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In the Light of Day October 2003 last modified January 1, 2004 by Amy R. PG-13.  This parallel-reality fanfiction expects reader familiarity with the Sony/TriStar television program Forever Knight, especially the episodes "Fever," "Dead of Night," "The Games Vampires Play" and "The Human Factor."  Please consult the endnotes  for disclaimers, citations and credits.

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Table of Contents

1. The Happy Ending 6. Downtime 11. Pawns and Players  2. It's All Good 7. Just Starting Out 12. This for That 3. Urs Unexpected 8. Visiting Vachon 13. Homecoming 4. What He Said 9. Faith, Finances and Flowers  14. Au Revoir   5. What She Said   10. Explanations * Endnotes

Chapter One: The Happy Ending ⁰¹

        Natalie racked her brain for Nick's current alarm code as she rushed her car into his parking lot of a driveway.  Half panicked by his message on her office voice mail, she could not remember the sequence.  He had said he felt "not all right."  What the heck was that supposed to mean?  She had tried calling from her cellular phone as she drove, but only his machine picked up.

        Grabbing her purse, regular pathologist's case and rarely-used medical bag from behind her seat, Natalie reflected that it had all seemed too good to be true, these past two months since Cal died -- that is, since Lacroix murdered Cal, and the vampire chanced on the ironic cure in his victim's HIV-infected blood for the fever then decimating his kind.  A horrible juncture, but there it was.  Since then, Nick and she had made such progress!  Recovering from the fever, Nick had adhered scrupulously to her prescriptions.  He had swallowed garlic pills, drunk protein shakes, consumed enzyme concoctions and progressively reduced his blood intake to nil.  His pulse and temperature had increased -- slowly at first, but then geometrically, proportionate with the decline of the rogue RNA tag in his cells.  Last week, Nick had witnessed only his second dawn in eight centuries -- this time with no drug fouling his perceptions.  She had necessarily hustled him back indoors after hardly an hour, but what an hour!  Even in her hurry toward Nick's door, Natalie wondered at how an old friend's death had coincided with a much dearer friend's closest approach to life.

        Stubborn vampire.  Before, he had never really believed that only the blood stood between him and his ancient dream of recovered humanity.  Heck, even she had doubted.  Simple abstinence had not eliminated his vampirism when Nick suffered amnesia earlier this winter, for example, nor when he joined that twelve-step program three years ago.  But now, here they were, and what else could possibly explain it?  Now . . . .

        Now, Natalie pressed the button next to the old warehouse's elevator and hoped she was not too late.  "It's me.  Are you there, Nick?  What's wrong?"

        "Hey, Nat," his voice flowed through the speaker, sounding anxious, but otherwise as strong and clear as ever.  Natalie released a breath she did not realize she had caught.  "Come on up."

        The exterior door unlocked with a click and Natalie stepped inside.  "That didn't answer my question," she reprimanded the intercom over her shoulder as the door slid shut behind her.  It did not even begin to answer her questions.  What could have gone wrong?  Everything had been so right!  The vampire RNA factor had ceased to duplicate in his new cells, and its effects sloughed away with the old.  Had Nick relapsed to the blood -- had someone made him relapse?  Resentment of past interference by Lacroix boiled over and temporarily drowned her fears.  How was Nick supposed to stay clean if that blood broker kept urging the stuff on him?  How was she supposed to get accurate data if Lacroix kept sabotaging her experiments?

        The elevator bumped into place with a clang.  Nick slid open the heavy steel door from inside his loft before she could reach the handle.  "Thanks for coming."

        "Since when do you have so many lamps?" she asked, stepping into the cavernous room and goggling at the light.  "Never mind."  She shook her head against the dazzle and refocused on Nick.  At first inspection, he looked as well as she had ever seen him.  A tad pink, or maybe ginger -- an unexpected skin tint accentuated by his white dress shirt and black jeans.  And his dark-blond hair appeared damp.  Sweat? she wondered.  But other than that and the slightly strained expression, she would have pronounced him the healthiest, fittest, thirty-something-looking man she had seen all week.  "What's happened, and what can I do to help?"

        "Do you want to set down your stuff?"  He gestured at the table defining his dining room, halfway between his well-worn piano and like-new kitchen sink.

        "You're not answering my questions, Nick," she pointed out, but went to deposit her bags on the table, anyway, avoiding the ivory-inlaid wood box currently serving as centerpiece.  It was probably worth a king's ransom -- or had held a king's ransom -- or maybe Nick had picked it up last week at Pottery Barn.  She just never knew.  Shrugging out of her winter coat, Natalie said, "And you didn't answer your phone when I called from my car, either.  What's up?"

        "You called?  I'm sorry; I didn't hear."  Nick strode past his piano to look at the answering machine on the credenza behind his couch.  One of his new lamps obscured the blinking red light.  "I was in the shower."

        Natalie planted her hands on her hips.  "Why don't we start at the beginning?"

        "Because all epics begin in the middle?" Nick bantered back, gesturing expansively, but a sudden pinch of pain snuffed his light smile.  His hands retracted toward his chest, curled like claws.

        "Nick!"  Natalie ran across the room as he slumped against the back of his couch.  Was he having a heart attack?  Had he become human enough to be able to suffer myocardial infarction?

        "I'm all right."  He took a deep breath and waved a still-clenched hand self-deprecatingly.  She caught it and began to take his pulse.  Was that pure sunburn on his face, or part embarrassed blush?

        "You didn't look all right.  Where does it hurt?"

        "Mainly my chest.  But it's not what you're thinking.  It's not cardiovascular or pulmonary --"

        "Not to underestimate your nineteenth-century medical training," she interrupted, not raising her gaze from her watch, "or your stint with the Red Cross in Vietnam, for that matter, but the doctor who diagnoses himself . . . multiplied equals seventy-two beats per minute."  Natalie looked up, her eyes wide.  "That's normal human range!  Normal!"

        "I know."  Nick's smile lit the loft more brightly than all his new lamps.  "It hasn't dropped below fifty-eight all week -- while I'm awake, in any case.  I was waiting for our appointment tomorrow night to tell you."

        "Oh, Nick.  Believe me, I want to know these things when they happen.  That's outstanding progress!"  Moving to embrace him, she saw the wince as her arm brushed his chest.  "Sorry.  Tell me again what hurts."

        "It comes and goes, now more intense, then completely subsiding.  It's like a burning, or maybe freezing, crackling across this thin layer right beneath my skin.  Mainly here," he gestured across his pectorals, again with his fingers curled, "but also on my calves.  I began noticing it around sunset.  Like I said, it comes and goes.  When I called you a few hours ago, it was as bad as it's been."

        "I'm sorry it took me so long to get back to you," Natalie apologized, turning over the symptoms in her mind.  "I was out on a case.  Two-car collision -- one death -- completely accidental.  It's an almost blind turn around a hill and, in the dark, and then the sudden glare of headlights, it seems each misjudged where the other was headed."

        "I knew you were working tonight.  I'm sorry for bothering you."

        "Don't be.  It's been, what, five, six years now since I signed on to this quest for a cure?  We're in this together, all the way.  Holmes and Watson, Bogey and Bacall, Lambert and Knight."

        "Kong and Wray?"

        "No way.  You'll claim you're Wray and make me the monkey.  Nick," she shrugged apologetically.  "I will need you to take off your shirt, you know."

        "Of course."

        Natalie returned to the table, shuffling through her case to give him a moment.  Mentally, she sorted Nick's symptoms, stifling the renegade bit of her brain that crawled out of its cave to promote a decidedly non-medical perspective on Nick disrobing.  How dare she think of that just now?  No merely attractive body would ever compromise her scientific detachment, she hoped, but somewhere along their strange journey to scientific breakthrough, she had fallen in love with this fascinating, driven man, and, she believed, he with her.  But stolen moments, stifled declarations, unspoken understandings -- sometimes her life felt like a monument to confused frustration.  For the same reason she could not do the ethical thing and resign this project into another scientist's hands, this patient to another doctor's care, she had never been able to simply ask him out on a date.  As Nick's vampirism had brought them together, so it held them apart.

        What second-rate horror fiction romantically dubbed "the vampire's kiss" proved invariably fatal in real life, Nick had carefully explained.  Once, fast and clean, or repeatedly, slow and zombiefied -- the human was inevitably just as dead in the end.  So she plugged away at the project of making Nick human, helpless to prevent the slow merging of her own emotional riddles with the scientific puzzle she had originally undertaken from him.

        Professional and personal, all goals had combined in Nick.  So close now to success in one, could she no longer entirely separate the two?

        Turning to Nick, Natalie saw him folding his white t-shirt lengthwise before draping it over the back of his couch next to the button-down shirt already hanging neatly there.  Crossing to set her notebook near his answering machine, she teased, "Preventing wrinkles?"

        "Old habits, I suppose."  Nick turned around then, and Natalie's breath hissed out through her teeth.  Easily seen through his thin crop of chest hair, Nick's pale skin reddened beneath a lattice of white lines, accented periodically by rough flakes peeling away from their surroundings.  The rusty tint of his face and hands testified to his exceeding her prescribed sun exposure, but sunburn fell short of explaining this.

        "Does it itch?" she asked, leaning in.  He had definitely been scratching.

        "I wouldn't call it an itch.  Itching stops after you scratch, right?  Like brushing a bug off your skin?"

        "Not necessarily," Natalie answered absently, on the verge of hypothesis.  If he had forgotten the nature of mortal itches over his undead centuries, the simplest answer might indeed apply.  "Nick, you said you were in the shower when I called.  Did the water help?"

        "Yeah, while I was in it, but then it was worse, after.  How did you know?"

        "What soap do you use?" Natalie persisted.

        "What?  Uh, it's called 'Magma.'  It comes in yellow bars, and powder.  It's great for removing blood . . ." Nick trailed off when Natalie failed to choke down her laugh at the product's name.  "What's funny?"

        She held up one finger as she raced to her bag, still swallowing a chuckle.  Retrieving a stout plastic tube, she unscrewed the cap as she strode back to him.  "I'm sorry, Nick.  I shouldn't laugh; I'm sure it does hurt.  But this isn't a set-back.  This is actually a good thing!  It looks like you're close enough to humanity now to suffer dry skin."

        "Dry skin?"

        "Very dry skin."  Natalie handed over the 'Intensive Care Moisturizing Lotion' for his inspection after squeezing some of the vaguely-botanical-smelling cream into her hand.  "Exacerbated by industrial-strength soap.  That stuff is for removing automotive oil from fingernails, Nick, not all-over body washing!  You never do anything half-way."  She gently set her palm on his chest, ready to pull back if it stung him.  He gasped, then nodded, no doubt able to feel the parched skin soaking up the moisture.  The driest, most irritated patches spread out where the shower spray must strike most and hardest, carrying away his skin's natural lubricants.  Natalie avoided those, simply smearing off the lotion on her hand and stepping back.

        Reaching up to rub it in, Nick noted, "It's not the most dignified affirmation of returned humanity, but I can say for certain that I've never heard of a vampire with dry skin."

        "Did you have dry skin before?"

        "Before Lacroix?  I don't remember anything like this!"  He squeezed more lotion into his hand.  "But it's not like we had daily showers in the thirteenth century."

        "A protective layer of sweat and grime would hold in the skin's oils," Natalie concurred.  "Well, from now on, buy regular soap, please.  Moisturizing.  The kind marked 'for dry skin,' if at all possible."  She started to cross her arms, then remembered the slick sheen of lotion still on her hand.  Holding it up for him to see, she grinned.  "If you want to sit down, I could help you with that."

        Nick's right hand stilled over his heart, and his left extended the lotion tube to her.  His slow, sly smile made her want to laugh even as it stole her breath away.

        During his head-wound-induced amnesia months before, Nick had demonstrated how attractive he found her without the complications that made their relationship so unique.  That had gone only so far, of course.  On the one hand, even had they succeeded, sex would have proven possibly injurious to him, and inevitably hollow to her.  She wanted his heart, not just his hormones.  On the other hand, retrospectively certain, rediscovering his vampirism with his fangs in her neck would have represented a definite set-back to the experiment.  So, trembling, still standing in front of his fireplace, she had called a halt when he suggested making love.  But, ever since, every look, every touch, reminded her that he had asked, and she had wanted.

        His full memory restored, and that one particular memory stroking her whichever way she turned, Nick's reticence had come to seem only caution, not the indifference -- or, worse, obligation -- she used to fear.  In her triumphant discovery of the vampiric RNA's recession, a comradely, congratulatory kiss had become something more.  Since then, his ingrained hesitation had peeled away with the vampirism that inspired it.  When she smiled back at him and took the lotion tube, he circled to the front of his black leather sofa and sat down.

        Shrugging out of her blazer to spare it moisturizer stains, Natalie draped it next to Nick's shirts and joined him on the couch.  Treating his sorely parched skin was her first concern.  But she let herself think about what was in his smile, and where they could take this now that the beast on his back no longer had the strength to overpower him when he reached for her.  And, oh, she wanted him to reach for her!  It had been so long.  Natalie wondered if Nick had become too human to hear her pulse pick up speed.

        "Nice blouse," he mused.  "New?"

        "Yes, thanks."  She glanced down at her purple shirt before squeezing some of the tube's contents into her hand.  Meeting his eyes, she smiled confidently into the humor and half-faked lasciviousness she found there.  "It's called a 'shell,' actually, which is department-store-speak for 'overpriced silk tank-top,' but it matches my favorite suit."  Natalie set the tube aside and began working her way systematically across Nick's chest with both hands.

        "I went outside today," he offered.

        "I guessed," she said.  "Even with the new sunscreen, you still burn so easily!  And I thought we agreed on a schedule for sun exposure?  No, sorry.  Never mind.  That's the wrong question.  The right question is, how was it?"

        "Glorious."

        Rich, smooth and deep, the word rose up from the bottom of his lungs and probably the bottom of his soul.  Natalie felt those three syllables ripple down her torso from her ears to her hips.  If the day had been a fraction as pleasing as Nick's perception of it, she regretted sleeping through it.  "But I thought today was overcast?"

        "It was."  She felt him shrug under her hands, and looked up to see him smile -- this time, the smile of a small boy to whom everything was new and good.  "The clouds evened out the light, I think, reflecting it around.  So the light was softer, with less sun, but not a shadow anywhere, not in a single corner.  It was like the world to the horizon lit equally, every step of the way.  Nat, it was the mirror opposite of night!  And I walked through it."

        "Oh."  She smiled back, then returned her gaze to his chest.  The less-damaged skin had already improved visibly, but some serious mid-thoracic scratches, on both sides, might take over a week to vanish entirely, without vampiric healing.

        Without vampiric healing.  Without the vampire.

        Somehow, the realization startled her.  She had known with her head, but now his skin warmed her hands.  Placing one over his long-suffering heart, she slid her other up to his neck to feel his reborn pulse beating away, steady and strong and human.  She looked up into his eyes, the same brave blue as before, but she fancied the sea now had a floor, the sky a limit.  The vampire in him was not just restrained or suppressed; it was dead.  The project was over, the adventure ended.  As physically close to Nick as she had ever been, Natalie suddenly felt cryingly alone.  "We really did it, didn't we?"

        "Yes."  His decisive smile conveyed the surety of experience endured and independence earned.  "We've won."

        "You sound awfully confident."

        "I am," Nick answered.  "C'mere."  He tugged gently at her right arm with one hand and placed his other on her left thigh.  Surprised but agreeable, she knelt over his lap so their eyes met straight on.  He clasped his hands around her waist, dropping his voice until his words thrummed under her hands as well as in her ears.  "A vampire's heart beats every ten minutes; mine beats every second.  Vampires implode in sunlight; I'm starting a tan.  Vampires drink blood; I had canned ravioli for supper -- with garlic toast.  The Hunger --" and Natalie could hear the capitalization, the nuance that distinguished vampiric craving "-- is stanched.  You're the one who explained the diminishing vampire RNA factor.  You charted my food intake, sun tolerance, pulse rate, body temperature, and I don't know what all!  I'd offer more dramatic proof, but somehow stabbing myself so we can watch me not heal doesn't seem proportionate."

        Natalie gave him a sharp look and a slight punch in the arm for threatening himself, even in jest.  "That's not funny, Nick."

        "It is, too."  He grinned, then continued gently.  "This isn't just today, Nat.  It's weeks now, and there's no lydovuterine, amnesia, or magic to praise or blame this time.  This is real, and it's all your science."

        "I know," she hesitated.  Why did she not want to believe the evidence she herself had collected?  "Of course I know!  But we pretty much knew all this a few days ago, too, and you weren't this sure then.  What changed?"

        "Dry skin?" Nick grinned again.  "No, of course not.  I've known all day, Nat.  I've just known.  The one kind of evidence nothing and no one could fake or distort.  I am human."  He lifted his left hand to her hair where she could feel it slipping loose from its bun.  "I went to Mass."

        "Oh."  Natalie's heart sank into her stomach as he invoked something so non-empirical as his final proof.  She felt even more isolated than before.  Well, at least this meant Nick believed in this new mortality.  She doubted it demonstrated much else, but his reaction to religious objects and settings -- which she could only assume psychosomatic -- had persisted consistently before.  "What made you think to do that?"

        He laughed, and she felt reassured.  "No credit to me, I was just out walking, watching the sun rise, and happened to pass St. John's while the organist was practicing beforehand.  He's quite good, really.  I listened at the door for a while, then snuck in to a pew way in the back.  I just sat quietly there the whole time."  Pausing, Nick placed his hand on hers, which still rested over his heart.  "I don't claim any miracle or revelation, Nat.  It's not like that.  But I've felt what it was to invade a holy place as a vampire and, today, I felt what it is to be gathered in as a human."

        "Human," she echoed wistfully.  "So we really did it, huh?  This is it?"

        "Have I thanked you yet?"  Nick leaned very close, running his hands up her back, tilting his head and meeting her eyes.  His breath felt warm and smelled faintly of toothpaste.  His nose brushed past hers, and his lips almost touched hers.  Almost.  Natalie hesitated, hovered and then closed the minute gap between them.

        One soft, light kiss.  A flock of feathery kisses, gentle, sweet.  Undemanding.  Natalie leaned back, caught Nick's eyes and mimed ripping a tag from his neck.  Then she shredded the imaginary tag in front of his face.

        "What was that?"

        "Your 'handle with care, sharp edges' label."

        Nick stared uncomprehending for a second, then began to laugh.  "That's only for removal by the end consumer, you know."

        "Guess that means I'm stuck with you."  Natalie threaded her fingers into Nick's hair, angled his head, and offered a completely different species of kiss.

        Surfacing for air an eternity later, Natalie found her hands tracing slick, tight circles against Nick's chest.  Consciously redirecting one hand to his left ear and the other around his back, she leaned in for another kiss, if he would so oblige.

        He did.  At some point, it must have occurred to him that the lotion on his chest was damaging her new purple shell, however, because he tried to disengage and apologize.  Kissing an earlobe, Natalie insisted that the shirt had given its life in a very good cause indeed, and then moved to dispense with it entirely.  Nick, breathing heavily, stayed her hand.

        "Nat, we do have to talk about a few things.  Now.  Before we go any further."  She began to reply, but he laid a gentle finger across her lips.  "We have talked, I know.  But it's never been a . . . decision.  You are my best friend, Nat.  Your friendship is the most important relationship in my life now -- and now I even have a life!  I don't want to risk our friendship if this . . . if . . ."

        "What are you saying, Nick?"  Natalie sat up a little straighter, and Nick's hand fell back to his side.  She knew better than to believe that with the scientific puzzle solved, the emotional pieces would fall smartly into place as well, but -- she had hoped.  And he had given every indication he had, too.  Blast euphemism.  And delicacy.  Much better to get it clear.  "Do you not want to have sex?"

        "Of course I do!  I know you haven't missed the evidence.  I just don't . . .  Nat, the amnesia uncovered it, and these past two months brought it home.  I love you.  I'm in love with you.  And I want you.  But what we want isn't always what's best.  If this is for the wrong reasons, just because I'm human now . . . just because we can . . .  Nat, after everything we've both been through, I don't want that for us.  This should be for the right reasons, or not at all."

        Natalie shut her eyes and swallowed.  He had just said he was in love with her.  And she could not possibly want anything more than she did him right now.  He needed better reasons than those?  She took a deep breath.  Then another.  Opening her eyes, Natalie said, "This is not like during the asteroid scare, or when you lost your memory.  This is about life -- your new life.  I love you, too, Nick.  You have been my world for six amazing years.  Please," she whispered, brushing her lips against his.  "Make love with me."

        She took his kiss for "yes," but then he pulled away again with that same worry hovering around his eyes.  She sighed, and teased herself about discovering a downside to the self-denial she had pressed him so hard to practice as a vampire.  "More to talk about?"

        "A bit," he admitted, touching his forehead to hers and stroking the back of her neck with one hand while undoing what remained of her bun with the other.  Her thick hair swung down to surround both their faces.  "Excuse me my newly-human anxieties, but it's entirely possible something's damaged, after being a vampire . . . and eight centuries out of the gene pool . . . I know you can do the research -- maybe you already have? -- but if we become parents sooner rather than later, the child will have to live with whatever I pass on, and if that's something vampiric . . ."

        "Oh."  Natalie's thoughts raced.  No form of birth control is infallible, of course, but children had been far from her mind, and vampirism's possible hereditary permutations even further.  It embarrassed her.  And what did he mean, "sooner rather than later"?  Tossing back her hair and leaning off Nick's lap, Natalie shifted toward the arm of the couch and swung her legs around to set both feet on the floor.  "You're right, Nick; we need to talk.  I have done some research, and . . .  But what else is worrying you, first?"

        He swallowed.  "As you remember, Cal's HIV-positive blood cured the vampire fever.  It's been just a few months since you injected me with it.  Now, you've said that the HIV obliterated the vampire-fever virus, and that the HIV then promptly died inside the vampiric system, as it would in a dead body, but --"

        "Believe me, Nick, if I thought there were any possibility either of us was HIV-positive -- !"

        Nick winced, and Natalie instantly apologized.  "I'm sorry.  You're being sensible, and I'm not being fair.  My body's just running on a different track than my brain, and apparently my mouth with it."  Regretting breaking physical contact, she clasped his right hand between both of hers and lifted it to her lips.  "I've been checking you for HIV since Cal's death, Nick, and the current tests aren't subject to the old 'hiding' incubation gaps.  There's a lag for the results, sure, but it's been straight negatives.  The vampire immune system is -- was -- a marvelous thing.  You're clear."

        "I'm glad.  I don't want to put you at risk."

        "And here I thought the risks would end when you became human."  Natalie smiled, touched by this manifestation of his habitual caution with the dangers he perceived himself to present.

        "No."  Nick's expression darkened, and he traced her lips with a finger.  "The old risks just made way for new ones.  Lacroix won't be happy about this -- my humanity or our relationship.  He may consider our truce broken.  He may even call in . . . older debts."  Natalie released his hand, and kissed his finger when he left it on her lips.  Nick smiled, but added to the warning.  "And even if he leaves us alone, we're both now 'mortals who know,' targets for those who protect the vampires' secret should anyone report us.  I have a few friends, but they may yet consider me as one dead, and if worse comes to worst, we may have no choice but to run -- maybe separately.  More, I doubt I'm hypnotism-resistant, so my memory and identity sit vulnerable to the first vampire who cares to tamper.  And even if the vampire community leaves us to ourselves, we'll have to be careful at work or we may get reassigned to prevent conflicts of interest."  As his cautions escalated, so did the attention her mouth lavished on his hand.  "I'm alive and human now, but Lacroix might destroy that tomorrow night, or a bullet the next day, or my new humanity may yet turn toward dust as it settles under the weight of eight centuries."

        "I love you," Natalie assured him.  "Whatever comes, Nick, I love you."  Maybe everything was not over yet, after all.  She kissed him again, floating on a sudden wave of excitement, then drew back with what she meant as a suggestive smile, but suspected was at best a rather silly grin.  "Didn't you say your calves were in the same condition as your chest?"

        "Yes," Nick confirmed, grinning back.  "Yes, I believe I did."

        "So some of this," Natalie picked up the lotion tube, "would be welcome there?"

        "Oh, absolutely," he laughed, and kissed her shoulder just below the shell's hem.

        "Shall we take this conversation upstairs and see about that?"

        "I don't think I'm strong enough to carry you anymore."

        "I'd planned on walking."  Laughing back, she stood and pulled him up with her.  "Besides, you'll need your strength for something else."

        "As milady commands."  Nick's elaborate, joking bow ended with him on one knee.  Concerned, Natalie bent over to help him, but he gestured for her to stay up, and retrieved a black velvet pouch from his back pocket, which he untied and unfolded, revealing a ring.  The delicate band shone with intricately entwined gold and platinum, and no jewel broke the smooth circle.  "I have a human heart to give, now, but it's already been yours for some time.  Natalie, will you make me your husband?"

        "Oh!" she breathed.  For a split second, all Natalie felt was surprise.  They had never discussed this.  Wasn't it just a bit sudden?  Even quite a bit sudden?  Then she looked up from the ring to his ardent expression.  "Of course.  Yes, of course I'll marry you, Nick."

Chapter Two: It's All Good ⁰²

        Never before had Nick felt the lack of a window in his bedroom.  The closest he had come was the first time Tracy had seen the inside of his home.  The rookie detective had jokingly threatened to report her partner to the appropriate authorities for the numerous fire codes violated by the windowless sleeping quarters and locking metal shutters, but since both obviously fell under the cover of Nick's "allergy" to sunlight, the observation passed lightly and never recurred.  Nick had hidden many eccentricities under that allergy in recent years.  Though he did not yet know how to present his "recovery" or explain those eccentricities that might prove impossible to shake even now, he could not have been happier to lose his excuse.

        Except perhaps, he thought as he leaned against the glass in his living room and looked out into the misty dawn, if there were a window in his bedroom.

        Until a few weeks ago, such a window would have exposed the vampire's refuge to its most persistent foe.  Today, a bedroom window, with light creeping around the curtain edges and through the shutter cracks, would have allowed him to watch Natalie's face as she slept at his side, her thick, curling, brown hair spilling up and over the pillow, away from her head, so her shoulders would not trap it if she turned as she dreamed.  Today, a window would have allowed him to confirm again with his eyes the almost unbelievable presence of the human woman beside whom he had spent the night.

        But, human, he could no longer see in the dark and, with the lamp off, his bedroom remained very dark indeed.  Reluctant to wake Natalie, reluctant to leave her, Nick's reluctance to wait in the blackness when sunlight beckoned had finally triumphed, and he had slipped away downstairs and raised all the shades.  Leaving the living-room window to perch himself on his couch with a mug of orange juice, he stared at his pallid feet protruding into the cloudy light from under the cuffs of his pajama trousers and marveled at it all.

        So much was so good that he could not even decide on the best part.  At the moment, the leading contenders were the end of the vampire's all-consuming hunger, and, well, Natalie.  Close behind came the sunlight, and freedom from the twin fears that he would not -- or would -- be heard if he dared to pray.

        The unobtrusive little box on his coffee table caught his attention.  Plain oak, one iron band for reinforcement, polished by time alone: it hardly looked the part of a reliquary.  "I do not fear death any longer, Joan," Nick said quietly, setting aside his orange juice.  "Not for itself.  You were right; those who choose the night dwell in constant fear of death.  Eventually, I chose the day.  But it's been such a long road from that choice!  On the other hand," he smiled, "the choice is everything, isn't it?"

        Suddenly restless, Nick stood and strode to the window, scanning the overcast cityscape.  Sun sliced some clouds, sending the pieces drifting.  When a bright beam bumped into the last of the night's rain and poured down in red, yellow, green, blue and purple, Nick's turbulent thoughts spun into the simplest prayer. "Thank you."

        "Talking to me?" Natalie yawned through a smile, leaning over the rail of the second-floor landing.

        Nick jumped.  "Uh, no."  She had startled him, still complacent in habits of vampiric senses.  His world had gotten a lot quieter over the past two months, but his expectations had yet to adjust.  "Not that the words don't apply to you, too."  He grinned up at her, admiring the angle at which his now wrinkled shirt skimmed her thighs, awed at the implications of his ring on her hand.  "Come see the rainbow."

        Yawning again, Natalie descended the steps and joined him at the window.  Circling his back with one arm, she tilted her head up for a quick kiss before looking out where he pointed.  The curving column of color bent away from the lake and vanished somewhere downtown.  "Nice."

        "That is one sight I truly haven't seen in eight centuries," Nick replied after a long moment drinking in the rainbow by sight and Natalie's closeness by scent and touch.  Human senses might not stretch far, but right now they encompassed everything he wanted in this world.  "Never again by flood."

        "Huh?"

        He looked down into her drowsy puzzlement.  "You know, Genesis.  Noah.  Sign of the first covenant."

        "Oh, right."  Natalie blinked.  "Yeah, next time it's fire."

        "Pessimist."

        "Only before coffee.  And I seem to recall someone else who's not usually at his best immediately on waking.  Speaking of which, what are you doing up, anyway?"

        "I like being up in the daytime, now."  Nick grinned, exhilarated with his new freedom from the sun's cycle.  Dawn and dusk chained the vampire, urging every blood-soaked cell toward deep, death-like sleep while the sun occupied the sky.  Human, he could make his own hours however he chose.  "And I seem to need a lot less sleep."

        "You, maybe," Natalie yawned and closed her eyes, snuggling against his side.  "Well, don't overdo it, especially before we get through the rest of that vaccination list.  A lot of germs have evolved since 1228, and you need sleep and good food if you don't want to end up in hospital dying of some trendy new bacteria."

        Nick kissed her forehead again.  "Food sounds good.  What would you like for breakfast?"

        "Actually, I want to go back to sleep."  Natalie opened her huge, owl-like eyes and looked up at him.  "Come with me?"

        "There's nothing I'd like better, Nat, but there are people I have to see today."  She looked hurt, and he kissed her to show he had not meant a rejection.

        She smiled and sighed.  "I suppose I should probably go to my own home.  Change clothes, feed Sidney, check messages.  Do you remember how to use the coffee maker?"

        A meal and a shower later, Nick circled the twenty-seventh precinct, seeking a parking space.  When one finally opened up, he maneuvered his Caddie in, and caught himself yearning for power steering.  His classic car had become increasingly difficult to drive as he shed vampiric strength and reflexes.

        Nick had been back to the twenty-seventh only a few times since the city consolidated the homicide squad under Captain Cohen's command at the ninety-sixth almost two years ago, each instance strictly on police business, and not at all since Don Schanke, his first partner, had died last fall.  Walking up to the building where he had spent nearly four years under Joe Stonetree's command, Nick felt almost as if he had stumbled back into an old life after beginning a new one, vampire style.  The sense of disorientation was the same, the impression of intrusion, but most of all the acute awareness of time's passage.

        It helped that it was daytime, he told himself.  He had never seen the squad room in the day, and he should not be able to picture himself and Schanke at desks that now belonged to others.  But the times there had been good, very good.  And it was not from here that Don Schanke and Amanda Cohen had died.  For nearly the first time in eight centuries, Nick was going to allow himself to walk back into his past, and pick up where he had left off.

        The freshness of this familiar world took his breath away.

* * *

October 1226, Cairo

        Sir Nicholas de Brabant, Knight of the Cross, scratched under his beard and tried to make out the women's agitated exchange.  In his five years of captivity, he had picked up enough Arabic to grasp the sense of most simple speech, but it was harder now, here in this dungeon-like cellar.  When Nicholas had first entered this wearying lot and had still hoped daily for ransom, those who held him had placed irons on his legs and used his strong back in constructing their strangely tall stone buildings in this timber-light land.  Then, he had shared at least a gesture, a look, and the comradeship of common labor with the men at his side.  Words had come more easily with their substance under his hands and before his eyes.

        Now, words floated down from beyond the outbuilding under which he languished, sifted like flour through the walls and stairs to his earthen floor.  He told himself again that he was glad of the dark coolness, a refuge from the withering summers, and relieved most of all to be spared the chains at last.  But God had not meant man to dwell alone, and sometimes Nicholas feared he would go mad with only his own remorse and resentment for company.  So he strained after the voices above, the first words of this day, snaring the whispers like slippery fish.

        "Nar!"  Fire!  The women's dispute split into a shriek and a shout, a word Nicholas knew taken up by more and more voices.  He pushed himself to his feet and listened even harder as dropped tools clattered and feet pounded all over the compound.  Those who stirred fires, tended animals and prepared the morning meal had been at their tasks, but others were just now waking to the general din.  A man's voice shouted about the smithy; a woman asserted something about the old clay oven.  Nicholas wondered how much threat fire could present in this place of stone and sand, then remembered the spring growth and summer drought, the thin grasses ringing the outer walls, and the precious orchards beyond.  He paced as the commotion swelled.

        "You, wood-worshipper!"  Nicholas froze in surprise at the familiar slur in unfamiliar French.  Here, only Kemal, whom Nicholas judged the reeve of this manor, spoke the language of the Crusaders, and that official now flung open the door to his prison.  "To the well!  Hurry, or you shall burn in this life as well as the next."

        Nicholas took the stairs three at a time and plunged headlong into the storehouse above, only to hesitate, blinking, on the threshold.  The first light of dawn hurt his eyes and stirred his soul.

        "Now, foolish Frank!" Kemal barked, tossing an empty bucket at him.  Nicholas caught it and hastened to the covered well at the center of the courtyard.  He joined a line of men passing full jars, pots and buckets out the north gate, where black smoke billowed and a ghastly roar underlay frightened shouts.  Children ran in the opposite direction with the empty containers, and somewhere behind them Nicholas knew women carried the household's treasures out of danger.  From the corner of his eye, he saw a slight, veiled girl clutching a huge tome as a taller woman lifted a kind of zither.  Nicholas thought fleetingly of his sister at home in Brabant with her books, and then of his beloved Gwyneth, now cold in her grave, holding her harp in Carreg.

        But his momentary distraction broke the rhythmic flow of buckets from hand to hand, and after a hard cuff from Kemal, Nicholas did not raise his gaze again until he reached out for the next water container and found none to hand.  Stretching, then, he saw that the smoke had finally dwindled to a faint, white column, and realized he had edged closer and closer to the gate during the anxious effort to supply water to those laboring at the edge of the fire.  All around, relieved men remarked on how more or less time had passed than they had thought during the crisis.  Many clustered together, savoring the excitement, while others slowly scattered back to their accustomed labors.

        Nicholas looked out the north gate.  Open, it reminded him that he also stood unfettered this morning, and suddenly the world looked as new as the eighth day of creation.  What he had seen a thousand times, he had never seen before.  Nicholas stepped behind two workmen, followed them through the gate, then turned -- with purpose, but without haste -- toward the orchards.  From the orchards, he could reach the river.  From the river, he could reach . . . he did not know.

        But he was free, if he could keep it.

        And the world was more beautiful than he had ever known.

* * *

        "Why, Detective Knight!" Norma Ellis greeted him from behind the front desk as he entered the precinct.

        "Hi, Norma."  He smiled gently and reached over to clasp her hand.  He had not seen her since Schanke's funeral, either.  The cloud-filtered light drifting in the windows showed her warm brown complexion to more advantage than the night-shift's fluorescents ever had.  "So are you on days, now?"

        "Oh, years now, ever since the big reshuffle.  I have enough seniority -- and what are you doing out in the day?  Have they finally found something for your allergies?"

        "Finally."  He confined his exuberance to a wide grin.  "Hey, what's Captain Stonetree's schedule look like?"

        "If you're just dropping in to say hello, you can probably go in now.  If it's case related, though, you should go through Ka."

        "Ka?"

        Norma pointed to a slender young man at a desk outside the captain's office.  "Ka Hasegawa.  Stonetree's secretary."

        "Stonetree has a secretary?"

        "Of course he does.  Didn't you know?"

        "Uh--" Nick cudgeled his memory.

        Norma laughed.  "It was Susie Peterson when you were here, but never mind.  The administrative pool works days.  It's been good to see you, detective."

        "You too, Norma."  Nick let her get back to her work, and headed for the young man's desk.  On the way, however, he stepped past the open door of Stonetree's office, triggering an implacable, familiar bark.

        "Knight!"

        "Captain?"

        "Wonders never cease."  Joe Stonetree came to his doorway to stare down at his former subordinate, surely noting the lack of sunglasses, gloves, hat and Nick's other usual sun-protection measures.  A genial smile spread from ear to ear.  "So you come here to show off your allergy cure, or are you slumming with us non-homicide division types?"

        "A little of both, Cap.  Do you have a minute?"

        "Do I, Ka?"

        "You have twenty-five minutes," the slight young man answered seriously.

        "You heard the man, Knight.  Make yourself at home."  Stonetree returned to the depths of his office, and Nick followed, closing the door behind him.

        "I am glad to see you out in the daylight, Knight.  Schanke . . . Schanke would be glad, too."

        "Thank you, Captain."  Nick dropped his eyes a moment.  "I know Schanke would have loved to get the heck off night shift, and that he stayed really only because of me.  That's one reason I'm here, actually."

        "Oh?"

        "I heard a rumor that the Police Commission has decided to break up the homicide squad again, spread it out away from the ninety-sixth.  The justification is closer familiarity with different parts of the city, but actually it's a cost-saver.  They say it would never have gotten a hearing if Captain Cohen had lived."

        Stonetree crossed his arms behind his head and leaned back, his chair squeaking disapprovingly under his solid bulk.  "Rumor flies."

        Nick measured his response.  "When the split comes through, would you be willing to take on me and my partner here, on day-shift?"

        Stonetree did not blink.  "No."

        "No?"

        "You're still partnered with Commissioner Vetter's kid."

        "Tracy.  I wouldn't call her a 'kid.'"  Not anymore, he amended to himself.  Not after this year.

        "We're all someone's kid, Knight.  I'm a father; I know what that's like.  And I've been here longer than you can count on your fingers and toes; I know what Vetter is like.  No offense to your partner, but I don't want her in my command if I can help it."  He uncrossed his arms and dropped them to his desk, leaning forward.  "If you want reassignment alone, I'll do what I can for you."

        "I appreciate that, Captain."  But Nick did not want reassignment alone.  He wanted to bring Tracy with him, not only for the team he felt they were finally becoming, but to help lift her out of the dark world of vampires into which being his partner had introduced her.  He could not leave her behind in that, even if he could no longer really defend her.  As long as Tracy was stuck on the night shift, so was he.  Nick swallowed bitterly, then found himself coughing; he could not breathe!  His throat hurt and his lungs and -- and then it was over.

        "Wrong pipe?" Stonetree asked.

        "Uh, yeah.  Wrong pipe."  Shaken, Nick raised a hand to his throat and mentally reviewed the relevant anatomy from the inside out.  For a split second of pain and fear, the entire world had contracted to that wayward swallow.  But Stonetree's nonchalant response reminded him that this was just something that happened sometimes.  He would get used to it.  He had to.  "Well, again, Captain, I appreciate it, but I'm not interested in a new partner."  Nick stood and extended his hand.

        Stonetree stood, too, but raised an eyebrow instead of accepting Nick's gesture.  "Was that everything?  You said that was 'part' of the reason you came."

        Reminded, Nick grinned, and wondered if grins would be his habitual expression now that he was human.  Despite dry skin, wrong pipes, and Stonetree's refusal, the world was a wonderful place.  "Nat -- Doctor Lambert -- and I are engaged."

        "Congratulations!"  Now Stonetree shook his hand, and clapped him on the back.  Dispensing praise of matrimony, Stonetree steered Nick into the squad room and called for attention to share the announcement.  Those who had known Nick and Natalie under the old precinct organization came up to express their delight.

        The stranger at what Nick could not help but think of as Don Schanke's desk was one of those who merely clapped politely and returned to their work.

Chapter Three: Urs Unexpected ⁰³

        "Massive internal trauma," Natalie sang to herself, making up a tune as she went.  "Caused by impalement.  Anomalously bruised upper thorax."  Okay, so it would never make the top forty.  Or four thousand.  But with no disrespect intended to the departed inhabitant of the body currently under examination, ever since her engagement to Nick almost a week ago, she just could not prevent the joy in her own life from bubbling out.  Grace had broadly hinted her willingness to serve as maid-of-honor, but Natalie had begged off thinking that far ahead.  She just wanted to enjoy being engaged.  And she found her thoughts straying to that pleasant topic at the most inappropriate times.

        Luckily, she had already performed this autopsy and officially recorded her conclusions: accidental fall from a balcony onto an iron fence post.  Nasty.  Natalie was only back now because Captain Reese insisted they all take a fresh look at the case with the idea of it as a homicide firmly in mind.  So there was no one to hear her singing the original findings.

        Except possibly her grandmother's ghost.

        Natalie banished the thought.  Figment of her imagination.  Overtired and overcaffeinated, with the crime scene the notoriously "haunted" nineteenth-century mansion known as Kessel House, she had thought she saw her deceased grandmother pleading to know why Natalie had never visited her in the hospital.  As if she could possibly not know.

        "Doctor Lambert?"

        Natalie yelped, almost dropping her scalpel into the corpse's gaping chest cavity.  A young woman in a navy-blue parka stood, hesitating, half-way in the door.  Platinum blonde curls framed deeply haunted eyes.  Natalie was sure they had never met.  "Can I help you?"

        "You're Doctor Lambert?"  The young woman stepped all the way into the room, pulling the door shut behind her and then looking carefully around the lab.

        "Yes, I'm Doctor Lambert."  Suddenly, her visitor's abnormally pallid complexion registered on Natalie.  Blast.  While she did not like to jump to conclusions, paranoia had its place, and Natalie suspected she was alone with a vampire.  She never had found a good place to stash stakes in the morgue.

        "I'm Urs."  The pale stranger smiled nervously at last, peeling off knit gloves and extending her hand.  Natalie set down the scalpel and removed her latex gloves to shake, pushing her smooth engagement ring back from her knuckle when the plastic pulled it.  Maybe she should take it off while she worked?  Fresh in from the winter cold, Urs's grasp revealed nothing about whether to count her among the living.  "I'm a friend of . . . well, that is, I know Detective Knight."

        "Yes?"

        The smile faded for an instant, then returned, forcibly bright.  Fake, Natalie noted.  "I had the fever.  Detective Knight said . . . .  You saved us.  You saved me."

        "Oh?"  Natalie's mind raced.  She knew exactly what the young woman -- that is, the young-looking vampire; no doubt remained -- was talking about, of course.  She also knew better than to discuss it with strangers.  Nick had told her of those who protected the vampires' secret.  She suspected he had told her only the half of what she had to fear from them, especially now that she had succeeded in restoring his humanity.

        "Please, Doctor Lambert."  Urs suddenly appeared on the verge of tears.  "Please.  I need your help.  You're the only one who can help me."  She glanced behind her, as if confirming the door was closed.  Her voice shrank until she little more than mouthed her words.  "I'm . . . sick."

        "Let me get you a seat," Natalie said.  Human, vampire, or pied purple people-eater, if Urs had come to her as a physician, she had an obligation.  Besides, she was curious.  Natalie pulled the sheet over the gentleman on her examining table and guided Urs to her desk chair.  "Can I get you -- oh, um . . ."

        Urs almost laughed.  "Water or coffee?  Thanks.  But, no.  Could I ask you to turn up the lights, though?  It's really dark in here."

        Natalie looked around, remembering that she had switched off the overheads earlier.  No wonder she had thought she saw a ghost; keep an autopsy lab half-lit, and the subconscious will eventually visit the cemetery.  But should Urs, a vampire, even notice?  Natalie turned on all the lights.  "Is that better?"

        "Yes, thanks.  Are we . . . Is it okay to talk in here?"

        "That depends what you want to talk about."

        Urs regarded Natalie quizzically.  Then the vampire's eyes flew wider and her mouth stretched in a silent "oh."  "You think I'm with the Enforcers."

        Natalie leaned against her desk, controlling her expression.  She had not even known that was what they were called.

        "You must think I'm bait.  Oh, I didn't even think of that.  They do do that sometimes, don't they?  Oh."  Urs folded her arms in her lap and put her head down on them.

        Natalie wished Nick were there.  A minute passed.

        "I'm sorry."  Urs sat back up.  "I get these dizzy spells, lately.  I'm . . . sick, like I said.  And we don't get sick.  You know?  That's why I'm here.  But I don't know how to convince you I'm not an Enforcer shill.  I think they'd kill me if they knew I was sick, they're so afraid of another fever.  I should have gone to Detective Knight first, I guess.  I should have asked his permission to talk to you, and --"

        Something in Natalie snapped at that.  "No one needs Nick's permission to speak with me!  Not as his mortal 'pet' or however you people think of it, and certainly not as his--"  She cut herself off.  Nick's cure and their engagement were not for discussion with strange vampires.  Natalie took a deep breath.  "Urs, if you're sick, I'll help you.  If that's a trap, it's one I could never avoid.  You're safe to talk to me here, I promise.  My safety talking to you is a risk I'll just have to take.  Now, from the top.  What are your symptoms, and when did they start?"

        Urs sighed her relief, and reached out to press Natalie's hand.  Her skin was at least room temperature -- probably warmer.

        "Dizzy spells, like I said.  They pass pretty quickly.  Then there's something very wrong with my vision -- like for your lights? -- and I don't hear right, either.  Taste, too.  Blood always tastes like it's gone off, now, even if it's fresh, and when I can swallow it, sometimes I throw it up.  Okay, not sometimes.  Every night.  And--"  Urs stopped cold.  The other symptoms had rushed out as if bursting a dam, but this wedged in her throat.  Finally, she whispered, "I can't fly."

        Natalie looked at her sympathetically.  Nick had expressed relief as most of his vampiric abnormalities receded, but not flight.  Losing the air had plunged him into a funk that had not lifted until he could stand in the sun.  "When did this start?"

        "I was cured of the fever," Urs said quickly.  "This isn't that.  I was well after the cure!"

        "Okay."  Natalie wondered if the fever had left this impression on other vampires, or if Urs's near-terror was a strictly personal response.  Either way, she supposed it was not an irrational reaction.  Nick had never really said how many had died, but Lacroix's involvement had hinted at a shocking toll.  "So you had the fever, got well, and then became sick again -- separately -- with these symptoms.  When?"

        "It's been almost a week for the throwing up.  Longer with my vision problems and hearing and stuff.  I . . . last night, I couldn't fly.  That's what decided me to come here."

        "Okay," Natalie repeated reassuringly.  "We'll need to run some tests, if that's all right with you?"  Urs nodded.  "Good.  Now, in the meantime, is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable -- short of opening a vein?"

        "I might like to try some of that water, actually."

Chapter Four: What He Said ⁰⁴

        "What were you thinking, Nick?" Tracy demanded from the passenger seat of his car.

        Eyes on the road, Nick did not answer.  After eight hundred years, he knew that question was rhetorical -- if he were lucky.

        "You know I'm glad your allergies cleared up, and yeah, I'm all for getting back on day shift -- though we might do some nights, occasionally, you know, as cases warrant -- but how could you go to Captain Stonetree without me?  That wasn't only rude, Nick -- really unthoughtful and inconsiderate -- but do you have any idea how you made me look?"

        Nick hoped that question was rhetorical, too.  He made a right onto the road that would take them past the infamously haunted Kessel House, last relic of a once-prestigious downtown neighborhood now largely given over to condominiums and apartments -- the same destiny the victims had planned for Kessel House, had they lived to buy it.  The crime scene still rested secure behind the authority of yellow plastic tape.

        "Well?"

        So it was not rhetorical.  Okay.  "You're right, Tracy."

        "What?"

        "You're right.  I behaved thoughtlessly.  I'm sorry.  What can I do to fix it?"

        "Not much!  Don't you get it?  You've made me look either like deadwood you're carrying in this partnership, or, worse, like someone who plays her connections, just like my--"

        Nick's cell phone rang.  He reached for it gratefully.

        Tracy intercepted.  "Not while you're driving and I'm in here with you.  You're distracted enough as it is.  And we're not done with this, just so you know."  She flipped open the cover and answered.  "Detective Knight's phone, Detective Vetter speaking.  Sorry, Natalie, he's driving.  Can I have him call you back?"  A brief pause.  "On the way to Kessel House."  A longer pause.  Nick fidgeted with frustration.  As a vampire, he could have overheard what Natalie was saying first hand.  Human, he had to wait.  Impatiently.  Tracy straightened in her seat and uncrossed her legs.  Nick could almost feel his partner setting aside her annoyance with him and donning her professional demeanor.  "Right.  Got it.  He'll call you from there."  The phone clicked shut.  "Nick, turn around at the next intersection.  We need to go to the Raven -- that club on the corner of Duncan and Richmond."

        "What?  Nat's not at the Raven, is she?"  Confirming quickly that the Caddie was the only car on the road, Nick made a recklessly rapid three-point turn.  If the Enforcers had Natalie, she would not be able to phone him; they would certainly have killed her immediately.  And Lacroix would only hurt Natalie with Nick present to witness it, he was sure.  But the world he had just managed to escape held so many other dangers that he did not know where to begin listing them.  And he could no longer protect her as he once had.

        "No.  She's at the morgue.  It's a friend of yours named Urs.  Natalie can't raise her on the phone, and wants us to go pick her up at the Raven.  Apparently, this Urs has some sort of medical condition?  Accidentally left her prescription with Natalie, and shouldn't be drinking?  Anyway, Natalie's really worried."

        "Did she say anything else?"  Nick remembered Urs, of course, particularly from the Ekhart murder, of which he had mistakenly suspected her.  But he had no idea how Natalie could be involved with the wistful American vampire who abhorred killing almost as much as he did.

        "Yeah."  Now Tracy sounded puzzled.  "Natalie said that I should go find Urs and bring her out, and that you're to consider your condition.  She emphasized that.  'Tell Nick to consider his condition.'  Does that mean something to you?"

        It did.  Suddenly, Nick realized that he could never walk into Janette's old club again.  Heart beating, skin warm, life spinning through his blood -- walking proof of the existence of a cure, he presented an irresistible target, one way or another.  Not just to Lacroix, who would not concede the game, but to every vampire who knew what he had been.  For the safety of everyone around him, he must cut cleanly with eight centuries of friends and family, acquaintances and adversaries.  He must . . . hide.

        Nick had known that, certainly, but never before had he felt it.  He thought his heart should hurt, but instead his stomach did.

* * *

January 1227, the Nile Delta

        As necessity had made his practice over the past few months, Sir Nicholas forsook the road after encountering the first traveler of the morning.  He pressed on until the trader or peasant slipped out of sight, then edged down to the bank of the river, pushed through the scrub, and covered himself with branches and brushwood.  Then he tried to sleep, so he might travel again that night and hide again the next day.  Long since having resorted to stealing garments hung out to dry, and with his skin burned by sun, his hair darkened by grime, and his beard retained in the local style, Nicholas knew he could go unremarked at a distance, and his tolerable Arabic usually allowed him to pass as an Armenian Christian to an unobservant Egyptian or Turk, but up close his blue eyes and bad accent drew comment.  He could not allow himself to be taken as an escaped slave.

        And such he would be considered, if taken, for there were supposedly no Crusader prisoners left in Egypt.

        Nicholas had heard about the surrender of Damietta following the disaster at Sharimshah, at which he had been captured.  Even with no language he understood, in those early weeks of his captivity, he had been made to feel the Crusade's shameful retreat and disgraceful failure.  He had not known, however, until this journey north, that the Sultan's settlement with Archbishop Pelagius had included the return of all prisoners on both sides.  Nicholas should have been returned.  Just two months after his capture, he should in all honor have boarded ship with his fellows.

        But he had not.

        And so Nicholas huddled on the riverbank, hoping to avoid notice, counting the wild figs remaining in his pouch from the tree he passed two days ago, and wishing for sleep.  He tried not to think that he was the only Brabantine, the only Frank, the only knight, the only Latin Christian in all this broad country.  He tried not to remember that he was approaching the sixth year since his capture, and that the law could declare dead a man lost seven years, passing on his patrimony and freeing his wife to remarry.  Nicholas had no wife awaiting him, and he tried not to think he now never would.

        Most of all, he tried not to think he was now so different from other men, so branded with failure and cowardice, that no one would ever take him in.  His superiors had sent Nicholas to the Holy Land from Carreg to atone for Gwyneth's murder, and though he had not committed the foul crime, he had accepted the penance for not saving her, for not loving her better while she was with him, for all his sins that felt so weighty with her loss so close.  But the Crusade's awful failure, his unlucky capture, his inexplicably prolonged imprisonment -- and what of the letter Kemal, the reeve, had sent mentioning Nicholas's father, the Duke of Brabant, and demanding ransom?  Nicholas knew no one could fail to believe he reeked of the just punishment of Providence.  His own word could never prevail over the evidence of his fate.

        Silent under his scrub-brush cover, outcast, abandoned and alone, Nicholas cried.

* * *

        "It's my allergy treatment," Nick temporized to Tracy.  The old excuse still served him well.  "Nat means that I shouldn't go into the Raven.  This soon, the smoke and strobe lights would compromise my skin's recovery."

        "Oh."  Tracy shrugged.  "Well, our shift's barely started, Kessel House isn't going anywhere, and I don't know what we expect to find that we didn't before, anyway.  We'll just swing back after we help your friend.  Now, are you going to describe her for me?"

        Nick did, in detail sufficient for Tracy to identify Urs in a line-up.  The minute physical observations, as if for a sketch artist, also served to put off questions to which he did not know the answers -- like how Natalie knew Urs, or why she should not be in the nightclub.  When they reached the Raven, Nick was surprised to find no parking spaces empty on the street.  Somehow, a prime spot had always been readily available before, but not tonight.  He paused just long enough for Tracy to jump out, telling her he would park in the lot of the building behind the club.  But he found no space big enough to accommodate his Caddie.  Frustrated, Nick finally just blocked the alley by the Raven's back exit, where Tracy and Urs would come out.  Then he retrieved his phone from Tracy's seat and dialed Natalie.

        "Lambert."

        "Nat, are you all right?"

        "Nick?  Yeah, I'm fine.  Where are you?  You haven't gone into the Raven, have you?"

        "No, I'm parked outside.  Considering my condition.  Tracy just went in for Urs.  What's going on?"

        "I think Urs may be in danger, Nick.  She came to talk to me last night about the fever cure, and I took some samples . . . .  Look, can you bring her here?  I have to speak with her.  Soon."

        "Danger?  Is the fever back -- Nat, tell me she's not contagious!"

        "No!  No, nothing like that," Natalie assured him.

        "Thank God."  Another round of plague, so soon, would wipe out the vampire community.  Even if that might ultimately be for the best -- and Nick still accepted that it might, though Natalie had firmly argued otherwise -- he did not wish the individual suffering and loss on anyone, human or vampire.  Funny, how illness affects attitude.  Stricken then, Nick had found himself praying that if the fever were God's way of ridding the world of vampires, God might yet temper justice with mercy, even to them.  Their eradication would be no less complete if they died in less pain.  Nick could not bear to imagine Janette and Feliks and even Lacroix -- and himself; of course himself -- dissolving in agony as he had seen Screed suffer.  He had not thought or dared or bothered to pray for centuries, through danger and loss of every sort.  But sick, it had leaped to his lips.  Nick was about to question Natalie further when Tracy tapped the passenger-side window.  Nick leaned over to unlock both front and back.  "They're here, Nat.  Be there soon."  He clicked off the connection.

        "You're obstructing the fire lane," Tracy disapproved, tossing an olive duffel bag across the back seat and helping Urs in next to it before sliding into her own seat in front.  "But convenient, I admit."

        Nick started the engine and headed for the street.  "How are you, Urs?"

        The pretty vampire offered a wan smile, but it did little to diminish the worry lines in her brow or the shadows under her eyes.  "I've been better."  After a glance from Tracy, she added, "I haven't been out of my room for a few days, except to speak with Doctor Lambert.  It's very kind of you to come fetch me."

        "So you'll be okay now?" Tracy fished.  "I wasn't entirely clear on the situation."

        "Are you taking me to Doctor Lambert?" Urs softly diverted the question.

        "Yes," Nick answered, forestalling Tracy's investigative instincts.  "Nat would like to talk to you.  I'm not sure what she has in mind, but do you have enough clothes there for a few days?"

        "This is everything, actually.  I'm used to leaving stuff behind."  Urs patted the duffel.  "Javier always insisted we travel light."

        Nick caught his breath.  Urs did not seem like the mortal-baiting type.  That must mean Vachon had never told her about Tracy.  He had assumed . . . .  Blast.

        "Javier?" Tracy asked, turning her head to face Urs in the back seat.  "Javier Vachon?"

        "Um, yeah."  Too late, caution.  Urs looked helplessly at Nick in the mirror.  "I know Javier."

        "Know," Tracy repeated.

        Nick imagined he could hear the gears in her brain clicking over.  He pretended to misunderstand.  "You remember, Trace.  The snitch who helped us during the Jerry Show case.  The long-haired guy with the motorcycle."

        "That's him."  Urs caught Nick's pitch.  "He's taken me riding on his motorcycle from the Raven a couple of times.  He always makes me wear his helmet.  He only has the one."

        "That's illegal," Tracy said automatically, as if she could not help herself.  "Canada's helmet laws are universal.  All persons on two-wheel motor-driven cycles must wear certified head-protection at all times while the vehicle is in motion."  Even vampires, Nick knew she was thinking.

        Nick did not let himself hope that this would throw Tracy off Urs's trail permanently, but in his eight centuries of supernatural existence, he had learned that the human mind will always cling to the natural explanation, if one offers.  Urs steered Tracy into the topic of Ontario's Motor Vehicle Code, and managed to keep her there until they reached the precinct.

        "Let me out here, Nick," Tracy said.  "I'm expecting some information from the town in Ohio where the victims were fraternity brothers.  I'll just go check the fax machine, and then meet you at Kessel House later on, okay?"  As she stepped out, Tracy looked at Urs.  "It was nice meeting you."

        "Thank you for your help, Detective Vetter."

        The rest of the drive to the Municipal Coroner's Building passed quietly.  When Nick glanced at her in the rearview mirror, Urs had closed her eyes and thrown back her head.  She did not look asleep.  Anxiously, Nick awaited the inevitable questions -- why was his heart beating? was he really human? how had he done it? and why? -- but as long as she held her silence, he would, too.  Urs was one vampire he did not worry would betray him to the Enforcers.  Even so, Nick found he both longed for and dreaded her judgment.  She was the first of his kind -- his former kind -- to see him cured.

        When Nick pulled into the parking lot, he was surprised to spot Natalie waiting just inside the glass doors of her building.  By the time he fit the Caddie into a space and turned off the engine, she had almost reached them.

        "You're both all right?"  Natalie strode up on Nick's side of the car.

        "We're okay."  He dropped a quick kiss on her temple, breathed in the scent of her hair, and then went to assist Urs out the other side.  He gestured her toward the building as he shouldered her duffel.

        "Urs?" Natalie asked.  "Are you both okay?"

        "Um, I guess, yeah," Urs answered.  "Should this wait until we get inside?"

        "We're almost there."  Natalie waved dismissively, then plunged her hand back into the pocket of her tan coat.  Nick began planning to buy her a pair of gloves.  Those fancy insulated ones advertised every December.  Maybe several pairs, to match her clothes.  "Look," she tried again.  "Has either of you noticed anything odd about the other?"

        Nick looked at Urs.  She looked back.

        "A simple 'no' will suffice."  Natalie strode ahead, opening the outer set of doors for them, and then pushing through the inner ones when Nick held the first for Urs.  "My lab is just down this hall -- but you both know that."  Her urgent demeanor calmed once she shut her office door behind them, though it seemed no less purposeful to Nick as she helped Urs to her desk chair.  "You might want to find a seat yourself, Nick."

        Obligingly, he leaned against the counter on which he had set Urs's bag.  "What's going on, Nat?  You said that it was definitely not the fever again."

        "It's not," Natalie confirmed.  Glancing at the closed door, she took a deep breath.  "You're both human."

        Nick was glad of the counter's support.

        "One-hundred-percent, cut-me-do-I-not-bleed mortal.  Both of you.  Urs didn't accept my initial diagnosis last night, and returned to the Raven.  The data from the tests piled up today, though, incontestably.  I take it you've changed your mind," she asked Urs, "since you're back now?"

        Urs shook her head slowly.  "I'm sorry, but that just doesn't make any sense.  No one has ever crossed back.  I'm sick.  Are you . . . sick, too, Nick?"

        "No.  I'm human."  He understood why Natalie had chosen to reveal her patients' conditions each to the other thus abruptly, and without permission.  He had been seeking humanity for hundreds of years; whatever had happened to Urs had clearly ambushed her, such that she could not accept the truth.  Her denial endangered her.  Nick unbuttoned his winter coat, approached Urs, bent low at her chair, and lifted her hand over his beating heart.

        She flinched back.  He released her.  Meeting his eyes, Urs slowly replaced her hand on his warm cotton shirt.  After a moment, she slid it up to his neck to count his pulse, then laid her fingers on her own neck, and then her wrist.  Then she began to cry, clear salt tears.  Nick knelt and held her as she sobbed.  He could not tell if the tears were of elation or terror.  He would understand either.  He had shed both, since he first began seeking a cure.

        Eventually, Urs pushed him away and looked at Natalie.  "How?"

        Nick saw his fiancée press her lips into a flat line.  Recognizing that hesitation as the boundary she had drawn on doctor-patient confidentiality in this bizarre scenario, Nick volunteered his own case.  "I gave up blood, took garlic doses, vitamins, phototherapy --"

        "You worked for it," Urs interrupted softly.

        "Yes."

        "I didn't.  Trust me, I didn't.  Doctor Lambert, what's happened to me?"

        "Nick," Natalie said.  "Will you wait for us in the break room?"

        "Of course."

        "No, it's okay," Urs disagreed.  "I thought that if the Enforcers came, he could . . ."  She shrugged.  "But even so, I don't mind him.  Really."

        Natalie stared at the newly-human woman for a long moment, then sighed.  Nick imagined her mentally throwing up her hands at the situation.  "Urs, I can't substantiate the causal relationship yet, so it's only hypothesis on that score, but you need to know that you're not just human.  You're pregnant."

Chapter Five: What She Said ⁰⁵

        Lurking in the dark, the vicious first step of Kessel House's grand staircase rose up and stubbed Nick's toe.  Nick subdued the absurd but powerful urge to kick it back.  Then he bit his tongue stifling a curse as he realized he had left his flashlight in his car.  This was just not his night.  According to Dispatch, Tracy should already be in here somewhere; she had headed over immediately after receiving a fax about the unsolved 1974 murder of a US Army nurse, a crime potentially related to this case's victims through both their proximity that year and the contemporary service star he had found near the first body.  He did not want to face his partner without the regulation-required flashlight, if he could even find her without it.  Trekking back to the Caddie, Nick knew he could not blame this one on human readjustment from vampirism.  He was off his game tonight, pure and simple.

        It had been a shock to find Urs human, but the news of her pregnancy then made perfect sense to him.  Somehow, he concluded, Urs had stumbled into the legendary cure Serena had sought unsuccessfully the previous year, recovering humanity by conceiving a child under certain mystical circumstances -- by a "special" man, "at the peak of the fire," "higher than high," "under a perfectly full moon."  Nick knew the child's father must be dead.  Humans never survived sex with vampires.  But he also believed that Urs could never have intended to kill her lover, whoever he had been, as Serena had deliberately done in pursuit of her goal, and as Nick had misguidedly let her.  And who was he to condemn either of them?  Despite his best intentions, people he had cherished with his whole heart had died in his vampiric embrace.

        Like Alyssa.  Her ghost had come to him here in this haunted mansion, as Natalie had seen her late grandmother, and Tracy a deceased childhood friend.  Blonde, stately, solemn and generous Alyssa, with whom he had once had every intention of spending eternity, had died, drained, on their wedding night in 1528.  Locking the Caddie behind him and returning to the interior staircase, Nick admitted that he had come back to this crime scene as much to see her as to discover the missing clue his instincts insisted the house still held.  But his obligations were to that clue, to the lives that might still be in danger now, not the one he had destroyed so long ago.

        At the top of the steps, Nick swung his flashlight's beam around the green-papered stairwell to illuminate all the turns and corners characteristic of such Queen Anne-style construction, sweeping briefly beneath the stained-glass window that shone inwards with the moonlight.  It depicted a young woman, or long-haired young man, kneeling, pleading, before a standing authority, with a child between them.  Nick stared at the child.  Like the kneeling figure, sex was indeterminate, but that did not matter.  It was a child.  It was vulnerable.  Which of those adults was on its side?  He could not tell.  Was either?

* * *

April 1227, Ascalon

        When Sir Nicholas first entered Ascalon, he tripped over a pig in the street and came up laughing.  Passers-by looked at him as if he were mad, picking himself out of the dust with smiles instead of curses, but it struck Nicholas that as much as the crosses on every corner, the pigs rooting through the city's refuse declared this a Christian realm.  Ascalon guarded the southern tip of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, for all the Holy City itself had not seen a Latin ruler in living memory.  He had made it.  He was safe.  He could go home.

        And maybe he could have a thick slice of roasted ham.

        But a few hours of wandering taught Nicholas that it was not only his laughter that had earned him odd looks.  Franks, Italians and native-born Poulains alike all shaved their faces, and not even the meanest dockhand of European heritage deigned to wear the Egyptian dress that had brought Nicholas this far.  He needed a barber and a tailor before he could hope for a ship's berth, and the money to pay them all.  Swallowing his righteous pride in his rank and lineage, he declined to mention them where they could do him no good.  But those he approached to offer his labor uniformly shrank from him, perhaps afraid he would upset their customers.  One suggested he join a guild; another threatened to call the civil guards; finally, as morning wore on toward noon, a baker pressed a generous half loaf into his hands and steered him toward a small church adjacent to an arched market.  "Now, just you ask for Father Joscelin right there in Saint Dymphna's, good sir.  He takes care of men like you."

        Nicholas thanked the baker from the bottom of his empty stomach.  He stepped only around the corner before tearing into the bread, instead of proceeding all the way to the church, though he could easily see the statue over its lintel depicting its patroness with her foot on the chained dragon representing madness and despair.  After bolting a few mouthfuls, Nicholas paused long enough to chew and reflect that perhaps desperate veterans were not uncommon in this frontier city.  Perhaps he was less marked out from his fellow men than he had feared.

        Crunching through the heel of the bread, Nicholas leaned against a convenient pillar and contemplated the long, loud arcade, busy with workshops and tradestalls, both temporary and permanent.  A dark, still hollow between two booths drew his gaze.  Resting there, his eye resolved on a tiny child in the shadow, its knees drawn up to its chin, its expression hollow and hopeless.  Children were common enough about the city, unremarkable and interchangeable as they rushed errands, wheedled produce, or dawdled amusements.  But this silent, motionless, little face drew Nicholas like kin to its bleak isolation.  Hidden away, the child seemed neither boy nor girl, Christian nor Muslim, peasant nor gentry, but instead the very idea of the next link in a family line.  It did no good to become attached to an individual child, even one's own, until it proved likely to survive; but every man worth his sword longed for a new generation to rise in his place and remember his name.  Far from home, still a stranger, Nicholas felt for this child as if loneliness were their common heritage.

        He stepped toward the shadowed nook.  There was little enough he could do, but perhaps the child was only lost.  Or perhaps it would come with him to this Father Joscelin; surely any parish equipped to sort stray soldiers could do something for mislaid children.  Nicholas bent one knee.  So near, he saw slender hands, dirty black hair and huge brown eyes above a shapeless, colorless tunic.  "And what is your name?"

        The child considered a long moment, watching him.  Finally, it nodded.  "Marta."

        Ah, Nicholas thought, a girl.  "I am pleased to meet you, mademoiselle Martha."

        "Mar-ta! Not Mar-tha," she corrected, then shrank back.  "Sorry, sir.  Please."

        "Marta," Nicholas repeated the Italian pronunciation and tried to gentle his voice.  "My error, child, not yours.  Please accept my apology.  And please allow me to introduce myself.  I am Nicholas of Brabant, a knight, and I am afraid I am lost in your fair city.  I was told to go to Saint Dymphna's church.  Do you suppose you could guide me there?  I would be very grateful."

        Little Marta stared, and her round eyes seemed to see everything about him.  She pointed at the bread crust in his hand.  "For that?"

        It was all he had in this world.  It was more than she had.  He handed it over.

        Marta clutched the crust with one hand, scrambled to her feet, and tugged him along behind her with her free hand on his clothes.  "Over here, sir."

        "Stop, thief!"  The cry froze activity as far as it could be heard, and all eyes turned to a strong, ruddy-faced man in a green tunic bearing down on Nicholas and Marta.  Eyes blazing, he ripped Nicholas's garment out of Marta's grasp.  "That's my property you're making off with!  And I have a caravan leaving today.  I'll have the guards on you!"

        "I don't understand," Nicholas said coldly.  As an afterthought, spotting an unfamiliar device on the shoulder of the bright tunic, he added, "Monsieur merchant."

        "The girl, man!"  The merchant leaned over and inspected Marta's hands, finger by finger.

        "Again, I fail to understand."  Nicholas stepped between the ruddy man and Marta.  "Is she your daughter?"

        "Daughter!" the merchant sputtered.  "She's my ware.  Do you have any idea what hands like those bring from the silk farmers?  Tiny fingers to collect the cocoons unbroken?  Years of work out of a wiry child like this one!  And a second use in a brothel in the fallow season, permanent if she survives to outgrow the silk trays?  It's the most regularly profitable disposition of child slaves, and I am the best supplier to the silk trade in Ascalon.  Now get out of my way."

        "Slave?" Nicholas repeated, blankly.  Though rare, slavery was not unknown in France.  But his people restricted it to chronic debtors, prisoners, or criminals unable to pay their fines.  Never children barely out of infancy.

        Yet this merchant spoke, dressed, appeared in every way a Frank.  The staring crowd seemed on his side, some laughing at Nicholas's ignorance.  Was this the eastern decadence people said corrupted the Levant?  Or had the whole world changed as much as he had since he left Brabant in Lord DeLabarre's service?

        "I see you are a traveler."  The merchant looked Nicholas over with a waxen smile and paused on his purse.  "We know the needs of travelers, here.  Perhaps you would like to rent the damsel until my caravan departs?  My rates are entirely reasonable, especially for a wench costing me such bother."

        Nicholas recoiled in disgust, but not shock.  He had lost shock somewhere along the way, he thought, if not in a cellar in Cairo, or on the muddy battlefield at Sharimshah, perhaps beside a cold lake in Carreg.  Nicholas shook his head and pressed his purse to show it contained nothing.  "My hands are empty."

        "Ah.  Well, mine are not.  Move, Martha!"  The merchant grasped the back of Marta's neck, pulled her to him, and pushed her ahead of him down the narrow street.  The last Nicholas saw of her, Marta was pushing her crust of bread into her mouth whole, as if afraid it would be taken away.

* * *

        The child in the stained-glass window woke Nick to what was really distracting his attention from police work tonight.  Not Urs's humanity.  Not even Alyssa's ghost.  No, it was Natalie, and what he had never suspected she could say.

        "I'll make an appointment for you with an obstetrician-gynecologist friend of mine," Natalie had told Urs at a certain point in the conversation, as Nick would have expected.  "She's a wonderful physician, and a very kind person, and you don't have to worry about her discovering you were a vampire.  There's nothing of the vampire left to discover, not in a physical exam, anyway.  Just answer her questions as truthfully as you can -- leaving out the blood."

        "Thank you, Doctor Lambert," Urs had replied.  "I guess . . . I guess there are a lot of things I need to start doing differently."

        "Mortality is a big adjustment."

        "Yes.  No.  I mean, for the baby."

        "Oh."  Natalie had leaned back against a counter, then, and crossed her arms high on her chest.  "You don't need to make any decisions just yet, Urs -- you've got a little time to think -- but you do know, don't you, that you don't have to go through with this if you don't want to?  You can terminate the pregnancy."

        Reflexively, Urs had placed her hands on her abdomen.  "Is something wrong with my baby?"

        "No.  Nothing I know of.  I just want to ensure you know you have the option.  It's medically sound; it's available; it's legal."

        "Thanks."  Urs had smiled.  "Really.  I appreciate it.  But no.  Absolutely not."

        And that had been that.

        Nick had not said anything at the time, but as the evening wore on, Natalie's comments bothered him more and more.  He had known she did not object to abortion in theory, but this was the first time they had encountered the issue together in practice.  He had assumed she considered it, as he did, a regrettable last resort, justified only by desperate circumstances.  Right to be available, wrong to be availed of.  That Natalie could raise it so casually shook him.

        Nick knew better than to be surprised that there were things he did not know about Natalie after six years.  After eight hundred, there were still things he did not know about Janette and Lacroix.  But this was different, he told himself.  While ideas about the beginning of life had fluctuated widely in his experience, like almost everything else, his personal code for a century had been absolute commitment to human life.  While he had disappointed his ideal more than once -- the face of Serena's lover, whom he had not saved, swam before his eyes -- he believed, in his brighter moments, that it was his very remorse over his failures that guided him better through each successive choice.  Natalie's suggestion made him deeply uncomfortable.  How could she be so nonchalant?

        Then again, perhaps she was not.  She had said she knew of nothing wrong with the baby.  But what if Natalie suspected the pregnancy endangered Urs's life?  Her safety or sanity?  Or -- and as Nick thought it, his flashlight fell through suddenly nerveless fingers -- the possibility also existed that Natalie believed the former vampiress had been raped.  That should not be possible.  But what if it were?  This world abounded in despair, horror, dead ends and bitterly cut losses; he knew it as well as any, though he sometimes let his romanticization of humanity veil its harsh, self-inflicted degradation.  Nick had presumed to make decisions for others too many times before, too often to mutual grief.  He hoped he was beyond that now, on this clean slate of new humanity.

        Even so, he remained troubled.

        Retrieving his fallen flashlight, Nick stepped through the entrance at the top of the landing into the huge second-floor room in which he had seen his dead wife's ghost.  "Alyssa, can you hear me?"  He waited in silence, scanning the long chamber's amorphous, drop-cloth-covered clutter.  When she did not respond, he walked past the cold black hole of the imposing fireplace and turned.  Perhaps Alyssa could not hear him here any better than anywhere else, but he did believe she could hear him.  He needed her to hear him.  "I want you to understand, Alyssa.  I did love you, very much.  I wanted us to be together forever."  Eloquence, he did not have.  Just grief.  "I'm so sorry."

        Fire suddenly blazed in the hearth.  And then she appeared, a nimbus of eldritch light edging, not the black dress in which they had buried her, but the white gown in which he had killed her.  Angelic ghost.  Ghostly angel.

        "Nicholas, I know that what you say is true.  I love you still."  He had not realized how that wound still ached until her words soothed it.  "But I must tell you, because I love you, that you should not have come here.  You are in danger.  You will die here tonight.  And because of what you have been and done, you will not be with me.  Ever."

        He brushed aside her caution and prediction.  She was here; she was all that mattered.  His Alyssa.  His fault.  "Please forgive me for what I have done."

        "I do!  I forgive you.  I needed to know that you remembered me and what we had together."

        "What we almost had."  The self-incriminating correction sank from his lips, weighted with all they had not shared, awkward with both the destinies -- mortal and immortal -- his impudence and ineptitude had closed to her.

        "Seeing you again gives me great peace," Alyssa's spirit reassured him with the gently perceptive generosity that had enchanted him so long ago.  Oh, her beauty and blood had caught his attention first, and the rebellious excitement of defying Lacroix, but Nick had lost his heart to the simple wisdom that never held a grudge.  Tears in his eyes, Nick began to extend his hands to her, but dropped them as an angry wind suddenly wailed around the room.  Alyssa's head jerked up, and her eyes tracked something he could not see.  "You must go now, Nicholas.  Others are coming.  Some among them bear you ill will, souls you dispatched from this world who cannot be appeased.  Go quickly!"

        "Please.  Come with me."

        "I cannot."

        "Be with me a while longer," he pleaded.  There was so much he wanted to say, to ask.

        "I cannot!"  She closed her eyes, calmed, then smiled faintly at him again.  "Oh, Nicholas, I wish you only joy.  But I am not the only one here."  Alyssa's shade stepped toward the fire, casting no shadow.  "Still, if you will not go, at least I can help you.  I know what you seek.  The answer is here, Nicholas.  Come to me and see."  Directly in front of the hearth, she vanished.  The fire remained.

        Nick swept his flashlight beam where she had stood.  Something gleamed beneath the kindling debris spilling carelessly from the hearth.  Retrieving a pearl earring, Nick remembered he had seen its mate the night of the first murder, on Shirelle St. Claire, the personal assistant to Kessel House's owner.  But she had worn just that one, apparently not yet realizing the other's absence.

        Before Nick could consider the earring further, the fire flared and the dark doors around the long room burst open, erupting ethereal light.  It felt like the sun; Nick blinked, but did not flinch as a vampire would.  Then the angry wind whipped up again, moaning accusingly ahead of the silent human figures now streaming through the doors, surrounding him.  Nick pushed past these spirits of those he had killed, and ran out of the room, not wanting to harm them further even if he could.  Closing the door behind him, he stumbled down the stairs, pausing on the landing to catch his breath.  Humanity alone had not purged the sins he had committed as a vampire, the vengeful ghosts reminded him.  Same old soul.  A moaning face materialized in the wallpaper at his side, and Nick fell the rest of the way down the stairs.

        Scrambling one step ahead of the ill wind now crying his name, and of the relentless ghosts -- he knew Danielle, Sergei and, oh! Jolene, but was shamed to recall no others, not even to the moment he had drained their life away -- Nick dashed into the front parlor and pulled the sliding doors closed behind him.

        Not immediately spotting an exit, Nick realized the ghosts had herded him here.  He stepped forward, and found himself face to face with Davis Ogden, the property owner.  Dead.

        At least, he looked dead, sitting inert in the one uncovered chair.  A vampire would have known for sure.  Nick checked vainly for a pulse, then, hearing a sound, spun around -- too late.  The uniformed woman struck him in the center of his chest with a rod, an electrical-discharge weapon of some sort -- he could not think which.  He could think of nothing but the pain as he slumped down against the doorway connecting the parlor to the dining room.  He could not move.  But he knew he still breathed, his heart still beat, and he was still alive.  For the moment.

        Alyssa had said he would die here, tonight, not yet redeemed from what he had been and done.  No!  Not like this.  He had so much to do now!  Natalie . . . .

        Above him, the woman pulled off a brown wig, revealing Shirelle St. Claire's blonde hair.  "They killed my mother," she explained, her eyes wide and mad.  "Scally and Weintroff.  She came to me here.  She told me, they have to pay."

        Nick could not muster the strength to ask why she had also murdered her employer.  He was unconscious by the time she finished rambling and shot him.

Chapter Six: Downtime ⁰⁶