Page 62 of Black Curtain

That rage still burned in his eyes.

Now I saw puzzlement there, too, maybe disbelief.

The rage lived inside all of it.

The utter outrage that Brick would do this to him again.

I knew that rage was likely to get a lot worse before it got better.

I found myself remembering again how my husband had reacted when Brick locked him up in that prison in Louisiana. I remembered everything that happened in the months after he finally got free. The night sweats, the flashback dreams, the obsessive planning to take the vampire down. I remembered how much worse it had gotten after Brick kidnapped me and took me all the way to Scotland. That time, despite everything he had done to Black, Brick wanted me to psychologically “fix” his equally psychotic mate.

All of that felt like a million years ago now.

At the same time, all of it felt so immediate, so visceral, I scowled.

I knew some of that had to be the seer wedding cake I was still high on. I also knew that cake was tapping into real emotions and memories that were all too real.

I also felt like an idiot as I stared around at the dark walls.

How had we forgotten about Brick?

How had we forgottenthisBrick?

How had we let ourselves believe the vampire who tortured and nearly killed Black in that prison had somehow “reformed”? The vampire king who won his throne by murdering his successor and blaming that murder on us, putting a target on our backs from the majority of vampire-kind? How had we forgotten Nick’s sire, who stalked him and coveted him for months before he saw his opportunity to murder my best friend, rape him and systematically traumatize him as he turned him into a vampire, only to set a psychopathic Nick on me and Kiko and the rest of the world?

How had we ever let ourselves thinkBrickcould be our ally?

How had we let ourselves believe thatsick fuckwas anything but a danger to us and everyone we cared about?

But I already knew the answer to that.

We’d needed him.

We’d needed Brick’s help, so we conveniently forgot the rest.

It was that, or let my uncle and his literalarmyof brainwashed, cult-like seers and humans take over the human and seer worlds. My uncle would have wiped out the vampire population totally. Brick needed us, so he played nice.

Before Nick, I’d believed it was vampires, by their very nature, that were the problem. I may not have articulated that to myself in so many words, but the belief was there.

Now I knew it was just Brick.

It was who he was.

But we’d needed him, so we pretended he could change.

I know my uncle would be laughing his ass off if he saw me now.

He would have told me I could have foreseen this, that I wasn’t ruthless enough, that I’d lost sight of who the real enemy was. My uncle would probably tell me I should have let him, Charles, kill off all the vampiresfirst,before making truces and compromises with my own people. He would have quoted Machiavelli or some ancient war criminal from Old Earth and told me I should have let myrealenemy be wiped out before I tackled the lesser risk.

But only my uncle would have the audacity to see himself as the “lesser risk.”

Pain rippled through me.

I had to grit my teeth to keep from trying to use my seer’s sight, even as my hands looked again for a collar, for anything on me I could remove. I needed to find out what was causing the pain so I couldget it off me,but there was nothing there. I felt over my neck, looked at my arms and body. I looked at Black’s body.

I couldn’t find anything.

“It’s this house,” Black muttered.

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