NAOKO FELT THE building start to shake.

At first, he thought it was some kind of defense system––some insanely expensive, likely experimental, possibly illegal, high-tech anti-breach protocol Black had installed in his building after he’d returned from Koh Mangaan.

Naoko froze when it started, melting into the shadow by the parked helicopter. Under his fingers, a black eagle was etched on the door of the gunmetal gray body.

He stood on the helipad, surfing the rippling tarmac, looking around in a wary, bemused kind of wonder. Even after he determined that it must be a natural phenomenon, that he was experiencing yet another of San Francisco’s famous earthquakes, he half-expected the metal door to the concrete stairs into the building to slam open.

He waited for it.

He waited for Dex and a half-dozen more of Black’s people to appear, bearing tranq guns and tasers, wearing black armor and infrared goggles.

Naoko waited, fangs extended, blood pumping erratically through his veins, as the earth shook beneath his legs, chest, feet, and arms like an angry Hawaiian god.

He stared at the only door into the main building, and waited.

No one came.

When the shaking worsened, his knees bent, bringing him closer to the ground. He balanced himself lightly, crouching on the tarmac. His fingers touched the underside of the helicopter’s fuselage, but otherwise, he didn’t move.

His eyes never left that metal door.

Eventually, the shaking slowed.

Then, even more gradually…

It stopped.

For a few seconds, Naoko remained where he was, crouched at the underside of the helicopter’s fuselage. He glanced up at the sky, noting a thin sliver of moon, half-covered by silver and black clouds. Far in the distance, he could hear voices with his vampire hearing. He heard car alarms going off, activated by the shaking deep inside the earth.

The voices he heard were excited.

Fear still lived there, but already, Naoko could hear the attempts to normalize what had just occurred.

What do you think? 6.0? That felt like a big one to me…

At least 5.8. I think higher though, depending on where the epicenter is…

Damn, the glass table broke…

Did you see the street? There’s a ton of damage down there…

Even further away, Naoko heard sharper, more violent sounds of unrest. He heard chanting, screams, threats, breaking glass, the whomp of ignited gasoline and grain alcohol.

He could feel how the earthquake quieted that unrest for those few minutes.

The Earth didn’t care about political disagreements. It rebelled against the animals living on top of it, pulling them off one another and their petty disagreements––forcing them to face their mortality, their lack of power, their lack of control.

Now, in the aftermath, that unrest would be worse.

In the end, humans weren’t so different from any other animal. They howled, baying at the moon. They snarled when uncertain or afraid.

They panicked when the ground turned liquid under their feet.

Now, they would reassert control.

Charles would nudge that along, of course. His pet dogs on the ground would act as his eyes and ears, the mind and light of the humans they controlled.

Naoko frowned, rising silently back to his feet.

He glanced around, looking for damage from the quake. The military helicopter he’d been hiding behind looked unscathed, its propellers still vibrating slightly in the aftermath of the shaking ground. The building itself looked unchanged.

Apart from a single, snaking crack along the white-painted square on the cement helipad, Naoko saw no real differences at all. The crack formed a jagged pattern through the black eagle painted on the larger white square. The symbol formed a near circle with its curved wings, marking a target for the helicopter to land.

Naoko pulled away from the silent, black and silver bird.

He began making his way to the metal door.

The earthquake could only help him now.

No matter what they were doing downstairs, an earthquake that size would prove a distraction. Also, if Naoko set off any security measures now, they might think they got triggered by the quake. If nothing else, the quake would make them slower to react.

He was halfway to the door when the building’s alarms went off.

The loud, wailing sound made him briefly freeze.

It sounded like an air raid siren.

That, or possibly the tsunami warning they tested several times a week in the Sunset and Richmond Districts, where he and Miri used to live.

He listened to the escalating, keening sound, not wincing––such things didn’t hurt him any longer; his vampire senses scaled up and down naturally, adjusting to changing volumes of light and sound without his needing to consciously will it––but he was made curious as to the cause. He wondered again if the metal door would be flung open before he could enter the building, if he should expect Black’s humans and seers to pour out, weapons raised.

No one came.

Naoko stalked forward cautiously, ready to run.

Worst case scenario, he would fling himself off the side of the building and scale back down the hard way. Hopefully not while dodging bullets, or getting hit by a tranquilizer dart and crashing to the pavement below.

He was nearly within touching distance of the door, when––

The siren cut out.

It happened so suddenly, Naoko again froze.

He stood there, listening to the silence.

When that silence persisted, he took the last step to reach the handle of the door. He’d just touched his fingers to the brushed metal surface, when––

Someone gasped.

The sound came from less than a dozen yards away.

Female.

No one had been out here before. No one shared the roof with him.

He was sure of it.

No one who breathed was out here at least––no one who would have gasped like that. No one with a heartbeat. He could hear that heartbeat even now, thudding behind the curved bones of her chest, forcing blood through her veins in violent, throbbing pulses, running it just below the skin. Hunger rose in him like a pain, making him hard even as his fangs extended enough that he felt them, razor sharp, lightly touching his lips and tongue.

Naoko didn’t think.

Well, he didn’t think beyond that, beyond what his body wanted.

He hadn’t fed enough tonight.

Given what he’d been doing all night, he hadn’t fed nearly enough.

Dropping to a combat crouch, he disappeared into the shadow by the wall, then immediately began following the cement-bricked surface towards the sounds of that heart and those breaths. He made it around the first corner and stepped off the tarmac.

His shoes landed on a light crunch of gravel.

He came to a complete stop once again.

He could see her now.

She lay on the ground near the wall, sprawled on her back, her skin pale and oh, so much of it. Her dark hair framed her face, fanning around her shoulders and head.

She was completely naked.

He blinked.

Staring at her, he doubted his eyes.

Then, in the pause before he stared at her face a second time, at those high cheekbones, full lips, those long dark eyelashes, that nearly-black hair… that pain and hunger in him keened violently higher… so high, it made him light-headed. In fractions of a second, it was louder in his mind than the air raid siren that cut out a few seconds before.

It was Miriam.

He had no idea how or why it was her.

It didn’t matter.

It was her.

He took another step towards her.

Like earlier that night, when she screamed his name, when she ran at him in the dark, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he had to restrain himself from draining her right there, the very fact of her in front of him briefly paralyzed him.

Memory once more tried to swim forward, confusing him.

With that memory came pain––a different pain than the hunger.

He stared at her, and found he was panting without air, fighting with that pain in his chest, like he had with Dorian inside that cage… like he had with Dorian so many times since then. He heard her laughing in his mind, saw her head thrown back, her eyes open, reflecting sunlight. He saw her sitting across from him at their favorite sushi restaurant in Japantown, where they went for more lunches together than he could count.

They’d gone to lunch together nearly every day for years, sometimes with Angel, sometimes not, pretty much the whole time he worked at the Northern Precinct and she had her offices across the street.

Tears came, shocking him, then confusing him.

He stared down at her, that pain crippling his chest.

When he could see again, her eyes were open.

Those giant, hazel eyes stared at him, holding more green and gold than he remembered.

Black had changed even her eyes somehow.

“Nick.” Her voice was low, frightened, almost husky.

She cleared her throat, looking around at where she lay. She had her upper body propped up on her hands now, and sat there, staring around at the gravel-covered section of roof. He saw her eyes focus past him, at the helicopter.

He saw it click where she was––where they were. He saw her look back at him, assessing his face in a single flicker of her gaze. He saw the intelligence there sharpen, that damned intelligence of hers, which always turned him on, even when it intimidated him.

“Nick, how did you get me up here?”

He only stood there, staring at her.

He saw her studying his face. He saw her seem to see something in his eyes. Before he could make sense of what it was, her own eyes filled with tears.

“Nick.” Her voice was low that time, broken. “Nick…”

He watched her fight for more words, for something to say to him.

But there was nothing to say.

She’d left him there. She and Black and the rest of them gave him to Brick.

He belonged to Brick now.

She seemed to see some of that in his face too.

“Nick, come home,” she said, soft. She wiped her face, without taking her eyes off his. “Nick come home. Stay with us. Don’t do this with Brick. Don’t go through all of this with Brick… with fucking Dorian. Do it with us. Let us help you.”

He let out a humorless laugh.

He couldn’t help it.

Her words also finally snapped him out of wherever his own mind had gone, out of that paralyzed, broken place, where Miri still maybe loved him, where he had a family and friends and it mattered what he did. He remembered Dorian’s words in his ears, his pale arms wrapped around him, and shivered.

He fought to get back that feeling, that…

Nothingness.

“Nick.” She shook her head, clearing her throat. “Nick, even Brick says you’ll change. You’ll feel differently than you do now. You’ll come back. More of you, at least.”

She stared at his eyes, and he couldn’t help but see the emotion there. He couldn’t help but see the fucking hope there.

He knew what she hoped for, though. He knew how completely fucking delusional it was. Moreover, he knew it probably wasn’t even about him.

“You don’t have to feel guilty, Miriam,” he told her.

He took a step towards her, and something about that gliding, forward momentum reminded him, clicking a different part of his mind in place. It put him back in mind of hunting. It took him out of the past, and back into the present, into the present of him. Sensation filled his mouth, ears, eyes. The sound of her blood throbbing inside him, following each expansion and contraction of her heart, each expansion and contraction of her lungs.

He grew aware of her nakedness.

Without making the decision consciously, he was staring at the rest of her, at her long, muscular legs, those fucking breasts, which he’d fantasized about more times than he could count back when he was human. With her tanned shoulders thrown back, as they were now, those breasts were displayed like she was a porn star centerfold in some eighties jerk-off magazine.

He stared at her feet, her calves, her muscular arms, her narrow waist.

He might not have it in him to kill her, not yet.

But he was definitely going to fuck her.

“Black’s going to have to learn how to share,” he said finally.

His voice came out thick, gruff… like an animal.

He no longer minded that, either. He didn’t mind anything, not anymore. His fangs were sharp against his lips. He felt the blood rising to his eyes, to his cock, to his tongue and mouth.

Within seconds, he didn’t care about much of anything.

When he looked up next, he saw Miriam’s eyes had widened. Those hazel eyes were surrounded by white, and he smiled before he knew he meant to. The hunter in him liked that look on her face. The hunter in him liked it a hell of a lot.

“Nick.” Her voice came out hard that time, warning. She held up a hand. “Nick, no. No, goddamn it. He’ll kill you. You know he will.”

“I know he’ll try,” Naoko murmured, his eyes back on her body.

He could see her breathing harder.

She was naked. She didn’t have a single weapon on her.

She didn’t even have a knife.

He heard her heart pounding in her chest.

“Nick.” She gasped, hyperventilating now, once more holding up her hand, shaking her head. “Nick… no. Don’t. Don’t, goddamn it. Don’t––”

But he could barely hear her now.

He was already moving.

HE DIDN’T HEAR them.

He didn’t hear them speak.

He didn’t hear the metal door to the downstairs open.

He didn’t hear their breaths. He didn’t hear their footsteps on the cement, or on the gravel when they walked past the edge of the white cement brick wall.

Despite his vampire hearing, his vampire sight, his ability to feel minute shifts in air and light, even when they happened outside his view––

He didn’t hear a goddamned thing.

Pleasure cascaded over him and through him as her fingers tightened on his arms. Her cunt spasmed around his cock as he fed on her, arching into her harder, feeling like he was wrapped in a hot, liquid blanket of sex, feeling her heart beat under his fingers, hearing her gasp in his ear as he angled into her again.

She liked his cock.

She liked his cock, his fingers, his mouth… the way he kissed.

He was lost there.

He was fucking lost.

The rest of the world had completely disappeared… gone away.

It wasn’t like any human he’d been inside, any vampire.

He’d never been so sated and drugged and turned on and frustrated and fucking hungry in his life. He’d never felt so much during sex. He’d never wanted to be so far inside another person, either their mind or body. He’d never been so far inside both things at the same time.

She belonged to him. She fucking belonged to him…

So no, he didn’t hear them.

He didn’t hear anything until the sound of a gunshot exploded, seemingly right in his ear, seemingly at the exact instant the bullet went through his upper chest.

They’d waited until Naoko raised himself up.

He’d waited, presumably so he wouldn’t hit Miri.

Naoko watched his own blood splatter over the front of Miri’s body, hitting her face, neck, breasts, belly. There was a silence where he heard her suck in a breath, where that was the only sound in the world as she released his arms, throwing up her forearms in an instinctive gesture of self-protection.

His body hummed with her blood.

His cock was so far in her he felt a split-second of reluctance, of regret, before his own survival instincts kicked in.

For that split-second, he contemplated taking her with him.

Even with the bullet twisting through him, slamming into bones and flesh, exiting out the front of him before mashing into a metal pancake on the cement wall, he still felt like he was on drugs, like everything about her drugged him.

He thought about her being his, really his.

He stared down at her, at her skin covered with his blood, and he thought about it even as the bullet exploded through his chest.

Both of them were so drunk on his venom he could feel her presence, even now. Not quite thoughts, not quite words, not anymore, but he felt her awareness of him, of him inside her.

He felt how good it felt for her.

He had her pinned to the gravel, his fingers fisted in her hair.

His instincts kicked in before she’d even finished that inhaled breath.

Then he rolled.

He was out of her and on his feet, running. His body and mind adjusted in milliseconds, clicking back into the mode of a hunter, his senses kicking back on even as he held up his pants, darting towards the outer wall, weaving and zig-zagging his way to the helicopter to put it between himself and Black’s gun.

The gun went off again.

Then again.

Then again.

It felt like slow motion now, although he knew Black––he knew the seer was firing without pause, without hesitation, emptying his magazine at his fleeing back in the dark without so much as a hair’s breadth pause between each squeeze of the trigger.

Naoko had zero doubt Black was firing that gun as fast as the model allowed him to fire it.

He’d just passed the helicopter when a bullet caught him in the side, jerking his body sideways, forcing him to twist in the air to keep his forward momentum. By then, he’d reached the edge of the wall. He didn’t hesitate but leapt without slowing, wind-milling his legs to go over the edge and drop out of the seer’s sight as fast as he possibly could.

He knew exactly where to jump.

He knew exactly what he was aiming for.

He knew exactly where the smooth glass top of the building changed, becoming the steel, jutting ridges of the lower part of the building’s architecture. Those ridges started at the fiftieth floor, expanding out the base of the building a good twenty feet in diameter wider than the tallest part of the building’s spire, which was made all of glass.

Falling seemed to take forever, too.

As he fell, a sharp, fire-like pain jabbed at his neck.

Nick slapped it with his hand in midair, but whatever it was, it wasn’t fatal, or even some kind of tranquilizer, like he’d feared. He wondered if he’d hit into one of Black’s insect-sized drones… but the pain was already starting to fade.

Moreover, it was nothing compared to the pain from the gunshot wounds in his chest and lower abdomen.

He didn’t have long to think to think about his injuries in any case.

He slammed into the top part of the wider rim of the building, hitting into the steel ridges like falling on the spikes of a metal fence. Exhaling air from lungs he didn’t need, he grasped at the slick surfaces with fingers slippery from his own blood, managing to slow himself down enough to wedge himself between two of the building’s ridges.

Within seconds, he was jammed between two parallel pieces of jutting metal, his back to one side, his feet to the other, like a rock-climber stuck in a narrow gully.

He gave himself one second, just hanging there.

Maybe two.

He didn’t need to breathe, but it felt like catching his breath.

It felt like he hung there, for just one breath.

Perhaps it was more like acknowledging he was alive, along with comprehending his new circumstances, and the state of his body, which hurt like fucking hell now that he was twisted into the narrow space between the two ridges. In that same bare instant, he fastened his pants, yanking them up and hooking the belt. He ignored his shirt, letting it hang open around his bare chest. He’d already chucked the jacket while he was with Miri.

That jacket, a gift from Dorian, was up there somewhere, on the gravel of the roof.

Then… the breath was over.

More gunshots went off from overhead.

Without looking up, Naoko dropped, releasing his hands and feet enough to slide between the two ridged metal walls. He fell as swiftly as he could while maintaining full control of the fall, adjusting his body as he went until he found the optimal angle to propel himself downward the fastest without letting himself just slam into the cement sidewalk.

He already knew there would be seers and humans waiting for him at the bottom of the building. No matter how fast he fell, Black would already have them down there, waiting for him, probably directly below where he was now.

He’d either have to attack them before they could take him out, or find a way back into the building before he reached the ground floor.

Even as he thought it, more gunshots went off from overhead.

They pinged against the ridged metal, one of them missing his head by inches, despite how fast he fell.

Black must have infrared.

He’d also clearly switched from a handgun to a rifle.

Naoko couldn’t know for sure if they could still see him. He doubted they could, at least right then, but he strongly suspected that wouldn’t matter to Black. He’d just aim down the ridge where Naoko disappeared, and fire until he ran out of bullets.

Moreover, Black would send drones soon, if he hadn’t already.

Black would send everything he had at him now.

At the thought, it crossed Naoko’s mind that hitting the pavement like this, with two gunshot wounds, no weapons, and no other vampires, wasn’t a good idea.

He needed to find a way back inside.

Releasing the ridged steel beams briefly at the thought, he let himself fall faster, going into a near-freefall for at least fifteen stories, mostly in an attempt to put more distance between himself and Black.

He knew where he was going now, though.

Something in the knowing calmed him, even as sirens once more exploded out of the sound system in the building behind him. He heard them wind up even louder overhead, echoing down to the street, reverberating between the tall skyscrapers.

He wondered how many people down there thought a big wave might be coming.

He never stopped counting stories as he fell.

Seconds later, he began slowing his fall.

Within a few seconds more, he brought himself to a full stop. Unlike before, he didn’t wait to gather his bearings. The windows behind him were all dark, which was a bonus, but he knew he didn’t have much time.

If he didn’t hit the ground soon, they’d start looking for him on the higher floors.

Knowing Black, he’d have spotlights cover every inch of the outer building.

Grabbing the steel ridge in front of him with both hands, he grunted, maybe more out ofs habit than necessity, pulling himself over and around the foot-thick piece of jutting metal, using only the strength of his upper body and arms. Balancing with his feet and legs once he got around the first ridge, he wedged himself between the next set of steel beams, then crawled around the next one, moving in a roughly northwestern direction around the building.

He pulled himself around to the next set of beams.

Then the next.

Then the next.

He made his way around maybe an eighth of the building that way, moving as quickly as he could, without pausing to rest, or to assess precisely where he was.

He would see it when he was close.

He traversed across six more beams the same way…

Then he did see it.

A terrace appeared four stories below him, a paler color than the surrounding black steel. Landscaped trees rippled softly in the night breeze, rimming the glass balcony and clustered in geometric patterns across the terrace itself, their small leaves making liquid patterns in the dark. Jutting out from the building, the cement landing was covered in glass-topped tables with dark red and blue umbrellas, closed now for the night, and surrounded by outdoor chairs. Potted plants rimmed the edge, below the trees, and a koi pond ran through the middle of the cement deck, decorated with a curved arch of a wooden footbridge.

Naoko didn’t wait.

Looking down, he gauged the exact distances of everything that was below him.

Then, once he had the whole layout memorized.

He dropped.