by Jean Graham
 

Nick marveled at the sunlight.

He stood in the midst of a human river, a throng of sun-warmed bodies hurrying past him, and stared up at the glass-towered wonder of Toronto by day. Bright windows mirrored a blue, cloudless sky. Pure, radiating light glinted from every rooftop, every wall, and from every car inching its way through the busy rush-hour traffic.

The crowd flowing around him slowed suddenly. In a moment, it stopped moving altogether. The sea of heads turned as one to look at him, their eyes judging, accusing. A thousand mortal faces stared.

He knew them.

Each and every one had died at his hand.

They moved toward him. Retribution burned now in those eyes, and in their fists they held sharpened stakes raised high, aimed at his heart. They attacked him en masse, each striking with deadly precision until he had fallen, helpless, at their feet. And while he lay dying, his blood forming pools on the sun-warmed concrete, he looked again to the bright sky overhead and thought, How beautiful the day is. The light. The colors...

The ringing telephone.

Nick sat bolt upright, blinking, disoriented by the cool, quiet dark surrounding him. Quiet, at least, but for the continuing shrill of the phone. Until two weeks ago, only one mortal had possessed the phone number for his private floor of the Brabant Foundation mansion. Now there were two. He grabbed the phone from the bedside table and fumbled with the receiver until it was the right way up.

"Knight."

"Sorry if I woke you," Natalie Lambert's voice apologized. "I just thought you might want to stop by the lab some time this evening."

All vestiges of sleep immediately fled. "You've found something?"

"Well, it's hardly the cure yet, but it could be a start. See you later?"

"I'll be there."

The sun hadn't quite gone down yet. Even through blacked-out windows, he could feel its deadly, lingering rays. He would have time for a shower, a liquid bovine breakfast, and a few phone calls of his own.

He reached Charles Du Champs, on vacation in Calgary, for an investment recommendation, an aide in South Africa for a report on a Foundation food distribution, and Sandra Grayson, downstairs, to learn whether anything on the docket tonight would require Director Knight's personal attention.

"Only a signature on the Santiago clinic grant," she told him. "I can bring it upstairs if you're in a rush."

"No, that's all right. I'll be down in a few. Thanks, Sandra."

"Sure thing."

Sandra was, in addition to the only other human with his phone number, the sole mortal who had ever breached his fourth-floor haven -- though merely as far as its foyer. There, she sometimes brought him notice of an urgent need somewhere in the world that the Brabant Foundation might be able to assuage. Even Du Champs, his broker and financial confidant of many years (and the one man who knew that Nick was more than simply the Foundation's director) met with him only in the suites downstairs, or at the occasional club.

To keep mortals at a distance was imperative -- but not always easy. Sandra, for example.

"This clinic's going to mean a lot," she said when he'd finished signing the release forms. He could hear her heart beating faster with every word, but the grant was not the cause. "It'll be in the poorest neighborhood in the city."

"Then I'm glad we could help." He handed her back both pen and forms, and always the picture of efficiency, she went straight to the phone to carry out the bequest. Nick quietly made his exit.

Sandra was one of the most conscientious humans he had ever known, and she administered the Foundation with an expert, professional hand. But every time he came physically near, her heart ran a secretive race with her breathing, and the look in her eyes told him that she would like very much to be more than just Mr. Knight's chief administrator. In another time, another life, he might have responded to those signals. In this life -- unlife -- it was an attraction he dared not encourage. Sandra, like many before her, would likely conclude that he was either faithfully committed elsewhere, or gay. It didn't matter to him, so long as she was kept at a distance.

Distance equaled safety, or at the very least, safer. It was an arrangement he zealously maintained with the few mortals he allowed into his life. Those few now included an M.E. named Natalie Lambert who felt certain she could find a way to cure him.

He parked behind the Coroner's Building and slipped in through a back entrance to make his way to her lab. He heard voices long before he reached the door. She wasn't alone.

"Sorry to keep bringing you the bad ones, Doc," one of the voices apologized. "First the pipe bomb guy and now this."

"That's okay, Eddie," he heard Natalie reply. "It's all in a night's work."

"Yeah." Eddie snorted. "Bet you'd much rather have a morgue full of nice, clean heart attack victims, though."

"I dunno. What would be the challenge in that?"

"We'll see ya, Doc."

Nick ducked into a closet and waited until three sets of footsteps came out of the lab, passed him, and retreated down the hall. Silence. When he neared the still-swinging door, only one heartbeat murmured on the other side. He hesitated, listening to be certain, then finally pushed the door open and went inside.

Three black-bagged corpses lay on gurneys, probably about to go into her cold storage room. Natalie glanced up from one of them as he entered. "Oh. Nick."

"Sorry," he said awkwardly. "I seem to have come at a bad time." The scent of human blood in the room was so strong that the vampire immediately threatened to surface. He had to grip the edge of a tall file cabinet and turn away until he could regain full control of himself.

When he turned back, Natalie was hastily zipping the bag she stood over. "No," she said. "It's okay. I can't say I'm exactly anxious to get started on these, anyway. Over here."

Nick steeled himself to follow her past the corpses to the microscope on the free-standing table beyond.

"Here." She switched on a small light source beneath the instrument's specimen stage. "Have a look."

To Nick, the slide resembled nothing so much as a bad piece of abstract art. "Is that my blood sample?"

"Yep. And this..." She inserted a second slide beside the first. "...is mine."

He looked again. The new sample displayed a dense field of slightly flattened ovals, red and white. The first one appeared colorless in comparison, its ovals bent and irregular, and there were hair-like strands floating between the cells.

"I don't know what it is yet," she said before he could ask, "but in the preliminary tests, it behaves like a viral infection."

"In my blood?"

"M-hm. Could be it's what produces the cravings, and your dependence on the blood. I'll need to run a lot more tests, draw some more samples, before I can be sure."

"Anything you need..." Nick stopped, listened. "Someone is coming."

"I don't hear any--"

He vanished into a back room scant seconds before the lab door swung open again. He heard Natalie say, "Hey, Schanke," and he peered out of the shadows just far enough to see a pudgy, balding man with a rumpled suit and Elvis sideburns chomping on a powdered donut as he surveyed the body bags.

"Hiya, Nat. I'm, uh, sorry about the full house. Little gangbanger bastards have had one hell of a busy night tonight."

"All three of these your case?"

"Yeah. Drive-by down on Lakeview. Shooter took out three rivals at once, with an Uzi yet. Damn near decapitated 'em all. I'd sure as hell like to know how he got that kind of hardware past Customs. Oh. Here. I brought you the IDs."

From his limited vantage point, Nick couldn't see what the detective had given Natalie. But she reacted to it with both dismay and frustration. "Great. Hector Ramon, sixteen. Marc Santos, eighteen. Eduardo Ruiz, fifteen. They were barely old enough to shave, for God's sake."

Schanke sighed. "Yeah. All runaways outta New York. And all trying to carve out some new home turf in good old T.O. Seems our boy Muerte takes exception to that, big time."

"You think he's the gunman?"

"Bet on it. Hard part's gonna be proving it. I've got several rounds from the wall already; figured you'd get a few more here."

"Yeah. Sure."

Nick didn't hear the rest of their conversation. Something the detective had mentioned, a name, was bringing back vivid images of his own gang encounter two weeks before. There had been four young, angry faces with shaven heads, metal piercing studs in noses and ears, all enraged by his sudden interference in their "banking transaction." Their intended victim, a seventy-ish man in an expensive suit, had picked himself up from the sidewalk and scurried away. When one boy had started after him, Nick had grabbed a collar and dragged the youth backward, tossing him to the pavement.

"Muerte!" one of the others had shouted. "Aqui esta el tubo!" And a short length of pipe had sailed into the air to be caught by the tallest of the four.

Nick barely registered the smoldering fuse protruding from the device. The one called Muerte gave it a tiny toss, caught it, leered at him and said, "Eh. Chingado. Catch!"

Nick remembered catching it, pitching himself forward toward the concrete, and then... Then there had been nothing, until he'd awakened here, in the morgue, on the coroner's table.

"We ever get an ID on the pipe bomb victim?" he heard the detective asking Natalie.

"Uh... no."

"What, you mean no prints, no nothing?"

"He was holding the bomb in both hands when it went off, Schanke."

"Oh. Yeah. Well, I've got nada from Missing Persons on him. 'Course, we didn't exactly have enough for an artist's sketch, either. But there's nobody missing who matches his general specs, leastways not in the MP database." Schanke licked powdered sugar off his thumb and index finger. "So wherever John Doe came from, there doesn't seem to be anyone who wants him back. Guess you'll just be keeping what's left of him on ice awhile, huh?"

"I'll do that. And I'll call you when I have something on these."

"Sure thing. Here's my home number, 'case you need it. Right now, though, I am outta here. Enough with the major overtime double shift, already. I promised Myra I'd pick up a bucket of chicken on the way home. Personally, I prefer souvlaki, but you know women, never happy with..."

"Good  night, Schanke."

"G'night!"

When she turned back from the door, Nick was standing in the room once again. "That," he said, with a nod at the swinging door, "is a detective?"

She laughed. "Well, don't let appearances fool you. He's a good cop."

Nick made a mental note of the phone number on the scrap of paper she still held. "He mentioned a name. Muerte. Who is that?"

"A twenty-year-old Honduran gangster here on a work visa. Only he doesn't work. Real name's Manuel Madeira. He's the..." She stopped suddenly. "Why? Someone you know?"

"We've met. Two weeks ago. Over a pipe bomb."

"He was the one who...?" She turned to gaze at the three black bags on the gurneys. "Schanke was right. He has been busy. Living up to his name." She made a sweeping gesture toward the bodies. "You want to know how many teenage 'clients' I've had in here over the past year, courtesy of gang wars? Thirteen. Thirteen babies too young to grow chest hair yet. And for what? To protect some imaginary urban turf? What the hell kind of a way of life is that?"

Nick said nothing for a moment, simply waiting until most of her outrage had spent itself. "It isn't," he finally answered, and at her querying look, added, "A way of life. You could say it's a way of death. A way to belong."

He knew about wanting to belong -- and about wanting not to.

He'd wanted to belong once. Eight centuries ago, after his first foolish attempt at a cure had nearly destroyed him, the newly-turned Nicholas had striven with all of his immortal strength to become everything LaCroix wished him to be. The killer. The predator. The vampire.

For two centuries, he had come very close to succeeding.

Then LaCroix had orchestrated "the banquet."

It had been the master vampire's pet term for an event which, in his days as a mortal Roman general, might better have been called an orgy.

They'd come from all over the world to LaCroix's chateau outside of Paris. Nicholas had never before been in the company of so many vampires. And they had brought with them a feast of mortals culled from their many lands.

It should have quickened his slow heart with joy, the sight of that ballroom filled with reveling vampires and their complacent prey, the wanton display of lust both carnal and sanguinary, the vision of his lovely Janette in her low-cut silk gown, even the absurdity of LaCroix playing the kind and gracious host. Instead, the entire affair had filled Nicholas with such revulsion that he thought to escape the house before any of his family should sense his disgust. But Janette had caught him, literally, in the foyer, and dragged him by one arm back into the ballroom.

"Mon Nicolas, you must come and see what LaCroix has brought for you!" And she had led him to a couch where the most exquisite of all the mortal women in the crowd lay waiting for him. He felt LaCroix's eyes on him then, turned, and looked up to see his sire on a heraldry-draped balcony across the room. Their exchange was brief. Nicholas forced a smile of gratitude. LaCroix nodded in acceptance, at once returning to his own repast. Nicholas thought he might manage to escape then. But the siren call of warm blood, so near, pulsing through the gift's mortal veins, had already captured his senses and turned his eyes to glowing amber.

For a time, he lost himself altogether in the mortal's sweet essence, in the flood of her human emotions, in the sensually erotic pleasure of feeding. But with the last drop of her blood, all the revulsion, guilt, and self-loathing that had plagued him returned in force. He cried out, thrust the lifeless mortal away, and turned to flee.

"Nicolas!"

Janette. In his feeding passion, he had forgotten her presence.

"Did you not enjoy your gift, mon amor?"

"I..." He closed his eyes and fought to suppress the guilt anew. She mustn't know of it. LaCroix mustn't know.

Too late. She had already sensed his distress. He felt it in the way her arms encircled him, the soft caress of her hands -- and the needle sharp prick of her fangs.

"No!"

He pushed her away and fled the ballroom, colliding with more than one reveler on his way to the door. There were more of them -- too many more -- in the foyer, so he veered right and ran up the grand staircase. He climbed to the top, threw open the last door, and broke free of the suffocating house at last. Night air. Night wind. The kiss of a star-swept sky. An invitation to flight...

"Nicolas."

He wheeled, angry to find her so close behind him. "Leave me alone."

"Oh, I think not."  Janette circled to face him. "I thought we had long ago settled this matter of the lingering mortal conscience."

She had seen it in his blood. One unguarded moment, and a single taste had been enough. "Please, Janette..."

"Oh, do not worry. I will tell LaCroix nothing of this. But you cannot keep such secrets long from him, mon coeur. You know that. He has warned you so many times, Nicolas! Why do you persist? Why have you not abolished this guilt?"

"Do you think I haven't tried? I have! For two centuries, I have tried to be all that he wanted. And my guilt remains. As does my yearning to be mortal again. Will you tell him that as well?"

She looked offended. "I said that I would not. But you had best take care, Nicolas, to see that he never learns of it. He will be very disappointed. And our master disappointed, as you know only too well, can be a formidable thing indeed."

He turned away, and in another moment, had taken flight into the welcoming dark.

This time, she had not followed.

"Nick? I said I can draw those blood samples now."

Refocused on both Natalie Lambert and the twentieth century, he unbuttoned one shirt cuff and rolled up the sleeve. "Okay," he said. "Let's get started."

Muerte had not been difficult to find. But then, hunting mortals was the finest-honed of a vampire's skills. And Nick had not forgotten.

He dropped out of a rain-swollen sky onto a water tower that topped a lakeside warehouse. The surrounding alleys glowed with the trash barrel fires of indigent camps. In one of those cul-de-sacs, a dead end against the waterfront, Muerte and two of his friends had cornered prey of their own.

"I told you I'd get it," a man's tremulous voice pleaded. "Next week. I should have more by next week!"

"Uh-uh." One of Muerte's companions closed in on the man. "You owe Muerte, you pay Muerte."

Unseen, unheard, Nick floated to ground in the shadows behind them.

"No, please. I'll get the money. I swear I will!"

"Too late, puto. You know the rule. You don't pay, you die."

The trio had advanced until their target was trapped against a chain link fence. One's hand rose, and pale light glinted off the blade of a knife.

Nick stepped out of the shadows.

"Muerte."

All three of them started, turning around. Like the robbery mark two weeks before, their intended victim bolted and ran, his heart pounding faster than his feet. No one pursued him.

"Quien es?" the youngest one demanded. The knife wielder shrugged, but in Muerte's dark eyes, Nick saw both recognition and denial. This couldn't possibly be the man who had caught his bomb. It couldn't be.

"Máta le, Julio." The order was short, precise. Kill him.

Nick waited. The one with the knife lunged at him. Nick allowed himself to be carried a short distance back into the shadows, there to be pressed against a crumbling brick wall. He felt the blade slide cleanly through his coat, shirt, lung and heart. His attacker stepped back, waiting for the body to fall -- only to find himself staring into smoldering, undead eyes. When the corpse slowly pulled his knife from its own chest and tossed it aside, Julio began backing away, making small choking sounds that never quite became words. Nick caught him by the throat, whirled and slammed him against the wall with a snarl. Julio immediately went limp and collapsed into an unconscious heap against the bricks.

Nick moved back into the light and was at once confronted by the second boy. This one, he stopped cold with a look. While another knife fell from suddenly-nerveless fingers, Nick told him, "It's time to consider a change of career. Go home."

Muerte watched his last protector turn and shuffle, like a sleepwalker, out of the alley. The Uzi materialized from somewhere under his coat and rapidly spat out several rounds. Most of them struck their intended target and passed through him.

"Madre de Dios." Muerte backed into the chain link fence. "You can't be real. That pipe bomb blew you apart, man. You're dead!"

Nick smiled at him, moving a few steps closer. "Didn't you choose your name in order to be close to Death, Muerte? Well, now you have met him. If you'd like a more intimate introduction, let me assure you, I can arrange it."

Dropping all pretense of machismo, Muerte crossed himself, and tried to run. Nick caught the tails of his coat and dragged him effortlessly back to the fence. He captured the boy's gaze and heartbeat as well. "You're going to have a long talk with a police detective named Schanke," he said. "You're going to sign a full confession to the three murders tonight, to the pipe bomb incident, and to every other death you've caused. All of it, Manuel. The whole truth."

Muerte blinked, and his near-black eyes abruptly refocused, wresting themselves from Nick's control. "No," he murmured. "I won't. Don't f--- with me, cabron! Get out of my way!"

He tried again to push his way free and again, Nick wrestled him back to the fence. Loose chain link rattled and clanked above them. "Well then, if you won't convict yourself, I suppose this will just have to do it for you." Nick slapped the Uzi still clutched in Muerte's hands, then treated both gun and owner to a short flight through the air, with a rather hard landing in an open, half-filled garbage dumpster that sat against the fence eight feet away. "Sweet dreams," he told the stunned occupant, and slammed the lid shut. A short length of sturdy metal plucked from the rubble under the bin secured the latch. It ought to keep Muerte "comfortable" until a certain anonymous party could phone Detective Schanke and tell him where to collect two gangbangers -- and the murder weapon -- involved in those drive-by shootings.

A steady, soaking mist had begun to fall by the time two patrol units and one portly detective arrived to pick up the unconscious Julio and release their kicking, swearing prize from the trash hopper. Nick watched them from the warehouse roof, concealed in the water tower's shadow.

"Man, oh man," Schanke told one of the uniformed cops, "you gotta love those anonymous tips, huh? Even when they drag you out of bed at four in the morning. We get any trace yet on where the call came from?"

"Pay phone a block down on Gateway," the uniform replied. "Whoever it was, he's long gone by now."

"Yeah. Probably a rival gang lord. Poor old Muerte's turf will now belong to the guy who canned him." Chortling at his own joke, Schanke patted the pockets of his raincoat in vain. "Hey, Phelps, you got any ciggies?"

Car doors slammed. Tires ground and skidded on wet asphalt. Then, finally, silence.

Emerging from the tower's shadow, Nick took note of a large FOR SALE sign that had been bolted to one strut, angled for viewing from the street below. Lifting one of the skylight panels, he quietly dropped through and onto the warehouse's upper floor.

Diffuse blue light filtered through glass bricks and the lazily rotating blades of a high-mounted fan. A modern kitchen had been built into the open space, just beyond a heavy cargo elevator. On the opposite side, two utilitarian stairways ran up to a catwalk balcony and two add-on bedrooms.

It had none of the mansion's colonial charm. But a loft like this might be the perfect aerie for a penitent vampire in search of a little solitude.

He went to inspect the rest of the building, realizing as he wandered that he had felt a certain... he could only call it vindication... in taking Manuel "Muerte" Madeira off Toronto's streets. It was a way to save mortal lives instead of taking them. A way to atone.

Maybe it was time to consider a career change of his own. He'd been a cop once before, in Chicago. He could take on that persona again, although it would mean closer contact with mortals -- something he had gone to great lengths, in recent years, to avoid.

The loft could provide him with a necessary haven from the multitude of human temptations, even though he would permit one mortal -- Natalie Lambert -- to breach that wall of solitude. One mortal was temptation -- and risk -- enough.

It was raining harder, driven by a cold wind off the lake. Nick moved to the roof's edge, casually stepped over it, and landed in an alley behind the warehouse. Ignoring the pelting rain, he walked the short distance to the lake front.

I will always know, a long-ago voice teased at him, carried on the wind. You cannot hide your thoughts from me for long. I am a part of you. We are a part of each other.

The night of the banquet, LaCroix had followed him to the shores of another lake not far from the chateau.

"Nicholas..."

"Leave me alone." His effort to take flight had been thwarted by a herculean grip on his shoulder.

"Never. I want to know what possessed you to behave so rudely to my guests, to Janette."

"I did not--"

"I saw you cast her aside, as you did many others in your haste to escape my hospitality. Now, are you going to tell me what is wrong, or must I resort to more drastic measures?"

"Nothing is wrong." Nicholas wrenched his shoulder free. "I wanted to be alone, that's all. I just want to be left alone."

Silence, while sire considered son's answer, and then, the expected reproach. "I will not tolerate deceit, Nicholas. What are you hiding?"

"How could I hide anything from you? You said yourself, we are a part of each other."

For reasons he could not discern, LaCroix's anger abruptly dissipated. But suspicion lingered in his pale eyes. "Sooner or later, you will tell me. As with all else, mon fils, you'll have no other choice." The wind had snatched him away then, leaving Nicholas to brood with only the calm, black water for company.

Toronto's lake was far from calm. But now, as he had done then, Nick addressed the dark water as though LaCroix still stood upon its shore. "You're wrong," he said. "I do have a choice. I choose to seek a way back to the light. A way to escape from you."

In neither century had the lake offered any answer.

Natalie Lambert had reacted with both surprise and amusement, a short time later, to find a dripping wet vampire standing in her otherwise deserted morgue.

"No more customers?"

"I've had more than enough for one night, thanks. Here." She tossed him a bundled stack of paper towels from beside the lab sink. "You look like you could use these."

Nick caught it in one hand, slipped off his wet coat, and put the towels to use on his soaked hair, face and hands. "There," he said, and handed the sodden towels back to her. "Does the good doctor find me more presentable now?"

"Well, if you like the wet, scruffy look, yes." She tossed the towels playfully into a trash bin. "Something I can do for you?"

"Actually..." He paused, drawing a breath. "I came to apologize."

Her eyes widened. "For...?"

"For following you the other night. For frightening you. For trying to make you forget."

"Oh." She had a childlike habit of biting her lower lip when she was nervous. "Well, I gather that's some sort of time-honored vampire survival mechanism, or something like that."

"You could put it that way."

"One I'd like very much to learn more about, I might add."

"Doctor Lambert--"

"Ah-ah." She held up a hand. "It's Natalie. Or Nat, for short. Are you this formal with all the mortals you know?"

He shook his head. "No. I guess I just don't..." Even the word was somehow difficult for him to utter. "...trust easily. It's nothing personal. It's just that it's been a long time since I risked confiding this much to a mortal. And Doctor--" He stopped himself, started again. "Natalie, there's still a great deal I won't be able to tell you. I won't jeopardize your life unnecessarily. What we're doing is dangerous enough."

"Well, then I'll work with what you can tell me." She reached out to lightly touch his arm: a small, caring, human gesture. "It's all right, Nick. It's a beginning."

The warmth of her touch had stayed with him all the way home, the fragile echo of a newfound trust.

It was, indeed, a beginning.
 

--End--