Chapter Seven

Nico blinked at his empty kitchen. Dimitri had… disappeared. He hadn’t run out the door, it was more like he’d teleported instantly somewhere else. Nico reached out into the empty air where Dimitri had been, dumbfounded. He’d been there, standing and smirking at Nico with those eminently kissable lips, and then the air had rushed in with a flicker of deep shadow and he… was gone.

He hadn’t realized Dimitri was being literal when he’d said Nico couldn’t follow. How was he supposed to teleport!?

He clamped a mental fist on the bond between them, but it was as strong as ever. Steady. Nico could feel muted regret coming from Dimitri and he hoped the vampire could feel his rising anger. How dare he leave this bombshell on Nico and run away? Vampires? Sires? Magic blood power??

Unacceptable.

Nico stewed for a while, pacing and grumbling to himself. He considered sending a command down the bond on purpose, demanding Dimitri appear again. From… wherever he was. Nico got the impression he was both close and very far. It was confusing.

But he squashed the impulse to demand an audience. He didn’t want to issue compulsions, he just wanted to be by Dimitri’s side. He was like an addiction. The moment he’d left, Nico had started craving.

He tried to meditate. He found a video on youtube that talked him through laying down (he chose the couch) and focusing on his breath. On flexing his body one muscle at a time from head to toe so he can deliberately relax.

He got about thirty seconds into it before pushing himself back to his feet and pacing around the apartment. His brain was just too much whirlwind of what-ifs and how-comes.

Nico poked at the bond in his chest, feeling around the knot of it blindly. Like massaging a muscle might teach him how to use it. He felt sparks of emotion from Dimitri, but the vampire remained steadfastly not here.

What was the other thing he’d suggested? Moving meditation? Yoga.

Nico flicked through videos of yoga, overwhelmed at the choices. He selected one, then immediately backed up and filtered for beginner yoga videos. A handstand while contorting like a pretzel didn’t seem within his ability.

Here was one. It looked like fancy stretching.

He propped the phone up on a dininroom chair and spread out in front of it. He didn’t have a mat, but the floor was clean. Ish. He really did have to vacuum.

Standing. Stretching to his toes. Something called a down dog. Nico followed the movements awkwardly. His balance was apparently not great and the transitions between forms were hard. Not at all smooth like the lady on the screen made it look. But he tried, the difficulty of it taking his mind off Dimitri for a moment.

Nico’s second time through the yoga released a lot of tension. His shoulders relaxed. His hips stretched a bit further but didn’t feel at risk of dislocating. And the knot that was his bond to Dimitri suddenly unfolded like a blooming flower while Nico was upside down like a dog again. He went to his knees and focused.

It wasn’t a knot at all, in fact. More like a clenched fist he’d finally relaxed open.

Dimitri’s emotions were suddenly clearer—and full of caution with a touch of fear around the edges. What could possibly scare his Dimitri?

He also felt closer, somehow. Nico knew he wasn’t anywhere near the apartment, but he was almost right there at the same time. Like he was a ghost on the other side of the veil, overlapped with Nico’s world. If Nico could just… reach out. If he could touch—

Nico’s whole body fell backward. He fell right through the floor, but not down into the lower apartment. Instead he crashed onto his ass in a place of utter darkness. His hands scratched over broken stone. And the silence was so complete that his ears rang like after a good concert. Like he’d fallen into the depths of an underground ruin.

Well, whatever this place was, Dimitri was right here. Nico reached an unerring hand out to grab the vampire’s stunned arm and yanked himself to his bare feet. “Told you I’d follow,” he said into the blackness. He nudged some rocks around with his toes to make a clear spot to stand. It was gritty.

Dimitri was mute for a moment, Nico could feel the shock through their bond. Then, “How the fuck did you get here?”

Nico shrugged. “What is this place?” He swung one foot out carefully, toeing around crumbling rocks and falling debris. His foot found a large slab of stone slanted up at an angle, the edges of it clearly broken.

“But… how?”

“I did what you told me,” Nico said, using his free hand to brush dust off the butt of his jeans. “Meditation didn’t work. The yoga was good, though. I’ll do more of that.”

Dimitri finally seemed to recover himself. Nico felt him shake his head through the wiggle of Nico’s grip on his arm. “You can’t be here.”

“I told you, you’re not doing this alone. And where is here anyway?” Were they in a basement or something? No, that wasn’t right. Nico could feel a nice evening breeze on his face, and the air smelled… humid. Kind of sweet. He hadn’t teleported across the planet… had he?

“You’re in the Shade. And you really need to go back home. Can you undo what you just did?”

“What’s the Shade? And can you turn on a flashlight or something? It’s dark as shit—“ his foot slid unwisely across another pile of rubble. It cascaded under his weight and he staggered back to Dimitri’s side, gripping his arm close.

Dimitri wrapped an arm over his shoulders securely, tucking Nico against his side. “There’s no light here. The Shade is the vampire dimension—“

“I’m in another dimension?”

Dimitri’s hand clamped hard on Nico’s mouth—without any fumbling, like he could see just fine, thank you very much, and how unfair was that?—and he hissed, “Shut up. Shut up and listen you impossible human. You are loud as Light and attracting attention. There are predators here, understand?”

The echoing, frantic alarm in Dimitri’s heart made Nico still under his hands. He nodded.

“Now tell me, please, that you can step back to your apartment,” Dimitri whispered.

Nico closed his eyes. He tried to remember what the feeling was. That chostly sense of something beyond the fabric of the world. But he’d been reaching for Dimitri when he stepped over and he didn’t know what to reach for to get back home.

He didn’t have time to give it a try. A bright purple light crackled like ice in the middle distance. Nico’s eyes flashed open and he got the first good look at the place he’d come to.

It was a castle—or it had been. Now it was so much rock and scattered ruin. He was perched on a shallow pile at one end, on the sweeping steps of a dias beside a cracked former throne. The angled stone he had found was the arm-side of the seat, now collapsed where it had stood. There were lines of rubble where walls and arches had once been. A pile of it to either side. There had once been a towering building here before its destruction.

And among all the stone Nico spotted people. Hands and feet at first, the bodies buried in the wreckage. Oddly pale in the purple light. Father away from the rock were more bodies, laying on the tiles of the former castle without any obvious injuries except that they seemed too thin. Like all the fat had been sucked off their bodies before they died.

Maybe that was how they died. He shuddered.

And finally, the source of the crackling light. Nico had expected something ice-like by the sound, but it burned like a fire in the palm of a person’s hand.

Maybe not a person if he was in the vampire dimension.

He was still working his head around that. Alternate dimensions and shit.

But the questionable-person appeared to be a middle-aged white female. Nico would have mistake her for a soccer mom if she’d been wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Her hair was cropped short under her ears and she looked other wise person-like. She just needed a small gaggle of children screaming around her to complete the PTA-parent effect.

She was wearing a cloak. There was a leather-looking tunic underneath, like light armor, and a pair of pants with too many buckles. Boots on her feet, not sneakers. Very SCA of her.

Ultimately, Nico got the impression—aside from the apparent ball of magic in her hand—that she was…just human.

The rising tide of fear pumping up the bond from Dimitri said Nico’s assessment was very, very wrong.

Nico squinted into the light, but his attention turned inward, to the bond. He tried to squeeze down on the flow of emotion, remembering the fist-like feeling of a muscle being clenched. He only managed to close the bond partially before Dimitri shifted. He moved only a little, more like was turning to face their visitor directly. But that movement put Nico directly behind him, one hand hard on Nico’s arm, warning him to be silent. To be unseen. To do nothing.

Nico clamped his mouth shut. He had a thousand questions, but even sending the shapes of them down the bond was like whispering into a thunderstom. Dimitri’s mind was awhirl with thoughts Nico couldn’t even begin to parse.

He caught the edges of some of them. Witches. The Void. A flashing memory of his former Sire standing, almost strung up on the tips of his toes before the throne, his head thrown back, his mouth open, his eyes burning and burning and burning with icy purple power.

The same power in this woman’s hand.

Oh goodie. Nico scowled at himself. This was one of the predators Dimitri had been trying to tell him about. Maybe even the one that had killed Dimitri’s Sire.

Nico clamped his eyes shut and brought his apartment to mind. He pictured the kitchen and the table, all of its chairs. He pieced together every single detail. The way he had turned one of the chairs and propped his phone up against it. The video it was probably still playing, clueless that Nico was no longer there to watch it.

He tried to reach for that place, his home, but all he did was physically reach his hand out into the darkness. Whatever he had reached for in Dimitri to get here, he couldn’t do it again.

But he wasn’t about to let Dimitri go up in ice-flames, either. He took a steady breath and tried harder. Reached further.

Nothing.

Dimitri’s hand on his arm squeezed briefly, like he knew Nico had tried.

Whatever the trick was, Dimitri had it. Couldn’t he teleport them both back home?

Nico had to assume that course of action wouldn’t work. Either Dimitri couldn’t carry a passenger or something about this woman made that impossible. She was blocking the teleport maybe. Or perhaps she could follow. Nico didn’t want to think about that too closely.

He risked peering around Dimitri’s arm, curious about both the silence and what threat this woman could be. He couldn’t help it. He was barefoot and clueless. Any information was helpful… right?

The woman still stood some meters away, the icy, purple flame burning in her hand. Nico couldn’t see, but he got the impression her eyes flicked to focus on him the moment he showed himself. He did see the slow smile that crawled across her face like it belonged to some other creature living in her skin.

Well. That was enough creepy for one day.

Nico clamped his eyes shut. There was no place like home. There was no place like home. There was no place like—

“Well…” Her voice was wrong. It scraped like ice across the distance, echoing through a place of absolute cold. “It seems I’ve missed two little bloodsuckers.”

Dimitri’s whirling thoughts stilled instantly.

He sent a single command up the bond, so clearly it rang in Nico’s head like a gong.

Run.