Nick Knight was beginning to wonder if this latest of Natalie's "cures" was really a good idea. Her assurance that the drug had produced no ill effects in lab animals was not particularly comforting: while rats and mice could be infected with the lethal elements of his blood, they were not vampires. He, on the other hand, had just endured his fourth night on the job with a rampaging case of nausea. Not even inhaling Schanke's garlic-laced souvlaki lunches had ever made him this sick.

"I'm just not sure about this one, Nat." He voiced his doubts for the first time as she prepared another injection from the medical bag resting on his kitchen table. "I mean, if a sour stomach is the only result we're going to get..."

She held the hypodermic aloft, squeezed a drop of pinkish liquid from its tip, then lowered it to look at him. "You want to give up on it so soon? My slides say it _is_ attacking the vampire nucleotides in your system."

He sighed, and taking a seat at the table, resignedly rolled up his sleeve. "Okay. One more day. But if I lose it and throw up all over Schanke on watch tonight, I'm going to tell him it's all your fault."

She laughed, but there was an edge to her voice when she replied. "Go ahead. Can't say it'd be the _worst_ thing I ever got blamed for."

He smiled back in answer, and offered her his arm. "All right, Doc. Complaint session over."

He watched the needle slide into the soft flesh of his forearm and lodge there temporarily, becoming a tiny knot of increasing pain. Odd. He'd never felt pain from Nat's injections before. But as swiftly as it had grown, the discomfort vanished. So did the needle, disappearing back into Natalie's black bag.

Nothing to do but relax now, and hope that the nausea didn't get any worse.

He rose and headed for the black leather couch, meticulously rearranging and rebuttoning his shirt sleeve on the way.

He didn't remember sitting down.

* * *

So dark. Why was it so dark in here? Like a tomb. And _cold._

He was supposed to be immune to cold.

Except in dreams, of course. Or in drug-induced hallucinations...

Voices. Around, above him. The language was not English, but he knew the words.

"Any time now," said one of them. "He is responding well to the increased dosage."

"Alexi," said another voice nearer his ear. "Can you hear me?"

Russian. They were speaking Russian.

"Open your eyes, Alexi."

Who was this Alexi?

With a sharp, sudden pain, someone struck his face with the back of a hand. With the taste of his own blood in his mouth, he heard the command to open his eyes repeated, this time mingled with a curse.

Light. Harsh, screaming, hellish light that was nothing at all like the dark place he'd been in just moments before. Nor was it the loft, where his kitchen had so often been transformed into Natalie's makeshift lab. It looked more like her small workroom in the morgue. But it was not that either.

Stark walls, whitewashed and bare, stared back at him. He was sitting, strapped hand and foot to a chair that was hard and unyielding.

Nick stared down at the hands secured to the arms of the chair and blinked in confusion. The weren't his hands at all. And he should have been able to break the leather straps easily, yet when he tugged at them, they held fast.

"Better," said the demanding voice, and a tall, beagle-faced man in uniform moved within his limited range of vision. There was something odd about the uniform. Something he couldn't quite place.

"You will answer the questions now, Alexi. Our potion is specially designed to help you to remember. So you will give me the names. All of the infiltrators which the filthy German dictator has corrupted and sent into our midst. Others such as yourself. Talk to me, Alexi. Answer me."

_But I am not Alexi,_ he thought furiously, and he tried to say "My name is Nicholas," but the words would not come.

Another blow. And this time the blood flowed more freely, spilling onto the torn clothes he wore.

"How many spies has Hitler sent among us?"

_Hitler. He did say Hitler..._

Now he knew why the uniform looked odd. It was one the Russian Army had employed -- over forty years ago.

"No," he heard himself say in a voice that was also not his own. "There are spies, it is true. But I am not one of them. I swear to you, I am not. I do not know any names."

His inquisitor gestured to the other in the room. "Give him another injection."

The other man hesitated. "Another dosage could be... dangerous."

Dangerous. He spoke the word as though it were not at all what he'd intended to say. Not dangerous. Lethal. Another dosage would be lethal.

He fought to banish the dream, then, raging at it to subside because of course, he could not really die in such a fashion. Only mortals died thus.

But like all dreams, this one chose to forbear reason.

The needle, with no effort to be gentle, jabbed his arm. His own unfamiliar voice cried out, a scream of pain and rage at this injustice. With Alexi's mind, he saw that what he had told them was the truth, and they would not believe him.

That realization stabbed him with the hideous memory of a time when _he_ had been the interrogator; memories of the French resistance, a young man named Giroux, and the coldly certain judgment that had made Nicholas the unbelieving inquisitor, the judge, the executioner.

_No matter what I say or do, they will not believe me._

The voices still surrounded him.

"Arouse him. Get him talking."

Hands shook him, jostled him, slapped his face. He did not respond to them.

"It is no use, sir. I believe he will remain unconscious -- for a time."

_No. Not for a time. Permanently. I will die._

More shaking, slapping; the inquisitor's hands this time. His angry voice commanded the other then. "Take him back to the cell. I want him conscious and talking again within the hour."

His footsteps stalked from the room. A door slammed. The assistant's trembling hands unbound the restraints at Alexi's ankles and wrists. The smaller man pulled him with no small effort to his feet, and straining, began to drag him toward the door.

_I cannot go back to the cell... to the dark place. I will die there!_

And in another moment, the calmer thought came: _To die is preferable. We are in Noril'sk. In the wasteland that is ice-bound from one year to the next. There is nowhere to run._

Nowhere to run.

He waited until the attendant was struggling to drag him through the door. Then he brought the hands-that-were-not-his-own to the man's throat and closed them around it, squeezing, crushing.

For the first time, he saw the face, pale and sweating, the eyes bulging in startled terror.

And then, for one brief flash, he saw another face altogether. One that grinned at him in smug triumph as his hands sought to choke the life from it. It couldn't be, of course. He'd killed that one already, hadn't he? Three months ago...

"LaCroix!"

Only the dying attendant stared back at him now, hands flailing, clawing in desperation, but Nick did not let go. Something incredibly fragile snapped beneath the fury of his fingers. The attendant's head folded backward as though it belonged to a child's wooden doll. Nick let him fall to the dirty floor, where he lay quiet and still.

Then he ran.

His feet -- Alexi's feet -- were sluggish with the effects of the drug, but they lead him, all the same, to the outside.

_We are in Noril'sk... Ice-bound... Nowhere to run..._

Nowhere.

Cold.

An incredible cold.

The snow engulfed him, forming walls on every side. Yet he ran in spite of the four-foot drifts, falling, floundering only to rise and run again.

There were shouts behind him now. Others running, calling out a warning. He did not heed them. Better to die here than in the dark place. Better to die upon the ice.

A single rifle shot echoed through the white emptiness. Pain exploded in his back; his feet refused to carry him further.

The soft, welcome snow came up to cradle him in its frozen arms.

_This is death,_ he heard Alexi's mind cry. _This is peace... This is welcome._

* * *

"Nick?"

Natalie's near-panicked query startled him. He opened his eyes to the sight of his loft at a peculiar angle, as viewed from the floor beside the couch, with Nat leaning over him.

"What...?" Not without difficulty, he sat up, leaned back against the couch. His clothes felt damp, sweated, and his lungs wanted to gasp for air they didn't need.

"I don't know," she said in answer to his question. "You walked over here after the injection and just collapsed on the floor."

"How long?" He was having trouble forcing the words out.

"Just a minute ago." Ever hopeful, Nat pressed two fingers to his wrist, searching for a pulse that wasn't there. Her disappointment was manifest in her voice. "Maybe you were right about this one. I'll mark it 'inconclusive' and start working on another compound."

Nick pulled himself up onto the couch, and the action triggered a wave of dizziness and nausea so acute that he could only nod in response.

He heard Nat's footsteps move quickly away. They returned a moment later, and something smooth, cold and intimately familiar was pressed into his hands. He opened his eyes to stare, first at the bottle and then up at her.

"Drink it," she said. "Doctor's orders. I'll be back tomorrow, just for a few blood tests so we can try to document where it went wrong. Then I guess it's back to the drawing board."

"Yeah," he managed weakly, and tried to smile at her. "Thanks, Nat."

He wasn't certain just when she'd gathered everything and finally departed the loft. But halfway through the cold bovine libation in the bottle, he heard an all-too-familiar voice floating from somewhere above.

"Bad dreams, Nicholas?"

He rose on unsteady feet, twisted to stare up into the shadows -- and saw LaCroix on the stair landing.

LaCroix, translucent blue and insubstantial, but unmistakably garbed in the 1940s uniform of a Russian Army officer.

"Dreams do have a way of turning on you, don't they?" the ghost taunted. "Haven't I always told you that? And haven't I always been right?"

With an oath, Nick hurled the half-empty bottle at the landing.

But long before it smashed against the red brick wall, the ghost had evaporated, leaving only its mocking laughter behind.
 

- The End -