Page 124 of Almost Midnight

He knew how fucking dangerous that seer was, and the twisted anti-human ideology he lived and breathed. Charles already tried and failed to destroy Nick’s home world once. Black and Miriam had stopped it somehow, but Nick struggled to remember how.

He probably should have warned the humans the instant Charles started popping up in news programs and all over the underground web.

But then, Nick had thought Charles was dead, honestly.

Hadn’t Brick killed him?

Had his sire lied aboutthat,too, for some reason?

Maybe Nick was remembering wrong.

It had been a very long time ago, after all.

Averylong time.

Maybe Charles had gone the way of his faithful followers. Maybe he, too, got expelled from Nick’s birth dimension and into a whole new one… maybe even this one… and now he was here to try his fucked-up, racial-supremacy bullshit on a whole new version of Earth.

Or maybe he was adifferentCharles, a Charles who actually came from this dimension, and harbored all the same twisted fantasies.

Either way, Nick had decided it was no business of his.

He’d stopped trying to puzzle out how things went that way a long time ago, just like he’d stopped wondering what happened to Aura and Brick in the past however-many years.

Dalejem was dead.

That was the only thing that really had the power to move him, even now.

When he refocused on his sire, he saw the other vampire frown at him.

“Just how long have you been here, child?” Brick’s voice grew shockingly gentle. “You didn’t come through right before the war like the rest of us did, did you?”

Nick grunted.

“Not quite,” he muttered.

The bartender put down a new glass in front of him, and Nick downed the remaining liquid in his last glass before pushing the empty towards the human. The bartender quirked an eyebrow slightly, maybe because Nick was still conscious, despite what he’d drunk, or maybe because Nick and Brick were both obviously vampires, and the world had grown aware of their kind in the intervening centuries, or maybe for some other reason.

Whatever it was, Nick didn’t really give a shit.

“You must know we have been fighting,” Brick clipped, a touch short. “You surely must have heard or seen our work on the news. I am the leader of the White Death. The humans would all likely be dead without us, or living in slave camps overseen by Charles and his band of merry morons and psychopaths. This war would have been over acenturyago, if we hadn’t deigned to come to this rather dented little world.”

Nick turned that information over in his head.

He did know of the White Death, of course.

He might avoid looking at news whenever he could, including news of the war, but he wasn’t able to avoid the headlines entirely.

Brick had been here for over a hundred years.

Brick had started the White Death.Hewas the famed leader of the elite cadre of warrior-vamps who fought alongside the humans to beat back the seers.

Nick might have thought it was a joke, if he still had a sense of humor.

“Don’t look so surprised, whelp,” Brick said, a touch of dark humor in his voice. He slapped a hand lightly on the top of the bar. “Did you really think I would sit back and let Charles destroy yet another of my worlds? Or that I wouldn’t aid humans, our only true cousins and food source, against such an evil incursion?”

He scoffed, smiling wider, but his eyes grew cold.

“I only wish I had gotten here sooner,” he quipped. “I would have cut the head off the snake before it managed to burrow in.”

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