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THE EMPTY NEST

B y the time we reached that upstairs room, I already knew we were too late.

I suppose I knew as soon as we pushed open the unlocked door to the storefront, and no one tried to stop us from going inside.

I maybe knew even before that, as we crossed the street and no bullets drove us back.

The small, obviously high-end, boutique clothing store looked pristine inside, like they were just getting ready to open for the day. All of the clothes hung on white hangars, and the floor was strangely spotless, the carpet recently vacuumed.

It was too quiet.

The entire building felt empty, dead inside.

It was the kind of silence that went beyond what I could hear. It went beyond what I could consciously see with my aleimi, or living light.

I suspect Black felt the same things I did.

Likely all of the seers did, and all the humans, too. We’d likely all come to the same conclusions about what it meant, even before Black and Jax broke down the door to that upstairs storage room.

We hadn’t heard a thing as we ascended the rickety staircase that led upstairs. Parts of the wooden railing were splintered and broken, but there was no way of knowing if that had happened today, or sometime earlier, even weeks or months ago. The railing was so loose in parts, I didn’t want to touch it.

Nothing and no one awaited us when we reached the top.

More empty boxes. A dusty rack of clothes. A large box of shoes someone probably needed to throw out. Boxes filled with receipts, old ledger books, gift cards, and flyers. A few lonely mannikins stood in a corner with scratched up bodies and faces.

I looked around dutifully with everyone else, but I hadn’t expected to find anything.

All Jem left behind was a partly-open window, a few shoe marks in the dust, and a number of areas on the floor and sill where his presence had wiped the layer of dust away entirely. Nothing personal remained. Nothing specifically tied it to him.

No shells were left behind on the floor.

He’d obviously taken the rifle with him.

Though I’d expected all of it, disappointment soured in my chest.

Had I expected a note? An explanation? Something that said “Sorry” or “Help me” or “I can’t stop myself”?

What had I expected, exactly?

I tried not to worry about Nick. Practically, I knew that Nick had probably been too late, too, and now was tracking him.

I understood why he wouldn’t want us along for that, especially Cowboy and Black, but it bothered me that he hadn’t trusted us enough to tell us where he was going. He could have called in and given us some kind of update, at least, or reassurance that he was all right, that he’d either lost Jem and was looking for him, or was following him now.

Nick had to know I’d worry.

He had to know Angel and Cowboy, and yes, even Black, would worry, too.

As much as I told myself I didn’t need to worry about Nick, that he was a vampire now, and a hell of a lot stronger and faster than Jem, not to mention immune to Jem’s seer gifts, it was concerning that he hadn’t checked in.

Could Jem have found some way to overpower him, or even to convince him to flee with him? Would Nick just go with Jem, maybe in the hopes of talking him down?

The thought worried me a little, but it was preferable to the alternatives.

Wherever Nick was, whatever he was doing, he wasn’t picking up when we tried to reach him through the comms. All we could do is wait for him to check in, or for Alisha to pick up something on the CCTV.

We spent a few minutes more going over the room with a fine-toothed comb, but we didn’t find anything useful and I hadn’t expected to, frankly.

When Alisha still hadn’t pinged us with new coordinates, Black ordered us back downstairs and across the street to help the others with their gruesome job.

Black checked in with the others once we’d returned to the store’s showroom.

“Anything?” he asked on the open comm.

“No,” Dexter said at once. “I mean, assuming you’re asking about the girl, no one’s found her yet.”

“Did you have any luck identifying anyone else?” Black asked.

He didn’t voice his relief, but I could feel it.

A part of me struggled with the same.

A vain, hopeful part of my light struggled to be heard, one that wanted to believe it meant something that they hadn’t found her body yet, that Jem maybe hadn’t killed Aura after all.

“We’ve got maybe fifteen ID’s so far,” Mika spoke up, her voice even more grim than Dexter’s. “Four might be relevant. I’ll have Alisha send you the full list.”

Seconds later, another bright pink link flashed in a corner of my virtual screen.

I mentally clicked on it, a little apprehensively, then sighed in relief when a grid of regular ID photos showed up behind my eyes, not images of people ripped apart by shrapnel. I scanned through faces, my mouth pursed, until one face caught my notice.

“Wait…” I said, half in disbelief. “Is that––”

“Rick Silver.” Black sounded repulsed. “Jesus.”

I remembered the name.

“He and Rucker were tight,” Black went on in a blunt voice. “This definitely fits the pattern with Rucker, Frasier, and Ungerman. I had Michelle and a few others in the research arm looking into Silver as a potential source for Aura.”

Black gave me a look, hesitated, then seemed to change his mind.

“I thought he might know something,” he admitted, gruff, almost apologetic. “Ostensibly, he’s a direct competitor, or he was, back when I regularly took military contracts. Private Security. He started White Rock over a decade ago. His father’s a senator from Georgia and got him some fat jobs over the years. But, in addition to a bunch of other illegal shit, Silver Jr.’s long been rumored to be involved in trafficking, especially in war zones.”

I nodded slowly, turning this over.

“You thought Silver might know who sold Aura to Rucker,” I deduced.

Black gave me a reluctant and slightly exasperated look.

“Yes,” he said, exhaling. “I thought it was a possibility. The girl told you she’d only come to the United States a few months earlier, right?” He waited for my nod. “Well, Rucker primarily lived in Europe before he moved his main residence to San Francisco. He had other properties, too, of course, but I was still thinking Europe was likely, in terms of where he might have acquired Aura. Silver’s been rumored for years to traffic in human beings, specializing in European markets. Mostly from the Middle East, but also from Eastern Europe and Asia, and sometimes even from the U.K. and Western Europe.”

“You think Silver himself found Aura and sold her to Rucker?” I asked, piecing this together, too. “Knowing what she was?”

“I thought it was a possibility, doc––”

“Where did Rucker live before now?” I asked. “Where in Europe?”

Black gave me another frustrated look. He rested his hands on his hips and exhaled in a kind of defeat.

“On the coast,” he said, jerking his chin forward. “South of here.”

I frowned. “France?”

Black gave me a noncommittal kind of shrug. “Mostly Monaco.”

I thought about that. I could feel there was something there, something important, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Was it just a feeling? Something Aura said to me that I hadn’t tracked the way I should have?

I couldn’t decide.

Either way, if Jem was still taking out targets related to Aura, or related to seer trafficking more generally maybe, he could be heading to Rucker’s old stomping ground next.

We’d walked out of the clothing store by then, and I could feel Kiko and Jax listening intently to what we were saying.

“Should we go down there?” I asked Black next. “To Monaco?”

Black let out another annoyed exhale.

He didn’t have to ask me why I was asking.

“Probably,” he growled. “Although I’m not exactly sure where to go first. He spent a lot of time all along the C?te d’Azur, especially in Nice and the surrounding areas, and Saint-Tropez. But you’re right. We should probably start with the property in Monaco.”

We were halfway across the wide, tree-lined street by then.

I was about to answer him, when Alisha popped up in all of our headsets.

It was the first time she’d spoken to us directly since we left the other group.

“I found them,’ she said, triumphant. “Well, I found Jem first, but now it’s both of them.” Relief filled her voice, a joyful buoyancy that took me aback. “She’s still with him,” she said excitedly. “The girl. She’s still traveling with him… so she’s not dead.”

Black and I exchanged looks, and I smiled at the relief in his.

Gaos. Jem hadn’t killed her.

Another thought hit me then. Where the hell was Nick? I’d initially assumed by “them” she’d meant Jem and Nick. Fear washed over me about whether he was really all right.

Had something happened to him?

Black reached over and took my hand. He gripped my fingers, a tense promise that everything was okay, one I tried to find reassuring. Black’s voice remained business-like as we crossed over the center of the cordoned-off street, and began walking around the circle of emergency vehicles to meet up with the others.

“What about Nick?” Black asked Alisha. “Is Nick following them?”

“I don’t know.” Alisha sounded frustrated again. “I’ve been scanning for him, using the photos we have on file, including the ones where he’s wearing the hat and the sunglasses and everything else. I’m wondering if he’s covering his face more than usual, or––”

Kiko cut in, her voice bewildered.

“Isn’t that Nick right over there?”

All of us turned to follow the direction of her pointing finger.

There was a silence.

Then I laughed out loud… I couldn’t help it.

I heard Jax burst out in a laugh next to me.

Nick stood almost directly across from us, in an soot-darkened alcove on the other side of the street, about twenty yards from the bomb site and well out of the sun. His pale face still managed to shine eerily bright, even in the shadows. It was pretty clear he was trying to stay out of sight, and unnoticed by the first responders working the bomb site a block north to his left. It was equally clear he saw us and had moved out of the shadows just enough that we might see him standing there, which is probably the only reason Kiko noticed him.

Now he stared at all of us like he couldn’t believe we were all just standing there, gawking at him. He frowned when he caught my gaze, and jerked his head in a way that made his message clear.

Why the fuck aren’t you walking towards me?

I laughed again, even as I shifted the direction of my feet, now half-jogging in his direction. Black quickly broke into a lope to keep up with me.

“Where?” Black growled into the headset to Alisha, a faint irritation mixed with humor in his voice. “Where did you last see Jem and the girl?”

“Metro Station,” Alisha said at once. “They boarded a train heading towards the old part of the city about four blocks from here. They’re still on it, heading southeast on Line 1, the same one that goes along north of the river and past the Louvre. They just passed the stop for Concorde…” She paused briefly. “The cameras in the station seem to be working. They didn’t get off. Still heading Southeast. Did you say you’ve got Nick?”

“We found Nick,” I assured her. “We’re all just southeast of the bomb site right now. We’re going over to join up with him now––”

“Meet us here in five,” Black added.

Nick had finally lost patience and pulled himself off the wall, or maybe just felt it was safe to emerge now that we were heading in his direction. He pulled out his large, black umbrella and opened it, then began striding towards Black and me, an annoyed, semi-embarrassed expression on his face.

He started talking as soon as he was confident we would hear him over the sounds of emergency crews and helicopters thudding overhead.

“I tried to stop Jem,” he said in a growl.

“Obviously,” Black retorted back.

“I didn’t succeed,” Nick continued, just as annoyed.

“Obviously,” Jax laughed back.

Nick snorted, as if against his will. “I thought maybe I could grab him before one of you assholes shot him. Even if it meant hitting him over the head with the damned rifle.”

“You don’t look shot,” Kiko observed, also smiling at Nick.

“Yeah, well… I got ambushed on the stairwell.” He looked directly at Black. “By Brick. Fucker threw me off the top of the stairs, bit me, and then hit me with a syringe full of that vampire tranquilizer shit before I even got to the door where Jem was.” Nick’s voice grew a touch harder. “I came to in a fucking closet. I walked back out here when I woke up, but I couldn’t find anyone.”

“You couldn’t call?” Black snapped.

I knew he wasn’t really angry. He was relieved, like the rest of us.

Nick quirked an eyebrow in Black’s direction, his eyes flat.

“He took my earpiece, Quentin, and my phone, so no, I couldn’t call.” Glancing around at the rest of us, Nick added sarcastically, “I suppose I could have walked up and down the street, screaming my fool head off like a moron.”

His voice and eyes grew a touch more serious as he tapped his ear.

“Incidentally, it’s a good bet Brick and his vampires heard everything you’ve been saying to one another over the comms for the last however-many minutes…”

I frowned at that, exchanging looks with Black.

Black’s gold eyes blazed, and his neck pulsed, but he didn’t answer.