Part Thirteen

Her father had a response to every contingency, an escape for himself and his family always waiting in the wings. A rebuttal to every practiced lie. When she had been young, Nyssa had thought it only one more trait among many that made him clever and strong. Now, she wondered if it was not merely cowardice instead. She noticed that he had not put forth any undue effort to find her before he had begun the latest escape attempt that she was witnessing now.

Her father hurried across the open floor towards the helipad on the roof, where a helicopter was waiting to take him away from everything that he had created. He was not as fast as he had once been. While his fighting days had long since run to their conclusion by the time that Nyssa had been born, she still remembered when he had carried himself with the physique of a warrior. Even vampires succumbed to the ravages of old age, eventually.

Her father's limping, labored steps halted as the walls of the room began to slide down before he could reach the outside. His days of being able to sprint and dive beneath them were also long past, and he whirled to see who was closing off his final avenue of flight.

Nyssa saw shock in her father's face as he turned and saw that it was she who was standing there. There may also have been betrayal there; it was becoming difficult for Nyssa to read his emotions as she once had.

'Pure and impure,' she thought, as she had been doing on endless loop ever since she had left her father's company, 'two strains arising from exactly the same source.' She took a deep breath before she said, "I reset the security code. We're locked in."

Her father stared at her for several seconds before he spoke, as if he was having trouble understanding what she was actually saying and needed time before the words made sense. "Are you insane? He'll kill us both."

After so long carrying a bone-deep uncertainty within her, the feeling of its leaving again was intoxicating. "Yes," Nyssa said, all but shivering with the insanity of it, realizing that her last chance of escape was bleeding away, if it had ever been real at all. "Isn't it sad that you will die not by the hand of your enemy, but by your own children?" Her father had taught her that she was a pureblood, and as a pureblood she had a duty to be strong and be true, and not to give in to the weak, puling urge to blame her mistakes on others. That was for the impure. Her father might have forgotten these lessons. Nyssa herself had not.

The alarm had cut off several minutes before, with no all-clear signal being given afterwards. That was actually a worse sign than if the alarms had still been blaring altogether. In the silence, the sound of Nomak's footsteps echoed across the floor and announced his presence more loudly than if he had had an actual courtier to introduce him.

"Father," Nomak greeted Damaskinos. His tone was soft and nearly reverential. It jarred against the controlled, menacing way in which he stalked forward.

Nyssa's father did not back away in the face of his enemy. He had that much dignity left to him. Nyssa's moment of pride in him vanished as soon as she heard the pleading note in her father's voice as he spoke in vampire. "All that has befallen you," he said as Nomak drew closer, "it was a terrible tragedy. An unforgivable mistake, but now you've returned to me." Her father reached out and tried to touch Nomak's face, as he had touched Nyssa's own many times before. Nyssa and Nomak flinched backwards as one motion, though Nyssa herself was still standing several yards outside of her father's reach. Perhaps the two of them truly were siblings, after all.

"We will find a cure," their father continued. "Take your rightful place by my side." Nyssa's place, she thought sourly. She did not think that she was altogether interested in fighting for it any longer, and she felt no sense of betrayal when her father reached out and hugged her brother to himself. "You are, after all, a prince," he continued, somehow missing the rigid way that Nomak's shoulders were still being held and refusing to melt into him. "Together, we will conquer it all."

Nomak remained silent for so long that Nyssa nearly believed that he would buy the fairy-tale story that was being presented to him. She did not know whether to be relieved or dismayed. In vampire, Nomak at last replied, "If what you say is true, why does your voice tremble so…Father?" With one fluid movement, he raised his clawed hand and ripped their father's throat out altogether. Blood poured forth immediately in shocking quantities, dark purple that became crimson as soon as it struck the air, so close to human. As he watched the blood running over his knuckles and down his arm, Nomak said, "I've spared you my fate. You will die."

Nomak released their father, who staggered towards Nyssa. She stepped back before he could touch her, watching the pool of blood as it spread beneath his feet. He dropped heavily to the floor, where his robes turned crimson within seconds.

"Out of this wound, your life blood will flow," Nomak finished in the grim tones of someone pronouncing a sentence that had been put off for far too long.

Nyssa still could not bring herself to touch her father or even to look directly into his eyes as the light faded from them. She could, however, pry the family ring from her finger and drop it into her father's blood as it drifted towards her feet. Nyssa felt curiously cold, and still entirely free of doubt. She was a vampire. She would conduct herself as a vampire, right up until the very end. In her native tongue, she said, "Finish it off, my brother. Let's close the circle."

Nomak stepped close to her, touched at her face. His skin was warm, so much hotter than she was accustomed to from vampire flesh. "You…" he began, and paused, searching her face. "You were always his favorite," he finished as he ran his thumb across her cheekbone. There was nothing brotherly about the caress. Nyssa stiffened, but did not pull away. She was a pureblood, a Damaskinos, and the last of her ancient line. She could make the last act of her life an honorable one by allowing revenge to its ghosts.

Nomak's lower jaw split open to unfurl that long, swirling tongue, those teeth. His expression was nearly one of worship as he bent his head to her neck, and the way that he caressed at her back was nothing like the way that a brother was meant to hold a sister.

It hurt, more than Nyssa had anticipated, and she had braced herself for quite a lot. She gasped as she felt first the barbs with their paralyzing poison, then the fangs themselves entering her skin. Nomak was not interested in suckling of her blood, instead running his tongue over and over the wound until his saliva had been mixed liberally with her blood.

He meant to turn her, not to kill her. Nyssa gasped and made a small, pained sound as she realized what a terrible mistake that she had made, but it was too late by then. She could feel the poison already beginning to do its work, sapping her senses and making it difficult for her to move. Nomak dropped her to the floor without ceremony; she barely registered the sound of Blade entering the scene at all.

---

As odd and even unsettling as it had been to see Whistler and Frost standing within three feet of each other in spite of the fact that neither one of them had his hands wrapped around the other's neck, there were other things that Blade needed to be dealing with at the moment. Things involving killing, things involving death. Blade did not think that he minded in the slightest.

If he was Nomak, he would go for the person who created him ahead of anyone else. If he was the person responsible for creating Nomak, then he would want to get to higher ground and thus escape as quickly as he was capable of it. Blade headed upwards, using the dead bodies of the guards to let him know that he was headed in the right direction.

He reached Nyssa just in time to see Nomak drop her to the floor with his mutated lower jaw still split wide open, his reptilian tongue waving wildly through the air, and his chin rendered slick with blood. Nyssa was already wearing a dazed, glassy expression; her hand was shaking badly as she raised it to touch the wound that had been torn into the side of her neck. His latest pretty poison, and this time the one that could not be rendered comparatively harmless. He had been wondering how he was going to tear itself free of its grasp. A part of Blade could not help but be grateful to Nomak for releasing that temptation from him, and this infuriated him all the further.

"Nomak!" he bellowed as he drew his reclaimed sword.

Nomak ceased staring downwards at Nyssa's dazed form and spun towards Blade. His lower jaw sealed itself back together so that he could speak, though he chose to flash Blade a small and chilling smile first. "Blade," he greeted him, as if they were old friends undergoing a slight misunderstanding rather than two enemies preparing to kill on another. "It could end right here. What do you think?"

That was exactly what Blade had in mind. He rushed forward, pausing halfway through only so that he could turn his headlong charge into a graceful flip that carried him through the air. He drove his sword into Nomak's chest as deeply as he could. It was hardly a battle, as Nomak made no attempt to either fight back or even to move away. Nomak staggered backwards, nearly falling over Nyssa in the process, and grinned so wildly that he was on the verge of splitting his lower jaw open again.

"Really, Blade," Nomak said as he wrenched the sword free and threw it to the side. The wound in his chest closed immediately. "You are a legend. I thought that surely you would be smarter than this."

Blade not expected that his second attempt at piercing Nomak's heart would be any more successful than his first, but he had still found room to hope. "Repeat yourself," was all that he said as he eyed the place where Nomak had thrown his sword. "Maybe I'll catch on eventually."

One free blow had been all that Nomak had had in mind. Blade's second advance was met by Nomak leaping into the air and then whirling, so that his boot struck Blade in the mouth with such force that it would have broken his jaw if he had been a normal man. Blade staggered backwards and, though he did not fall, still felt his mouth filling with blood.

His head ringing, Blade remembered what had happened the last time that he had fought Nomak, back in the House of Pain. The best that he had been able to do then was take him to a stalemate, and he had no lucky sunlight to aid him now. The outcome of this fight was far from certain.

'Unacceptable,' Blade told himself firmly. If nothing else, he would stall Nomak until they both sensed that the sun had risen, and then he would drag him screaming forward into the light. Letting Nomak go was not an option.

Blade spat the mouthful of blood to the side and ducked the next blow that Nomak directed at him, though not without difficulty. Nomak was faster than any vampire that Blade had ever faced before, and he moved as if he was jointed like a snake. Blade used Nomak's momentum against him and whirled, knowing that Nomak would not be able to bring himself to a halt and reverse direction nearly quickly enough to follow, and brought his elbow into Nomak's face. There was a cracking noise of cartilage giving way as Blade withdrew that let him know that his blow had struck home, even though Nomak did not make a single sound of pain.

The moment of satisfaction was short-lived. Blade was barely drawing out of range before Nomak had recovered, seized him, and then hurled Blade most of the way across the room. Strong as well as blindingly fast. Damaskinos had made quite the winning soldier for himself, if only Nomak did not have a such a damnable tendency to bite off the hand that fed him. Blade struck the wall on the far side of the room, hard, and did not know what cracked harder: his ribs or the stone behind him.

Nomak did not wait for Blade to catch his breath before he was bounding across the room like Springheel Jack, using the very walls and posts around him as launching points in defiance of gravity. Blade grit his teeth and, ignoring the pain from his ribs, rolled to the side before Nomak could land on him. The tile cracked where he had been as Nomak's weight came down on it. Blade leaped back up to his feet in spite of his ribs and took a swing at Nomak with the sword that would have removed his head for him if it had connected. Nomak dipped backwards at the at the waist, once again acting as if his joints were for other mortals, and wound up receiving only a thin wound to his cheek. It closed up again almost before the sword left the flesh. At least ordinary vampires could give him the satisfaction of letting him know that he had injured them, if he could not manage to kill them.

Nomak snarled, and, seizing Blade's sword arm, twisted, and put a kick to his sternum so hard that Blade felt several more of his ribs crack and was sure that his arm would be ripped entirely free from its socket before Nomak released him so that he could fly backwards. Blade struck a pillar with a spine-jarring force and slumped, momentarily dazed, down to the floor. He was barely aware of Nomak's feet across the floor and was only just pushing himself into a sitting position by the time that the monster was leaning over him. Blade made as if to stab Nomak with the sword; Nomak grabbed at the blade and, though blood ran thickly down both his wrist and the metal itself, snapped the sword cleanly in half. He threw the fragment to the side and sneered, "After all, it looks as if I've finished my father's job."

Nomak's lower jaw split open and allowed that long, predatory tongue to unfurl. He meant to turn him into a creature like himself, Blade realized as Nomak leaned down. 'Unacceptable,' he thought again. Reeling and in pain, Blade raised what was left of his sword into Nomak's side just as Nomak was about to attach his tongue to the side of Blade's neck, pushing the metal into the place that Nyssa had identified as his only weak point. There was the barest moment of resistance before the metal found its way past the protective casing of bone and into the heart itself. Nomak gasped and paused, staring down at Blade as if he could not believe what had just occurred. He fell to the ground.

"It hurts," Nomak whispered. Blade, misunderstanding and thinking that Nomak was struggling to pull the sword free from himself, pushed it in deeper and then twisted. Nomak put his hand over Blade's and aided him, shocking Blade so badly that he nearly released the sword altogether. "It hurts no more," Nomak finished, before his eyes went dim and his body crumbled away into dust. That much, at least, he still did like a vampire.

Blade remained where he was seated for a few moments longer in order to catch both his breath and his resolve before he brushed the sad remains of Nomak off of himself and pushed himself up to his feet. Nyssa could not have gone far during the fight.

He found her only a few feet away from where he had left her, having pulled herself out of the growing puddle of blood and propped herself up onto her elbows so that she could stare down at it in horror. She looked up as Blade knelt beside her and began to stroke her hair. "You little fool," he told her in a soft voice. The skin around her bite wound was already beginning to blister, turning a corpse-like blue-gray wherever the blisters popped.

Nyssa tried to smile, but it came out looking more like a grimace. "We are what we are," she told him. "I was taught that being a pureblood is a noble thing. I needed to prove that that could really be true." Blade continued to stroke her hair back from her face and eye the blisters on her neck. His hand fell down upon the remains of his sword. Seeing the gesture, Nyssa went on, "I have only ever envied one thing about the impure in my life. I have never seen the sun. I would like to, before I die."

Blade was silent for a long moment, his fingers continuing to work through Nyssa's hair, before he said, "I'll need the security code before I can raise the walls."

Nyssa told him.

---

The loudest sounds in Deacon's ears were the harsh rasp of his own bleeding and the pounding of his heart. He ignored them both in favor of digging his teeth into his lower lip so savagely that he wound up reopening the wound that Reinhardt had put there and tasting fresh blood all over again. He would have time for lament #3541 on how the universe at large had fucked him over later, after he had sleep and coffee and Vicodin. Whistler was keeping his mouth to himself, at the very least.

They encountered no guards, not even human familiars, and after a time Deacon understood why. As he and Whistler made their way upwards and towards Blade, he soon found out why. There was a pile of corpses at the place where Nomak had likely made his entry into the complex, the blood so thick in the air that Deacon could nearly taste it. Most of them had died by having their throats torn out, though one or two had had their necks broken so savagely that their heads were now facing around backwards and looking out over their own shoulder blades. Deacon could not tell whether the wounds had been inflicted by Nomak's claws or by his teeth, only that most of the victims had expired with expressions of terror on their faces.

"Son of a bitch," Whistler said, his voice soft and horrified.

"I've seen worse," Deacon said shortly. Whistler passed up the chance to point out that Deacon had very likely done worse, which Deacon grudgingly admitted was nice of him. It would have been true all the same, but Deacon had never known the old man to keep his opinions to himself.

He and Whistler had each taken a gun from the unconscious guards, plus all of the ammunition that they could carry. Deacon pulled out his gun and stalked rapidly towards the corpses. Behind him, Whistler called out in a sharp voice, "What do you think you're doing?"

"Becoming a vampire is one thing," Deacon snapped back, all but daring Whistler to argue with him. "These are not vampires. They're something else." He reached down, flipped one of the corpses over, and put a bullet into its head before he had the time to think about it for too long. The bonus was that he only had to stare into the eyes for a second or two before they were blown away into jelly and bone fragments.

Looking back over his shoulder, Deacon then saw Whistler watching him with that damned old scrutinizing expression, the one that Blade had given him for months before he had finally figured out that Deacon was not using him as a launching pad for world domination. Deacon was getting deeply damned sick of that look. "You going to help me with this or not?" he asked in a rough voice. "If he bit them, then they'll rise unless we do something."

Whistler drew his own gun and, approaching Deacon, instead put a bullet into the corpse directly to Deacon's left. If Deacon had been a sensitive man, he might have said that things were still not quite copasetic between them. Whistler and Deacon worked through the corpses without saying a word to one another. If Whistler spent a fair amount of time staring at the blood that splattered up from them to land on Deacon's knuckles, that was fine. Deacon was spending nearly as much time staring at them himself.

They made it up to the upper floor, where Deacon and Whistler seemed to realize without needing to speak that Damaskinos would go in search of escape and that Blade would go in search of a fight, without molestation. Deacon was not convinced that this was a good thing, rather than merely a trap for something much worse, until he saw Blade kneeling out on the helipad with Nyssa clutched in his arms. The sun was just beginning to cast its pink and gold fingers over the horizon, searching for a good handhold with which to hang onto and bring forth the day, but that did not matter. Even from yards off, Deacon could see the ugly wound that ran along the side of Nyssa's neck. It seemed to be growing as Deacon watched.

"Stay here," Deacon told Whistler, as if there was even a need. They had both come to a halt, instinctively, knowing that they were intruding upon a scene where they, even Deacon, did not quite belong. Nyssa's skin began to first blister and then to peel, and she arched so hard in Blade's arms that he had to struggle in order to keep his grip on her. Deacon almost thought that Blade was going to hold onto her even as she burst into flames, at the end, but he set her down on the ground to his feet and stepped backwards. When there was nothing left to her but ash that began to swirl in the wind, and then seconds after that nothing at all, he stalked past the both of them without saying a word.

End Part Thirteen