An angry wind had rattled the door behind him as Nick descended the concrete stairs from the roof. He could have sworn he'd heard a voice in that icy gale. LaCroix's voice, swearing never to release him from his curse.
Shuddering, Nick approached the bright red door leading into the loft. He stopped with his hand on the knob, suddenly aware of a human heartbeat on the other side.
Natalie.
Damn. He'd completely forgotten that she'd promised to come by for dinner after her shift. Dinner and a new formula injection. He was late. Late, and... He looked woefully down at his singed and torn clothing, and briefly considered going back to the roof to sneak in another way so he could clean up before making his apologies. But she'd already heard him coming.
"Nick?" She opened the door from the other side, immediately assessed his disheveled condition, and took a startled step backward. "What the hell happened to you?"
"Just a little smoke damage. Sorry I'm late." He moved swiftly past her and headed for the stairs to the second level of his living quarters. "Give me ten minutes. A shower and a change and I'll be good as new." He vanished up the stairs at a faster-than-mortal pace, escaping her sputtered questions -- for the moment.
In due course, over a microwaved stir-fry dinner, he gave her an abbreviated version of the night's events. "I had a little run-in with one of Muerte's gang members after I left the Richert house. He had the idea that a Molotov cocktail just might manage to finish what his pipe bomb started a few weeks ago."
Natalie's eyes widened. "You didn't..."
There was an unspoken accusation in just those two words, and he allowed the slightest hint of umbrage to taint his response. "No. He's on his way back to the youth authority camp he walked out of -- and he won't leave again."
She looked relieved, and he found her decided lack of faith in his self-control more than a little stinging. For the first time in many weeks, he found himself wishing for a long draught from one of the green bottles that still lurked in the back of his refrigerator. He stared down at the pile of colorful vegetables on his plate and, despite having eaten this particular mortal meal many times before, deemed it not at all appealing.
"Come on," Natalie urged, tucking into her own repast. "Seven weeks on mortal food is something to celebrate, you know. You're doing great." She was changing the subject, getting around the unpleasant topic of how swiftly, how easily, the vampire was still capable of killing. Nick pretended not to notice.
"Yeah." He pushed the plate away and got up, pacing to the fireplace. "I guess I'm just not very hungry. You said something earlier tonight, about a new formula?"
"Ready and waiting." She nodded toward the lab he'd recently had installed for her in the second level's spare bedroom. "With any luck, we'll have you tanning on the Riviera within a month."
When she'd finished her meal, he followed her up the stairs to the lab and patiently waited while she injected the new serum, and after several minutes, drew a blood sample to test. "This should decrease your light sensitivity to a far greater degree than the previous formula," she said as she prepared the slide and placed it under a microscope. "Riviera, here you come."
"I'll settle for a sunrise, to start," he said wistfully, then fell silent again as she examined the slide.
"Looks good so far," she said, and left the microscope to move back toward him. "How many seconds are you up to now?"
"Forty-three."
The first ray of morning sunlight was already slanting through the lab's unshuttered window. Nick approached it, and extending one hand into the light, began silently counting off seconds. He reached forty-seven before smoke began rising from his singed fingers, forcing him to withdraw.
Natalie had timed the test as well, staring at her wristwatch. "Better and better," she said, and there was a smile in her voice. "You really are doing great, Nick. Over a month on mortal food, no blood at all, and now promising progress on the next hurdle."
"Thanks to you."
He'd meant it as a simple, sincere compliment to her efforts. But the look in her eyes told him that she'd taken it as something more. He broke the awkward moment by reaching for the remote and triggering the shutters, leaving them in the harsh, artificial light of the overhead incandescents. He moved away from her then, deliberately placing both physical and emotional distance between them. The hopeful expression she'd worn quickly changed to one of hurt.
"Nat..." He was still getting used to that odd, overly-familiar abbreviation of her name. But to so much as dream of anything more than a platonic friendship with any mortal was, for him, a forbidden indulgence. He had to make her understand that, somehow, before the very dangerous hope she was beginning to entertain went any further.
"Nat, please, don't..." he began, but she didn't allow him to finish.
"It's all right." He had no idea what that meant, and she gave him no time to ask. She swept out the door before he could try, muttering half-intelligible things about having to go because she had to stop for catfood on the way home. He quelled the urge to follow her down the stairs, and simply stood in the lab, listening to her footsteps descend to the loft floor.
Nick wasn't even sure how he'd have finished his interrupted sentence. Please don't get too close? Don't care for me?
He had the uncomfortable feeling that things had already progressed too far for that, on all fronts. Because, try though he might to prevent it, he'd begun to care, too. Forbidden or not, against all of his personal rules or not, he couldn't deny it any longer, even to himself.
He was falling in love with Natalie Lambert.
A part of him wanted desperately to go after her, to tell her. But he stood and listened to her footsteps cross the loft's concrete floor, to the sound of the elevator door sliding open and shut, and then to the growl of the mechanism as it descended to the street.
Love was a thing he'd long ago forbidden himself, a thing he had banned from his life, even with those of his own kind. He could not allow it to interfere in what should have remained a strictly business relationship with Natalie Lambert. It simply should not be.
And yet, it was.
He slept fitfully, and was still mulling over the impossibility of his situation on the drive to work the next evening. The Caddy's radio segued from an eighties rock ballad into a song he didn't recall hearing before.
"Take me to the edge of darkness," the clear female voice crooned.
"Follow the moon to its hiding place.
There is magic in the silence
As I start my fall from grace."
Well, he had certainly done all of that in his long lifetime, hadn't he?
"There is no stairway to the light.
There is no answer, heaven knows.
Will there be music left to write?
In my fantasy... Black Rose."
No stairway. No answer. Perhaps it had been a mistake ever to accept Natalie's offer to search for a cure. Perhaps LaCroix had been right all along, and his search for mortality would indeed come to nothing more than grief. That had certainly been the pattern with every attempt he'd made in the past.
The police radio crackled to life, interrupting his morbid reverie. "All units in vicinity of Twenty-fifth and Bay Streets, reports of multiple shots fired. Repeat, Twenty-fifth and Bay Streets, shots fired. Over."
Nick snatched up the microphone, and in the midst of executing a tire-squealing U-turn, thumbed the transmit button. "Dispatch, this is 81-Kilo responding, over."
The radio spat static for a moment before the dispassionate voice responded with a curt, "Copy that, 81-Kilo," and cut itself abruptly off again.
He arrived at the designated intersection in time to see three dark-clad figures emerge from an alley at a dead run. They scattered at once, all disappearing in different directions. Nick didn't try to give chase. He could sense a faltering mortal heartbeat coming from the alley -- along with the overpowering scent of human blood.
The man, propped against a concrete wall, was dying even as Nick reached his side. Barely a man, he decided on closer inspection. Eighteen, perhaps nineteen. He wore gang colors and a pattern-shaved haircut with some arcane symbol displayed across both sides of his head. And the last of his life's blood was fountaining from a bullet wound that had severed the artery beneath his left ear.
The boy's faltering heartbeat ceased just as Nick knelt beside him. The blood flow was immediately reduced to a trickle, but the heady, iron scent of it...
Nick pulled away, shaking his head to clear it, fighting back the sudden wave of hunger that had almost overwhelmed him. He hadn't been this attracted to the scent of blood in many weeks, not since Natalie had first begun the treatments. Yet he suddenly found himself staring at the dead boy's neck wound through eyes that had turned a fevered yellow. Like some newly-uncaged beast, the hunger resurged in him with a ravening desperation he had not felt since that first night, when the first hunger had overtaken him, eight centuries past. He had to feed. He had to feed now. And he had to have living prey, a beating heart. Yes. He would go after the killers and one by one, with the slow and savoring pleasure only a vampire could know, he would drain them of every last precious drop of life-giving blood.
He rose, looked up, and preparing to take flight, froze instead at the sight of a figure standing on the rooftop above, watching him.
"Nicholas," it said. Joan's voice. Joan's face. And her spectral figure wore the mailed man's armor she had once affected in life.
He flew to the roof, half expecting her to vanish before he could alight. But she remained. The vampire snarled, regarding her with blazing eyes. "What do you want of me, Maid of Lorraine?" he demanded in Medieval French. "Will you mock the soul I possess and yet cannot free? Why do you come here?"
With the blood lust still screaming within him and the nearby Caddy's police radio squawking something about two more units being en route, he almost missed her reply. "To help you," she answered in the same archaic tongue. "One short night ago, you promised to accept my intercession, as I promised to give it. Tonight, both shall be fulfilled."
"It's much too late for that now," the vampire told her in icy, compassionless tones. "The Light you embrace abandoned me, with no way to redeem the soul trapped within. So go back to your God, Joan of Arc. Tell Him I no longer have need of Him."
"You will," she whispered, and as the wail of approaching sirens filled the night air, her form began to dissipate. "Very soon, mon chevalier noir, you will."
Would he indeed? Were ghosts now prescient as well? The vampire growled its displeasure at that notion as her spectral form faded into nothing, and the screech of tires announced the arrival of two squad cars below. While four uniformed figures rushed into the alley to discover a lifeless murder victim, the vampire took to the air, eager to hunt victims of its own.
The streets and alleys of Toronto raced beneath him at the exhilarating speed of vampire flight. It had been too long -- far, far too long -- since he had hunted human prey. This night was overdue. And he intended to enjoy it.
The wind carried one murderer's scent to him within minutes. The victim's blood still clung to the killer's clothing, and now it had led another, far more dangerous predator straight to him. Nick dropped out of the sky directly into the fleeing man's path, delighting in the startled reaction his entrance had evoked. When the gun appeared and fired three shots directly into -- and through -- his heart, he merely smiled, and advanced on the prey with a calculated, menacing air.
"This is the night of your death," he snarled, and knocked the useless gun away with the sweep of a hand. The prey staggered backward and tried to run, but the vampire caught it easily, holding it aloft by the throat until its struggling ceased. With the meal at last quiescent, he bore it to the nearest wall, turned its head aside to expose the throbbing artery, and with a growl of both ecstasy and triumph, began his long-denied feast of warm, pulsing human blood.
His euphoria was short-lived. With the first swallow, he found himself engulfed in an intense, searing light. It blinded him, and the heat of it forced him to withdraw from his barely-savored feast and stumble away, clinging to the wall for support. He heard his intended victim recover enough to panic and run, but Nick made no effort to follow. He couldn't see, and the light was growing still more intense, as though the sun had somehow risen out of turn and intruded on the night. The scorching agony of it drove him to his knees, and impossibly, he felt his flesh beginning to burn.
"It is God's light you feel," Joan's voice whispered from somewhere in the glare. "A light from within your own soul. Do not fear it. Use it to bind the evil in you, Nicholas. Embrace it."
"I can't. Please, I can't!" He was certain that at any moment, he would burst into flames. Perhaps that was precisely what Joan's ghost wanted -- to grant him a cruel imitation of her own fiery death. "Please!" He begged her unseen spirit for mercy, only to hear her soft admonition fading rapidly away. "It is your light, Nicholas. Your soul. Only you may command it. Only you."
He took her at her word, and with all of the vampire's remaining strength, demanded of the light that it retreat back into the limbo that had, for so many centuries, imprisoned it. Incredibly, the "fire" that had nearly engulfed him obeyed, and began to subside. The blinding light and the hideous sensation of burning alive both retreated into cold, comforting darkness once again. But they left behind the one malady that had preceded them -- the desperate need that had lured him to this dark street in the first place.
The hunger.
Unsatisfied, tortured by an all-too-brief taste of the nourishment it craved, the beast raged at him now for fulfillment. The prey must be hunted down anew and finished. He had to complete the taking. He had to.
His knees buckled under him when he tried to get up, and a wave of dizziness sent the overhead streetlights spinning like some bizarre carnival ride gone mad. Nick fell back against the wall, panting, confused and infuriated. What was happening to him? What had gone wrong? Something with Natalie's treatments? Or had Joan's intervention somehow triggered this?
Natalie... He had to find Natalie. How far was he from Grenville Street? She'd be at the morgue at this hour, just starting her shift. With an effort, he pushed himself up, using the wall for support, then drew on the vampire's strength to force his legs to hold him upright. Flying was out of the question now, as impossible as further pursuing the escaped prey. Something was very, very wrong here. If Natalie could determine the cause...
He moved with clumsy, halting steps in what he thought was the right direction, keeping close to the buildings, guiding himself past bricks, doors and windows with his hands. His vision was blurred, the world continued to spin and tilt, and the hunger still shrieked at him, desperate to be fed. He defied them all, and kept walking.
He passed mortals on the streets who watched him with wary suspicion and distrust. Some laughed, and pointed in derision at "the drunk." But all of them avoided him, and that, he thought acridly, was just as well -- for them.
An eon passed before he finally reached the Coroner's Building and made his way inside, navigating the long, harshly-lit corridors to Natalie's lab.
She wasn't there.
The blue-tiled room was deserted, with not even a corpse to grace any of its cold metal exam tables. Nick staggered to the bank of refrigeration units, wrenching open the one in which he'd found the blood supply when he'd first awakened here a few months ago. The plastic-encased blood units were still there. "We keep them on hand for the occasional 'customer' who turns out not to be dead after all," Natalie had told him, and at his incredulous reaction, she'd added, "The occasional mortal customer." Nick snatched out one of the bags, fumbling with its clasp and tubing until he could at last access the contents. Cold human blood held little more appeal than the chilled bovine variety, but he greedily drained the unit anyway, gratified that no flash of blinding light interrupted his meal this time.
Midway through a second unit, his attention was drawn to a framed piece of faux calligraphy hanging on the wall beside the storage vault's closed door. He'd never noticed it before.
Hic locus est, its Latin words proclaimed, ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. 'In this place, death rejoices to teach the living.'
Well, he thought drolly, sometimes the living could also teach the dead, couldn't they? Where was Natalie? Surely she'd begun her shift by now. He had to tell her what had happened, that something had gone terribly wrong with the new formula...
Voices. Several people were heading this way from the corridor outside the lab. Nick quickly opened the cold room/vault and stepped inside, closing himself into a refrigerated metal crypt lined with multiple body shelves, most of them occupied by anonymous, plastic-wrapped corpses. Hic locus est...
He heard the lab's outer door bang open, then many footsteps and the squeak of a gurney's wheels. "Thanks, guys," Natalie's voice said, and then a shuffle of footsteps again, some apparently leaving the lab, others entering.
"Here's all we've got on the DOA," a male voice announced, and papers rattled briefly.
"Yeah." Nat sounded completely disinterested. "Still nothing on Detective Knight?"
"Not a thing since he told Dispatch he was going in. Car's still where he left it. Central will impound it by morning if he doesn't report in."
Of course, that's where Natalie had been. The crime scene in the alley. That was the victim they'd just brought in. And now they had the additional mystery of Nick's unexplained disappearance to contend with.
"We picked up one of the gangbangers over on Bloor," the cop was telling Natalie. "Also with a neck wound. Only this guy was so meth-hyped he didn't know his own name. Kept babbling a lot of crap about being attacked by a vampire, no less."
"A vampire." Natalie's response was derisive, but Nick could hear the shocked tone underlying her words. "He really said that?"
"Yup. Hey, listen, we gotta get back out there. I'll give you a call if we hear from Knight, OK?"
"Thanks, Mike."
Nick waited until he knew she was alone -- only one heartbeat remained in the lab -- before he reached to open the vault door. He'd pushed down on the release bar and had started to shove the heavy door outward when a sharp abdominal pain made him falter. He stumbled out of the vault, nearly falling before he reached Nat, who grabbed him by both arms. She seemed suddenly, incredibly strong, capable of holding him upright when he might have collapsed. That wasn't right. It should be the other way round. Vampires should have five times a mortal's strength.
"Nick! What happened? What's wrong?"
"I don't..." he stammered, but couldn't finish. The pain had intensified, doubling him over despite Natalie's efforts to hold onto him. She guided him back into the vault, to one of the empty shelves at ground level. Nick lay down without an argument, gasping for air he should not have needed. Natalie's hands deftly checked his forehead for a fever that didn't exist and his wrist for a pulse that didn't either.
"Has to be the new formula," she concluded, and then quickly grasped both his hands when another seizure gripped him. "Hold on, Nick. I have to get a syringe and take a blood sample before I can figure out what's wrong. Nick... Nick, can you hear me?"
He could, but he could no longer answer. In fact, he could no longer move at all. He had experienced this paralyzing sensation only once before -- when Joan's cross had lain with a crushing weight upon his chest and LaCroix had enclosed him in a crude wooden coffin until starvation had sent him into true undeath. It was a state of complete blood deprivation in which the vampire remained totally aware of every torturous passing moment, yet could do nothing at all -- except perhaps go mad from the horrible, endless tedium.
This time, however, the hunger had felled him despite just being fed two units of blood, and the pain brought on by the first seizure had not gone away. What was this?
He hadn't realized that Natalie was gone until she returned with a hypodermic to draw the blood sample. "Hang on, Nick," she said, and there was a barely-discernible quiver of fear in her voice. "We're going to figure this out." He never felt the needle, but he caught a glimpse of the blood-filled syringe in her hand as she hurried back out of the room.
A room filled with corpses.
Well, he thought prosaically, if by some impossible means he should actually die here, he could hardly have chosen a more appropriate venue. The dead could rest with the formerly undead.
There were more voices outside in the lab. Someone talking to Natalie. She'd closed the vault door, but he should have been able to hear every word just the same. He couldn't. The roar of a thousand winds was suddenly bombarding his ears. And then...
Then came the light.
It was even brighter than before, but this time it neither burned nor blinded him. It shone from a corner of the ceiling, a corridor of light that invited him, without words, to enter. He recognized that glowing fissure -- it had beckoned him once before, on the night he'd come across. He'd turned away from it then, had gone back to the darkness of LaCroix's alluring promises. This time, however, with no demon to whisper temptations in his ear, he slipped easily free of the paralysis that had bound him and drifted upward, toward the light.
Flying had long been second nature to him, but this -- an airy, weightless floating -- was distinctly different. He drifted near the ceiling for a time, and looked down upon the shelves full of human corpses, neatly wrapped in their clear plastic swathing like so many supermarket pot roasts. All but one.
Is that really what my body looks like? It's so pale...
The light engulfed him then, the vault room vanishing in its brilliance. He stood now in full light brighter than that of any sun, and for the first time in eight centuries, did not burn. It was impossible, and yet it was real.
"You can embrace the light," Joan's voice told him, and she appeared out of the glare surrounding him, standing on seemingly nothing but the endless brightness.
"How?" That single word carried with it an eternity of anguish. "Please... I don't know how."
"Indeed," another, darker voice intervened. "And why should you?"
Nick wheeled to find that a storm cloud, black and roiling, had somehow intruded on this world of light. And in its midst stood the source of his evil. His tormentor. His master. His sire.
"You have no soul," it hissed at him from the darkness. "You are my creature, and you always will be. No god can save you. It is much too late for that."
When Joan's voice answered from behind him, Nick turned back to look at her. "God has not abandoned you, Nicholas. Use His light to overcome the evil that dwells in you. Use His strength to atone for the lives that you have taken. And when your life in the mortal world has ended, use His grace to enter into His kingdom."
"Lies," LaCroix whispered at his shoulder. "Deceptions. No god holds any power over us. No god would dare to try!"
Nick ignored his sire's taunts to plead with Joan instead. "Is that how I can redeem my soul? By atoning for the lives that I've destroyed? Will I be forgiven then?"
Joan smiled at him at one hand; LaCroix scoffed loudly at the other. "God has already forgiven you, Nicholas," she said. "It is your own conscience, your own guilt which you must now appease."
LaCroix snarled at her. "The only thing he will appease is his master. Come away, Nicholas. This inanity has gone on long enough."
Torn, Nick did not move. "I want to atone," he told her. "I want to be mortal again."
"Then use His light," she repeated, and at once, her form began to fade. "Use His strength."
"Mortal!" LaCroix snorted the word as though it were a curse. "You cannot deny what you are, mon protege. And what you are is a vampire. A killer. You cannot long resist the need for blood, no matter what potions your coroner friend may concoct. You've said it yourself. The temptation is simply too great. So stop this nonsense, Nicholas. Come back to us, and get on with the business of being what you are."
"No." Nick shrugged away from him. The bright light surrounding them dimmed suddenly, and Nick felt something pulling at him, a hard, jarring tug that jerked him violently backward. Without warning, he found himself back on the shelf in Natalie's vault, an IV tube piercing his left arm, delivering blood from one of her emergency units into his veins. He felt a deep and anguished sense of loss, of wrongness, of not belonging here at all, after standing in that light. Joan's light. God's light.
You cannot deny what you are, LaCroix's words still seemed to whisper into his ear. You cannot resist the need for blood.
The need. The hunger.
With a deep-throated growl of rage, the vampire rose to rip the IV needle free and snatch the blood unit from the pole that had supported it. The pole swayed and fell, crashing to the tile floor with a loud clatter. He'd already drained what was left in the bag by the time the noise brought Natalie running.
This mortal, this coroner, was the one who had resisted him. The one whose blood he had already tasted once, though somehow she had escaped the enthrallment that should have ensued. No matter. She had since fallen victim to a thoroughly mortal type of enthrallment instead. He had seen it in her eyes.
"Nick?" She stopped short just inside the door, and the look of startled fear on her face pleased the vampire very much indeed.
"Come here," he demanded, and when she didn't obey, he flew to grasp her by the throat and press her against the heavy vault door.
"Nick, stop it!" With amazing strength, she loosened his grip and thrust his hands away. The fear in her eyes had been replaced with anger, and suddenly she was chattering at him, a flood of scientific babble that he only partially comprehended. "Nick, your blood is overcoming the serum, treating it like a disease and healing it. We have to find another method, another way to..."
"No." The vampire's bass voice cut her off. "We have done this. You and your potions, I and my folly. There is no cure. I'm not human, and I never will be."
Defiance flashed in the blue eyes now. "I don't believe that," she said stubbornly, "and neither do you!"
"I took some of your blood once before," the vampire rasped, and reached to stroke the soft flesh of her throat. "Perhaps now, I will take the rest."
Hurt. Anger. Outrage. "Go ahead," she challenged. "Kill the only hope you have of ever becoming human. Is that really what you want? Is it? Answer me!"
You cannot resist the need for blood, LaCroix's words echoed, and his own vampire responded still more forcefully. Take her, it urged. Kill her. Do it now!
At once, the memory of Joan's words returned to overpower them both. Use His light, she had said, to overcome the evil that dwells in you. Use His strength...
He called on those powers to fight back the rampaging need for her blood. He remembered the pure, shining light that had surrounded Joan and summoned it to vanquish the crimson vision through which he now saw her. It's Natalie, he told himself furiously. Natalie! She is not prey. You no longer feed on human prey!
And in the midst of his internal battle, Nat's voice again demanded, "Is that what you want?"
He found the strength to answer her only when his blood-vision at last retreated, and he forced himself to turn away. "No," he said, though he choked on the word. "I want..." He pressed himself to the opposite wall, as far from her as he could be in the cramped, gray vault, and made a Herculean effort not to hear the heartbeat pumping blood through her veins. "I want to be human again. I want to atone. I want..." His throat tightened on the word "you," cutting it off. With a howl of frustration, he slammed a clenched fist against the wall until the metal dented -- but the blood lust at long last ebbed to a manageable roar. For several agonizing moments, he remained there, breathing hard and praying for a way out of here. He had to get away from her, away from the siren call of that heartbeat, away from the smell of blood coursing just below the pale skin of her throat...
He flew. Past her startled (and wounded) expression, through the half-open door, down a blur of corridors to a door with a glowing EXIT sign, and at last out to the welcome embrace of a night sky.
Freedom.
If only for the moment, he could soar above all worry, all care, and think of nothing at all but the sheer joy of flying.
But visions soon assailed him on the wind, racing past with the speed of his flight. The image of Joan set ablaze on her pyre gave way to her ghost repeating its litany, "Use the light, Nicholas. Use the light."
LaCroix's sneering features replaced her, scoffing, "Nonsense! You cannot turn your back on all you have been given. You will not!"
Janette, so long ago, cradled in his arms, in his bed, pleading softly, "Come back with me, Nicolas. I miss you. I need you."
And LaCroix's contemptuous response when he had indeed returned with her. "You abandoned us, betrayed all that you are. Tell me why I should take you back again!"
And his own voice, shamefully cringing. "I"m sorry, LaCroix. Please, forgive me."
"It is your own conscience," Joan had said, "your own guilt which you must now appease."
And his tear-choked answer to Natalie's question. "I want to be human again. I want to atone."
When he eventually dropped through the loft's open skylight, she was there waiting for him, her face stern and angry once again.
"You shouldn't have come here," he growled in the vampire's guttural voice. He stalked past her to the refrigerator, where he shoved aside the mortal food that had been his fare for the past seven weeks, snatched out one of the ubiquitous green bottles of steer's blood, and greedily downed its contents in front of her. She hated to watch him feed. He knew that. But just now, he could not afford to care. It was that or complete the act he had very nearly consummated in the vault.
"I told you at the start that I might kill you," he said when the bottle was drained. "Well, now I nearly have. Twice. It's about time to hang it up, don't you think?"
"I brought the Caddy in for you," she announced as though he hadn't said anything at all. "Stonetree let me have the spare key from your desk -- after I told him you'd stopped by the lab and that you'd be calling in soon. I said you were pursuing a suspect on foot and ran into a little trouble, so you came to me just long enough for a fast bandage-job and then took off again. You'll have to make up your own story from there."
He glared at her, sparks of the vampire's flame still burning gold in his eyes. Then he wheeled away to snatch yet another bottle from the refrigerator. He carried that to the window beside the mantelpiece, where he could look out on Toronto's night as he fed. The bottle was half drained before he felt the last of the fire dissipate from his eyes. But in the wake of the vampire's retreat came the agony of crushing guilt. What had he done? How could he have so completely lost control?
"Nat, I'm sorry," he whispered to the mantel's carved dragon figure. "I never meant..."
"It wasn't your fault." Nat was suddenly beside him, too close again, though the bottled blood had at least tamed the worst of his hunger. "The blood elements that make you what you are give your system very efficient healing properties. So efficient that it's overwhelmed our formula, reasserted all the vampire traits. I suppose I should have seen that coming. But it doesn't mean we've failed, Nick. It just means we have to start again, try another method."
She touched him -- a hand on his shoulder meant to comfort. But it sent the sound of her blood rushing at once to his ears, and threatened to defeat the control he'd just fought so hard to regain. He closed his eyes, forcing the rising beast back into submission. "I can't."
"You can." She overran his objection with stern confidence. "I told you I'd never give up on you, Nick. I couldn't now, even if I wanted to. I..."
"Don't." He had to stop her before she said it, and he couldn't look at her when he replied. "Don't love me. That's a death sentence, Nat. I can't condemn you to that. I won't."
"I know." With a gentle squeeze, she withdrew the hand from his shoulder. "I know. But we mortals are funny that way. We can't help how we feel."
Neither can I, he wanted to say, but he didn't dare confess that weakness. "I can't," he repeated instead, and at last found the strength to turn and look at her. "We can't. I wish it could be different, Nat. I wish it were possible. But it isn't." As he spoke, he traced his fingers down her cheek to rest, for a fleeting moment, on her lips. "It can't be."
She grasped his fingers with a hand that trembled, and there were tears in her eyes when she nodded. "I know," she said again. "But there's another way, Nick, another cure. There has to be. Please, don't push me away. Let me go on looking for it."
He studied her eyes for a long moment before he finally nodded an assent. "All right," he said, and he drew her into a forbidden embrace, suppressing the siren call of her blood with an iron will. He held her close, lightly stroking her hair. "All right. We'll go on looking. Together. But we can't work this close to each other, Nat. I won't endanger your life that way again. We'll close up the lab here, go back to working from your office whenever we can. There's got to be distance, for your sake. There's got to be."
She nodded, her head still pressed tightly against his chest, and in that same moment, her pager went off, a raucous, intrusive beeping that completely destroyed their tender moment in each other's arms.
"Damn." Natalie reached into a pocket to pull the offending gadget free. She silenced it, glaring at the number displayed on its tiny screen. "That's the office. I've gotta get back." She wiped away a stray tear with the back of her hand, and was at once all business again. "You'll call in, right? Captain Stonetree's about to start gnoshing the precinct furniture worrying about you."
"I'll call," he promised. "And Nat..." He reached out, and with the lightest touch of his fingers to her cheek once again, said, "Thank you. For believing in me. For not giving up. For everything."
Again, she grasped his fingers and held them for a moment, her grip firm and confident. "I'll call you later," she said.
Nick scarcely heard the elevator's noise as it took her away.
Another sound intruded on his silence then, a ringing in his ears that resonated with the vibrations that were all things vampire. It was an announcement, a summons, a mark of ownership.
LaCroix.
Nick whirled to stare up at the loft's skylight, but nothing moved there.
The signature vibration faded as quickly as it had appeared. Not yet, the wind seemed to whisper at its parting. But soon, Nicholas. Very soon.
With a stifled oath, Nick slammed the wine bottle down on the mantel. It didn't break, but blood splashed from the bottle neck, flying out to splatter both his hand and the carved figurine. Crimson droplets ran down the dragon's crest and runneled over its snout to finally drip from its sharp wooden fangs.
LaCroix.
Sire. Mentor. Master.
True to form, he would bide his time, making his presence known but remaining hidden until he was ready to strike. And when he did...
When he did, it would begin all over again. Manipulation. Control. Cruelty. Enslavement. Everything that Nick had striven for eight long centuries to escape. And yet again, he would fail. Unless...
Unconsciously, Nick pressed his blood-splattered fingers to his mouth. With the other hand, he lifted an oak walking staff from its place beside the hearth. Heavy and intricately carved, it tapered to a point sharp enough to bring any vampire's existence to a definitive end. It would be easy enough to secure the staff with its point upright, and then a simple matter of falling just so...
"Would you so readily commit the sin of suicide?" An all-too-solid hand grasped and wrenched the staff away, sending it bouncing to the brick hearth with a hollowly reverberating clang. Joan stood there, in the midst of her golden light. Its halo reached swiftly out to engulf him, and the walls of his loft vanished, absorbed into the brightness. Her hand, still solid, gripped his own with determined fierceness. "Would you do this thing?"
"I won't go back to him," Nick despaired, and a coward's tears choked his voice. "Not again. I can't."
"Then deny him. Deny all those who have given their souls to the darkness, for you have not." She released him to gesture at the fallen staff. "Save your wooden sword for these foes, chevalier. Wield it with the strength that is yours alone. Your soul and your light can destroy the destroyer."
What she appeared to suggest filled Nick with a hideously cold dread. "I can't kill LaCroix."
She smiled. "It is within your power," she said, "as is the redemption of the soul you prize." Again, she reached out to touch him. This time, her hand came to rest over his heart, and he felt a warmth emanating from her fingers. For the first time, he saw the cross on the breast plate of her armor -- a cross that, with her touch, began to glow in phantom reflection on his own chest. It was a symbol he had once borne, in mortal times, with faith and pride. Now, it was a terror that burned with the heat of a thousand suns.
He cried out and backed away, falling out of her halo of light, slamming hard against the loft's brick wall. And though the phantom cross abruptly faded, Joan's image did not. "Leave me," he pleaded. "I can't walk in that light. I can't be redeemed!"
"You were a soldier of the cross once," she admonished him. "How can you understand so little of the God you served? His grace is freely given. You have only to believe."
"It's not that simple." He growled the words at her. "Not for me."
"For everyone," she insisted. "You as well. Sola fide, Nicholas. Plain, simple faith. There is nothing else. Nothing."
"There's atonement," he argued. "There's assuaging that conscience you spoke of. What of that?"
"That is your cross," she said, and the light around her brightened as her form began to fade within it. "You have chosen to bear it while you walk this Earth. But self-atoned or not, your soul is God's, Nicholas de Brabant. Remember that."
She was gone then, the echo of her words left ringing in his ears until the electronic squall of the telephone intruded, dissolving the last of her lingering light.
Nick remained pressed to the wall, listening to the recording of his own clipped tones advising callers not to take his incommunicado status personally. The machine beeped, and the deep voice of Joe Stonetree came rumbling through the speaker.
"Knight? Where the hell are you?"
Though sorely tempted to ignore this mortal intrusion on his immortal life, Nick moved to pick up the receiver. "I'm here, Cap'n."
Stonetree hesitated, apparently taken aback at finally reaching him. "Where the hell have you been?" he asked grumpily. "Dr. Lambert said you were wounded chasing a suspect."
"Nothing serious," Nick dissembled. "I'm fine. I'll be in to finish my shift in a few minutes."
Stonetree grunted in tacit agreement. "Fine," he said. "But I need you to report to the Royal Ontario Museum complex instead. We've got a probable burglary-homicide out there. Looks like somebody decided to drain a museum guard of about four pints of blood..."
Nick paled. LaCroix's calling card had just been delivered.
He hurried downstairs to the Caddy with the echoes of a song repeating themselves in his head.
"They said that good things come to those who wait,
And I've waited for so long...
It's now or never and the hour's late.
I want this moment right or wrong.
There is no stairway to the light,
There is no answer, heaven knows;
There is a flower of the night,
My only true love... Black Rose."
End