Page 7 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 7

THE KNIGHT

He stepped out of the ring, wiping blood and sweat off his face. He barely looked at or heard the screams of fans, or the faces of his handlers as he pushed his way through them.

He remained dimly aware of all of it, of course.

The crowd was massive, and maybe would have been daunting, even, if it had been a different kind of night. As it was, Nick just saw a blur of indistinct faces with his vampire eyes. He saw mouths open, heard a cacophony of screams and yells, some of them hoarse, others shrill, some closer to roars. He saw people jumping up and down in the dark past the lights flooding the fight cage. Confetti rained down, along with popcorn and women’s underwear. He heard the deafening rumble of feet as the crowd stamped their feet and jumped up and down.

The amphitheater groaned under their collective frenzy.

It sounded like thunder.

It sounded like a monster’s heartbeat, if it had one.

Nick didn’t.

He didn’t feel his adrenaline, either, or whatever passed for that in a vampire.

Whatever heat the fight had risen in him, even if it was just a base, reflexive surge of pure survival and defensive instincts, had already started to cool by the time he was halfway down those stairs. He felt like his normal mind didn’t wake up, however, until he was all the way down, and those lights and sounds began to fade for real.

The door shut behind him.

The record seemed to skip.

Then he was just standing there, inside the pit, as the fighters and the staff called it. He blinked around in the harsher lighting of the staging area Farlucci owned below the arena.

His fangs were already retracting as he reached back to unbuckle the mask that wrapped around his mouth and the back of his head. Blood streaked his chest and arms, and specks of it dotted his legs and abdomen so liberally, they seemed to dye his marble-white skin like one of those reddish-looking roan horses.

Horses. Where the hell had that come from?

He must have pulled it from one memory or another, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually laid eyes on a real horse. It must have been several centuries, at least.

His memories had been more difficult to navigate in general lately, though.

They grew increasingly blurred in his mind.

Even while he’d been in that cell, he’d felt confused about events, about what was real and what wasn’t, what he remembered of his own life and what came from the doppelg?nger.

His brief contact with the portal seemed to have made all of that worse.

He had so many fucking questions.

Where had his car come from, if it hadn’t been Angel who’d bequeathed it to him all those years ago? Brick was the obvious answer, and by the far the most likely, but something hurt in Nick to realize it had never belonged to his childhood friend.

The thought that he still had her car had softened that hurt, just the tiniest bit.

Knowing that it was just some random fucking antique, unconnected to her or him in any way, made him feel vaguely sick. It also made him miss Angel so badly he felt dizzy.

He missed Miriam. He missed Black?

Had he really taken so much comfort in that fucking car, in the thought he still had that connection to his old life in San Francisco?

The truth was, he had. It had given him a connection to his past and the people he’d loved that he’d badly needed. Had Brick sensed that? Had his sire given him other little tokens to connect him to the past he’d erased and obscured and lied about?

Why did Nick remember Angel making him promise that he’d take care of it?

Was that more bullshit? Something planted there, or even just suggested to him by Brick? He didn’t have a seer’s photographic memory, unfortunately, so it all just felt smudged and out of focus. It felt like either everything had to be real, or none of it was.

Why did he dream about Dalejem and France and living on the ocean?

Why did it feel like they’d lived by the water in more than one place?

San Francisco, maybe? Or was that all a dream, too?

Why did he sometimes see himself wearing clothing that made no sense for him to be wearing, not from the point of view of either world?

Why did he suddenly remember so many fucking horses?

Nick grabbed a clean towel that one of the attendants had left for him on the bench.

He wiped the worst of the blood and grime off his face.

His opponent had been a decent fighter for a change. The worst sprays of decorative blood happened when Nick broke the other vampire’s nose through the mask. The fucker kept fighting, but yeah, it had been messy for the next however-many minutes the fight lasted.

Nick finally got him to tap out when he broke one of his arms and one of his legs, then stomped on his other ankle hard enough to render him unable to walk.

That had been the end, but it hadn’t come easy.

Nick felt like he’d been run over by one of those drivable lawn mowers he now also inexplicably remembered.

He was beginning to wonder if mere proximity to that portal had done something to his mind. Because he was a vampire and didn’t need to sleep––or, more to the point, didn’t need to dream––these things seemed to be coming back to him in odd flashes instead, like waking dreams. Or really, like hallucinations.

None of it was particularly helpful.

None of it made the sequence of events any more clear, or logical, or believable.

Everything seemed to come to him sans context: black and roan horses, impossibly starry skies, dirty marketplaces, pristine fields, Jem laughing over a stone fireplace, Jem naked in a fur-covered bed, the ocean visible over sand dunes across a busy, familiar street, Dalejem wearing beach shorts, then a blink to see Jem on a horse, wearing silk breeches. Another blink to see him naked, lounging in a hot tub with a beer, his long hair wet, his gorgeous eyes closed.

Some of those images kept returning.

Some of them looped.

Specifically, an image of falling backwards through… something… Brick’s cinched, iron-like arm crushing Nick’s chest.

Fucking lawn mowers.

Outdoor markets filled with people dressed like medieval peasants.

Remembering being annoyed by leaf blowers that woke up Jem on the weekends when he was trying to sleep in a few extra hours.

Throwing Jem an apple as they wandered in the manicured gardens outside a castle. Jem laughing with a woman in an astonishingly high, Marie-Antoinette-style wig, Jem himself wearing an odd hat with a feather and deerskin boots.

The constant, mundane, casual thoughts of Jem brought a hard pain to his chest.

Gaos, he needed his fucking memories back.

He knew he did. He needed them.

But they might just kill him.

Even knowing Wynter was Jem, in all the ways that mattered, it was still difficult to think about the male seer without being nearly overwhelmed with grief.

With that grief came an even more destabilizing feeling of unclear but intense memories of living many years with unbearable loss. Even the faintest whisper of that feeling, and the memories around it, even the faintest hint of that loss, brought up feelings of unbearable, excruciating pain.

It had nearly killed him, that pain.

It nearly caused him to break his promise to Jem.

Promise me you won’t just die. His pale green eyes stern, unwavering, but also nearly desperate. Promise me. Fucking promise me, Naoko… fucking promise me. Not by your own hand, at least. Don’t fucking die for me, ilyo. Live for me. I’ll find you… I promise I will… but I can’t find you if you’re dead…

The memory felt like a punch to the face.

Yet the fact he couldn’t be sure it was real almost hurt more.

It was maddening that he didn’t know.

How much of it was illusion? How much could he ever really trust? What memories had Brick implanted there, and why? How much of his life was utter and complete bullshit?

How did all of it still have so much power over him?

He caught fleeting scents of ancient feelings without being able to put them into any real context. It was maddening, not knowing what was real.

One thing he did know: something really dark lived in him around those thoughts.

It felt like a few thousand layers of grief hid in him somewhere, sleeping, just waiting to be poked. Just waiting for an excuse to rise from the dead and crush him.

He tasted some of that darkness every time he experienced one of those strange flashes of waking dream. It was beyond strange. It was beyond unbalancing. It made him feel like he knew nothing about his own mind at all. It made him feel like he was slowly going mad.

Moreover, it made him think he’d possibly more scrambled his mind than erased it. He wished he knew what the fuck he’d done to himself.

He wished he knew what he’d persuaded Brick and others to do to him.

Well, assuming Brick told him the truth about any of it.

Maddeningly, he couldn’t assume that.

He couldn’t assume anything at all was true, not anymore.

Nick tossed the soiled towel in the bin, the synthetic material now covered in the other vampire’s blood and some of Nick’s own, along with what smelled like paint chips from both masks, and skin from that fucker’s filed fingernails.

At the thought, he checked his arms, and saw gouges down the center of both.

He winced at how bad they looked.

Wynter was going to have some choice words about that.

Thank fuck for the face mask. At least that part of him generally came out unscathed, even if he did get the occasional black eye or bloody lip.

He’d just turned from the bin and started heading for the showers when the doors burst open behind him, and he turned.

Farlucci power-walked into the cave-like prep room, grinning from ear to ear and flanked by two of his latest fight handler-types. They were difficult to tell apart to Nick’s tired eyes. All of Farlucci’s guys were big, juiced-up, no necks, usually human, and not exactly there for their scintillating conversation skills. Farlucci hired them to provide the fighters a modicum of protection, but most of that was for show.

Obviously, they could only protect Nick from humans, not from other vamps, so the size of their shoulders, their respective heights, and even their function, was mostly theater.

Nick guessed they were hired primarily to provide a buffer zone between the fighters and any unruly fans or other humans who might accost them, including the press. Having that bulky layer of humanity between the fighters and their public probably made it a lot less likely a vamp would lose it on someone if their fans got too forward or simply too close.

Like any sport, the fans tended to lack boundaries.

The press obnoxiously ignored boundaries, and generally seemed annoyed by the suggestion that they do anything else.

The more enthusiastic the fans and the press got, the worse they behaved. They also tended to get worse the more famous a fighter was, and Nick had a lot of fans.

With Nick himself, however, the biggest risk was probably that he’d shoot his mouth off in ways that would piss Farlucci off. He had a tendency to be sarcastic and flippant, including about the fight industry itself. Of course, he’d had his days where it was tempting to do more than make sarcastic remarks. Some of these humans had no fucking filter whatsoever between their brains and their mouths, maybe especially when they viewed Nick as more “thing” than “person.”

In practical, everyday terms, Nick’s Farlucci-appointed bodyguards mostly served as deterrents to any members of the media who might try to talk to him after a big fight like this one, or even try to enter the fight pit itself to harass him for an interview.

Nick tended to be a popular target for those sorts of ambushes, which baffled him, frankly. It wasn’t like he did a lot of talking, even when they did manage to get him alone. He had to be the most boring fucking interview subject in the entire circuit. No matter how much they prodded him, he had no interest in playing the taunting game with his opponents, or even the “aw, shucks” false modesty some of the fighters employed.

He asked Wynter once, how he came off in interviews.

“Like a cop,” she said without hesitation.

He’d snorted. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means you sound like a cop,” she’d said, smiling. “You sound like you’re giving some kind of situation report. Usually you list out the fight sequence, blow by blow, like you’re documenting a crime scene.”

Nick thought about that, snorted. “Great.”

“It’s cute.”

He’d given her a disbelieving look. “How could that possibly be cute?”

She wrapped her arms around his neck. “I don’t know,” she’d said, still smiling as she shrugged. “But it is. It’s fucking adorable.”

He’d smiled back, then wanted to laugh when he realized something else.

“It’s cute when you say ‘fuck,’ principal-lady,” he’d murmured in her ear.

He hadn’t even been lying.

He couldn’t help but find it adorable when she swore.

It sounded so strange coming out of her mouth, and not only because she was the principal of a super-swanky boarding school, and, unlike him, he’d never once heard her swear at work, at least not where she might be overheard.

Cops swore constantly, unnecessarily.

They were as bad as the military.

The thought made him wince a little again, even as he refocused on Farlucci’s face.

It hit him that his fight manager had been gushing about the fight that whole time, that familiar light in his eyes that told Nick he’d made a lot of money for his boss that night.

“––fucking unreal, that thing you did where you whipped him around!” Farlucci burst out in a delighted laugh. “I thought you were going to break the fucking wall! And how, in the dark shadowed underworld of the vert, did you break his nose through that mask? I’ve never seen that done before. That blood probably gave us an extra point share in ratings, if not three––”

Nick smiled politely.

As he didn’t seem to be required to answer, he didn’t.

Farlucci moved on a few minutes later, after clapping him cheerfully on the shoulder, only to pull his hand away and wipe it with a small towel one of the two human bodyguards handed him. He jogged happily in the direction of his office, still grinning, and now apparently speaking to someone in his headset, although he didn’t bother to switch it to sub-vocals but simply continued to brag loudly about the fight to whoever listened on the other end.

Nick sighed.

The sigh was just for show, of course, since he didn’t breathe, but it still expressed something emotionally.

Once he couldn’t hear Farlucci anymore, he continued his interrupted trip to the showers.

* * *

Nick’s headset beeped right as he fitted it back to his ear.

He wore only pants now, having tossed his ring-fighting shorts, a sort of uniform for the fights here, into the laundry chute set into the wall of the shower room.

He was still in the fight pit, but it felt quiet down here now.

He’d been the headliner, so he’d been the last fight of the night.

Farlucci might be wandering around here somewhere, or locked up in his enormous office with a lot of alcohol and possibly one of his women, but the other trainers and fighters who worked for the promoter had already cleared out.

Nick suspected at least one, likely two, of the beefed-up, bodyguard types would be waiting for him in the staging room when he got back out there. They would insist on escorting him out to a Farlucci car, likely a limousine, which would drive him out of Brooklyn and over the bridge back to Manhattan and then, likely, all the way up to the River of Gold.

For the same reason, he answered the summons in his headset without thought, figuring it would be Wynter, wondering where he was. She had to have gotten back from work by now, and she usually checked in with him after a big fight.

And, funnily enough, this had been a big fight.

Bigger than usual, anyway.

Nick hadn’t really thought about it when he got here, or even when he walked out into the ring, but he knew from the size of the crowd and the lack of other events in the enormous arena, that it had been one of his biggest fights to date.

Now he couldn’t even remember the name of the vampire he’d beaten.

Was that exhaustion? Depression?

He didn’t really want to know.

Whatever it was, it made him feel strangely listless, and uninterested in anything but getting back to his mate. Maybe that’s why he didn’t notice the red light pulsing in the corner of the screen.

“Tanaka,” he said absently, as he felt the connection open.

“I thought it was the White Wolf,” a familiar voice said dryly. “Or is it the Death Angel? Aren’t you reveling in your victory? It’s all that’s on the fucking feeds right now…”

Morley waited for Nick to answer.

When he didn’t, the old man chuckled wryly, “You always sound so damned depressed after a fight? You just kicked the crap out of some jacked-up bloodsucker with gold teeth. Where's the pride in workmanship?”

Nick fought a number of reactions.

Annoyance. Relief to hear the other’s voice.

Amusement.

More annoyance.

“Someone dead?” Nick asked Morley, just as dryly. “Already?”

“Indeed, yes,” the old man said, a touch primly. “Someone is dead. Thus me calling you in the middle of the night to come do your other job. You know, the thankless one.” Another pause. “You coming? Or you going to make me hunt down some other Midnight?”

Nick lowered his foot into his first boot.

He hit a pressure-point on the side, and the organic laces shortened until the boot fit snugly around his foot, ankle, and calf.

He heard the faint warning in Morley’s voice.

He knew the old man was right.

He needed to take this.

The sooner he convinced the H.R.A. he was a law-enforcing, law-abiding Midnight, and a firmly-leashed killing machine that did whatever it was told, even when he really didn’t fucking want to, the better.

Wynter would have to wait.

Nick would have to wait, too.

“Send me the location,” he said, not hiding the thread of tiredness in his voice. “I’m already on my way.”