HE WAS ASLEEP when I walked into Kiko’s hospital room.

Slumped on a chair he’d dragged over next to her bed, he shifted while I watched, his head leaned sideways on the chair’s back. I watched him fight to settle into the worn cushion, his profile in sharp relief against the orange fabric.

He was about a foot too tall for the chair.

He’d also pulled it close enough to the bed that his knees banged into the metal edges of it. His five o’clock shadow was growing into the beginnings of a full-fledged beard, and he wore the same clothes he’d put on before we left Santa Cruz.

I watched him sleep, keeping my light still.

Glancing down at the breakfast I held in both hands, the food I’d brought him from the bagel shop down in the lobby, and the coffee I’d gotten him at the gourmet coffee shop next door to the bagel place, I frowned. After a bare pause, I set the white paper bags with the bagel sandwiches on the table near the door, and across the room from where he sat.

I set the cardboard tray holding our coffees next to it.

I didn’t want to wake him. He looked exhausted.

At the same time, I wondered how sore his neck would be if I let him sleep like that for long. He needed a damned bed. I knew how unlikely it was he’d go find one, though––even if I did wake him up.

Sighing, I decided to leave him be.

Grabbing the bags with the bagels and the tray with the two coffees, I backed slowly out of the room. I reached behind me, groping for the door, and heard him stir, shifting his long body on the fabric chair. When he didn’t open his eyes, I turned around, catching hold of the metal, L-shaped handle.

I’d just yanked down on it, opening the door, when his voice rose, sounding groggy.

“Hey,” he said. “You stealing my breakfast, doc?”

I turned, feeling a flush of guilt, but not about his breakfast.

I watched him stretch, his body obviously stiff from having dozed off in the fabric chair. Watching me look at him, he gave me a half-smile, nearly a smirk.

“I see what you’re up to,” he said. “Pretend to get me food, just so you can run off and eat it yourself.”

“You should sleep.” My voice remained low like his, nearly a whisper, but it carried a lot more genuine scolding, versus his joking version. “You should go home and sleep, Black. Let one of us stand vigil for a while. The doctors say she’s recovering well, now that her blood pressure is stabilized. She’ll be okay if you just crash for a few hours.”

Black’s sculpted lips hardened into a faint frown.

“The others are here, too,” I added, before he could argue. “Most of them are down the hall, camped out in the waiting room. Dex, Jem, Yarli, Mika, Manny. Kiko wouldn’t be alone, Black. Not even for a minute. And we have a guard on the door.”

Black shrugged. He didn’t really answer me, though.

He also didn’t get up from the chair.

“You going to give me that coffee you brought, doc?” he said instead, quirking an eyebrow as he stretched up his arms a second time, wincing at their stiffness. “And stop looking at me like that,” he added. “You have no reason to feel guilty. You didn’t wake me up. The smell of that damned bagel with egg and bacon did.”

“What’s the difference?” I said, exasperated.

“The difference is, my stomach is smarter than I am. I need food more than I need sleep right now.”

Staring at him, I frowned.

I considered arguing the point about his stomach being particularly “smart” when it came to his body’s need for sleep. I also considered pressing the point about him needing a real bed, wondering if he’d use a hotel room bed if I got him a suite in the four-star place next to the hospital.

Seeing the immovable look on his face, I exhaled in defeat.

Even so, I clicked at him as I brought over the two bags of food, along with the two cups of coffee I had in a cardboard tray, balanced on my arm. Once I got close enough to him, he leaned up for a kiss.

He pulled on me with his light as he kissed me, and I found myself giving in for real, feeling the worry and exhaustion on him, but also his relief that I was there. I was still looking down at him when he took all of the food I’d been carrying away from me and put it on the table closer to Kiko’s bed.

Once both of our hands were free, he pulled me briefly into his lap, and kissed me for real. I found myself caressing his face and neck and shoulders as he did, putting light into him as much as touching him, doing it instinctively as I felt his light merge into mine. He felt borderline affection-starved as I leaned into his chest, but after a few minutes, he let me go, nudging me with his mind to stay, to sit with him for a bit while he ate.

I slid out of his lap as he leaned towards the table to grab the food.

Glancing around, I pulled over a second chair from by the window while he took the coffees out of the cardboard coffee tray, setting them on the table, then opened the bigger of the two white paper bags in his lap.

“Gaos,” he murmured, peering into the white paper bag. “You even got me the right cheese. I could marry you all over again, doc.”

I grunted, plopping down next to him.

I took the coffee with my name on it from his fingers when he handed it over.

“I thought you were doing that already,” I observed, quirking an eyebrow at him.

He gave me a faint smile, then leaned over for another kiss, pausing to clutch my hair in his hand as he used his tongue. I got lost in his light a second time, breathing him in when I felt him merge into me, and only coming up for air when he did.

He pressed his forehead to mine briefly, kissing my cheek.

Despite his attempts at levity, I could feel the exhaustion on him, as soon as he opened his light at all, along with another hot plume of that gratitude that I was there.

When he let me go, releasing my hair, I felt the reluctance on him, too.

“How is everyone else?” he said, gruff, taking a sip of his coffee.

He kept a heavy hand on my thigh, and I found myself giving him more of my light, bleeding it subtly into his fingers and up into his arm, hoping it might help him with the tiredness. I hadn’t meant for him to notice, but I felt him notice anyway.

He sent me another pulse of gratitude, leaning over and kissing me again, that time on the side of the neck, using his tongue.

When he straightened, adjusting the bag of food on his lap, I watched his eyes return to where Kiko lay on the hospital bed, her eyes closed.

Exhaling, I tried to answer his question.

“They’re fine,” I said, taking a sip of my own coffee.

I paused long enough to briefly savor my drink. The coffee shop in the lobby was surprisingly decent. I’d gotten a mocha, figuring the extra dose of sugar and caffeine couldn’t hurt. Tasting the chocolate on my tongue now, I found myself really glad I had.

“Most of them only got bit once,” I went on after a pause. “They were groggy when Javier found them in the conference room, but no one was seriously hurt. He said it scared the shit out of him, seeing them all lying on the floor and on couches like that. He said they really looked dead. But he realized they were asleep––not dead––as soon as he got close enough to see them breathing.”

Giving Black a grim look, I added, “Javier says whoever it was, he bit Dex first, and got him to order the others into the conference room. He then bit each of them as they arrived, more to subdue them than to drink.”

Grimacing overtly, I added, “The one exception was Dex… who you knew about. And Kiko, of course. Dex was missing enough blood that he needed to be taken here in an ambulance, but he’s fine now. He was the one who called Kiko and told her to go up to your apartment. He can’t remember exactly what he told her, but Jem read him, and he says Dex told her you and I had gotten back early from Santa Cruz, and that you wanted to talk to her about something to do with the meeting with Brick. Kiko, that is.”

Black’s face changed while I watched, turning hard as stone.

He never took his eyes off Kiko.

“Dex got a transfusion, too,” I added. “He was down a few pints at least, but it looks like the vampire only drained him for extra blood to paint the walls. The forensics guys say the writing in the living room, along with the stuff on the paintings, and those handprints on our wall in the bedroom was mostly Dex’s blood.” Glancing at Kiko, I grimaced. “Whoever it was, they apparently drank Kiko. The others were mostly there as props. And to get them out of the way, of course, and make sure no one could raise the alarm.”

“What about the seers?” Black said, his voice cold. “Where were they?”

“Training exercises,” I said at once. “At the building on Mission Boulevard. There wasn’t a single seer in the California building, so whoever did this, they likely had us under surveillance. Cowboy and Angel weren’t there, either… or Manny. All three of them had gone along with the seers to the Mission building.”

Black nodded, silent. His jaw grew harder still.

He didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

He also seemed to have forgotten the bag of food cooling on his lap.

When he finally spoke, his voice was lower.

“And the bite marks?” he said. “Any news on how many of them?”

I exhaled at that, clicking under my breath. Studying his profile, I fought with the pain that wanted to rise at the expression on his face.

“Just one, they think,” I said. “Manny said they had a few of the forensics guys in to measure the bite marks on all of the humans who got bit––”

“Yeah. I know.” Black turned, lifting an eyebrow at me briefly. “I gave that order. They came in here, too. I wanted them to look at Kiko. They took saliva swabs, measured and photographed all the bite marks and bruises. I told them to get access to the rape kit the hospital put together for Kiko, too. Do you know if they got that? I told them to bring Mika or Yarli… or one of the other seers. I figured if the hospital gave them a hard time––”

“It was fine, Black. They got everything you asked for.”

He took another sip of coffee, his gold eyes growing harder.

“I’m not going to ask if they went through everything then,” he said flatly. “I know they did. They would have stayed up all night doing it.” Pausing, he glanced at me, adding, “Did they get the results from all of their tests yet?”

I nodded, watching him cautiously. “The report I heard included all the data on Kiko, along with those vampire DNA tests, or whatever they call them, saliva and semen, and all the bite marks on the others. They think it’s all the same vampire.”

Black’s jaw clenched harder while I watched.

He looked at Kiko, watching her breathe through the oxygen tube on her face.

For another few seconds, neither of us spoke.

I found myself pulsing more light and warmth at Black, especially at his chest and heart. I felt him trying to relax into it, but I also felt him not having much success.

Watching Kiko breathe, I understood.

I understood better than I wanted to.

This was likely only the beginning for her. Some part of me hoped like hell she wouldn’t remember much of what happened, but I wondered if that would make things better for her or worse. Waking up in the middle of the night screaming without knowing why wasn’t exactly an ideal way to process trauma, either.

“They had to replace more than half of her blood,” Black said, still looking at his friend’s face. “If we’d found her even ten minutes later… if we’d gone to dinner at Cal’s without going upstairs… she would have died. We would have found her lying in a pool of her own blood on that fucking couch, and she would be dead. They told me it was damned lucky we found her when we did.”

Remembering why we hadn’t made it to Cal’s, remembering that figure I’d seen standing across the street from the California Street building, I didn’t speak.

Had that been Nick, warning me?

Some kind of premonition? A ghost?

I didn’t really believe in those kinds of things, as funny as that might sound, given all the seer stuff I’d experienced over the past few years, not to mention the existence of vampires. Black told me that true precogs, what his people called “prescients,” were extremely rare in the seer world. Back on Old Earth, they were treated like shamans or holy sages, since the gift was so unusual. It also made a lot of them batshit crazy, apparently.

Most seers got only occasional and extremely unreliable glimpses into the future, since the timelines changed so quickly.

When I asked Black why that was, he just shrugged, and said “free will.”

People had control over their own destinies, especially in the short term. Moreover, one person’s free will could have a pinball-like effect, interacting with the free will of countless others whose lives they touched.

It was only unusual seers who could see the timelines above that layer of free will.

Those seers, or prescients, saw the path of a “life-wave” as a whole, as Black termed it, meaning those currents or historical patterns related to an entire species. Those were the timelines that unfolded over not days, months, or years, but centuries.

Even millennia.

He told me he’d never once met an actual prescient, not on Old Earth, and not here.

Letting out a tired-sounding sigh, Black took his hand off my thigh long enough to open the bag in his lap a second time, and pull out the bagel sandwich I’d brought him. Pulling his out and setting it on his lap in the wrapper, he handed over mine, which was smaller and decidedly less packed with ingredients.

We sat there, eating, both of us watching Kiko breathe and sleep.

There was no sound apart from rustling paper, our chewing, and our swallowing.

Black hadn’t been lying about being hungry.

It struck me again that we never made it to dinner the night before.

Even so, and despite the fact that it was now a little before ten in the morning, I was in awe of how quickly he inhaled the food. It seemed like bare seconds before he crumpled up the wrapper and tossed it into the empty bag.

I’d only made it about a third of the way through the bagel and lox sandwich I’d gotten for myself by then.

Leaning back in the fabric chair, he stretched while I continued to eat, arching his back in a third attempt to get the kinks out of his spine and shoulders. He’d just grabbed his coffee off the table again, when his phone rang from inside his jacket.

I watched him pull it out, and just stare at the name that came up on the ID.

I leaned over, glancing at it.

It was a single word, a single name.

BRICK.

Giving me a cold, death-like stare that made my chest tighten, Black rose smoothly to his feet, hitting the button to answer the phone.

He didn’t wait for whoever was on the other end to speak.

“You’re fucking dead,” he said.

He spoke lower than a whisper, his voice cold, furious.

“Do you hear me, motherfucker? You’re fucking dead. You and those bloodsucking, sociopathic fucks you call your people. I fully intend to spend the rest of my day finding out from Charles exactly how I can help hunt down every last one of you miserable, soulless pieces of shit. I want to personally light the match after he’s dumped gasoline on all of your––”

Whoever it was must have cut him off.

Black’s voice abruptly rose.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what the fuck happened!” he snarled, seemingly forgetting about staying quiet for Kiko’s sake. “You’re lucky I haven’t shown up at your door with a trowel made of razor blades and a goddamned flamethrower! These are your people, Brick! You’re responsible for this!”

Listening to something the other said, he shook his head.

Still listening, Black clicked at him sharply, letting out a coarse laugh.

There wasn’t an ounce of humor in it.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’ve got the fucking gall to ask me that, after what I came home to last night…” Pausing to listen, briefer that time, he snarled, “I don’t give a fuck, Brick. You hand that vampire to me, or there is no conversation. The only meeting we have starts with me ripping that motherfucker’s heart out of his chest––”

Again he stopped, his teeth gritted.

“Don’t even go there,” he growled. “Don’t even fucking go there. You want to talk about the Pentagon, Brick? About what I did to you? Let’s talk about that prison first, shall we? Let’s start there, if we’re going to play that fucking game…”

Again he fell silent, listening.

Sandwich forgotten, I stared at him, watching him pace by the foot of Kiko’s bed.

I watched emotions ripple through his light like electric currents.

The pure intensity behind those twisting, fire-like plumes alarmed me.

Below him, dark shapes writhed in the structures of his light, turning the room darker, as if a cloud had passed over the sun. Black’s hand curled into a fist while I watched, as he listened to the other speak.

“Fine,” he said after another pause.

His voice remained cold, death-like.

“Fine,” he said again. “We’ll be there. And I don’t want to hear shit about numbers or security. If he’s not there, don’t expect the meeting to end well. For you or anyone else. And if this is a goddamned attempt to trap me, trick me, or harm a single hair on any of my people’s heads, you might want to rethink that right now… old friend.”

I watched him click the hang-up button and shove the phone back in his jacket pocket.

By then his words had penetrated enough that I stared at him in shock.

“You’re still going to meet with him?” I said in disbelief.

Turning, Black scowled, meeting my gaze.

That death look was still in his eyes.

“Yes,” he said, gruff. He glanced at his watch. “I need to go make arrangements. Can you make sure someone’s with her? At all times? It doesn’t have to be you.”

Watching his face, I nodded slowly.

“Of course.”

His expression softened, but not very much. “Thanks.” The instant he looked away from me, his face grew taut all over again.

Feeling the pulses coming off his light, I found I understood.

This wasn’t about making a deal with Brick anymore.

This was about killing the vampire who’d done this to his friend. It was about killing Brick if something similar had happened to Nick Tanaka.

I wondered if Brick knew that, even after what Black said to him.

Since he’d clearly agreed to bring the vampire who’d done this to Kiko to the meeting with him, he probably did.

All of which made me wonder why Brick would agree to meet with us at all.

“Did he say who did it?” I said, when the silence stretched.

Black gave me a furious, incredulous look.

None of that anger or incredulity felt aimed at me.

“No,” he growled. “He didn’t. He didn’t explain shit. He said one of his new recruits got away from him, that he’s being ‘disciplined’ now, apparently by Dorian.”

Black gestured vaguely, his jaw hard, like he was too angry to speak.

When he finally did, his voice rose sharply.

“His excuse was that the vampire’s ‘young.’ Like… what the fuck does that mean? Young? Young how exactly? Like a teenager? A kid? Why the fuck would Brick bring a goddamned kid with him to something like this?”

Shaking his head, he clicked angrily, louder than I’d ever heard him make the sound.

“That doesn’t mesh with the bite marks I saw, the rape, the images I got off Kiko, any of it. It doesn’t make any fucking sense at all.”

Trailing, he glanced at Kiko on the hospital bed.

He winced, right before he lowered his voice.

“Brick claims he wouldn’t have brought him, had he known he’d do something like that. He said this vampire has ‘issues’ he wasn’t aware of.”

I stared at him.

That time, my face twisted in disbelief.

“What does that mean?” I said. “Issues? What the fuck kind of issues?”

Black grunted, his expression unmoving.

“I don’t much care at this point, doc,” he said, his voice as cold and fathomless as his eyes. “As far as I’m concerned, it means this vampire’s going to have a very short fucking life. It means Brick is a lot less likely to leave this city alive, too.”

Looking at him, I didn’t answer.

I couldn’t help being worried, though.

I also couldn’t help thinking it wouldn’t be that easy.