Page 23 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 23

FATHERLY ADVICE

Nick didn’t think.

He leapt up to the balcony railing, took a step forward, and dropped, not bothering to aim his fall until he was roughly halfway down.

He landed lightly on his feet about two feet from St. Maarten’s dead body, and less than that from where Brick now sprawled on his back, his cracked-crystal eyes glazed as he stared up at the ceiling above the stairs.

Brick didn’t breathe, of course, so he wasn’t breathing now.

He wouldn’t have a last breath.

He wouldn’t spit up blood, or gasp, or choke out a death rattle.

Even so, Nick could feel it.

He closed the gap between himself and Brick in one stride. Once there, he slid down to a crouch so that he hung directly over his sire’s face. His eyes flickered over the other vampire’s body. He could guess what had happened now.

She’d shot him in the heart.

It was more than that, though; something smelled off in the wound.

Whatever she’d shot him with, it must have been loaded with the same vampire toxin the H.R.A. used on Nick. Now that Nick could smell it for himself, in a non-hallucinatory state, and smell what it was doing to his sire, Nick had his doubts he would have survived being left under that truck after all. He probably should tell Wynter and the others that, and thank them, and Malek, when he left there.

Right now, however, his eyes shifted to Brick’s.

Absurdly, his sire was smiling at him.

Blood was visible at the meeting point of his pale lips.

“Bitch… had a gun…” he managed, his lips slipping on the blood. “…in her sleeve. Didn’t smell it. Not until it went off…”

Nick could only stare down at the vampire king.

However he thought this night would go, he’d never once considered that this would be one of the outcomes. Dalejem had once asked him, long ago, why Nick had never just killed Brick himself, removed his presence from his life the surgical way, the permanent way. Truthfully, it had never crossed Nick’s mind to do such a thing, not really.

It wasn’t something one did, killing their sire.

Nick had never believed Brick’s fiction to Black and Miriam that he couldn’t survive without his sire, that Brick had “made” Nick in some unusual way that meant Nick would be forever bound to Brick’s blood. He’d never felt bound to Brick in that way, and he’d felt sure he would if that story was remotely true.

Nick initially believed Brick that he’d been difficult to make for various reasons, possibly due to blood type or genetics or whatever else. But even that struck him as suspect over the years. No, Nick found it much more likely the original blood tests done on him by Black’s team of crack scientists had simply been wrong.

Maybe that traitor seer, Luric, had even rigged the tests.

Whatever the truth of it, Nick had never believed he would die when Brick died. Still, it was strangely unnerving looking at his sire, knowing he was dying now.

The feeling there wasn’t emotional exactly.

It wasn’t grief.

Oddly, it might have been fear.

Nick had never lived as a vampire in a world without Brick.

Something about Brick always being there had grounded him, given him a sense of continuity, of family, maybe even validated his own vampire-ness on some level. Now, as Nick looked at his sire, he knew, without doubt, that Brick would soon be gone.

“Why?” he asked only.

His puzzlement, his confusion, came out plainly in his voice.

Brick chuckled.

It brought splatters of blood to his lips.

He looked up at Nick, almost fondly, and Nick saw that the vampire king knew his time was winding down, too.

“I knew you would leave me,” he said.

Nick’s confusion deepened. “What? Leave you? Leave you how?”

“I knew she would tell you,” Brick said, patient, as if he thought that would clarify things. “I know you. I know you, Nick.”

Well, that didn’t clarify shit.

“What does that mean?” Nick asked, gruff. “What did you not want Lara to tell me?”

But Brick didn’t seem interested in clarifying further.

He forced out more words.

“It’ll be hard to get to… now,” the vampire king said. “Outside the dome… far from the nearest… collapse. But the cave is there. It’s still there. Just… outside… in the graveyard…”

Nick felt his eyes widen.

The cave.

“France?” Nick blurted. “Are you talking about the cave in Nice?”

Brick smiled at him wider, his lips now dripping with blood. “Smart boy. You do remember. I can’t go back. Now… it doesn’t matter…”

Nick felt his throat close.

“Where you landed…” Brick said. “Came first… you and that…” Brick’s lip curled. “Dog of yours. Landed early. Hundreds of years early…”

His fingers clutched at Nick’s hand, but he couldn’t hold on.

“I came later…” Brick managed. “You’d been here, and the dog was dead. You were half-dead, too… drunk… like a corpse…”

Nick felt his fangs lengthen.

“War was already… it was happening…” Brick managed. “Yi. That seer fuck… he started it. He started the whole thing…”

Nick felt his eyebrows go up.

Yi started the war? How the fuck had Yi started it?

“Pretended to be Charles…” Brick said in a whisper. “Knew about our world. Knew about the war… he pretended… shapeshifter. Fucking demon… and he had Charles’ followers. Found them. Somewhere. Maybe the dragon…”

Brick’s voice was getting weaker.

He was scarcely whispering at the end.

“Zoe.” He exhaled her name. “Zoe is the one…” Brick met Nick’s gaze, and now his cracked-crystal eyes were blooming a last crimson flower. “She won’t come with you, you know,” he forced out. “She won’t come. She won’t. She’ll be queen.”

Nick stared down at that handsome face.

His eyes were changing in other ways now. The crimson flower at their center was dying, turning a dark purple, then black, then gray.

Nick watched as the light leached out of those eyes.

He watched as his sire died, and then as his body began to fall apart.

He watched the skin turn from ghost white to gray. It darkened more as Nick watched, turning the color of burnt ash. It began to collapse in on itself, then to break off.

The smell started to bother him.

It shouldn’t have smelled, the process of Brick dying the way he was, but somehow it did. Not of human or vampire rot or death exactly, but of burnt skin, burnt flesh and bone, like Brick’s body was being incinerated from the inside out.

It struck Nick that Dorian had not died like this.

Dorian had exploded, so maybe that was part of it; he’d left blood and stringy guts and gore all over Angel’s house in San Francisco. It’d taken Nick and Jem and Angel hours to clean it all up afterwards, and to scrub Dorian off the ceiling and walls. Nick had been forced to replace whole segments of Angel’s foyer because he couldn’t get the bits of Dorian out.

He’d bought new sheetrock and repainted everything and ever rebuilt and re-hung shelves and bought Angel a new hall table.

Brick didn’t die like that.

Nick had no idea why.

He had no idea what caused the difference, but Brick disintegrated instead, while Nick watched. His vampire body eventually collapsed inside his clothes, like a sand castle drying out in the sun until it fragmented to powder under its own weight. It happened so shockingly fast, so weirdly fast, Nick couldn’t make himself look away.

The vampire’s skull collapsed last.

His cheekbones broke down while Nick watched.

His lips, his teeth, his ears, his eyes, all of it turned to powder.

Soon, the only thing left were Brick’s expensive, designer clothes, and inexplicably, his long, dark-auburn hair. Soft, gray powder covered the floor, left in lumpy, untidy piles that vaguely resembled a human shape.

All other trace of the vampire king had gone.

* * *

Nick didn’t know how long he crouched there.

His mind must have fuzzed out for those few minutes, to the point where he wasn’t even yet thinking about what Brick had actually said to him.

He just crouched there, staring down at the piles of fine ash.

He jumped a foot when a voice over him spoke.

“Did he say anything to you?”

Nick’s eyes shifted up.

Zoe stood there, on the bottom few steps, her hand rested lightly on the metal railing. Her eyes met Nick’s when he looked up, then returned to the ash-dusted clothes, and the odd, fan-like halo of dark auburn hair.

Nick thought about how to answer.

In the end, he told the truth.

“Yes.” He met her gaze as he rose back to his feet, and then his full height. “We’ll talk about it later.”

Briefly, a hard look touched Zoe’s crystal-colored eyes.

Nick saw a flash of anger there, aggression, coldness, maybe even a hint of, Who the fuck are you to keep that from me, when you abandoned him long ago?

Then the female vampire averted her gaze.

Zoe glanced up the staircase, her expression now neutral. When she lowered her chin and looked at Nick next, that flicker of emotion he’d seen burning there was gone.

“Later, then,” she said evenly.

She jerked her chin upward.

“They went looking for your friend. The newborn.”

Nick nodded.

Without a word, he walked past Zoe, ascending up the stairs to the right of where she stood. He walked swiftly, aiming his feet for the floor where the desk receptionist had told him they were keeping Jordan.

After the barest pause, he heard Zoe start to follow him.