Page 154 of Black to Light

I tried to pull apart Brick’s words, failed.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked angrily.

I wondered why I was the only seer speaking suddenly.

Black and the others just stood there, staring at Jem and the girl, with blank, paralyzed looks on their faces.

What was I missing? What the hell was happening?

Ace and Kiko seemed to be wondering the same thing.

They looked between one another like they had no idea what any of us were talking about, or why everyone was staring at Jem and the girl.

It was Black who finally broke the silence.

“Then it was the girl who did it?” Black’s voice sounded oddly distant. “It wasn’t Jem who went after them… it was her.” He looked at Brick. “So you had nothing to do with Rucker dying. Or Frasier. Or even those deaths in Paris.”

Black didn’t voice it as a question. He did glance at me, though, like he was remembering our conversation in the dining car last night.

Brick laughed, as if Black’s words delighted him yet again.

“I had nothing to do with it in the slightest,” the vampire proclaimed, smiling wider. “I’ve been following these two little scamps, just like you. I didn’t realize the significance of their odd connection, but with the help of Zoe, we figured it out…”

I froze, following Brick’s eyes a second time.

He was looking into the darkness of the cavern on the other side of where he stood.

Brick hadn’t come here by himself, and he hadn’t only brought with him the vampire version of my baby sister, Zoe. Multiple pairs of red eyes shone out of that dark. Bone-white skin and even whiter fangs flashed in the glow of theyissotorches as the vampires stepped forward and lowered their hoods, making themselves visible.

I counted eight… no, ten vampires standing there.

My sister, Zoe, stood in front.

They wore all black, and most had donned cloaks with hoods to cover their hair, and likely much of their skin until they walked forward into the edges of our torchlight.

They’d stood so utterly still before that. With their ability to remain bloodless and unbreathing and statue-like, in that way only a vampire could do those things, I’d had no idea they were there until Brick instructed them to make themselves known.

“It was Zoe’s idea to use a seer to look at the girl,” Brick commented, his eyes fond as he looked at my sister. “We found one of the new ones for that… one you wouldn’t miss… and puthim to work solving this puzzle for us. Sadly, our new pet expired after we got a little too enthusiastic and a little too careless with him.” Brick’s red eyes flashed coldly. “But, luckily, not before he told us something very interesting…”

Brick’s red eyes met mine.

They seemed to dare me to react to his murder of another innocent seer.

When my expression didn’t move, he smiled.

“You see, my dearest Miriam, Jem and the girl aren’t simply oddly, freakishly similar, as you have no doubt now seen… they arethe same person.They are mirror images of one another, separated only by dimension, by body, and by life experience. Our tasty little friend who helped us unravel that puzzle concluded they share the exact samealeimi,only altered by training, age, and experience. They share a kind of ‘soul,’ you see. A soul that could exist happily in multiple forms across different dimensions… so long as it didn’t try to reside in multiple forms within thesamedimension.”

Brick paused, likely for effect. He raised one shoulder in a languid shrug, the one that attached to the arm and hand that gripped Nick by the throat.

“In short, our pet theorized they were twodifferent versionsof Dalejem… birthed in two different dimensions. When the girl wandered blithely intoourworld, there were two of them in thesamedimension, when there really should’ve only ever been one in each.”

Brick looked away from me and towards the girl, Aura.

“It seems that wasn’t much of a problem until the girl got sold to that human with the fetish for children.” Brick sniffed dismissively. “Even then, it was relatively fine while he kept her imprisoned in his little castle in Monaco. But then he brought her to San Francisco, to the same place where Nick and his lovely Dalejem lived. Their little seer brains started to fry fromthe proximity… and then, we think, to vie for control. Obviously, she had more reasons to want to live in dear Dalejem’s body than the reverse. Because your girl here was the more damaged and righteously angry of the two, she managed to colonize Jem a number of times, I’m afraid… and then she grew a taste for it.”

Brick’s smile swiveled back to me.

“She grew tolikeher freedom, I expect,” Brick drawled in my direction. “Then she began to realize what she could do with it. To better her situation, of course… and, dare I say it, perhaps to extract a little revenge.” Brick smirked down at Nick’s face. “I admit, my darling Naoko, I might have been a little kinder to you about your very pretty pet, if I’d realized just howbloodthirstyandvindictivehe could be…”

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