From: Lisa McDavid DTD: All We Need of Hell An ending to Susan Garrett's Dawn to Disk by Lisa McDavid Against all reason, some ember of hope that had continued to haunt Nick's heart flared up as the door opened. It wasn't Nat, though. It would never again be Nat. He had dropped by the Coroner's Office, a couple of hours into his shift, for the results in the O'Casey homicide. He didn't really think that even Natalie's efficiency could hurry the tests through some sort of warp factor to impossibly early results, but he'd wanted to see her. She'd been away at the International Association of Medical Examiners for a week. He hadn't just wanted to see her. He needed to see her, needed the sound of her voice. Nick had known centuries that seemed shorter than that week. "Yes, do send him in." Nat's response, overheard by Nick's vampire hearing in response to Grace's query, was sharp. He wondered whether he should offer to return. No, he decided. Nat was just overwhelmed with piled up work from her absence. She would have missed him as badly as he had longed for her. The thing he hated most about wiping last Valentine's Day from her memory was that he could never admit he knew she loved him. Walling off his own heart was something he'd learned early in his vampire life. He had no idea how to block out the certainty of Nat's love. "Natalie!" Nick had said, smiling at her as he crossed the threshold. "I was beginning to think Honolulu had lured you away from us. How was the convention?" She stood in front of the examining table, which seemed to have been pressed into service as an auxiliary desk in the absence of a customer for Nat's Bed and Breakfast. Her hands remained clenched in the pockets of her lab coat when he reached for them. Without a smile she said, "I attended a very interesting seminar. On the uses of hypnosis in recovering memories. In fact, I was one of the guinea pigs because the specialist asked for someone who couldn't be hypnotized." Nick stopped short. His hands dropped to his sides. Please, God, no. He'd heard that bleak tone twice before: once after Richard's true death and once after Cynthia's murder. He said as steadily as he could manage, "And did he hypnotize you?" "You're damned right he did!" Nat's face went white with fury. "I know what happened last Valentine's now. Nick, how could you?" "Natalie, I *lied* to LaCroix, you know that! I love you." Nick held out his arms again. Nat sidestepped sharply. "Like Hell you do -- you're worse than Roger! He only tried to rape me. You defiled my mind and my heart and my soul if I have one. That's worse than rape. That's spiritual murder!" "It was for your own protection," Nick said desperately. "If LaCroix thought you remembered he'd never let you go. He'd --" "My own protection. That's a good one. That's *rich*. You were protecting yourself, in case I remembered that spiel about my infatuation. Or was it that I might wonder if you were ready to kill me rather than surrender to LaCroix if he hadn't pretended to believe you? Oh, yes, he was pretending. I hadn't heard such bad acting since my kindergarten Christmas pageant. Tell me, Nick. Were you going to kill me?" "I don't know." Nick's own anger was rising under Nat's assault. "Well, I do." She turned and pointed to the clutter on the examining table. "And here's my own protection." Natalie threw back the corpse sheet which had covered half the table. A heap of ashes overlay shards of glass and a melted diskette. "Those are my treatment records, all my notes. I'm through, Detective Knight. From now on we're professional associates and that's all." Nick could smell the tears Nat had dammed behind her anger. Again he said, "Natalie," in his gentlest voice and tried to take her in his arms. Nat screamed and hurled herself at him, clawing for his face. Nick evaded her, grabbed her wrists. Nat, thrown off balance, lost her footing. The impact as her head hit the edge of the steel table snapped her neck. She was dead before she fell into his arms. Nick didn't remember how he got out of the morgue. He didn't know whether Grace had seen him. Whatever Nat's treatments had done seemed to include the mortal capacity for psychic trauma. Captain Cohen hadn't been in her office. In fact, he realized now, it had been locked. He had broken the mechanism without a second thought, to throw his badge and his gun onto her desk. There had been a pad of those pink while-you-were-out notes next to the Captain's phone. He had scrawled, "I hereby resign. Nicholas Knight," on the top one. No doubt the Captain was still out at the latest crime scene. Otherwise she would have been on his machine, demanding the proper paperwork. The very latest crime scene, Nick corrected himself savagely. That would be the Coroner's Office. If an APB hadn't already gone out on his Caddy, it would be on the air as soon as 81 kilo failed to respond. He should have ditched it into the lake. It wasn't as if he was ever going to need it again, and its presence on the street made as good an announcement of his location as a neon sign. The elevator door opened completely. "Nicholas, Nicholas, all this melodrama for this woman you do not love." LaCroix shook his head. "I could almost imagine that you *have* given me satisfaction for Fleur. And here I thought love had never fired the soul you haven't got." Nick ignored him. "I'm so cold." He had regained a little sensitivy to temperature in the last few weeks. Nat had been so elated. Being cold was such a human thing. LaCroix walked past him to the fireplace. "I shouldn't wonder if you are," he said. "You need real blood, Nicholas. Warm from a mortal throat." The older vampire took a long match from the ornamental dragon holder, the one Nat had given Nick two Christmases ago, and lit the fire. "Never mind. If you insist on playacting the mortal, we'll try mortal means." Nicholas moved toward the hearth. Nat had loved to sit in front of it. He forced back a sob and slumped against the mantel. "Oh, Nicholas, it's all so unnecessary. Your little friend was a mortal. Mortals die. This one just went a little sooner with your help. Why waste all these histronics on something that no longer exists?" LaCroix lifted Nick's face to his. "Natalie is not a something and she does exist!" Nick spat back. LaCroix's smile was like an etching on ice. "You mean she's in your Christian heaven? Perhaps, Nicholas, perhaps. But then as the poet said, ""Parting is all we know of heaven..."" The master vampire put one arm around Nick's shoulders. ""And all we need of Hell,"" whispered Nick. Hell .... Yes, the Hell he'd cheated for 800 years. It was time. Nick threw himself against LaCroix with all his weight. Unprepared, LaCroix fell back under Nick, into the fire. He fought, but his struggles only served to grind both of them deeper into the flames. The fire flashed red and seemed to implode. "Knight?" Schanke's face appeared on the door monitor. "Knight, look, I know you're up there. You've got to let me in. It's either me or the Swat team ...." But the only sound in the empty loft was the soft hiss as the fire in the great, Gothic hearth sank into nothing. *********************************************************** The quotation is From Emily Dickinson's "The Bustle in a House, the Morning after Death," or at least that's the poem I think it's from. I'm at home without either a copy of her works or a Bartlett's Quotations.