Page 22 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 22

KING AND QUEEN

Nick leapt back without thought.

He found himself staring at four plasma rifles raised to uniform-clad shoulders. At least one of those rifles aimed right at Nick’s face.

One squeezed trigger, and half of Nick’s head would be gone.

Unless they aimed a few inches lower, at Nick’s neck––then Nick himself would be gone, and almost definitely gone for good. A direct shot to the neck, at this kind of range, would decapitate him. Even a shot to the head and face would likely decapitate him from this close.

The reality that this might be it, that his time might really be up, made Nick freeze.

He went utterly still, like an animal caught in headlights.

His vampire senses continued to map out his environment.

He clocked the location of each gun held by one of the soldiers, not just the one aimed at him. His eyes tracked the one aimed at Malek, and the one aimed at Zoe and a third one aimed at Brick. A fourth gun aimed right at Thorn, who stared at it blankly, just like Nick stared at his.

Only then did Nick meet the gaze of the woman standing in the middle of that open doorway.

Lara St. Maarten stood there, looking business-like, but faintly triumphant.

She looked like someone whose plan had unfolded exactly as she expected.

She appeared to be totally unarmed, and wore one of her usual, impeccably-tailored, form-fitting, vaguely nineteen-forties-style suits. This one was dyed forest green and embroidered with silver and bronze accents. Her lipstick was a dark wine color. Her eyes had been made-up to appear lighter, mostly from dark, kohl-like eyeshadow that covered her lids. Her cheekbones were heightened by wine-colored blush that matched her lipstick.

She wore diamond drop earrings, a diamond neckless, and several diamond rings. A diamond bracelet that matched the necklace hung loosely from her thin wrist.

Nick went back to her empty hands, her lack of an obvious weapon.

Somehow, that single fact maybe shocked him the most.

The sheer confidence behind that decision made him hesitate, which is maybe the only reason he was still alive.

She hadn’t come here to fight. She clearly thought the fight was over.

She’d come here to negotiate.

She’d come here to win.

Nick felt his body tense as he held her steely gaze.

He should have expected this. He did expect it, to a degree at least, but he’d honestly thought it would happen when they got deeper into the Archangel complex, and that it would involve a direct threat to Damon’s life, if not to theirs. He’d expected a disembodied voice over a loudspeaker, threatening to kill Damon with force-fields or with acid gas if Nick didn’t hand over the kid and Malek, and likely Wynter and himself, too.

He certainly didn’t expect Lara to come in person like this.

All of those things told him, instinctively, not to move.

They told him she wouldn’t have done this, not like this, unless she felt confident she could bring Nick to the table, and quickly. His knowledge of St. Maarten fed that instinct to wait, to hear her out, to let her begin the negotiation.

Brick had no such instinct.

In fact, Brick’s instincts took him in exactly the opposite direction.

Brick leapt at the richly-dressed Archangel C.E.O. without any warning whatsoever.

No snarl. No quippy word. No angry scream.

He moved so fast, Nick doubted St. Maarten had expected it either, whatever perfect plan she’d thought she’d concocted in coming here like this.

The humans with guns had no prayer of their reflexes catching up to Brick’s frontal assault. Not a single projectile or plasma bolt hit him; he moved too rapidly for any of them to find their mark before Brick was already on top of her.

Truthfully, Nick doubted any of the humans could even see Brick’s leap with their eyes, much less shoot at it. The older vampire had always been fast.

There was a reason he was still alive.

Even so, Nick felt a little awe-struck at the blur Brick’s lanky form made, too.

The older vampire didn’t leap so much as dive like a predatory bird. He threw himself at the woman in the fifty-thousand-credit suit, and Nick found himself thinking Brick might have broken her spine, simply from the force of that impact.

Then a lot of other things happened really, really quickly.

* * *

Malek dropped to one knee, gun in hand. He fired from low down on the floor, his mismatched eyes concentrated, and harder than Nick had ever seen them.

Nick recovered more slowly than either of them.

It took the human in front of him turning his gun off Nick and onto Mal to get him to act. Nick lunged the instant the barrel moved a centimeter off his head. He back-fisted the man’s face, feeling as much as hearing the satisfying crunch as he broke his jaw and one cheek with a glove-clad hand. He followed up the first hit with an elbow to the throat, which dropped the man so fast, Nick might have kicked out his legs.

He didn’t wait, but yanked the rifle out of the human’s hands, and shot him with it.

Luckily, all of St. Maarten’s soldiers appeared to be human.

Zoe had also ducked and zagged, and now she had her own gun out.

Brick, of course, who started all of it, had knocked Lara St. Maarten over completely with his intense vampire weight.

Impossibly, St. Maarten still put up some kind of struggle, even as Brick forced her backwards so quickly Nick could barely track it with his eyes. Nick heard a gunshot then, saw a red spot appear sharply in the left part of Brick’s back, and realized Lara had been armed after all. She’d just shot Brick in the chest.

It wasn’t enough, of course.

Brick’s weight and momentum continued to propel the two of them backwards until they slammed into an organic metal railing between the wall and stairwell. The force of the impact vibrated the thick bar. Lara let out a pained gasp, the first time one of them broke the silence. They balanced there another half-second, until Brick and St. Maarten flipped over the metal railing altogether.

They disappeared.

Nick heard Lara scream on the way down.

It was an ugly, unnerving, somehow improbable sound.

He’d never heard the Archangel C.E.O. scream before. If asked, Nick might have said she didn’t scream, and likely wouldn’t scream, or even couldn’t scream, even if faced with her own imminent death.

But in the end, everyone screamed.

Everyone screamed when they faced the abyss, when they saw the darkness about to swallow them.

Nick knew that, but sometimes, like now, it still managed to surprise him.

The scream didn’t last long, in any case.

Nick disarmed a third soldier who’d aimed a rifle at Malek. He tossed the weapon behind him, grasped the man’s wrists, and broke both of his arms with a hard twist of each hand.

The man screamed, too.

Nick kicked out one of his knees next.

The Archangel soldier fell to the tile floor, now screaming so loudly Nick could no longer hear anything else. He bit the man and venomed him, mostly to shut him up, then did the same to a second human for pretty much the same reason, one of those Mal had shot but not killed, and who lay in the opening of the staircase doorway, groaning and crying out in agony from a hole in the upper part of his chest.

The one Mal shot probably wouldn’t make it.

Nick’s victim probably would.

While Nick’s vampire senses noted both things, none of that mattered to Nick in the moment. He was in shock, truthfully, at what he’d just witnessed.

He couldn’t quite believe it was real, even now.

He dragged a second body into the doorway next to the now-docile, venomed gunshot victim. He stacked another body on top of that one, mostly make sure the door remained open.

Then he looked around, and realized the gunshots had stopped.

He rapidly assessed their current situation.

There had been eleven guards in total with St. Maarten.

Nick had taken out two. Malek had taken out four, and downed two more, including the guy with the sucking wound in his chest.

Nick checked to make sure the other three soldiers were downed and no longer in danger of killing one of them. Zoe had killed one by leaping on her and snapping her neck. Another was quickly taken out by Thorn’s gun, the guy with the green mohawk. The big mohawk vampire shot him, then leapt on him and snapped his spine after he tried to make a run for it.

Nick now aimed a pointing hand down the corridor, his voice a snarl.

“Go stand lookout!” he said to Thorn and Zoe. “And get on the fucking comm! Tell Tai and the other vamps they need to get their asses here, now. We should expect the whole building to lock down in the next fifteen minutes. We have to get Jordan, and get the fuck out of here before they send the entire H.R.A. and the goddamned military…”

He switched on his comm.

“Kit?” he bellowed. “You need to slow down every piece of surveillance that caught that. Buy us as much time as you possibly can!”

“Working on it.”

“Work fast,” he snapped.

Only then did he dart to the balcony and look down.

The sight below was what he expected to see.

It still managed to stun him, even to knock him off-balance. It also managed to bring the reality of what had just happened crashing down on him in a way that it hadn’t.

It also, less explicably, made him feel sick.

Was it even grief he felt?

He felt disturbed, yes. But somehow, without knowing how to explain it to himself fully, Nick knew this was the only possible outcome that would have allowed them to get out of there alive. Moreover, it was probably the best possible outcome for them in the moment, if they still wanted to rescue Jordan.

Lara had more or less forced their hand.

He wondered if Wynter would agree.

More upsettingly, Nick wondered if Tai would agree.

Tai had been half-raised by St. Maarten. Lara had been involved in Tai’s life in some capacity for years. She’d trained Tai, given the young seer a job, even an important position within the Archangel company and staff. While Lara had likely never been a mother figure exactly, she must have been something to the young seer.

She must have been something to Malek, too.

The thought made Nick feel even sicker.

His eyes never left the scene at the bottom of the stairwell, however.

Brick was on his feet now, and brushing himself off.

Lara St. Maarten, on the other hand, whose body lay at a distinctly unnatural angle, was unmistakably dead. Her skull had likely been crushed in the fall. Her spine would have been broken already, just from the weight of Brick’s vampire body slamming into it, but it had likely been crushed to powder by Brick’s vampire body landing on it at the bottom of the stairs.

Brick knew how to use his weight to his advantage.

He would have ridden her all the way down those six stories, and used that as a weapon to finish her off.

More than anything, Nick felt numb.

He looked at her broken body, but it still didn’t really feel like the Archangel C.E.O. could be dead. He couldn’t comprehend what the repercussions would be, but he suspected they would be very bad, and that they would see those effects very quickly.

A vampire had just murdered one of the most powerful women in the world.

Moreover, the vampire had done it––the vampire king of the notorious White Death.

If they hadn’t been in a race war five minutes ago, there was a not-insignificant chance they were in one now. The military-industrial complex of the human world would definitely see this as an act of open warfare against the entire human power structure.

Not only had Brick killed a human, he had killed one of them.

He’d killed someone the humans in power believed to be untouchable.

The thought brought a nervous, off-key note to whatever brief feeling of victory Nick might have felt for managing to not get his head blown off.

“Jesus,” a voice muttered in his ear.

Nick flinched.

It hit him only then that he was still on the line with Kit. He was, even now, showing Wynter, Kit, and Morley what had just happened. He’d forgotten he was the eyes and ears for their part of the team when he had the channel open.

“It couldn’t be helped,” he muttered, not sure he believed it himself.

“Right,” Kit said.

It sounded like she didn’t fully believe it, either.

Still, she didn’t sound angry. She sounded afraid.

Nick felt a flush of anger that he knew was also likely fear.

“What the fuck was she thinking, coming here in person?” he growled under his breath. “How insanely arrogant would you have to be, to think you could take on a bunch of vampires as an unarmed human?”

“It’s a good question,” Morley said cynically, also in Nick’s ear. “Maybe she figured her favorite vampire wouldn’t actually murder her?”

“I didn’t murder her,” Nick grumbled back.

“Who says I meant you?” Morley retorted.

“She was armed, though,” Wynter pointed out. “Brick was shot, wasn’t he?”

It hit Nick that they’d probably seen some or all of the bloody skirmish on the surveillance footage already. Wynter had likely been screaming in his ear for the whole fight; he hadn’t heard her because he’d had his comms switched off.

“Anyway,” Wynter said, her voice colder than the other two. “She was about to murder you, from what I saw. Brick likely saved your life.”

Nick couldn’t help but feel a flicker of relief that Wynter seemed less angry at him around Lara’s death than angry at Lara herself.

Truthfully, Brick’s actions bewildered Nick as much as St. Maarten’s.

He almost didn’t blame Lara for being caught off-guard.

She’d clearly expected her presence there to end the attempt to extract Jordan.

She’d at least thought she’d get some chance to explain.

Explain what, Nick had no idea, but clearly she’d come there, thinking she would have all or most of the cards in what she likely thought of as cease-fire negotiations. She’d probably camped herself in the building so she could face Nick personally, persuade or coerce him into “seeing reason,” and returning custody of Tai and Malek to her and Archangel in exchange for her personal guarantee of protection.

She’d probably come loaded down with promises of getting charges dropped on Nick in return for his continued cooperation.

That, or she just planned to threaten all of their lives.

So why hadn’t that happened?

Why hadn’t Brick wanted that to happen?

Nick wasn’t exactly upset that things had worked out the way they did, but he was confused as to why Brick would take such an insane risk. Had the older vampire leapt at her to keep her from saying whatever she’d come there to say?

Or had he decided to kill her and escalate the war between vampires and humans before he even got here? Had he known St. Maarten would be lying in wait? Had he planned for it? Counted on it, to advance his broader goals?

Or had Brick decided all of that in the split-second it took him to attack?

Nick had his doubts.

Brick was generally known for maintaining one core belief, one that trumped everything else he valued in his life: Self-Preservation.

That finely-honed sense of me, before all, had been the guiding principle of Brick’s existence for as long as Nick had known him. He’d never known Brick to be anything but coldly practical on that front. Brick never put himself in direct risk, not unless he was certain of his own survival, or if he had absolutely no choice.

Brick hadn’t obviously or deliberately done so even in wartime that Nick could recall, yet he’d just blatantly risked his own life when it wasn’t even obviously necessary.

More baffling still, he’d done it in a way truly did seem unplanned.

What could Lara possibly have to tell them that would threaten Brick so much?

Nick was still staring down the stairwell, trying to make sense of it, when he saw Brick come to a dead stop where he’d been walking towards the bottom stairs. The vampire king reached out with a corpse-white hand, fingers grasping at air.

Nick blinked, sure he was missing something.

Brick’s fingers finally clamped around the white, metal banister, gripped it tightly, but then, inexplicably, slid off. They grasped weakly at air a second time, right before his arm fell to his side. Brick’s fingers twitched, almost as if he couldn’t manage to close them.

Brick stumbled.

Then he staggered.

The oddity of seeing Brick visibly lose his balance was enough to freeze Nick in place. If he’d still been human, he would have lost his breath.

As it was, he stared, bewildered, thinking it must be a trick.

It had to be a trick.

Before Nick could make sense of what he was seeing…

…the vampire collapsed onto the cement floor.