"Don't take it personally… it will be harder for you if you fight. Ready?"
Nick stood silent, preparing himself… but the slashing blows cut through every strength he thought he had. He fell, leapt up, and struck, but was beaten down again, and more powerfully, and fell to the floor as Divia rose above him ready for the final strike. Then an unholy shriek sliced the dimness.
"Divia!"
Nick realized it was Maura, screaming from the gallery above, outside the bedroom where she'd lain sleeping and waiting for his return.
Divia raised her head with a hiss.
"Mortal," she sneered, not even sparing a glance behind her. "Watch as I destroy more lives than you can imagine ever existed!" She seized Nick by the collar, ready to sink her fangs into him and remove LaCroix's last refuge.
Maura raced down the stairs, barely touching them. She grabbed the slender, roughly made wooden crucifix from the box where Nick had kept it in eternal reverence and snapped off the end piece to leave a ragged point. "Divia!" she howled again, a combination of rage and terror. This... thing, this creation LaCroix called "daughter" though she was in fact his master, meant to kill the only life Maura had been able to accept as her own, and her brain emptied of everything but reflex.
Superior enough to entertain herself by indulging Nick's mate, Divia dropped him to the floor and turned to face Maura. The weapon she saw didn't impress her, but the look in this mortal's eyes displayed more madness than she'd expected.
"You 'love' Nicholas, don't you?" she suggested silkily, "My father loves him more… and for centuries longer than your small weak life." She was already tasting the sweetness of the injury she'd cause him when Nicholas was no more.
"You're breaking my heart," Maura drawled, hoping she sounded steadier than she felt as the initial rush of adrenalin burned off, leaving nothing but a mortal desperation to think fast. Divia's eyes glowed white-hot and her mouth opened wide even for a vampire, fangs longer than any Maura had ever seen.
Go for broke, Maura thought to herself, and yanked the neck of her nightshirt aside. "Come and get it, little girl!"
She thrust the pointed end of the crucifix in front of her as Divia struck. She honestly had no idea what it might do, if anything, but if nothing else she'd have the satisfaction of the effort. The sound of it penetrating was sickening. Divia arched, fell back a step and looked down at the now-smoking cross embedded in her, then met Maura's eyes with something very like disbelief. Maura had no illusions that this arrested undead adolescent was afraid of her, only that she was unsure of what other surprises might be produced that could delay her vengeful plans.
"Nicely done, mortal," Divia admitted in a hiss only marginally weakened, "have your immortal lover, then, for a little while longer. I'll have him soon enough." Without bothering even to touch the flaming stake that had bypassed her dead heart, she disappeared.
Maura dove to the floor where Nick had been flung. "She's gone."
"No she's not," he warned her, "she's just gone elsewhere."
Even as he spoke Divia was tearing through Vachon en route to LaCroix.
Maura jerked to her feet as if struck by electricity.
Nick was at her side in a flash. "What is it? Did she manage to get at you?" Divia's powers were so beyond those of a "common" vampire, her hatred so ancient and closely nurtured, there was no knowing what even passing contact might do to a mortal.
"No, no… something's wrong, I don't know, it's as if somebody jerked on all my nerve endings at once, it hurts…" she looked at Nick, bewildered, and suddenly the pain focused in the palm of her left hand. The spot where Vachon had drunk from her that night in the alley. I'm yours for life...
"Nick we gotta find Vachon, something's wrong!"
Nick felt the sharp rise in her heartbeat, the echoes of her alarm. "I'll find him, I have to find LaCroix as well, we have to find a way to stop her. I'll go to Vachon's place, but you have to promise to stay here. "
"I can't, I have to find him!" She was on the edge of hysteria and headed for the door.
Nick seized Maura by the shoulders, holding her face inches from his. "No. You saw her, Maura, she has the kind of power even my kind can't fathom. She won't come back here, she only wanted me to get at LaCroix. She wants to destroy everything around him, and save him for last. Promise me you'll stay here." It was an order, not a request. When she hesitated he shook her roughly. "Promise me!"
His voice had taken on the guttural echo of his true nature, his eyes darkening.
"Okay," Maura acquiesced shakily. "I promise. But,"
He was gone so fast all she saw was the dark blur of his passing as the door slammed behind him.
Collapsing on the sofa, she clenched her fist around the pain that remained centered inside. A short while later it intensified, flared, and was gone. The abruptness of it made her gasp. The sharp, jangly feeling inside of her was gone just as abruptly. Good, she thought, Nick must have been able to help. She pictured him at Vachon's, both of them having driven Divia away, or perhaps having destroyed her.
The truth was that Nick was there at the church, as was Vachon. And Tracy. Nick stood in the shadows, unseen by his partner and never to be seen again by the dark vampire she held in her arms.
Back at the precinct he vented his grief and frustration to Natalie. He could say nothing to Tracy, couldn't be there for her or even acknowledge the loss.
"What about Maura?" Natalie asked him, and he shook his head helplessly.
"I don't know, I can't even think of that now." He shut his eyes tightly for a moment, then opened them again. "Right now, I have to find Divia and LaCroix. My guess is even if she means to destroy him she won't let him go easily."
"Nick," Natalie grabbed his arm as he turned to go.
"It's too late to be careful, maybe all we can be is lucky."
Hours later luck, and madness, and the combined power of rage, bitterness, and desperate vampire cunning had done their wild work, and Nick dragged himself into the loft just before sunrise. He found Maura sleeping soundly on the sofa, wrapped in a lush blanket of purple velvet that Vachon had given her for some one of her birthdays since they'd met. Her left hand was lying loosely alongside her face.
Maura woke to the feeling of lips pressed into her palm. She struggled awake. "Vash?" she slurred, eyes barely open.
"No, Sweet."
The look in his eyes struck her hollow, and in that instant she knew how wrong she'd been. She pulled her hand away and clenched it tight, trying so hard to feel something, anything. Not even the ghost of burning nerve endings remained.
I'm yours for life...
"Liar," she whispered accusingly into her now-open hand.
Nick managed to restrain her, but not before she could draw her own blood.
"Liar," she repeated, moaning the one word over and over into her bleeding palm in response to the broken promise echoing in her head, I'm yours for life...
Nick may as well have been invisible to her, but in the hours that followed he didn't let her go.
I'm yours for life...
Liar.