Dan Richert didn't look dead.

He looked like a man who'd simply gone to bed on this winter night, in his modest tract house in the Toronto suburbs. Nothing unusual about that, except that there were no obvious signs of what had killed him. Yet.

While Natalie started her prelim, Nick searched in vain for any signs of a struggle or forced entry. Nothing. He kept looking anyway. Anything to get out of the station for a few hours. He'd been confined to desk duty for five straight weeks, since the night Stonetree had agreed to sign him on as a "non-partnered" homicide detective. And what did he pull for a first assignment? Something that didn't look like a homicide at all, unless Natalie had found some incriminating evidence in the interim.

"Anything?" he asked, returning to the bedroom and dodging an overeager forensics photographer, who'd been taking flash photos of the body from every conceivable angle for twenty minutes now.

"Maybe," she answered noncommittally, rolling up the dead man's pajama sleeve with both rubber-gloved hands. "I'll let you know in a few minutes."

The photographer, a nerdish kid barely into his twenties, nudged Nick out of the way to snap yet another picture, then bumped him again on the way back to the other side of the bed. Patience exhausted, Nick caught him by the folded-back hood of his nylon anorak, spun him around and captured his bespectacled gaze in one easy heartbeat.

"You have enough pictures," he said. "You can go back to the office now."

"But I..." The youngster stammered, stared deeper into Nick's eyes, and then obediently parroted the vampire's every word. "I have enough pictures. I'm going back to the office now." He turned and without further ado, marched out of the bedroom with his camera still clutched in both hands. Nick's grin of triumph, however, was short lived. It collided with Natalie's frost-coated glare of disapproval and dissolved on the spot.

"I'll... uh... be out in the living room," he muttered, and beat a hasty retreat. It hadn't occurred to him that Natalie, in the course of working to cure his "condition," would begin attaching conditions -- one of those being that he not use the paranormal abilities LaCroix's curse had bestowed on him. That would likely make this job one hell of a lot more difficult. Then again, as Nat would say, if he really wanted to be human...

Nick paused in the hallway and leaned against one wall. He'd been avoiding the living room, aware that the deceased's young daughter, the only other occupant of the house, was in there with several uniformed cops from the Twenty-seventh. He really didn't want to deal with this part of it; had been secretly hoping that Natalie would instantly declare death by natural causes, and relieve him of the obligation. Even after five weeks spent working elbow-to-elbow with mortals at the precinct, he wasn't yet used to dealing with them in such close proximity. Many years spent in isolation had taken their toll -- enough to make so many heartbeats thrumming so close... so close... a temptation that teased at him, a growling beast battering at a door he dared not open.

But those temptations notwithstanding, it had been seven miraculous weeks since he'd touched even animal blood, thanks to Natalie's serum injections. Somehow, the shots had enabled him to survive on mortal food, unappealing though he still found most of it. Still, the heartbeats and the sound of rushing blood through mortal veins continued to present a nearly-irresistible lure. Nat's potion may have succeeded in dulling the vampire's appetite, but his beast was, as yet, far from vanquished.

Nick took a deep breath, straightened, and went on into the living room, where two uniformed officers were holding down places on the trendy overstuffed couch, on either side of the dead man's distraught teenage daughter.

"She found the body?" he asked, and one of the officers nodded, rising to answer him.

"Name's Marietta." He lowered his voice to a sympathetic whisper. "She's sixteen and taking this pretty hard. We've got a call in to the department shrink, Dr. Loren. She's on the way."

"Thanks." Nick hated this aspect of the job for another reason. Eight hundred years old or not, he had no more idea what to say to the bereaved than any of the mortals did. "Give us a minute?" he asked.

Both officers stepped away, and Nick found himself sitting next to a pretty young girl, whose eyes seemed permanently focused on some unseen event very far away from the here and now. There was something eerily familiar about those eyes, as though he'd seen them somewhere before.

"Marietta?"

She blinked, but showed no other sign of having heard him.

"My name is Nick," he said gently. "You think maybe we could talk, just a little? Can you look at me?"

She turned her head, and the pale blue eyes met his. Her first words made no apparent sense. "She told me you would come."

"What?" Taken aback, Nick tried unsuccessfully to fathom her blank stare, to force that gaze to focus on his own. "Who told you?"

"The Maid," she said, still making little sense. Nick had been about to ask who this precognizant cleaning woman might be when the girl added, "The Maid of Lorraine."

Nick's question died on his lips. The Maid of Lorraine? How did a twentieth century teenager come to know anything about an ancient French legend whose name had once been applied to a warrior maiden called Joan of Arc?

"She told me you would come," Marietta repeated before he could collect himself enough to ask another question. "You are Nicholas de Brabant. The man of the night."

Startled, he grasped her firmly by the shoulders, a nervous glance confirming that the two officers were now engaged in conversation across the room and were not listening to their exchange. "Look at me," he commanded, more firmly this time. "Look into my eyes." She obeyed, but the heartbeat he could hear was far too rapid, and there was something deep in those eyes that unnerved him. "Who told you that, Marietta? How do you know those names?"

A glint in her eyes seemed to make them change focus, and suddenly it was no longer Marietta, but Joan's knowing gaze that stared back at him, just as it had done in Rouen all those centuries ago. "I wept for you," she said. "For a soul chained in darkness. I wept that you turned away from the Light. Away from God."

Nick tightened his grip slightly and tried again to exert control over a will that seemed entirely elusive. "Who?" he demanded. "Who said these things?"

And then the name, plainly and without hesitation. "Joan." She gave the name its distinctly French pronunciation. "I am called Joan."

It wasn't possible. He had witnessed Joan's immolation nearly six hundred years ago, and yet this child had just repeated, verbatim, a phrase Joan had spoken to him at their meeting in the church at Rouen. It wasn't possible...

"Detective Knight?"

He started, releasing the girl to look up at Paula Loren. Metro PD's department psychologist looked, perhaps rightly so, as if she might consider Nick a potential client. What she'd just interrupted must have seemed odd, to say the least.

"Dr. Loren," he said by way of greeting, and got up to shake the psychologist's offered hand, a custom he still found awkward. Until very recently, shaking a lady's hand had been considered a serious social faux pas. "I'm glad you're here," he said. It was a lie. He wanted nothing more than to gather Marietta Richert into his arms and fly with her to some place away from other people, where he could learn the truth of how on Earth she knew these things. "I think maybe she's in shock."

Loren knelt to examine the girl's vacant stare, took hold of her hands and tried to speak to her. "Marietta? It's all right now. We're here to help you." There was no response. The doctor stood again to address Nick. "Did she say anything at all?"

"No," Nick lied. "Nothing."

Loren nodded sympathetically. "I can take her to Protective Services for the night, order a psych evaluation in the morning." She handed Nick a card with the initials CPS emblazoned above an address on Conley Street. "Here's my number there if you need to follow up. I understand there aren't any relatives in town?"

Nick shook his head. "Nearest is an aunt in Vancouver." He was fighting a strong temptation to hypnotize Paula Loren, to persuade her to let him take Marietta in for further questioning. But the officers were watching them again now, and there was the new commotion of a gurney being wheeled out of the bedroom with Dan Richert's body zippered into the too-familiar black body bag. Nick was obliged to relinquish the teenager into Loren's custody and turn his attention to Natalie, who had followed the gurney as far as the front door and now waited to speak with him.

"Anything?" he asked again, keeping one eye on Loren as she escorted a coat-bundled Marietta out the door.

Natalie noticed his distraction. "I think maybe I should be asking you that question. Did something happen with the daughter?"

"She's in pretty bad shape," Nick dissembled. "Probably just the shock. Any idea yet what he died of?"

"Well, from the excessive perspiration and the apparent needle tracks on the left forearm, I can make a pretty good case at this point for heroin overdose, most likely self-administered. I'll try to get an expedited toxicology report through to clinch the cause of death. But much as I hate to deprive you of a case, in the absence of any obvious motive, I'd say a homicide's unlikely."

Nick agreed. "We'll run a background check on him anyway," he said. "Just to see if any old enemies turn up."

She studied him for a moment. "Do I misspeak, or isn't this the first time Captain Stonetree has unchained you from that desk?"

"You don't misspeak," he admitted. "Every new guy gets desk duty to start. If he can survive all that paper work, they figure he can probably survive anything."

"Even the Natalie Lambert frozen microwave dinner diet?"

Nick groaned. "Even that." He held up two fingers, as though he were swearing an oath. "Seven weeks and not a drop. In fact, I think I'm actually beginning to taste it. Speaking of which, would m'lady care to dine with me on such a rich repast this evening?"

"Mmmm. Sounds yummy. M'lady will stop by tonight after her shift. I have some new formula modifications to work on, anyway. Today the diet, tomorrow the suntan!"

An M.E. Department aide whisked her away then, leaving Nick to help the uniformed officers secure the house. When at last he slipped behind the Caddy's steering wheel, however, he did not head immediately back to the precinct station. He drove in the opposite direction, going nowhere in particular, and staring out at Toronto's cold, deserted streets, wondered how he might arrange another chance to talk with Marietta Richert.

The lights reflecting off the Caddy's windshield reshaped themselves into Marietta's face. That face, in turn, became Joan's. Joan, who had been nearly the same tender age as Marietta when the executioner's fire had claimed her. Helpless to intervene, he had been forced to watch her die, and the horror of it had haunted his dreams forever thereafter.

He'd spent a year in exile after that horror, his first isolation from mortals and vampires alike, hoping to find some semblance of an answer, reliving the vision of those hideous flames again and again.

Why hadn't he been able to save her? He'd tried to influence the minds of those pious English prelates, the men who had convicted her of heresy and witchcraft. But in the end, he could do nothing but flee from the sunlight and take shelter in a cooper's cellar. Its barred window faced the courtyard -- and the raised stake to which she was lashed.

When she had begged him to hold up her cross, he mouthed in futile apology that he could not. A mortal in the crowd outside had lifted another crucifix high on a sigil post, level with her eyes. It gleamed in the sunlight while flames raced greedily up the pyre toward her. Though the coward in him tried to turn away, Nicholas, hands gripping the window's iron bars in both anguish and rage, compelled himself to watch the fire envelop and consume her. He heard her plead with St. Catherine to deliver her, but no heavenly messenger had appeared. No saint, no angel, no God. Reaching toward her, Nicholas had thrust his hands out into the light until his own flesh reddened and blistered, a heretical mockery of the blazing horror up there on the pyre.

The jeering mortal crowd, the terrible, choking stench of it, and her echoing screams of agony would all remain with him forever. He heard them in his sleep every day for a full year after the execution.

That year had been spent in complete solitude, in a place devoid of life. Yet he'd heard Joan's screams even in the roar of wind and waves against Iona's rocky shoreline. His island of self-imposed exile lay off Scotland's northwest coast, and it had seen no mortal inhabitants since the last of St. Columba's monks had abandoned it centuries before. There were few personal amenities here: a rustic cloak and a knife to tame his hair and beard, little else. He had only wild goats, crumbling buildings, and the burial mounds of long-forgotten ancient kings for company. And until tonight, he had not cared.

Every night for the duration of his sojourn here, he had entered the tiny stone church on the island's north edge. There, despite the pain engendered by its consecrated ground and its granite Celtic crosses, he had prayed to God, the saints and the Holy Virgin to lift his curse from him. He had entreated them for help in redeeming the mortal soul he now knew for a certainty he still possessed. But no matter how fervent his supplications, no matter how numerous his prayers, no sign had ever been forthcoming, nor had any prayer been answered.

He was alone.

On this night, weary of praying and bitterly disappointed, Nicholas had left the church to walk along the island's shallow sea cliffs, haunted as always by the ever-present echo of Joan's cries in the wind. He stood on the precipice and lifted both hands to the cloud-shrouded night.

"Why?" he asked of a God who now seemed unwilling to hear him. "Why could you not save her? Why will you not save me? Tell me, what good is a soul trapped for eternity in a creature of evil?" Only the buffeting wind replied, moaning at him from across the pitch black channel. "How can I ever serve you, how can I ever go back to the light, if you will not show me the way?"

The gale swallowed his words and left him alone in the darkness.

When the wind died, it took with it the last remnants of his hope. It was as the first pale light of an imminent dawn appeared in the east, making his flesh crawl with the pricking of a thousand unseen needles, that he felt the vibration. The presence of another.

It was a vibration he recognized.

"Janette?"

She stood on the rooftop of Columba's monastery behind him, a dark angel come, perchance, in answer to his prayers.

"Are you pleased to see me, Nicolas?"

He lifted his arms to her in reply. She flew readily into his embrace and returned his kiss with an unfettered passion that he hadn't realized he had missed until now.

"I've missed you," he said, confessing thoughts she had doubtless already surmised.

"And I you. But I think, mon coeur, that perhaps we should renew old acquaintances out of the sun?"

His eyes burning amber with rekindling need, Nicholas lifted her into his arms and carried her back toward the building on which she had landed. He took her down a steep flight of steps and through a heavy door into the torchlit expanse of wine cellar that had served, these many months, as his haven from the daylight.

They had no further need of words. Two centuries of intimate familiarity with her sexual desires guided Nicholas' hands with eager and yet measured ease. Despite a year's privation, feeding only on animal blood, he restrained the vampire throughout most of their lovemaking. He allowed her to feed from him first, then brought her to the pinnacle of carnal pleasure before he at last indulged himself. It was only then, in the final taking of her blood at his own climax, that he came to know what her life had been like in the long year of his absence.

He saw the terrors of a century-old war that had at last overrun the whole of France. There were images of LaCroix's once-opulent chateau set afire, of Janette and their master narrowly escaping the inferno, taking flight into a smoke-blackened night sky. And then...

Another great house in another city. London, where the war had been far enough away to pose no further threat. But there, with the ravages of war no longer a distraction, LaCroix's wrath over Nicholas' abandonment of his family had resurfaced with a cruel vengeance. It was a wrath that had taken a punishing toll on one who was entirely innocent of the act. Janette had never, would never abandon LaCroix. She loved him as Nicholas had never been able to do. And yet he had repaid that loyalty with derision and alienation. And his wrath at the absent Nicholas had more than once driven him to strike her. That Janette, the faithful daughter who had never once disobeyed him, should suffer at the master's hand for something in which she had had no part, made Nicholas' cold blood boil.

"I'm sorry." He had cradled her against him, caressing black tresses that shone in the torchlight. "Forgive me, Janette. You needed me, and I wasn't there."

Tears constricted her voice. "Nicolas, he was so hurt when you left us. So angry. He..."

"Shhhh. I know. I saw." In truth, her blood had merely shown him what he should long ago have surmised on his own. Lacroix would consider his leaving a betrayal, and the master vampire's fury would, as always, find an outlet. He would turn on the most convenient victim at hand.

"Forgive me," he said again. "I never meant..."

"Non, mon cher, there is nothing to forgive." She kissed him, tracing slender fingers through his hair. "I am really not so fragile as I look, you know." Her laughter made him smile, and he drew her into a renewed embrace beneath the linen coverlet.

"I love you." He whispered the words into her ear again and again, between kisses.

"Oh, but I have missed you so very much, Nicolas." She drew away just far enough to look into his eyes. "Will you come back with me?" Perhaps she had seen a flicker of doubt in his gaze. Before he could answer, she said, "Have you not learned in all these months that this soul you revere so much is a thing long gone? Have you not found that the God you seek does nothing more than revile us?"

Clearly, she had seen much in his blood as well, though she had also assumed a great deal along the way. Nicholas did not disillusion her. Better that she and LaCroix should go on believing his extant soul a fantasy.

"I'll come with you," he promised. "I have nothing left to do here."

He would go back. But he would not give up his quest. If God would not see fit to lift his curse, then he would find a way back to the light himself. Even if it took him a thousand lifetimes.

The icy breeze blowing over Lake Ontario could not begin to rival the gales on Iona. Nick wasn't sure how long he'd been standing on the shore, looking out over the dark water, remembering. The last thing in the twentieth century he could recall was driving away from the Richert home in the Caddy.

Where was the Caddy?

Unsure which direction to walk in, he opted for a car-sighting technique Natalie wouldn't have approved of. He took to the air and within minutes, spotted his prized vintage conveyance parked in a nearby alley. He landed on the nearest roof, making sure no one else was in the alley before he drifted down to open the car door and slip inside.

The ragtop was up, the interior in shadow -- but he should have sensed the mortal presence long before pulling out into Toronto's sparse late-night traffic. He heard nothing until the cold metal barrel of a gun was suddenly pressed to the back of his head.

"Keep driving. Don't turn around." The voice was young and male with a heavy Hispanic accent. "There's a warehouse at 35th and Conley. Go there. Now."

Nick kept his voice carefully neutral. "What's this about?"

The gun muzzle was pressed harder against his skull. "Drive!"

Nick drove. It took less than ten minutes to reach the warehouse, and only when they'd parked in the dark alley beside it did the gun withdraw, though only a few inches.

"Finding you was too easy, man. This puke-green land yacht just can't hide."

Nick waited several mortal heartbeats before he answered, affecting mild umbrage at the insult to his car. "I like it."

"Get out," the voice commanded.

Nick obeyed, not because the gun posed any true threat, but because he wanted to see his would-be abductor. The moment they both stood free of the car, he recognized the face behind the silenced .45 automatic that remained pointed at him.

"Julio," he said, and watched a play of hate-filled emotions cross the youthful face. "When did your keepers turn you loose?"

A few short months ago, before he'd joined the force, Nick had run afoul of a street gang headed by a vicious young killer who'd called himself Muerte. It had begun with the pipe bomb that had sent Nick to Natalie's morgue, and ended (or so he'd thought) in an alley much like this one, where both Muerte and Julio had, in their turn, run afoul of a certain eight-hundred-year-old vampire. They'd been left for Detective Schanke to collect, and both had eventually been tried for murder. A few years difference in their ages, however, had meant that Muerte was tried as an adult, Julio as a juvenile. Still, Nick doubted that even the youth authority would have released a teenage murderer this soon.

"They didn't," Julio snarled, confirming his suspicion. "You wanna know how easy it is to walk out of a juvenile offender program, cop?"

"Too easy," Nick said. "And now you want revenge on the one who sent you there, is that it?"

"Oh, I want much more than that. Muerte is dead because of you. He lasted three days at Millhaven, did you know that? Three days before they killed him. Guards found him face down in a latrine. Seems his B-Dog cellmate had a little objection to being caged with one of Los Muertos. So he's dead. And it's your fault."

"So what now?" Nick challenged. "You shoot me and that makes everything even?"

"No." Julio's expression grew harder, colder. "Just shooting you would be pretty pointless, now wouldn't it? Vampire."

Nick betrayed no surprise at that revelation. He merely stared back at Julio, affecting boredom, and said nothing. But his stare sought to find and capture his opponent's will. He could hear the steady heartbeat, the throbbing pulse, the heady rush of blood through veins and arteries.

"Put the gun away." The vampire's bass voice reverberated in the night stillness. "It won't help you."

Julio's eyes began glazing, but then abruptly refocused, and he smiled -- a smile that uncannily resembled LaCroix's when the master vampire had successfully cornered a fleeing victim. "Oh," he breathed, and there was triumph in that single syllable, "I think it will."

The gun fired: one, two, three shots, all of them seeming unnaturally loud to Nick's ears despite the silencer. Three bullets struck him in the chest and should have passed harmlessly through him. They didn't. All three lodged and instead brought an immediate onslaught of nausea, dizziness and stinging pain. What...?

Julio's laughter mingled with the chuffing explosions of four more shots. Nick went to his knees and pitched forward. His hands met damp, gritty asphalt. His nostrils were assailed by the stench of old motor oil and the mingled scents of gunpowder, garlic, and... something else he ought to recognize. So hard to concentrate suddenly. So hard...

He remembered hitting the pavement. Then nothing, until he awoke to find himself shackled hand and foot to a chair. Wooden boxes towered on three sides. He sat facing the steel cross hatching of a closed freight door. Beyond it, dimly lit by sickly yellow emergency lights, lay the empty warehouse.

Freight elevator, he realized belatedly. He was chained to a chair inside a freight elevator with three stacks of cargo crates. He should have been able to snap the cuffs, tear down the door and fly out of here with ease. But he couldn't. His effort to jerk free produced nothing more than a pathetic twitching of his fingers. Just lifting his head seemed to require a promethean effort. How...?

"Curare," he muttered, realizing with disgust what that other, harder-to-identify odor had been. Hollow point bullets loaded with both garlic and curare. Julio had done his homework.

A sound. A mortal heartbeat. Something moved in the darkness beyond the gate, and in a moment, Julio's near-black eyes were peering at him through the steel latticework.

"Time to pay, chingado." The voice was a menacing half-whisper, a threat veiled in silence and shadow. "Time to pay."

"Muerte is dead because of what he was," Nick said calmly. "Not because of me."

"No." Julio's dark eyes glinted in the dim light. "He's dead because of what you are." Something else out there now caught the light: a shiny, roundish object in Julio's right hand. Nick couldn't see it clearly for the intervening gate. "In Puerto Rico," Julio said, "the abuelas know of others like you. Vampiros. Mal creados. These are creatures, the abuelas say, who are unto evil born."

"Myths," Nick insisted, somewhat less than convincingly. "Old wives' tales."

Again, the derisive, rasping laughter. "Those old wives know far more than you think. They know of los vampiros. How they are made. And how they can be killed." Julio held up the shiny thing, displaying it like some sort of talisman. It looked to Nick like a beer bottle. A beer bottle with a fuse protruding from it. "This is your death, vampire. Your sentence for Muerte, maybe for all the others you've killed, too. How many is that, eh?"

Nick said nothing, still trying in vain to capture the will behind those cold eyes. He couldn't. Perhaps the curare, or the fact that he hadn't fed on either human or animal blood in so many weeks.

Julio struck a match against the grating, lit the fuse, and casually tossed the Molotov cocktail through the diamond-shaped opening in the slats. Glass shattered, and with a loud whoosh, flames instantly erupted from one of the stacked cartons.

"Adios, mal creado," Julio hissed at him through the gate. "Vaya al Diablo."

Smoke began filling the elevator. Nick could no longer see whether Julio remained out there, watching, or not. It didn't matter. He had to find his strength, had to break these cuffs and free himself somehow.

Rocked by his efforts, the chair scraped noisily across the wood-plank flooring. It gained him precious inches away from the rising flames. Not nearly enough. Coughing, he rocked the chair harder until it finally tipped and overturned. His head struck the floor hard enough to send light flashes swimming through his field of vision, but he continued to fight the shackles, summoning the vampire's strength and mentally commanding them to break.

The curare's effects defeated him. The bonds held fast.

He could feel the fire's all-consuming heat behind him, and his worst fear -- that of burning as Joan had burned -- drove him to struggle harder. In moments, the fire would eat into the wood flooring to surround and devour him, turning him to ash and sending his immortal soul into the depths of hell. Fighting panic, he forced his lungs to shut down the unnecessary task of breathing, and concentrated all his energy on snapping these bindings. They had to break. They had to break now!

Fire lapped at the back of the chair and singed his hair. The cuffs held, cutting cruelly into both his wrists and ankles, adding the puissant scent of blood to the charred wood stench of the fire. Nick breathed again, choking on thick black smoke. It was useless. He could do nothing to break these chains. Nothing. He would die here. And his soul...

Call upon the Light, Nicholas.

A woman's voice. From where? In his head, perhaps. A dying hallucination. But it came again.

Use God's Light to break your bonds, she whispered. It is within you. Use it.

And in his desperation, Nick prayed to a God he had forsaken centuries ago for the strength to escape this inferno. He felt a searing heat burn into the flesh of his ankles, his wrists, and was certain that the fire had claimed him. But when he peered through the thick smoke at his hands, still shackled to the chair arms, he saw a pure white light begin to radiate from the cuffs. It flared brighter still, burning him with the agony of full sunlight. He cried out, shut his eyes against the blinding glare, and prayed for a swift end to his imminent immolation.

The cuffs fell away.

He felt the metal give abruptly, freeing his hands and feet, and he immediately rolled away from the overturned chair, away from the flames that had begun to devour its wooden backing. He collided with the gate, grabbed wildly at its metal grating and pulled, gratified when it slid easily aside. Nick scrambled out of the elevator on hands and knees, still coughing in the smoke that roiled from the furiously burning crates. He found a wall, used it to pull himself upright -- and came face to face with the unwelcome vision of Julio standing less than five meters away. In both hands, the gang member held a bolt-loaded crossbow pointed squarely at Nick's heart.

"More than one way for los vampiros to die," he said, and his index finger began to tighten on the weapon's trigger.

When the bolt flew at him, Nick snatched it from the air, and venting a deep, animal growl, snapped it in two between his thumb and forefinger. His singed and lascerated wrist protested the action. He ignored it, turning eyes now crimson with rage on his suddenly mortified adversary. The last of the curare's intoxicating effect dissipated with the vampire's emergence. He felt it leave. "And there are many more ways," he snarled, "for a mortal to die."

Julio dropped the crossbow and ran.

He'd nearly reached the warehouse door when Nick's brief flight overtook him. The vampire caught him by the throat, suspended him in midair and allowed him to dangle there, choking and gasping for breath.

"I should kill you here and now." Nick's menacing snarl would have made LaCroix proud. LaCroix, who had taught him to kill without thought, who would have broken this human vermin's neck with no remorse whatsoever. So simple a thing, really. He had only to tighten his grip ever so slightly, and...

With a growl of frustration, Nick lowered the squirming mortal to his feet, though he kept an iron grip on the teenager's collar as he bore him to the nearest wall and pinned him there. Nick waited a moment for his rage to abate and for his eyes to turn blue once again. But then, just as he had done in that lakefront alley a few months ago, he captured Julio's gaze with his own and without reservation, mentally wrenched the boy's will into complete submission.

"The old women's stories were myths," he rasped, and drove the words home with enough mental force to make Julio wince. "There are no vampires. You never believed those stories. Never. You're going back to the juvenile offender camp now, to turn yourself in and finish out your sentence. You won't walk away from it again. And you won't remember anything that happened here tonight." He gave the words another firm mental push, pressing Julio hard against the concrete wall. "Get out of here," he commanded, and released the mortal's collar with a disgusted flourish. "Now!"

Julio remained, blinking stupidly for a moment before at last turning to amble like a sleepwalker out of the warehouse.

The sound of the closing door echoed and faded away, leaving Nick alone with the snapping and crackling noises of the dying fire. It had consumed the crates, the chair and much of the elevator's floor, but meeting concrete and steel plating beyond that had effectively deprived it of fuel.

Making a mental note to anonymously report the building's owner for not installing smoke alarms, Nick approached the elevator to study the remains of the chair. Something odd caught his attention then. He knelt to examine the smoldering heap more closely. Unburned amidst the jumble of splintered wood lay four metal cuffs, still attached to the chair's charred pieces and each trailing a blackened length of chain that led to... nothing. The matching cuffs that had held him were nowhere to be seen.

This wasn't right. No normal fire could melt tempered steel. The matching cuffs ought to be there.

Subconsciously, Nick rubbed at one sore wrist and tried to make sense of the impossible.

"The Light," someone said.

Nick started, turning and rising in one swift motion. For the second time in one night, he hadn't sensed a mortal heartbeat when he should have. It was there now, thrumming quietly in the thin young figure that stood a few yards away, its face dyed crimson and gold by the glow of smoldering embers.

"Marietta."

How...? Child Protective Services was on Conley, but it was many blocks from here. Had she walked all that way, in the cold, alone? And where was Dr. Loren?

Nick started forward only to halt again, met with a new uncertainty. This was unquestionably Marietta -- but the look in her eyes and that voice both belonged to a maiden he had first encountered in Rouen five centuries ago.

"Do you still not understand the Light that dwells within you?" The question was phrased in medieval French, leaving no doubt as to who had asked it of him.

"I don't," he confessed in the same tongue. "Show me how to understand it. Please. Instruct me."

"One who was truly born unto evil would have slain this adversary," she said. "You did not."

"I nearly killed him. A part of me still wants to," Nick admitted. "It is as he said. I am a thing created of evil. Mal creado. Can't you see that?"

"No. He was wrong. And so, chevalier, are you. You must believe in yourself, believe in the God you once served. Do so again, and He will serve you in turn."

"How can I?" Nick had long since despaired of any such hope. "How can a creature of darkness serve the Light when its symbol burns him and the palest of sunbeams can destroy him?"

"You can." She extended one slender hand toward him. "I will guide you. Will you accept our guidance, Nicholas de Brabant?"

Nick grasped the proffered hand. "Yes," he said, and at once, a warmth that did not burn him spread from her fingers and flowed into every part of his being. Before his eyes, the wounds on his wrists paled and vanished. He felt the same heat reach and heal both his ankles and the stinging pains left by Julio's bullets. He wanted to hold onto her healing grasp until the power she served had driven out every trace of LaCroix's evil. But to his disappointment, she released him.

"Go with God, Nicholas," she said, and then abruptly, the eyes and voice that had been Joan's became Marietta's once again. "Detective Knight," she said, sounding mildly confused. "She spoke to you, didn't she? Joan spoke to you." Her gaze darted to the smoldering wreckage in the elevator before returning to meet his. Whatever emotional dam had been holding back her fears dissolved then, and the tears began streaming down her face.

He held and soothed her until the tears at last stopped coming, never knowing whether she cried for her father or in fear of the spirit that had spoken through her. "I'm sorry," he whispered, both apologizing and consoling. "I'm so sorry."

Five centuries ago, he had uttered those same words with far less sincerity, on the night he'd submitted to the shameful humiliation of begging LaCroix to take him back. He'd endured the ordeal by telling himself that it was for Janette's sake he'd returned. It was, after all, partly true.

"You're sorry." LaCroix had hurled the words back at him with glacial contempt. "And that's to be the end of it? You vanish without cause, without explanation..."

"I needed to be alone."

"Ah, yes," LaCroix sneered. "To meditate, I suppose, upon the fiery death of the fair Maid of Lorraine?"

"Yes."

The first blow caught Nicholas unprepared, and sent him quite literally flying across the anteroom of LaCroix's North Yorkshire castle. He heard Janette's soft cry of empathy as their master hoisted him off the floor to strike him again. But he knew that, as always, she would do nothing to interfere. Nor would he. To resist LaCroix was to invite far greater punishment. That harshest of lessons he had learned from painful experience.

So he endured the blows, the curses and the shame in silence, until at last his maker stood over him, held him by the throat, and with eyes the color of hellfire, breathed, "That is an end to it. I forgive you. And I will take you back. But mark my words, you will never abandon your family again. You will never leave me. You will never be free of me. You are mine."

The crushing fingers that had clutched his throat released, and dropped him dismissively to the floor. LaCroix vanished then, in a fury-driven sigh of rushing air. In the master's wake, small, gentle hands embraced and lifted him. The familiar and comforting aroma of Janette's perfume mingled itself with the more puissant scents of fear and blood.

"Stay with me, Nicolas," she pleaded, as though his presence might somehow always protect her from LaCroix's wrath. "Please, stay with me."

He willingly gave her that pledge, and there on the stone floor, they held one another until dawn assaulted the outer walls and his wounds began to heal of their own accord. He carried her then to her bed chamber, where they joined in the exchange of blood that would complete both his healing and his vow. He would stay with her.

He had come home.

Home to five centuries of darkness and death and LaCroix's endless cruelties.

Toronto's glittering skyline mocked him now in mute accusation. All his sins remembered. All his evil bared.

He'd driven Marietta Richert back to CPS, and had been spared an awkward explanation when she'd insisted on walking back in by herself. She would, she said, make her own excuses to Dr. Loren. She'd kissed him then; a gentle, innocent, child's kiss on the cheek. "Go with God," she had whispered, and then she'd climbed out of the car, quickly disappearing up the short flight of steps into the building.

Nick had steered the Caddy home with tears stinging his eyes.

A chill night wind sliced across the loft's roof, buffeting his hair and tugging at the coat he wore. Nick closed his eyes, and while the icy breeze washed over him, he mentally tasted the familiar, sensual vibration that was Janette's signature. He knew that she was here in Toronto, knew that she had sensed his presence and now waited for him to take the first step in rekindling their centuries-long relationship. He did plan to see her, when the time was right. But he had no plans to renew their sexual bond. His quest for mortality would preclude that. Better, for now, that he avoid the temptation.

Severing the fragile connection, Nick again surveyed the skyline. This was home now, and he wanted no other. Out there, in the night, Janette waited. Out there, thousands of mortals like Joe Stonetree and Natalie Lambert were going about the daily business of simply being human. And out there, Marietta Richert was beginning a new life under Paula Loren's care, awaiting the arrival of her aunt from Vancouver.

Vampires and mortals. Darkness and light.

He still meant to forsake the darkness, to one day regain the light: Natalie's light of the sun and Joan's Light of salvation. He was certain that both were closer now than they had ever been. One day, soon, he would finally escape LaCroix's curse forever.

He remained on the roof until the first breath of dawn had begun to turn the horizon pale gold.

"I will leave you," he said to an illusory LaCroix. "No matter what."

And when he turned toward the stairs that would lead back into the loft's safe shelter, the last of the dying night wind caressed him with unseen, sepulchral hands.

Never, it whispered. And as the latch clicked shut on Nick's disappearing form, the angry wind swirled and moaned, shuddering against the door.

Neverrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
 

-End-

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