Page 118 of Black Curtain

They’d already spent some time asking the woman, Virginie, as many questions as they could think of. Black and Miri asked most of those questions, but Dalejem and Jax aimed a few things at the witch and Armel, too.

None of them produced much.

The psychotic witch hadn’t been any more illuminating with Miri and Black than she had been when Nick questioned her the first time. Now they were coming to the end of the second time of watching the whole thing with everyone.

Which meant Nick was seeing it all for the third time.

“She went to the bathroom,” Nick said, glancing sideways at Jax. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his dark blue suit, imitating the human mannerism in an attempt to put the seer more at ease.

It didn’t work.

When Jax continued to glare at him suspiciously, Nick motioned out over the blood-splattered room, grimacing at the visage of the teenager with the broken jaw and the swollen face.

“…She didn’t want to see this shit again, Jax,” he said, giving the seer a sideways look. “She’d already seen it twice. Can you blame her?”

Jax frowned but conceded his words with a nod.

He continued hovering around where Nick stood, at the edge of their group. Nick couldn’t help noticing the seer’s black pupils were looking overly dilated again. Nick might have found it endearing, but honestly, he was ready to throttle the seer. Jax needed to calm the fuck down. It wasn’t helping anything, being that wound up, and Kiko was a damned badass.

She didn’t need this much “help.”

Dalejem looked over at him, smiling.

He glanced at Jax then, and nudged him with an arm.

“Nick’s right,” he said, brusque. “Calm down, brother. You’re giving us hovering, overprotective seer idiots a bad look.”

Nick grunted at that.

Just then, Black’s voice rose, sharper than before.

“What the fuck was your crazy, serial killer mother doing, ‘Armel’?” the seer snapped, obviously yelling at the virtual version of Brick as a young human. “Summoning vampires? The Devil? Hell? An army of zombies? What?”

Nick grunted a humorless laugh, in spite of himself.

Black’s anger at Brick for kidnapping them all, and locking them in his parents’ murder-is-fun house, was now spilling into his dealings with the artificial representation of Brick’s human alter-ego. It might have been funny if they weren’t all trapped in here.

Black yelling obscenities and insulting the mother of a fake human was strangely perfect for this shit-show.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Black snapped, cutting off the holographic Armel before it could finish speaking to him in accented, dated English. “She’s your mother, isn’t she? You sure as fuck seem familiar with all of this… or did you reallyjust nowfigure out she was batshit crazy?”

Dalejem let out a grunt of his own, exchanging wry looks with Nick.

They were all kind of letting Black vent.

Maybe they needed to pull him off, see if they could get him focused on something more productive. Clearly they’d hit the limits of what this particular recording was going to tell them.

Dex was starting to get frustrated, too.

Nick couldn’t help noticing that Dexter was also fast becoming probably the most level-headed person here, which was a huge relief. Nick had always found the Marine an intensely grounding presence before all this. It felt like normalcy, looking to Dex to keep them all from going off the rails, especially now, in this fucked up house of blood and mirrors.

“Look, Brick already knows all this stuff,” Dex was saying now. “We still don’t know why he brought us here… what he wants us to solve, exactly. He wants us to know his mom was a serial killer. He clearly wanted us to see that she had some fucked up occult beliefs… but that can’t be what he brought us here todo.He clearly alreadyknowsall of this.”

“But he’d know everything he put in here,” Dalejem pointed out. “Wouldn’t he?”

“Yes,” Dexter agreed at once. “He would have to.”

“So where does that leave us?” Jem asked.

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