Page 142 of Black Curtain

There was a longer-feeling silence.

Brick stared at him through it.

Then a slow smile rose to those strangely red lips.

I couldn’t help remembering him as a human.

I couldn’t help transposing the one face over the other, as it hit me again just how different he looked now, how little of that humanity actually remained.

The boyish idealism his mother mentioned was gone.

The hurt, the pain he’d felt, the anguish, even the resignation I’d seen on his face when he realized exactly who and what his mother was… it was all gone.

The love he’d had for that mother had likely disappeared long ago, too.

Maybe he left it behind around the same time he made up his mind to murder her, just like he’d eliminated my Uncle Charles in cold blood, with zero fanfare inside a human jail cell. The colder part of me understood his reasoning in both cases.

The colder, more practical side of me even sympathized.

That same part of me might have made the same decision about Brick, come to think of it, if the conditions were right. If it was practical, if it made sense, if it felt like the right thing to do… I might have decided Brick himself was too dangerous to leave alive.

Maybe I wasn’t the person I’d been either, back when I saw myself as fully human.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about who I was now.

But I accepted her. I accepted this new version of myself.

Some part of me was sad looking at Brick, however.

Armel must have been a mess.

A fucked-up, traumatized mess, given the parents he’d had.

But he’d been a real person. He’d been human once.

He’d had a heart I could almost feel, just from those few glimpses of his face.

All I saw was the sociopath now. The Vampire King. The murderous trickster who played with people’s lives as a matter of course.

Brick might be capable of some feeling.

He might look out for his people, behave loyally to them.

But Armel D’aureville was long gone.

Armel D’aureville was dead.

The Vampire King was all that remained.

That same vampire king smiled now at my husband.

Stretching out one foot artfully, he executed a deep bow, waving his arm forward like he must have done at formal occasions, all those years past.

“I will do my utmost best to accommodate your wishes, my friend,” Brick said with those same overdone manners. “But I suspect we will see each other sometime again, Quentin.”

His crystal eyes stared meaningfully into the back of the limousine.

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