Chapter Three

At one in the morning Natalie's apartment complex was still and quiet. I walked through the lobby and took the stairs to the second floor, wondering what I was going to say. LaCroix was right. I had no hope of undoing the fix Nick had put on Nat's memories. The best I could hope for was to patch the faulty code that was crashing her system, leaving Nick's new software in place. I hated the idea of participating in Nick's deception, but Nat really was on the verge of crashing. I had to do something.

"Nat?" Her door was ajar. Inside I could hear the alarm I'd set on her computer chiming like crazy but there was no answer to my call from Natalie. I pushed the door open and listened. From the apartments on either side I could hear faint heartbeats, mortals deep in sleep. Sounds from the street below were louder; she'd left the window open. In February. But no sign of Natalie.

Not a living one, anyway. The thought pushed me inside and I checked each room quickly, pleading with a God who wasn't happy with me to show just a little mercy, just this once. Nat wouldn't be the first mortal to suicide over memories that she couldn't understand and couldn't get rid of. The apartment was a wreck, with clothes, papers, and half-eaten food scattered everywhere, but there was no sign of Nat. I started to check again, my heart in my throat, then forced myself to stop. Thinking was harder work, especially in my current state, but it was what Nat needed. Where would she go? Work? She was still on vacation, but most of her friends were there. If she couldn't talk to Nick, then maybe she had—

"I will not trade Fleur for that!" Natalie's voice, unmistakably. Something in her inflection and tone was strange, but I was beyond sweating the little stuff. Natalie was alive! The shout wasn't repeated, but as I ran to the open window I heard her voice, now soft and faint. She wasn't on the grass below, and the words were too clear to have come from another apartment. The roof! I was out the window like a shot, touching down on the roof before I could consider if she was alone or not.

Natalie was alone, and not alone. Standing much too close to the far edge of the buildings' roof for my taste, she was holding an animated conversation with herself. Her filmy white nightgown whipped around her in the chill night breeze, her hair a floating, shifting cloak around her face.

"Nat!" She didn't react to my words, intent on her own garbled conversation. Most of the words were in French, but the accent was an unfamiliar one and I couldn't make out everything that she was saying. Occasional phrases came out in modern English, and those were chilling enough to freeze even my bones. I started walking slowly across the roof, not wanting to risk startling her.

"Whose heart do you choose to break, Nicholas?" That, at least, made sense, even if the French Nat was using to speak the words didn't. Her voice was deeper than usual, with an inflection that was maddeningly familiar. "I cannot live without you!" The same language, but a completely different tone and inflection. I had almost reached her. Natalie spun around, her eyes wide and unseeing.

"…more satisfying than any food," Natalie whispered in that same husky voice, this time in English. Then she seemed to see me, her face softening into a gentle, loving smile that was only for me. "It's as if we've been together forever," she whispered softly in that foreign French. She took a step toward me, one pale hand reaching for my face. I was rooted in place, unable to move. Natalie, I wanted to say. Oh, my Natalie…

"I can't control it. I can't accept it. And yet it is!" She spun away, walking with a man's stride toward the edge of the roof. "We are a force of nature." She shuddered and then I heard a soft sob. "You are…fascinating creatures." Nat's voice.

"Natalie?" I reached out and took her by the shoulder, guiding her away from the ledge. Her skin was like ice, her eyes dull and confused. "Come on. Let's get you inside."

"It is her innocence that you love," she said softly. "You revere all that is mortal."

"No," I replied gently. "Just one particular mortal." I slipped an arm around her shoulders, wishing that I had more body heat to lend her. She let me start guiding her back to the stairwell, but I didn't think she really knew I was there. I had opened the door to the stairs when she turned her head and looked at me steadily.

"I do not love this woman." Perfect English this time, and a perfect impression of a voice I knew all too well. Nick. Awareness and a soul-deep sadness flowed into Nat's eyes at the same moment. She tried to smile for me as a single tear spilled down her cheek, and then Natalie fainted dead away.

###

Natalie was stirring in my arms as I slipped through her window and into the living room. God knew I'd had fantasies of holding her in my arms often enough, but now that the reality was finally here it was too colored with worry to be enjoyable. I settled her down onto the couch as gently as I could, sitting down next to her and watching her face, wondering what the hell I could do to help. Her cat Sydney appeared from nowhere, mewing his concern and bumping his head against Nat's limp hand. At the touch Natalie shifted and blinked sleepily before snuggling up to me with a deep sigh of contentment.

"Nick," she murmured sleepily.

"No." I wanted so much to believe that Natalie wasn't still deeply in love with Nick. Wanted it more than I'd wanted anything in decades. But one look at Nat's vulnerable sleeping face, her lips turned up in a slight smile that was all for Nick, told me everything I needed to know. Maybe Nick didn't deserve the lady's love, but he had it.

Damn it.

I drew away from Nat and twisted to face her directly. She was sleeping, but I could see in her face the memories that were tearing her apart drifting just below conscious thought. Her face twitched in an uneasy frown and I reached out to touch her cheek.

"Sleep." The whammy I put behind it wouldn't have worked against an awake and alert Natalie, but her exhaustion gave me just enough of an in to send her where she wanted to go anyway-into a deep, restful sleep. The relief that spread across her face as the voices inside her were temporarily silenced was more than reward enough for the headache that settled in behind my eyes in response to the unaccustomed effort. I picked an afghan up off the floor and spread it over her, resisting the urge to kiss her on the forehead as I tucked it around her shoulders. The wind blowing in from the open window was cold enough to get even my attention, and I quietly got up and shut it before staring out into the darkness, trying to think.

The problem with making big changes to a mortal's memories was that you rarely got everything. Some little details, snippets of memories and sensations, almost always get missed in the sweep. Those fragments of memory usually faded away in time, but sometimes they can become echoes in the victim's head, telling her that what she remembers isn't quite right without being enough to tell her what right is. The apparent schism in reality will gradually take up all of her focus, driving her to madness. Nat wasn't there yet, but I was very afraid she was on her way. The best solution is to uninstall the new memories and replace the old files, but it took a skilled and very powerful vampire to make that happen. Nick wasn't willing, and I didn't have the skill or the power to even try. All I could do was try to remove the remaining bits of old memory code, and the idea of doing that to Natalie made me sick.

But the little scene I'd just witnessed on Nat's roof told me that it was even worse than that. Nick wouldn't have spoken to Natalie in French, and certainly not in a dialect that had disappeared, I finally realized, long before Natalie was born. Natalie wasn't just repeating bits of what Nick had told her when he began his mind wipe. She was reliving pieces of Nick's own history, and that was very, very bad news. I rested my forehead against the cool glass and closed my eyes in despair.

Using our powers to force a mortal to go against her basic nature was hard-it had taken me decades to really get the hang of it. In forcing Natalie the resistor to believe that she didn't love Nick, had never loved him, Nick had pretty much had to pull out all the stops. That kind of reprogramming requires prolonged, intimate mental contact, and the data stream is rarely just one way. The result for poor Nat had been what I thought of as a mental virus. A virus that was now slowly but surely eating away at her core self, replacing it with a defective and incomplete copy of Nick's own thoughts and memories. Left unchecked, the virus would destroy her mind as surely as a bullet to the brain.

And, God help me, there wasn't a thing I could do to stop it.