BLACK DIDN’T WANT me to go.

I understood why. I especially understood why after the Kiko thing. I understood after Nick, after all of it.

I also knew some of Black’s worry had to do with Brick’s threat towards me in New York, when the vampire king had been determined to turn me into a vampire. Black and I hadn’t talked about that, not specifically, but I could feel it was still on his mind.

Everything had changed now, though.

There was no way in hell I wasn’t going to be there.

There was no way in hell I wasn’t going to hear Brick’s explanation of what happened to Nick with my own ears. It was never going to be enough to hear or see it through someone else’s mind and light, even Black’s. I’d never trust that I wasn’t being influenced by another person’s take on it. Even if I did believe I was getting the exact account, word for word, impression for impression, thought for thought… it would never be enough.

Even seeing Nick’s body wouldn’t be enough.

I needed to hear and see all of it for myself.

I needed to hear every fucking word that came out of Brick’s mouth.

Angel felt the same way.

So did Cowboy––and Dex.

While I suspected Cowboy’s issues were more about Angel than Nick per se, and Dex’s issues were likely more about Kiko, both men were pretty tight with Nick by the end, too. Even so, Kiko changed everything all over again, and not just for Black and Dex. That grew increasingly obvious when Black started assembling the team and handing out assignments for the meeting with the vampires that night.

Black invited just about every seer we had with any infiltration experience. He also made the duty completely voluntary.

Despite that fact, not a single one of them turned him down.

From the looks on some of their faces when they stood with us in the lobby of the California building, waiting for transport to come and pick us all up and take us to the meeting location, they would have come even if Black hadn’t asked.

Jem, in particular, looked positively fucking dangerous.

I’d never seen him in his full-blown military persona before. The difference wasn’t solely due to the all-black combat gear he wore, or even the M-4 he had strapped around his chest and back––I’d seen him geared up for ops before, both in Thailand and in D.C.

It was something else, something different in his actual light.

Even so, I’m not sure I’d ever seen him carry quite so many weapons on his person.

As I looked him over, I realized he wore two handguns at his thighs, gunfighter-style, two more at his ribs in shoulder-holsters, another at his ankle, and one in a holster at the small of his back. I also counted six throwing knives in each of the sleeves he wore on his forearms, in addition to the two katana-style swords that crossed his back, similar to the swords and scabbards Black and Cowboy wore.

Jem’s long hair was pulled out of his face, both in the back and the top of his head in two separate ponytails, making him look more Eurasian than I’d ever seen him, and a little bit like a preternaturally handsome Genghis Khan.

I saw a number of the human women in Black’s crew staring at him, almost like they couldn’t help themselves.

If Jem noticed, I didn’t see it on his face, or feel it in his light.

He stood right next to me. I couldn’t help but feel the protectiveness he threw over and around me, strangling my light. Between him and Black, I felt like I was encased in four feet of light on all sides, including below my feet.

“Hey,” I told him, nudging him. “Relax. I don’t need a bodyguard.”

Jem gave me a flat look, unsmiling.

“Tough shit,” he said, blunt. “You have one. If you have an issue with it, talk to your husband.”

I looked at Black.

He felt my stare, but barely bothered to shrug.

“You heard him,” Black said, his gold eyes flashing briefly. “Tough shit.”

He glanced at Cowboy and Angel, then back at me.

“Anyone Brick’s targeted in the past… or who Brick might target due to their relationship with me… or to you… has coverage, doc. You can’t possibly think that wouldn’t include you, given you’re the fucking poster child for both categories, Miri.”

“Does it include you?” I retorted.

“Yes,” Yarli said, stepping out from the other side of Black.

She gripped a M-4 in both hands, one that looked even more modified than the one Jem carried. Next to her stood Holo, wearing a similarly modified HK433. I’d never seen either of the two seers with such warlike expressions on their faces.

On Holo’s other side, Jax looked the same, and equally pissed off.

Looking at the three of them, it suddenly became much more real to me that they’d fought in a long-running war on their home world.

Realizing at least two of them were directly covering Black, if not all three, I nodded, backing down with my light.

“Fair enough,” I muttered.

Black quirked an eyebrow at me, but didn’t smile.

All of the seers and humans who’d geared up for this stood around Black in a rough circle now. They all looked to him expectantly, expressions grim, but the seers stood so inhumanly still, with such expressionless faces, I found myself scanning over them, noting how tightly they were shielded.

So these are infiltrators, I found myself thinking.

“Military-trained infiltrators,” Jem said from next to me. “And please shield your light, sister. I’ve been told these vampires have coerced seers to work for them before. We can’t assume they won’t have any with them now.”

I glanced over at him, frowning as it hit me how right he was.

They could easily have another Efraim by now. With so many new seers on this version of Earth, they could have found a lone seer before that seer even knew vampires existed in this world, before they had any idea of the risks.

Hearing me through his light, Jem checked his gun, his face twisted in a scowl.

“We can’t afford to have a single one of these fuckers knowing even one more thing about us,” he muttered. “They know way too fucking much already.”

I nodded, agreeing with him.

I focused my light. Concentrating on the structures I used to shield, I began closing my aleimi down systematically, hiding it from view, checking for gaps at each stage of the process to make sure I wasn’t missing any part of my mind or light.

Within seconds, the world felt further away.

It also felt strangely clearer, as did my mind.

Keep a line open to me, doc, Black murmured in my mind. At all times.

I sent him a pulse of acknowledgment, feeling the structure he highlighted over each of our heads, the one that connected the two of us.

Once I’d double and triple-checked to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, I glanced at Jem.

“Better?” I said.

The older seer frowned, looking at me. I saw his light green irises shift faintly out of focus, his gaze narrowing as he methodically scanned my light. I didn’t feel a damned thing, but from what I knew of Jem, I could count on him being thorough.

His eyes slid back into focus a few seconds later.

Surprise flickered subtly across his expression.

“Yes,” he said, giving me one of those delicate seer frowns. “A lot better than I would have expected, sister, if I am to be honest. And not only because you were raised on a planet with almost no other seers.” He frowned in Black’s direction. “Did he teach you that?”

“No,” Black said, glancing over his shoulder at Jem. “I didn’t.”

I gave Black a semi-humorous look, but he’d already gone back to where he was speaking in a low voice to Yarli and Dex, seemingly without missing a beat.

Jem grunted at his back, glancing at me.

“Is that true?” he said.

I shrugged. “Half true, so no… not really. He definitely taught me to do it more consciously. And how to be more systematic about it. And how to check to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. But I suppose he’s at least partly right.”

Glancing at Black’s back, I looked back at Jem, lowering my voice. “My father taught me. He started when I was a kid.”

Jem’s eyebrows rose at that.

He didn’t comment on it, though.

Hearing the light squeal of breaks from the street outside the building, I looked out the one-way glass walls. A row of armored SUVs was pulling up to the curb, all of them with blacked-out windows.

I didn’t have to see the gunmetal gray eagle insignia on the doors to know they were there for us.

Watching each of them come to a stop, engines running, I gave Jem a grim look.

“Here we go,” I said.

BRICK AGREED TO meet us not at the California Street building, as he’d originally proposed, but at one of Black’s other properties instead, which Black more or less demanded.

Black didn’t want him anywhere near our headquarters, or our home.

I could hardly blame him.

At the same time, I’m not sure why Brick agreed to Black’s demands.

I don’t know why the vampire would agree to meet at one of Black’s properties at all, much less let Black pick the place. It’s not like Black made much of an effort to hide his state of mind over the phone.

The whole thing struck me as an enormous risk for Brick, no matter what leverage he believed he had. I could only think Brick must’ve been so damned determined to convince us he was operating in good faith, he was willing to risk Black setting up an ambush and just massacring his people wholesale.

That, or he planned to do the same to us.

Whatever his reasons, Brick agreed to meet us at one of Black’s storage facilities inside the city, an older one located in the Mission District.

Black bought it back in the 1980s, when the Mission had been run down, the area was more or less ignored by developers, and the properties went for ridiculously cheap, particularly by current-day standards in San Francisco. What now had to be an eight-figure property may have cost Black as little as five-figures back in those years.

The neighborhood had since been gentrified.

That was putting it mildly.

Now the large, brick, heritage building that took up a full block of real estate, with its blacked-out and barred windows and thick steel doors, stood on a series of city blocks dotted with high-end bars and restaurants, not to mention nightclubs, art galleries, expensive and trendy loft apartments, boutique hotels, specialty and designer shops for wine, as well as imported food, local clothing and jewelry designers, cigars and antiques.

For the same reason, it was strange to watch the row of armored SUVs pull up to the massive, sliding metal door smack in the middle of the busiest part of Valencia Street. It was even stranger to watch those SUVs empty out, dumping what looked like a small army out onto the sidewalk across from a row of trendy restaurants and bars.

We got a lot of stares initially, but within seconds, most of those eyes had turned away. Glancing around at the armed seers now surrounding me and Black, I realized the infiltrators were already engaging in crowd control.

I knew that for certain when I glimpsed the faces of nearby humans as they slid from surprised to utterly blank in a matter of seconds. Those who clearly recognized Black blanked out even faster, their expressions turning as empty as manikins before they came to a dead stop, going motionless and unblinking on the sidewalk.

All of those who’d been approaching our position either quickly walked through if they were already close to the steel doors, or they stopped before they got within twenty yards of the warehouse opening. Many of those latter just stood there, like the ones who’d noticed Black, as if waiting for a light to change. Others turned around entirely and began wandering aimlessly in the opposite direction.

I felt whispers of fear on most of them.

Black told me once that humans on this version of Earth knew on some level, when they were being pushed. He said it made them subconsciously fear him––it made them fear any seer who tampered with their minds.

Even without that, even without the fear I picked up from the crowd that stood out of our way, the power behind the group of infiltrators unnerved me.

Shaking off my misgivings, I glanced towards Black’s warehouse.

The path between the SUVs and the steel doors was entirely clear now.

The brick and iron building was taller than I remembered, at least ten stories, and more forbidding-looking. I remembered Black telling me it used to be an armory for the United States military, which is part of how he got it for so cheap.

Overall, it struck me as oddly appropriate for the meeting we were about to have.

It was the kind of place I could picture vampires living in already.

I knew one reason Black picked it was that a heavy, military-grade construct, as Jem put it, already protected the structure. I suspected that had more to do with Charles than Brick, however, since constructs were pretty useless against vampires.

Black definitely wouldn’t want Charles to think he and Brick were negotiating.

At the very least, he wouldn’t want Charles listening in on what was said.

I suspected there were other reasons, as well––reasons having to do with the functionality of the construct for the seers operating in it, and advantages that might give us, even over vampires, who were relatively immune to most seer abilities––but I could only really guess at those, since the whole infiltrator thing was still pretty new to me.

Black nudged me with his light.

“We need to get off the street,” he said, gruff.

I nodded, glancing his way. “I’m ready.”

“Stay near me, doc. At all times.” He gave me a grim look. “We have drones over us, and inside the building, but unless I order Javier to blow the whole damned structure, they’re liable to be too slow. That leaves those of us with swords on the front lines. Mostly seers.”

I nodded a second time, showing I understood.

Holding my gaze another beat, Black motioned for Javier and Dex to open the sliding doors into the warehouse.

Once they did, Black and I made our way to the gaping opening.

Seers and humans jogged around us, keeping us more or less surrounded the instant we left the shelter of the SUVs.

I think we were only on the street for a few seconds total, but I felt Black’s light gearing up and charging in that unnerving way I remembered from Koh Mangaan. I wondered if the other seers around us noticed, or if those structures on Black were still relatively invisible to them.

Black seemed to think they were––invisible, that is.

He claimed it was one advantage of having a lot of advanced structures below his feet, rather than above his head, which is where most seers were trained to look for them. Apparently, you needed some awareness and training in your own lower structures to see subterranean structures on other seers.

Or something like that.

Truthfully, I needed a lot more training in whatever the hell Black was talking about, too.

The bottom line was, according to Black, most seers didn’t have the ability to even see what he had in his light, nor the training on how to look for it.

Glancing at Jem as we entered the warehouse, I wondered if that was true of all seers.

Pushing all of that from my mind, I focused back on why we were here. Even with those stray thoughts, I could feel the part of me that was laser-focused.

Once this meeting became real, once it sank in that I’d be in the same room as Brick and his vampire henchmen, that I’d be in the same room as the vampire who attacked Kiko, that Brick would have Nick’s body with him, all of my more volatile emotions faded back.

I fell into a state I recognized, but one I hadn’t lived in for a long time.

It didn’t really hit me until we were inside the warehouse, walking down a black-painted passageway to the high-ceilinged room where the actual meeting would take place, that it was a mental state I’d cultivated in a war zone.

The last time I remembered feeling like this was Afghanistan.

It was a mental state Nick helped me learn, both through his advice, when I was green and he was a lot less so, and just from watching him operate.

Hyper-practical, completely focused on the job, Sargent Nick Tanaka maintained a peripheral awareness without letting anything pull his attention from the task at hand. I learned that from him, consciously emulated that in him. Something told me, even when I first met him, that adopting Nick’s approach to the front lines might be the only thing to keep me alive.

That state of mind had changed in me somewhat from those years, now that I understood my living light. I knew how to shield myself differently, as well as how to focus my mind, to gear into the more aggressive parts of my seer abilities, to aim that power outward––but the fundamental mental state still came from Nick.

Thinking about Nick now wasn’t going to help me, though.

I followed Black and Yarli down a second narrow corridor between another set of black-painted walls.

Behind me, I felt Jem pacing us, even though I still couldn’t hear him.

I’d foregone the assault rifle most of the seers and humans around me carried.

Instead, my hands rested on the grips of two SVI Tiki’s I wore at my hips.

Black handed those specific guns to me personally, and told me to wear them as my primary guns, since he’d noted during training exercises I was the most accurate with those. He also muttered about needing to buy me some “real guns,” presumably meaning some that belonged to me personally, versus those coming out of his general armory.

Two more guns rested in shoulder holsters inside my coat.

Those I’d already been carrying when Black handed me the Tiki’s with holsters. Both were Desert Eagles, and matched the Baby Eagle I wore at my ankle.

I didn’t carry swords like Black or Jem, although I had a long knife in a scabbard on the small of my back under the coat. I figured in this, I should play to my strengths. I’d logged a lot more time at the target range with handguns than I had with either of the other two weapons in the last six or so months.

If nothing else, I could cover the others, slowing down attacking vampires long enough for the seers and humans with swords to take them out.

It was a secondary job that had worked well within our team in the past.

In the same half-muttered conversation about the guns, however, Black informed me he would be starting me back up on sword-fighting lessons “right away,” so maybe this would be the last time I wasn’t carrying the double-scabbard worn by a lot of his senior team.

Angel wore the twin swords now.

So did Yarli, and Mika.

Normally Kiko would be here, wearing hers, too.

Normally she would be the one standing beside Black, acting as his bodyguard.

We entered the two-story warehouse room right as I shoved the thought from my mind. Whoever came here ahead of us already had it set up with a long, wooden table, surrounded by worn leather chairs.

Black clicked his fingers to Dex, conveying in a series of hand-gestures where he wanted everyone. Clearly, Black didn’t trust that vampires wouldn’t already have the warehouse under surveillance. He also likely didn’t trust that Brick didn’t already have someone inside our group, which is probably why he waited until now to deploy the teams to their final positions.

Knowing Brick, he would have sent at least a few vampires ahead, if only to look for signs of an ambush. One or more had likely been inside this building.

“They’re here,” Mika said, touching her earpiece and looking at Black. “Javier says they just pulled up in front of the building. The drones have their numbers at approximately sixteen. All of them appear to be vampires.”

Black nodded, once.

He looked at me.

Without hearing a word from him, or even a pull at my light, I walked over to where he stood at the head of the table. He sat down, and I took the seat to his right. Manny sat on his other side. Angel, Cowboy, Luce, and Easton sat down the table from me. Ace, Frank and two more humans from Black’s San Francisco team sat on the other side of Manny.

Behind us stood a row of seers, all of them carrying assault rifles and most of them wearing swords.

None of them sat down.

Jem stood behind me, next to Yarli, Holo, Jax and Mika.

Kiessa, the new seer with those eerie black and white eyes, stood on the other side of Mika, her dark face set in an unreadable mask. I counted eight more infiltrators with assault rifles I didn’t yet know, standing on Kiessa’s other side.

Dex stood with the seers.

So did Nadia, and a number of other humans high up in Black’s organizational structure. Black wouldn’t let Magic or any of the younger Natives come. I was there when a few of them threw a fit about that, but I was fully on Black’s side in that particular argument.

This was no place for teenagers, no matter how good they were with weapons.

I knew I was a hypocrite to say that, given how young I was when I first went to war, but I didn’t really give a damn.

I may have lied about my age to get into the military the first time, but I didn’t have to fight vampires in Afghanistan.

Javier was holding down the California Street building and monitoring the drone feeds. He was also keeping an eye on the refugees, the Native kids, and building security, not to mention making sure Kiko had both companionship and security guards posted outside her hospital room at all times.

I realized some part of me was still looking for Kiko… and for Nick.

Frowning, I finished my scan of the catwalks above us and the group standing behind us, and returned my gaze to the empty side of the table, and the black-painted corridor beyond.

None of us spoke.

After a few minutes, I heard sounds in the corridor.

Not quite footsteps.

Not even really the rustle of clothes.

It was more like the whispering echoes of movement, like ghosts shifting air down the narrow passageway between the high walls. The displacement of air was so soft, so subtle, I questioned my own ears, as well as my light, which seemed to pick up on the faint ripple as the vampires moved towards us through the building’s construct.

I doubt I would have heard or felt anything at all under normal conditions.

But these weren’t normal conditions.

Not only was every part of me on high alert, straining for their approach, those of us around the table, both seer and human, sat unnaturally still. The humans’ lights were as deathly still as mine and Black’s, probably aided in part by the construct and the row of infiltrators standing behind our chairs.

Here. Black reached into his pocket, and handed me something. Looking down at my hand, I realized was an earpiece. Wear this, doc. It’s already set to the right frequency.

I took it from him without question, fitting the small piece of green metal in my ear.

As I did, I glanced at Black’s ear and saw that he already wore one.

The instant I had the earpiece in place, a voice rose in my ear.

I realized it was that seer who reminded me of an anime character, Zairei.

“They should be reaching you now, lao ban,” he said.

I turned back towards the corridor and flinched, barely, when the first vampire face appeared. The pale, angular face turned both ways as his eyes darted around, taking in the space like a reptile––or maybe a predatory bird.

Like seers, vampires were beautiful.

Also like seers, some were more beautiful than others, but all of them ranked unnervingly high on the physical beauty scale.

My mind and light tracked that beauty differently with vampires than it did with seers, however. Vampire beauty struck me overtly as camouflage, barely masking the death they signaled to a more primal, flight-or-fight part of my brain. Looking into the eyes of a vampire was like staring into the eyes of a shark.

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, what 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.

Then Brick returned his gaze to Black.

Unlike the smirk I normally saw on the vampire king’s face, particularly when he addressed my husband, Brick’s expression grew even more serious, and utterly still.

It remained that way as he began to talk.