means, including at least one semi-pathetic claim of illness.

Now the entire court could see that neither of them were ill.

Further, they were young, visibly unattached in the eyes of the court and King, and running out of excuses to keep their distance.

Gah, they should have stayed in the C?te d’Azur.

To hell with Paris and Versaille, and especially to hell with the court and entourage of the narcissistic Sun King.

Nick wasn’t thrilled with the thought of having to deal with this shit on a regular basis.

He wasn’t thrilled with the thought of having the King try to pressure them into marrying, either, as some part of his scheme to gain more power over the French nobility, not to mention Europe itself. They should have gone to England already, but Jem hated the weather there, and Russia was completely out of the question for a bunch of reasons.

America had its attractions, but Nick honestly wasn’t sure about going there, either.

The more he squirmed under the conundrum in which they’d found themselves, the more he fought back a more physical reaction that would have changed his eye color, not to mention the shape of his teeth. No, he couldn’t let himself go there, not now. He and Jem would discuss it later, when they got back to the rooms they’d been assigned while they were here.

Still, he felt his discomfort extend his fangs by a few millimeters anyway.

It those same few seconds, he made a decision.

It was dark in their corner of the garden, at least.

He put a warm thrall into his voice. It instantly grew soothing, persuasive.

Demanding.

“Why don’t we go for a walk, my dearest lady, just the two of us, and discuss it?” he suggested in a low purr.

His French over the years had grown impeccable, of course.

He wore a gold and turquoise brocaded tunic over silk leggings and a ruffled white shirt with long sleeves. As was the style, at least in court, he also wore a large hat with a white feathered plume, and a powdered wig. The day’s fashions made his pale skin stand out less, at least. He powered his face so it would look the same as everyone else’s, though, and absolutely hated the feel of all that crap on his skin.

The idea of having to wear these ridiculous get-ups every day, and not just for a day or two, once or twice a year, made him think seriously about whether he and Jem might go to India, or possibly Siam, or maybe Burma or somewhere on the southern Malay Penninsula.

They’d even considered Japan, although if Nick knew his Japanese history (which he didn’t very well, sadly), it wasn’t a great time to be there, either.

Maybe they really should go to the Americas.

It really was a shit time in history though, in most parts of the world.

Really, they would have to make compromises wherever they landed.

Still, maybe he could put off the inevitable for a little bit longer.

He was feeding on the woman behind one of the thick hedges, filling her head with thoughts of why it would be better to leave Dalejem and Nick alone, and convince the King to do the same, and how she should tell all of them that they were likely pirates and possibly had impure blood, possibly even Roma or even Jewish blood, when a sharp intake of breath made him break off his bite and raise his head.

Jem stood there, his face bright red under the alcohol, rich food, and the pale powder he also wore. His eyes were glassy, but absolutely livid.

“You unimaginable prick,” Jem slurred at him.

Nick stared at his mate.

Briefly, he had to stifle the abrupt impulse to laugh.

Even he knew what a terrible mistake that would be, and how much more likely it would prolong the fight, rather than diffuse it.

“You woman-lusting, blood-sharing, piece of shit cheater––” Jem slurred, louder.

Nick couldn’t control himself at that.

Maybe he was a little too drunk himself.

Either way, he did laugh, and unfortunately, quite loudly,

* * *

“––think he might be waking up,” a soft voice said over him.

Nick’s body jerked, and his head immediately hurt.

His side hurt so badly, he had to bite his tongue to keep from crying out. He blinked into much harder lights, artificial lights that seemed to want to pierce through his eyes and into his skull and brain.

Slowly, his vision came back into focus.

Even so, when he blinked, he was briefly back at the party, in a garden with tall hedges and flower-covered bushes and hanging lanterns.

He blinked again, and the garden faded.

Dalejem’s livid face disappeared.

Nick remembered people carrying him across a dry field choked with weeds and littered with old cans and plastic bottles. He remembered their grubby faces, dark clothing, and worried eyes staring down at him. He remembered Wynter then, and the tears filling her beautiful eyes. The memory both alarmed him and confused him, until he slowly realized he could smell them all around him still.

He was still with them.

They were in this very room, or had been.

Most of them weren’t there now, he realized a few seconds later, but he could still smell their scents in the air.

He could smell their blood.

Gaos.

What had they done?

Why had they come here?

They would all get arrested now.

They were harboring a fugitive, a dangerous, non-human criminal.

“Everyone’s fine,” a soft voice said.

Nick jumped, startled. Fear and adrenaline must be running through him at higher levels than usual. It continued to vibrate his skin now, even as he struggled to speak, to answer that quiet voice.

“Where are we?” he tried to ask. “What happened?”

What came out didn’t sound like words. His throat and lips emitted garbled, throaty, thick, croaking sounds, like metal scraping over rusted metal.

A light hand pressed gently on his shoulder, and Nick realized he’d been trying to rise. The fingers were small, but warm, reassuring, and not the ones he’d expected to feel.

They weren’t the ones he’d wanted to feel particularly, either, but they were welcome.

He wanted to ask where she was.

Why wasn’t she here? Where the fuck was she?

She wouldn’t have left him.

Had something happened to her? Who had her?

Why would she have left him?

“Ms. James went to get you more blood,” the same voice explained quietly. “We couldn’t really spare much more, between us, and you don’t control yourself well when you’re this out of it. We needed to find synthetics with healing properties, and she had a lead on how.”

Nick blinked.

The words penetrated slowly, until he finally understood.

Immediately, shame slid through him, and a feeling of worry.

Gods. He’d hurt them. He’d attacked them––

The small hand slid from his shoulder down to his bicep, and Nick realized he wasn’t wearing a shirt. She rested her fingers gently on the arm that didn’t have the ragged cut down the middle of it. His hand was still cut, and part of his wrist, so he couldn’t help but wince, but her fingers weren’t anywhere near the injured parts of him.

It was just fear. Irrational, animalistic fear.

Nick felt the warmth in those fingers, the reassurance.

“No, it’s okay,” the same quiet voice said, even more gently. “You were hurt really bad, Nick. And we need you to get better. We all discussed it, and it just seemed better for some of us to go buy a few bags of the fortified artificial stuff, since you’ve already gotten a lot of seer and human blood in you. Mal went with her, so she’s okay. Mr. Morley went, too.”

Detective, Nick’s mind corrected without thought.

“Detective Morley,” Tai acknowledged agreeably. “He went with Ms. James, too, and him and Mal will be there when she buys from one of the black market dealers.”

Nick blinked.

That time, he realized his eyes had filled with tears.

He wanted to wipe them away, but his arms felt really heavy.

“We tied you down,” the small voice explained. “You weren’t controlling yourself very well, Nick. I told you that. But you’re okay. You’re going to be fine. Ms. James said you’re out of danger now. She said the vampire doctor they brought in got most of the toxin out, and your body should be able to handle what’s left.”

Nick frowned.

Tai paused at his frown, then seemed to decide to go on.

“That doctor said it’s a miracle you got as far as you did like that,” she added, sounding impressed. “He said you must have been really pushing yourself. Most vamps wouldn’t have woken up at all when you fell over the wall like that. Not with what they’d done to you.”

Nick felt more tears well in his eyes.

Tai patted his arm reassuringly.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You didn’t hurt anyone. We could tell you were hallucinating. You kept speaking in French. It was really weird how good you were at it. You were yelling at us at one point to get our hands off your cousin…”

She paused, as if remembering.

Then Nick heard her smile.

“I think it weirded out Ms. James,” she confessed. “I didn’t know this, but she speaks French, too. Did you know that, Nick?”

He managed a nod, still watching those ice-blue eyes.

Tai smiled. “She said the French you were speaking was really old. That you sounded like you were in an old movie or something, as if you were saying ‘Thou’ this, and ‘m’lady’ that. Ms. James said some of the things you said were really strange, too. About horses and court and kings and tribute and gold, and how you just wanted to go surfing and be left in peace. There was stuff about ‘devils’ and disease, too… and you talking to someone about moving to America, and maybe living among the Native Americans out West?”

She posed a faint question at the end.

Nick could tell the idea was interesting to her.

He turned his head carefully. His neck hurt like hell, but he managed to turn enough to look at her directly.

He stared into that achingly familiar, elfin face.

Tai smiled back when her ice-blue eyes met his.

Her silvery-blue-tipped hair was pulled back in a high ponytail, making her look even younger than usual, and her otherworldly eyes look even larger. Absurdly, she wore a light pink T-shirt with a unicorn on it under a military-style, armored, black jacket, and a high-tech wristband that probably came from the labs at Archangel.

He fought to speak, to make noise, and eventually croaked out words.

“Where are we?” he asked. “Safe?”

His voice was unnervingly quiet.

It sounded like melodious breath.

His words came out insubstantial, barely making a ripple in the air.

“You hurt your throat,” Tai explained.

Again, she answered his thoughts before she answered his actual words. She held up her wrist, the one wearing the high-tech gadget.

“Don’t worry about this,” she said confidently. “Ms. James is really good with organic machines. She shut off everything that could have traced me anywhere. All of our headsets are completely un-networked. They’re solely for data access now. Maps, medical info, etc. There are no signals going in or out. It’s all stuff pre-loaded on here.”

She lowered her arm and hand.

“And we’re in the basement of that church,” she explained. “You know, where me and Mal used to live. Before we came to stay with Ms. St. Maarten.”

Nick immediately felt a jolt of panic.

“No.” She shook her head, and gripped his arm tighter. “No, Nick. Ms. Maarten doesn’t know where this is. She’s never seen it. You’ve seen it, but only the upstairs. Remember?”

Thinking, he gave her a bare nod.

She leaned back, observing him shrewdly with pale eyes.

“We’re being really careful,” she said seriously. “We thought about all this stuff, Nick. We don’t want to get hauled off by the Leash, either.”

Nick forced his shoulders to slowly relax.

He could feel that everything she said was true.

Still, he couldn’t control how worried he was.

What was the plan, exactly? Were they all going to dig out their implants, live off the grid forever, like he might have to do? Did Wynter and James Morley plan to join the White Death? Live as refugees, maybe in some other Protected Area under fake names with fake ident codes and fake blood records?

What kind of life was that for any of them?

He fought to control the swirl of emotions that worsened his headache.

They’d probably drugged him with something, to make sure he couldn’t break out of whatever they’d bound him with.

“We did,” Tai affirmed.

It was probably making him crazy.

At least a little irrational.

“It is,” Tai agreed. “And more than a little, Nick. You’re super loopy right now. You should relax. I’m sure Ms. James and Malek and Detective Morley can explain it better than me. They’ve been talking pretty much non-stop for the past two nights.”

Nick let that information settle into him.

Two nights?

“Nick.” Tai sighed. She tossed her head to get her bangs out of her eyes. “Relax. Just relax. You should close your eyes. No one’s going to leave you out of anything. No one’s going to do anything nuts. We’re safe. You’re safe. Ms. James is safe. I promise.”

He fought to do as she said.

He should just think things at her, then.

Trying to talk was just a waste of energy.

That’s why they’d left Tai with him while the others went off.

“Don’t think,” she scolded. “Close your eyes. You should be asleep right now. They didn’t think you’d wake up until after they got back. So no, they didn’t leave me here so I could argue with all your crazy thoughts.”

Nick made himself close his eyes.

He didn’t want to, but he could see the logic in it. He could feel it.

He closed his eyes with an effort.

He forced his muscles to unclench.

He had no awareness of when he started to fall unconscious.

At some point, though, he must have.