Natalie had heard him use that commanding baritone many times before. She’d always assumed it to be an effect of the Beast’s persuasive abilities. But it was a mortal Nick who now faced three vampires in the Raven’s stifling back storage room.

Janette and her rather decorative bookends, however, were standing their ground in spite of his request.

“Do not play the fool with us, Nicolas,” the brunette vampire admonished him. “Are you going to tell me that you have not seen the opportunity? Is this not the very thing that you have desired for so many centuries? A way to free yourself of LaCroix’s gift once and for all?” She sauntered forward to reach out and stroke her former lover’s face, but Nick brushed her hand away.

“Yes,” he confessed. “But I won’t sacrifice the life of another for it. You know that.”

“Oh? Are you so certain you would not?” Janette’s voice grew suddenly sultry, her demeanor becoming nothing short of seductive. “Think of it, Nicolas. Everything you have yearned for these many years has been delivered into your hands. You can remain as you
are, live out your mortal days with your beloved Natalie, even father an entire dynasty of mortal fledglings if that is what you desire.” Ignoring his rebuff, she pressed herself against him, and tilting her head up, breathed her sensual words into his face. This time when she reached for him, Nick captured both her hands, forced them down and held them firmly in his own.

“It can all be yours,” she went on, undaunted. “So very, very easily. All you have to do...” She brushed his lips with hers. “...is nothing.”

For the briefest of moments, Natalie saw something in Nick’s eyes – a look that was at once both cold and yet wistful. What an alluring temptation Janette’s offer must have presented: in order to keep his cherished mortality, he need only allow one newly-made vampire to die.

So simple.

The look vanished, however, as quickly as it had appeared, and Nick used his hold on Janette’s lace-gloved hands to thrust her stiffly away from him. “Leave us,” he repeated. “All three of you.”

A thousand years old she might be, but Janette had obviously never learned to deal well with rejection. “Do you think me an idiot? I will not leave you here with him!” she said defiantly.

“Yes you will.” Nick’s tone was as cold now as his gaze. “Because keeping me mortal isn’t what you want. It never was.”

Janette’s lips formed a petite moue, but Nick curtailed whatever denial she’d been about to put forth. “Your word,” he demanded, “that when it’s done – if it can be done – LeFebre goes free.”

The moue became a pout. “Mon cher Nicolas,” she said. “How little you trust me.”
 
"Your word, Janette.”

She considered for a moment before answering him. “If he remains far from this place, he will be in no danger from me. But if he should continue to hunt our kind, I cannot speak for others.”

And that, Natalie supposed, was the closest thing to a promise Nick was likely to get out of her. He accepted it with a curt nod and a gesture toward the door. “Now get out,” he said. “Bar the door, if it pleases you. But get out of here.”

Her crimson lips disdainful, Janette waved a dismissing hand at her vampire duo, then followed in their wake to the door. She turned back just long enough to flash Nick a coquettish – and thoroughly gloating – smile.

In that moment, Natalie could cheerily have driven a stake through her.

The heavy door closed then, sealing them into the tomb-like, almost airless little room.

Nat heard the padlock snap into place before Janette’s deceptively delicate footsteps retreated down the outer hallway.

Nick remained standing where he was, facing the door, and seemed all but oblivious to Natalie’s approach until she reached to take his hand.

“Nick?”

When his gaze finally focused on her, there were tears glistening in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, and pulled her to him in a desperately tight embrace. “Oh God, Nat, I’m sorry.”
 
They held each other, cradling and consoling, for several minutes, until Natalie pulled slightly away, reaching up with trembling fingers to brush a tear from his cheek.

“Hey,” she said, not caring that her voice broke on the word. “Don’t you dare give up on me that easily, Nick Knight. If it can happen once, it can happen again. We’ll find another way.”

He kissed her forehead, her nose, and finally her mouth. “I love you, Nat.”

She fought back her own tears in order to smile at him. “I know,” she said, and barely got the rest out when her throat tightened. “I love you, too.”

With a final reaffirming hug, he broke their embrace and moved quickly to the wooden latticework of the Raven’s private wine racks. He selected a bottle, one of many meticulously labeled in what Natalie would make book was Janette’s own hand, and carried it over to the semi-conscious man still sitting propped against the storage room’s back wall.

“Here,” he said, kneeling at LeFebre’s side and wrenching the bottle’s cork free. “You’ll need your strength, if we’re both to survive this.”

If they were both to survive? Natalie didn’t like the sound of that, but before she could say so, Nick had turned back to look at her. “You still have the gun?” he queried softly while beside him, LeFebre proceeded to indelicately consume the bottle’s human-vintage contents.

Natalie put one hand to her shoulder bag. “Yes. Why?”

Nick was helping LeFebre to steady the rapidly-draining bottle. “Get it out and hold it,” he told her. “And if either of us makes so much as a move toward you, use it.”

Stifling the urge to protest, Nat did as he asked, though she was also struggling with an attack of conscience. After listening to Janette’s seductively murmured temptations, a small but entirely selfish part of Natalie wished that Nick hadn’t refused her.

One life, her mind teased. The life of a self-made vampire, no less. It was a small enough price to pay, wasn’t it? All they had to do was walk out of here, and look the other way while Janette’s minions did their dirty work. Walk out now, and Nick – a warm, loving, mortal Nick – could be hers. So easy.

And so utterly, impossibly wrong.

“You could simply allow them to do as they wish, to destroy me,” LeFebre said when Nick had cast the empty wine bottle away. “Then you would be free of your curse, once and for all.”

Natalie started guiltily at this echo of her own thoughts, but Nick did not appear to notice.

“I’m not willing to pay that price for my mortality,” he told the faith healer. “Are you?”

LeFebre’s eyes answered the question without need of words. “Je suis désolé,” he repeated after a long silence. “I have failed you. And I have failed God.”

“No you haven’t,” Nick said earnestly. “Not on either count. Through you, God gave me back the humanity I’d sought for centuries. Even if it was only meant to be mine for a day...” He glanced up at Nat with a look so full of longing that she thought her heart would break. “...I’m grateful for that.”

For another awkward minute, no one said anything. Then Nick met the faith healer’s eyes and said, “Can you undo what you’ve done, LeFebre? Can you ‘cure’ yourself of the evil the same way you ‘cured’ me?”

“I...” The man’s voice broke. “I believe so. Yes.”

As they had done last night in the church, the two of them knelt face to face. LeFebre reached out to place unsteady hands on Nick’s head, and as before, began praying in the unknown tongue.

As though he were falling under the influence of some spell or trance, Nick’s eyes glazed, then closed.

Several minutes passed before the rose-colored light appeared, once more surrounding Nick like an arcane halo. The two of them again recited the strange litany in unison.

Nat kept her distance and this time there was neither an energy surge nor a light flash. The glow simply faded, and abruptly, the bizarre words ceased. The two men remained on the floor, still holding onto each other, for a long time after all of their efforts were spent. But Natalie knew, without having to ask, that their undertaking had succeeded.

The tears escaping from Nick’s tightly-closed eyes, clear and mortal just moments ago, now flowed a deep, blood red.

*    *    *

In the hour before dawn, Nicholas made his way one last time down the Mese Street, past the cistern, the great aqueduct, and the ruins of Constantine I’s original wall.
 
The conquerors had preceded him.

Many of the vanquished lay dead in the street. Every house along the once-grand road had been looted, every church desecrated.

Sickened, Nicholas hurled his borrowed sword to the pavement and ran at barely-mortal speed toward the east. If the Turks had reached the Hagia Sophia...

He found it looking much as it had when he’d left it a few hours before, the great doors thrown open, bright light spilling out from inside. But as he approached, the puissant odors of blood and death assailed the vampire’s keen senses.

“No...”

Disregarding the Beast’s inner scream at crossing God’s threshold, he rushed inside...

...And found himself standing amidst slaughter worse than that of any battlefield.

He turned, taking in the horror through the red glow of the vampire’s rage. At every point on the vast marble floor, priests, nuns, women and children alike had all been put to the sword. Many lay dead or dying near the high altar, upon which not a single sacred object remained. The sacristy had likewise been broken open and plundered. Most of Sophia’s prized icons and statuary had been carried away or hacked into splinters. And having finished with their sacrilege here, the defilers had already moved on.

“Leander...”

Nicholas moved swiftly through the carnage, searching frantically for any sign of his young aide. He at last spied a piece of familiar green cloak amidst a tangle of bodies in the south chapel, and with the Beast clawing at him to be out of this place, he bent to pull the dead aside until he had at last freed the boy.

The young Greek moaned and stirred at his touch. “She came to us,” he murmured. “The Holy Virgin...”

Nicholas hastily examined his wounds, only to find them too numerous for any physician to heal. With the Beast still clamoring, still dying his vision crimson, he gathered the boy into his arms and carried him to the chapel door. He committed a small sacrilege of his own on the way, taking the small copper dish of holy water from its receptacle in the wall. Simply holding it burned his hand like Greek fire, but Nicholas paid it no heed.

He carried Leander out through the narrow cloisters into the garth beyond the chapel, and laying him carefully against the base of an ancient olive tree that grew there, bade him drink the blessed water. While he swallowed what little had not splashed from the cup, Nicholas struggled to banish the fire from his eyes, and when the world was no longer crimson, he cast the now-empty copper dish onto the grass, heedless of the tiny curls of acrid smoke rising from his singed fingers.

“Can you not see her?” Leander’s hoarse voice entreated. “She is there, at the cross.” The boy raised an unsteady hand to point upward, at the church’s great dome.

Nicholas looked, and saw only the once-gleaming cross that had for centuries stood atop St. Sophia’s, now pulled over on its side with only one charred and broken crosspiece still intact.

“There is no one...” he started to say, but Leander hadn’t heard him.
 
“She came for her icon, to take it back with her to Heaven. The saints came for theirs as well. I saw...” The boy coughed, one hand clutching at Nicholas’ bloodied tunic. “I saw them disappear into the walls, and take the holy fathers with them. They said they would return, when Sophia is once again our Lord’s.”

“Why did He allow this?” Nicholas fought back verging tears to shout his query heavenward. “Why?! What kind of ‘just God’ permits this desecration? This butchery?”

An apparently unhearing God gave him no answer, but the dying boy who clung to him did.

“He punishes us,” the weak voice responded. “For the sin of arrogance. For calling ourselves God’s City on Earth.” Again, the boy’s eyes looked to the dome and the vision that only he could see there. “She says that God’s true kingdom is not of this world. But we are charged.. to keep faith...”

“Don’t try to talk.” Nicholas covered Leander’s trembling hand with his. “Save your strength.”

The young eyes seemed to focus on him for the first time. “Will you tell them, Master Nicholas? About the miracles we saw here tonight? God’s people cannot lose faith. Tell them.”

How can I? Nicholas wanted to say. God abandoned me, and I Him, a very long time ago. But aloud, he said, “I will tell them, Leander.”

The boy smiled. Then, abruptly, the small hand clutching Nicholas’ tunic released it and fell away.

“No...” Nicholas gathered the frail form back into his arms then and hugged it tightly to him, willing it to live. But neither breath nor heartbeat remained to obey his wish.

In the shadow of Sophia’s broken cross,  the one-time crusader from Brabant rocked the young son of a Byzantine shoemaker in his arms, and wept.

*    *    *

The Beast was his again.

Nick could feel its incredible strength filling him once more, changing him, augmenting all of his senses with its power. As though consciously reveling in its return, the vampire at once exerted the Hunger, tantalized by the blood scent that clung to the mortal nearby. Eyes gold and fangs bared, it snarled and reached out to take hold of the source of that scent. It could smell two mortals close by, and rejoiced that it would feed so well this night.

“Nick...”

The other one – a female – had dared to grab hold of his shoulder in a feeble effort to pull him away from the male. The vampire growled its indignation at her, turned and struck the tiny weapon she held from her hand. She cried out, stumbling backward, regaining her balance in time to flee across the room.

She wasn’t fast enough. No mortal ever was. Not that there was anywhere for her to go.

The Beast caught her easily, pinned her struggling against the tall wine rack and drew the auburn hair away from her throat, ready to partake of the heady, sweet nectar it could sense pulsing there.

“Nick!”

Someone had screamed his name. Nick fought to remember. He knew that voice.
 
Again, a mortal hand – the man’s – seized his shoulder to pull him back, this time pressing the cold glass of a wine bottle into his grasp. Snarling in fury at this interruption, the vampire cast the thing away. Glass shattered.

The blood scent became suddenly tenfold, driving the Beast mad with rampaging hunger. It shoved the bothersome male aside and turned back to the female it still held imprisoned in its clasp.

Blood was life. And the Hunger must be fed.

The voice that he should know intervened again then, small, weak and pleading. “Nick... please... don’t!”

Natalie!

“It’s me, Nick. It’s Natalie. Oh God, please tell me you can hear me!”

Natalie...

Fighting to clamp down mental barriers, a panting Nick at last gained enough control to force the vampire to release its hold on the intended prey.

Run! he wanted to tell her then, but the Beast was not yet allowing him speech. Across the room, behind the wine racks, anywhere away from me.

Instead of fleeing, however, a terrified Natalie (he could hear her heart racing) reached behind her to pull another bottle from the wooden rack. She twisted out the cork and, hands shaking, held the offering out to him.

The Beast railed at him to smash it as he had the other, insisted that he take her for his feeding instead. Nick censured its demands by accepting the bottle from her and drinking deeply of its lifeless – but very much human – contents.

Through an amber haze, he watched Natalie all the while, and listened to her heart as it finally began slowing to its normal, mortal rate. By the time the bottle was drained, he had persuaded the Beast’s fangs to recede and had quenched the flames in its eyes. He wished that he could as easily extinguish the shame at what he had very nearly just done to Natalie.

His Natalie.

“Nat,” he tried to say, but his voice broke on that single syllable and further words failed him altogether.

“It’s okay.”

She reached out, took the empty bottle from him and returned it to the rack behind her. Then she caught both of his hands in her own and drew him close to her, apparently mindless of the danger that remained. “You’re all right now. We’re all right.”

A guilt-ridden Nick returned her embrace, cherishing the joyous warmth of holding her once again in his arms.

“I don’t deserve you,” he whispered.

“No,” she said with a tremulous smile. “But you’ve got me, anyway.”

Nick half-smiled at her, then sobered suddenly, remembering the vampire’s wrath as it had thrust the other mortal aside.

“LeFebre...”

He turned to find the faith healer, looking shaken but otherwise healthy, standing nearby against the storage room’s brick wall.

“Are you all right?” Nick asked him anyway.

LeFebre nodded. “I am unharmed.” He glanced down at the bloodied remains of his clothing and his voice quavered when he added, “Despite appearances.”

There was an awkward silence, during which LeFebre bent to retrieve Natalie’s pistol from the floor, carefully avoiding a pool of glass and gore close beside it. He came forward then to hand the gun to Nat.

“This, I believe, belongs to you.”

Nat took it, but handed the weapon in turn to Nick, who slipped it quickly into a coat pocket.

“I owe you my life,” LeFebre said to Nick then. “But I regret what my hubris has cost you.”

“You gave me something I hadn’t possessed in eight centuries,” Nick told him. “Don’t ever regret that.”

“All the same, I have failed,” LeFebre said. “I truly thought that we... that I could conquer the vampire, with God’s help. It seems my faith was not nearly so strong as I believed it to be.”

Nick held Natalie close to him, stroking her hair as he spoke. “Someone tried to tell me once, a long time ago, that our faith should never be dependent upon circumstances, especially when we ourselves have presumed to dictate those circumstances to God. I didn’t understand then. Now, I think I’m beginning to see what he meant.”

LeFebre’s eyes were tearing. “You have perhaps missed your calling, Detective Knight,” he said. “I think that at heart, you are truly a philosopher.”

“Well,” Natalie muttered against Nick’s shoulder, “I’d really love to stand around discussing theology all night long. But do you think we could maybe change the venue?” She pulled away to look up at Nick. “We don’t really have to wait for Spider Woman out there to come back before we can get out of here, do we?”

Despite the solemnity of his mood, Nick found himself chuckling at her sarcasm.

“No, I guess not,” he said, and moved to the door Janette had earlier bolted from the outside. Eyes closed, he cast the vampire’s senses outward in search of Janette’s age-old, familiar signature, found it, and knew at once that she was not far away. She was also fully aware of his “reclamation,” and of all that had just occurred in her storage room. It was, after all, precisely the chain of events that she herself had carefully orchestrated.

A true child of her maker, was Janette.

Nick grasped the door’s handle, pulled, and was shortly rewarded with the satisfying sound of a hasp and padlock snapping apart and tumbling to the outer hall’s concrete floor.

Easing the now-free door open, he turned back to face his two mortal companions.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.