Seers may have reminded me of animals at times, even predatory ones, but vampires looked alien in a way that sent fear and adrenaline darting down my spine.
They felt like natural enemies, I guess.
Whereas seers… well, they felt more like me.
That first male vampire to enter moved soundlessly, shifting out of the opening in the wall in a fluid, dancing step. I blinked and had to turn my head to follow him.
Then the second face appeared.
I watched as the female vampire split off from the male, moving to the other side of the high-ceilinged space. Both of them looked wary, despite the flatness of their expressions. Unlike the combat gear we wore, they wore expensive civilian-wear, like they’d just come from a bar or dance club on Valencia Street, and wandered mistakenly into the building.
The male wore a modern-cut black suit with a white shirt and tie. The woman wore a long green dress, slit up to the tops of her thighs on both sides.
While the contrast confused me briefly, it made sense.
They didn’t need weapons.
They were the weapons.
I watched more of them file in, just like the first few had.
Brick entered somewhere in that flow of silent, swift-moving bodies and limbs.
Once my eyes zeroed in on his face, and the silent, stone-faced Dorian who walked behind him, I found I couldn’t look away from either of them.
Brick, alone among all of them, smiled.
His black hair was longer than I remembered.
It hung past his shoulders, but he’d tied it up in a half-ponytail to keep it out of his eyes, almost how Jem wore his hair. On Brick, the hairstyle managed to look more elvish than Asian, or perhaps in some gray area of elf-pirate. His dark hair and pale skin made his crystal-like eyes stand out even more above darker lips, a full mouth, and a strong jaw.
He was handsome too, I remembered––a fact I always managed to forget until he stood right in front of me, likely because it was probably the least relevant thing about him.
Behind him, Dorian stood like the ghost of a fairytale king.
He wore a faint beard, like I remembered, his white-blond hair cut short on the sides and back, left longer in front. He still presented a confusing, conflicted appearance to me. Dorian’s features evoked a kind of old-world nobility, like he really did belong in some kind of horror-fairytale, even as his clothes blended seamlessly with San Francisco chic.
In the same way my mind made him a fairytale king, I also noted he could have been a young tech mogul with his perfectly cut blue pants with the metallic glint, coupled with a black thigh-length jacket, a dark red shirt, and expensive shoes.
All of his clothes looked expensive, really.
He could have just stepped off a runway in New York or Milan.
I watched him shadow Brick, who wore clothes that evoked more of the San Francisco goth vibe than the tech one. The vampire king dressed more to stereotype, with his Anubis-head cane, a black velvet jacket coupled with a dark green shirt, dark red pants, and, again, expensive-looking black leather boots.
I watched Brick make his way casually to the chair at the opposite end of the table from Black, that smile still ghosting his lips.
He sat with a grace more alien and reptilian than mammal-like, resting one of his arms and hands on the unfinished wood surface. He met Black’s gaze, quirking one dark eyebrow. I watched as his gaze left Black’s face long enough to take in mine, then the row of seers standing behind us.
His eyebrow quirked higher.
“You’re displeased with me, Quentin.”
I stared at him, then at Black.
If Brick looked like a reptile, Black looked more like a great cat.
Cold-blooded predation met warm-blooded rage, and I practically felt Brick reacting to the heat coming off the male seer sitting next to me.
Black’s stare did look animal, in a way that made my fists clench.
He stared at Brick like a lion assessing a threat that had invaded its territory. Black’s eyes never left Brick’s face, although I could feel from his light an awareness of the placement of every vampire in the room. Like the seers, they didn’t venture past the halfway point in the table, but fanned out behind Brick in a protective arc.
Only two vampires sat beside him.
One was Dorian.
The other was a female I didn’t recognize, but who looked at me like she knew me, and like she knew Black.
I wondered if she’d also been in New York.
Assessing her briefly to memorize her face, I returned my gaze to Brick, mirroring Black’s stare.
When Brick didn’t say anything more, Black lifted his hands from the table in a brief but evocative gesture, flipping over one hand to show his palm.
“Well?” he said. “You know my conditions for this meeting. I was crystal fucking clear.”
Brick frowned faintly, glancing at Dorian.
“Yes,” he said, returning his glass-like eyes to Black’s. For the first time, the humor faded entirely from his expression. “I remember. I only caution patience, friend. A bit of self-control. That we might talk through this thing like civilized beings––”
“Where is Nick’s body?” Black cut in, cold. “My people tell me it hasn’t yet been delivered to my lab. So, you’ve already broken our agreement in terms of timing. Which means you have about two minutes to fulfill the second condition of this meeting, or the negotiation portion of the evening is officially over––”
“I beg of you, my friend!” Brick raised his voice, simultaneously raising a pale hand. “Please, Quentin. Calm yourself. I have not yet delivered either condition as agreed because I wished to assess your mental state first, with my own two eyes. I would prefer this meeting to occur peacefully. As a promise and precursor to alliance, not a messy start to a tragically impractical and mutually self-destructive war between the two of us––”
Behind me, Dex let out a disbelieving and openly angry grunt.
I didn’t turn to look, but I felt a ripple of similar sentiment go through the seers standing with him across the back of the room.
In the background, I heard the murmur of voices on my earpiece rise.
My mind couldn’t quite focus on them, though, not with Black and Brick still arguing.
“Quentin,” Brick said, his voice warning as he continued to hold up his hand. “I caution you to not react rashly to this young vampire when he appears. I caution you to await our explanations first, before something even more tragic occurs, and you lose someone you care about for real––”
“Where the fuck is he, Brick?” Black growled. “Which one of these pieces of shit did it? And why? Why Kiko, for fuck’s sake? What is wrong with you, bringing someone with goddamned mental health problems to a meeting like this?”
Again, the voices in the background rose.
I couldn’t make sense of most of what they were saying; they were speaking Prexci, the seer language, not English. I’d been taking lessons to try and learn it since Koh Mangaan, but I was nowhere near understanding them when they spoke this fast.
As a result, I only made out a few words.
“Stand down!” I heard. “Don’t fire!”
More words ran over those, words I didn’t understand.
Next to me, I felt Black stiffen.
I turned, about to ask him through our bond what was going on outside, but I felt a blank wall fall around Black’s light, even as he gave me a taut glance.
The vampire king’s words rose in the silence while I stared at my husband.
“––He is coming in now,” Brick was saying. “He is unarmed. He has been chastised already for his misdeeds. Repeatedly. Moreover,” Brick added, in a slightly louder warning. “If you attempt to take his transactions out on myself, the outcome will be tragic for all of you. I mean that sincerely, friend. Without any guile whatsoever.”
I turned, staring at Brick.
Truthfully, I couldn’t comprehend
a damned thing he’d just said.
The vampire’s voice grew deathly serious, more stripped of humor than perhaps I’d ever heard it.
“Please,” he said. “I beg of you, friend. Have patience until we are able to converse about this like adults. Wait for the explanation before you go off half-cocked.”
I frowned, still trying to make sense of his words. Before I could, however, and before I could speak, movement pulled my eyes back to the black-painted corridor.
A form appeared there, materializing out of the dark.
It moved so silently and gracefully, I could only blink, staring at it as it mirrored the movements of the other vampires, its cut-crystal eyes darting around to take in the rest of the room.
Then, somewhere in that, in the midst of my staring, I sucked in a gasp.
I didn’t exhale the breath.
I just stared at the creature as it assessed the room, my heart pounding as the black-haired vampire walked around to the other side of Dorian, gliding like a snake, moving in such a measured, predatory way, I could only watch him, unblinking, my jaw loose.
It couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be real.
This couldn’t possibly be fucking real.
Next to me, I heard a strangled sound come out of Angel’s throat.
I didn’t look over at her, but the vampire tensed and turned, staring at her.
He saw me then, and froze.
Those clear, crystal eyes met mine.
It was the one part of his face that was completely and irrevocably different from how he had been before, but even in those cracked glass irises, I somehow saw my friend. I watched the scarlet bloom around the black pupil as he stared at me.
I saw his full lips twist in a faint smile, and felt like I might throw up.
Then another voice rose behind me, so angry and loud in that silence, I jumped.
It was Jem. He didn’t speak to any of the vampires.
He spoke to Black.
“You said it wasn’t fucking possible!” he snarled, his voice loud enough to make me flinch. “You said they couldn’t fucking transmit it to him… that he wasn’t fucking compatible with their DNA. You said it wasn’t fucking possible. You fucking told us that!”
Black didn’t look back at Jem.
I hadn’t noticed until then, but he hadn’t taken his eyes off Nick. I didn’t turn to look at Black, even now, but I felt him staring at Nick just like I was, just like Angel was, and probably every seer and human on this side of the room.
I also felt Black’s awareness of me, of what I might do.
For a long moment, none of us spoke.
Nick continued to stare at me.
His eyes had flickered briefly to Jem when he shouted, then returned to Black, then to me. I watched him examine my face, studying every detail of my expression.
Now, as I stared back at him, I didn’t see anything in his eyes or on his features I recognized.
He looked so different. He looked so goddamned different.
I couldn’t really get over at first, just how different he looked.
I couldn’t get over how much he looked the same.
It was like a strange kind of uncanny valley, where he looked both too much and not enough like my friend, a man I’d known and loved for over a decade.
Like the shadow I’d seen across the street the night before, he looked about twenty years younger than the Nick I’d last seen on Koh Mangaan. That apparent age difference was much more pronounced now that I could see him clearly. Everything about his body and features appeared subtly altered, or strangely exaggerated. His cheekbones looked higher, his eyes larger, his mouth fuller, his hair blacker, his shoulders and chest more muscular and broad, his hands and fingers and legs longer.
A scar I remembered on his neck from shrapnel was gone.
The visible parts of his bare skin, including his face, were so pale and unblemished, they looked like they’d been made out of porcelain. He looked like the creation of some artist who only roughly based his likeness on a photo of the real Nick.
The spell didn’t break until Dorian reached up, catching hold of Nick’s wrist.
Looking up at Nick’s face, the vampire with the white-blond hair pulled on him gently but insistently. When the Nick-vampire glanced down, taking those crystal eyes off me, Dorian gave him an openly warning look.
It was only then that I realized they’d left a seat open.
Whatever Nick saw in Dorian’s face, he found it persuasive.
Without a word, the breathtakingly beautiful, Japanese-looking vampire with almost the face of my best friend sank into that open seat.
Once he had, for the first time since Nick entered the room, Black looked at the vampire king. For a long moment, he only stared at him, his face unmoving.
Then, out of the silence, he spoke.
His voice was so cold, so filled with fury, I turned, staring at him.
“In what fucking universe do you think you will leave this warehouse alive?” Black said.
In the silence after he spoke, Black stared across the table, his face as hard as glass. Even with the fury that stood there, the full-blown hatred I felt in his light, genuine puzzlement lived there too, in his voice as much as his light.
“I really don’t understand,” Black said after that pause. “How could you not realize we’ll kill every last one of you for this? Do you wish Charles to annihilate you so badly that you’d force me to help him destroy you? Or are you mentally damaged in some way?”
Once again, Brick held up a hand.
That time, he raised his voice for real.
He also changed it in some way.
His words reverberated through the high-ceilinged space, forcing me to look at him, forcing me to focus on his face, to hear him past the words themselves.
If he’d been a seer, I would have said he’d infused his voice with light.
As it was, I had to assume it was some kind of vampire, voice-punch equivalent.
“If you kill me, Naoko dies,” Brick said, that strange vocal quality echoing up to the catwalks. “He is mine now. He is literally tied directly to me––to my blood. He belongs to me as no human child belongs to their father. It is how he was made, so this quality of his, it is irreversible. It cannot be undone.”
Brick’s crystal eyes took in all of the seer and human faces around the room, stopping the longest on Jem, Angel, and finally on me and Black.
“You cannot kill me without also killing him,” he repeated, that power still infusing his voice. That same power made his words melodic, made the sounds shiver my light, even as my hands clenched on the table. “Do you hear me, friends? If any of you kill me, you will end Naoko Tanaka. I can explain all of this, and will do so, willingly. I can tell you how it works, and why I made this drastic decision, but that requires you to hear me out…”
He added extra punch to his words, pausing before adding,
“…before you allow your emotions to overtake you. Before you do something exceedingly rash, something we will all regret, you must listen.”
There was a silence after he said it.
In it, I could only stare at Nick.
I watched him study me from across the room, his crystal eyes appraising me openly, that hint of scarlet in them expanding silently. It occurred to me, somewhere in the midst of that, that I still hadn’t heard him speak a single word.
A helpless kind of rage came over me as the silence stretched.
Brick knew us better than I’d thought.
Whatever Nick was now, I couldn’t let Black kill him.
I couldn’t let any of them kill him, not when I still saw so much of Nick in his face and eyes. I couldn’t let them kill him before I understood what the fuck he even was.
I just couldn’t.
I looked at Black, right as he looked at me.
Meeting my gaze, he frowned.
I could feel him picking up off my light what I’d already realized about myself, wh
at Brick had clearly understood about me better I had. Perhaps Brick understood it about all humans and seers––including Black, Angel, Dex and Cowboy, and the rest of us who cared about Nick. I felt Black’s rage rise as he looked at me, his helplessness, but I knew neither thing was aimed at me.
I also felt his understanding.
I felt him thinking about if it had been Kiko who sat next to Dorian, or Dex… or me.
More than any of the rest, I felt him imagining it was me.
Pain rippled his light at the thought, even as he turned to aim a hate-filled stare at Brick.
For another long-feeling set of minutes, no one spoke.
I now felt every eye and light on our side of the table focused on Black, on what he would do. I studied his face along with the rest of them, feeling my muscles tense as I realized I might actually have to fight some of them to keep Nick alive.
Before I could go any further with that train of thought, Black reached for me. He took my hand where it rested on the table, squeezing it roughly in his.
Giving me a heavy look, he shook his head, once.
No, Miri. No.
I met his gaze, and he shook his head a second time.
Never, doc.
He faced Brick.
“Talk,” he said. His voice came out stripped, cold as ice. “Tell us everything we need to know about this newborn of yours. And do it carefully, Brick,” Black added, his voice even colder. “Do it very, very fucking carefully right now, or I can’t promise I’ll be able to control them. Any of them. Including my wife.”
He paused, unblinking, then added,
“…Especially my wife.”
Glancing over his shoulder, he aimed a meaningful look at the row of armed seers, as well as Dex and the others in his human team.
Then, still squeezing my hand, he looked at me.
I looked only at Brick.
The vampire king had followed Black’s stare to my face, to my eyes.
I watched him assess me warily, studying something he saw on me before he glanced at Dorian, who answered his frown with an even more delicate frown of his own. I sensed them communicating in some way, but I didn’t hear or see any change in either of them.
TO BLACK WITH LOVE: Quentin Black Mystery #10 Page 29