Page 36 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 36

THE PROMISE

It felt instantaneous.

Unlike his memories of the first time, there were no vortices, no tunnels, no flashing lights. He didn’t have Brick with him this time, so there was no being torn away with the person he’d entered the open door with, and no separate path while he watched another’s light go streaking away from his.

Nick walked through the lit opening.

Everything went dark.

His body felt strangely compressed.

And then, abruptly, there was light.

Not a lot of light.

It was still strangely dark, but that dark felt immediately different.

Nick smelled bodies now, heard grunts and sounds as others followed him and Wynter into a dank-smelling cave, one filled not with organic machines, but with living beings that seemed to teem under his feet and fill the air all around him: earthworms and mice, rats and spiders, bats and houseflies. Lichen and water teeming with living matter dripped from a ceiling that smelled like sulfur and other minerals.

There was so much in those first few wafting scents, Nick felt dizzy with memory and familiarity and total disbelief at everything he could smell.

It was all… real.

He hadn’t smelled so much living matter anywhere in so long.

Not since he and Jem and their gardens before any of the wars.

Not since before the wars ended, before so much of the planet got razed of all living beings, including all the flowers and trees.

Not since he’d been on those fields with Brick, toting weapons that weighed probably as much as he had as a human, even at his most muscular.

He remembered digging Jem’s grave, covered in rich earth, using the shovel rhythmically in the dark while tears streamed down his face.

At that point, he hadn’t been able to feel anything yet.

The death hadn’t felt real, despite all the years and months and days he’d had to prepare for it, as he watched his mate age and slowly die in front of him.

Nick gasped, unable to see past his memories, fighting to breathe even though he hadn’t breathed in hundreds of years, and his lungs no longer held air.

That’s probably why he didn’t at first see the people standing in that cave right in front of him, despite his insanely keen vampire eyes. To him, it might as well have been full daylight where he was, even though he knew he was inside a cave, and the only light came from semi-organic torches that let off a sickly, green-yellow glow from where they spat and hissed quietly at the edges of his vision.

Then a body flew at him.

Nick caught hold of it instinctively, then held on tighter when the smell of her filled his nose. He blinked his eyes, and suddenly he could see again. He looked down at the dark hair on the head whose face pressed against his chest, and he wondered if he’d died.

He wondered if this was where vampires went at the end.

You were supposed to be reunited with all of your friends when you went to heaven, weren’t you? They were supposed to be waiting for you, waiting to greet you and embrace you and welcome you home.

Then he looked up and saw a pair of gold eyes staring at him in shock.

They familiarity of those, too, hit him like a punch to the middle of his chest.

The woman was disentangling herself now, pulling back and away, mostly so she could look up at him. She stepped back, but only a few feet, and stared at Nick with a near-puzzled look in her eyes, her relief fading slowly as it turned into something closer to confusion.

He watched her eyes scan over him, staring at his face, his hair, his clothes.

Her eyes stopped on the half-moon Midnight insignia on his chest, and the ones on his armbands. Then her eyes dropped down to Wynter.

She stared at Nick’s mate in something like curiosity at first, then Nick felt his muscles tense as recognition and disbelief slowly grew over her face.

“Aura?” she gasped.

Nick looked down at Wynter’s face.

His wife looked confused, too, almost hostile, but something about that name meant something to her. Nick could see that it did, but he could also feel through his wife’s blood that she didn’t really remember.

She knew just enough to be disturbed, without having any idea why.

Who is this woman? Wynter thought at him. Who is she, Nick?

Nick looked back at the dark-haired woman standing there, still dumbfounded that she was there at all. He no longer believed he was in heaven, but it felt damned close.

It’s Miri, he thought back simply. It’s Miriam Black… looking exactly the same as she did the last time I saw her.

Looking at the woman who had been his best friend, Nick found himself remembering how he’d once thought Wynter looked like her. He’d even wondered if Miriam and Black could be Wynter’s real parents. He’d wondered that and felt weird about it for at least the first few months he knew Wynter Cara James.

He glanced around the cave, and memory slammed into him like a cascade of falling rocks. Where he was, when this was, what had happened, all of it was suddenly, disturbingly clear.

I think only a few minutes have gone by in this world, he told Wynter, feeling dizzy from the shock of it, even as he sent it to her. I think, from their point of view, I only left here with Brick a few minutes ago. I think, to them, I haven’t been gone for any time at all.

There was a silence in Nick’s mind while Wynter absorbed this.

How is that possible? she asked.

Nick looked around the cave, then around at the friends he’d left behind, all those hundreds of years ago, and didn’t have an answer.

He knew he was right, though.

The longer he stood there, the stronger and more clear the memories grew. He remembered all of it now, exactly how he’d fallen through that portal.

He remembered what everyone had been wearing.

He remembered how their hair had been cut, how they’d smelled.

There’s no way they could have replicated all of this somehow.

It had to be the same time and place.

It had to be.

Nick remembered his struggle with Brick, who’d attacked Dalejem, mostly for the crime of loving someone Brick thought of as his. He remembered his own careless kick against the rock, which he’d meant to slam Brick into the wall, and get his sire to let go.

Instead, he’d miscalculated where he was, his own strength, the strength of Brick…

…and he’d vanished through that opening in the wall.

All of those hundreds of years, of lives good and bad, wars and enslavement and finding Wynter and living on another’s world…

It had all started so simply, so stupidly, really, and all from a misplaced foot.

Nick looked down at Wynter, and squeezed her against his side.

It was difficult to regret any of it, even now.

Then his eyes returned to Miriam’s face.

Gaos, how would he explain any of this? Could any of it really be real?

Miriam’s blue-green eyes studied him back, and now her confusion had tipped into something closer to alarm. She still looked relieved to see him, but as she looked through the faces behind where Nick and Wynter stood, that alarm grew as it widened her eyes.

“Where’s Jem?” she asked next.

Nick felt more than saw Wynter scowl.

Something about it made him want to laugh.

The fact that he was now one hundred percent certain he’d found and lost and found Jem again in that alien land, and had dragged his soul back through the portal with him, only made him want to laugh more. He knew this, as absolute fact… yet the two women in the world he’d loved more than any others, apart from maybe Angel and his mother and his sisters, were the two women utterly unable to see it.

It didn’t matter, though.

It didn’t fucking matter.

He was home.

He was home, and he’d found his mate, and brought her back with him.

The thought was utterly strange.

He was no longer Nick Midnight.

He was just Nick here.

He was Nick Tanaka, ex-cop, and here, it wasn’t illegal for him to exist as a free person. Here, his parents were still alive, and his sisters, and his best friends. Here, it wasn’t illegal for him to marry, and it wasn’t illegal for him to have a dog, and maybe even adopt a few children for real.

Here, he fully intended to legally marry Wynter Cara James.

Here, he might be able to live that second life.

But it wouldn’t be exactly the same as the first one had been.

He knew more now.

Now, he had to make sure that this world, his home world, didn’t end up like the world he’d left behind. He couldn’t give up on this place the way he’d given up then, even if he lost his mate a second time. He couldn’t absolve himself of responsibility like that, ever again.

It was a strange thought, but Nick knew it was right.

He couldn’t let it be for nothing.

He had to protect this world, the way he’d failed to protect the one where he lived with Jem. He had to protect it from itself. He had to protect it from the forces that would destroy it, and rip all its beauty away. He couldn’t forget that, no matter what happened, or who he lost, or how fucking alone and devastated he felt.

He wasn’t alone. Not really. Not as long as he was alive.

Jem would always come back for him.

Wynter would come back for him, too.

He only had to wait, and not despair.

He would do better this time, he promised himself.

He would be a better version of himself, and not only for those he loved.

He would do better.

He owed Jem that much, at least.