“Home. In bed.”

Virgil made a note. “You have any witnesses?”

“No. I was in bed alone.”

“Poor you. In more ways than one. Without someone to corroborate your whereabouts … and with them having photographic evidence…” Virgil grimaced. “Look me in the eyes, kid.”

Nick did.

After a minute, Virgil blinked, then made another note. “Okay, you’re telling the truth. By the way, Nick, you have the most screwed-up life. You’re either boring as all get out, or you’re about to die. There’s no middle ground with you. You might want to work on that.”

No kidding.

“So what do you think they’ll do to him?” Caleb asked.

“I wish I had a better answer for you, but … It all depends on who our judge is. We can have his mom say he was home. However, the prosecutor is going to say that kids slip out of their homes all the time without their parents knowing it. Nick has a bad record for violence at school.”

“Defending myself!”

“They won’t bring up the why,” Virgil said coldly, “only the fact that you’ve been in trouble, many times, for fighting at school. And that you were recently hospitalized for fighting.”

“I wasn’t fighting!”

Virgil arched a brow at him. “Given your record, do you think any judge or jury will buy the fact that you laid on the ground while someone hit you and you didn’t fight back?”

Nick winced. Another valid point. But … it was the truth.

“You should have filed a mugging report,” Virgil said under his breath.

Nick growled at him. “I didn’t want to get the kid into trouble.”

“No good deed goes unpunished. And for that, you might spend the rest of your life in prison. Go you.”

Nick refused to believe that. It couldn’t happen that way. It couldn’t. “I thought the law was all about getting to the truth?”

Virgil burst out laughing. “Stop watching Law and Order, kid. Courts don’t care about the truth. The only thing that matters is what you can prove. It’s not ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ It’s ‘I have an open case log thicker than the New Orleans and surrounding parishes phone books and I need to close some of them.’ So until you prove to me that I arrested the wrong person, you’re going to jail, buddy, and I’m closing at least one case this week.”

Nicks stomach heaved. That was not what he’d been raised believing. But if anyone knew how the legal system worked, it would be Virgil.

“I just want to go home.”

Vigil smiled sympathetically. “I know, Nick.” He checked his watch. “Let me go see if I can rush this along and get you a bail hearing tonight. In the event I can’t, or that you need something during daylight hours, let me give you my business partner’s card. His name is William Laurens and he’s one of the best litigators there is, second to me, of course.” After pulling out the card, he handed it to Nick.

Nick frowned as he read the card. “This says Bill Laurens, paralegal.”

“Ah crap, wrong card. Sorry. Have no idea why that’s still in my pocket. Bill’s my partner’s oldest son and he interned with us as a paralegal while he was in law school. He’s now one of our junior partners.” He handed Nick the correct card. “You could call Bill, but I’d rather you deal directly with either me or William.”

“All right.” Nick tucked the card into his pocket. “By the way, who called you?”

“Kyrian Hunter called William and William called me. Be grateful. Without notice, you’d have been taken through general procedures, which goes a whole lot slower, and they would have put you in a holding cell with some exceptionally fun people.”

“Believe me, I am grateful. Even if I am in here with an undesirable.” Nick glanced askance at Caleb.

Caleb made a noise of pain. “Next time, Gautier, you go alone.”

Virgil checked his watch again. “All right. You two sit tight for a few and let me go see if I can work some magic for you.” His gaze went to Caleb. “Kicking a police car? Really?”

Caleb shrugged. “Car offended me. It was sitting right where I wanted to stand. What would you do?”

“Made sure there was no surveillance, then sucked the cops blood dry, and blown the car up.”

Caleb laughed. “Hos-tile. I love it. You and me could be friends.” He glanced over to Nick. “As for why, I had to do something for them to lock me up with snot-nose, and I didn’t want it to be anything too serious since I would like to leave, sooner rather than later. I’ve got enough things hunting me. I really don’t need anything else.”

“I feel that pain myself, brother.” Virgil slid his PDA into his pocket. “I’ll see you two in a bit.” He started to leave, then stopped. “I know you, don’t I?” he asked Nick.

“About a year ago, you helped us out. We were with Bubba and Mark at the time.”

His eyes brightened with recall, then they widened with substantial interest. He pointed at Nick, but looked at Caleb. “He’s your Nick.”

Caleb saluted him. “You’re a little slow on the uptake tonight, Virg. You down a few pints?”

“Freshly fed and … we really have to get him out of here.” He practically ran out of the room.

Nick turned a probing stare to Caleb. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“The longer you stay in a place with concentrated malice, and let’s face it, this is a cesspit of malice, the more it’ll seep into you. Think of it like a tributary feeding a stream that turns into a river. The more you’re around it, the more it feeds the demon side of you. The more you’re likely to convert into the true Malachai.”

He would be like the monster who’d almost assaulted Kody. “Is that why my father attacked my mother?”

“What do you mean?”

Nick didn’t answer. Instead, he fell silent as memories went through him and he tried to make sense of it all. “I think my father loves my mother.”

Caleb scoffed. “That’s a delusion. Malachais are incapable of love.”

Nick scowled. “I’m not.”

“You haven’t been fully converted yet. You’re still an embryo.”

Not as much of an embryo as Caleb thought. But Nick wasn’t going to argue that right now.

Or let anyone know about the bargain he’d made.

“I disagree. You didn’t see his face when she was yelling at him. He was hurt by it. And he couldn’t have been that hurt if he didn’t care about her.” That was the first thing he’d learned in grade school. When someone insulted and yelled at you and you didn’t have feelings for them, it angered you. Made you want to hurt them. But when you loved someone and they attacked, it raised your level of hurt more than it raised your temper.

Caleb fell silent as he considered that. “You know, that actually explains a lot about you. And a lot about Adarian.”

“What do you mean?”

Caleb moved to sit on the cot underneath the bar-covered window. “Normally, a Malachai is born to parents who hate it. Both mother and father. The father because he knows if the child lives, he will die—most Malachai, including Adarian, murder their children as soon as they find out about them.”

“You mean I had siblings?”

“Yeah, and he killed every one of them. Except you … which never made sense to me. You, he wanted protected. And the mothers hate because of the way their children were conceived, the babies. Again, your mother is different in that she embraced you. So if what you’re saying is true, you are a Malachai conceived in love and nurtured. That, my friend, has never happened.”

“Which means I can love, right?”

Caleb’s gaze lost focus as he thought it over. “It means something. Not sure what. But…”

It gave Nick hope. Maybe he could avert his future and find a way to save them all.

Wishing he had an answer, Nick moved to the other cot, closer to the door.

“So, how did you save Kody, by the way?”

Nick cringed at the question, then hedged at the answer. “I took her to help.”

“And that would be…?”

“Someone who helped her.”

Caleb growled low in his throat. “I don’t want to play this game with you.”

But it wasn’t a game. It was serious business. Nick had made a pact that he knew he shouldn’t have. One Ambrose had thrown down a tantrum over when he’d learned about it.

“What have you done?” Ambrose had snarled in his face.

“What I had to.”

Ambrose had held his hands out like he was choking Nick. “A dog can’t serve two masters.”

“I’m not a dog.”

Ambrose curled his lip. “You’re so stupid. I knew I should have killed you.”

Nick had snorted. “Wow, that hurts me in my tender place. Nice to hear me say I wished myself dead. Love you, too.”

Ambrose shook his head. “You don’t understand. I made your mistake … later in life, but I did the same exact thing. I bound myself to my enemy and it did not work out well.”

“But we’re changing the future. Right? For all you know, I might have already fixed things.”

Ambrose had paused in the circle he was pacing around Nick’s room. “That’s where it gets tricky. There are things that will happen regardless of the actions we take.”

“Such as?”

“You meeting Kyrian and working for him. No matter what I’ve tried, that always happens. I can’t stop it. I can only change the events that lead up to it and the time in our life when it happens. That one moment of meeting him, however, is written in stone. But…” Ambrose squinted as he ruminated. When he spoke again, his voice was a full octave lower. “You might have found the answer for us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why did you save Kody?”

Nick pressed his lips together as he debated telling him. But in the end, it wouldn’t matter. One way or another, Ambrose would learn the truth. “I love her.”

Ambrose sneered. “Love? You don’t even know the meaning of that word.”

“Oh yes, I do. Don’t you dare tell me I don’t.”

Ambrose shook his head. “You’re too young to understand it.”

“No, I’m not. I know what I feel and I know it’s real. I would die for her.”

“Then you’re even dumber than…” Ambrose paused as his eyes danced around. He closed the distance between them and smiled a smile that made Nick’s blood run cold. “We are destined to become a Dark-Hunter. That, too, I haven’t been able to avert. Until now, the catalyst has always been the death of our mother. But…”

Nick wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that word. “But what?”

“If you love another woman, a woman I’ve never known existed before, then maybe she’s the one who dies instead.”

Agony exploded inside him. “No! You’re wrong.”

“Think about it.” Ambrose jerked him into a tight hug. “You’re right, kid. You may have found the answer I’ve sought all these years. That has to be it. You love Kody enough to die for her. It only stands to reason that she’d be the one you lose to launch you into a DH.”

That was not what he wanted to hear. While Ambrose might enjoy the thought, it made Nick ill.

“I won’t let her die. I won’t.”

Anger turned Ambrose’s eyes a deep shade of red. “Listen to me, moron. Who would you rather bury? Your mother or your girlfriend? ’Cause I’m telling you right now, one of them is going to die horribly.”

“I won’t allow it.”

“You have no choice.” Ambrose had spat those words out coldly.

Now, Nick was feeling the truth of Ambrose’s prediction. By trying to keep Kody alive, he’d already screwed up. Badly.

And as he stared at the glass over the window, he saw images appear.

In one, he saw his mother in a chair inside a house he’d never been in before. Her lifeless eyes were wide open as he called out for her to wake up.

In the other, he saw an older version of Kody. Dressed in a white wedding gown, she lay in his arms, covered in blood. Her blood.

It’s your imagination. It had to be.

Yet inside, he knew the truth. Those were the two possible futures for him. Just like Ambrose had said. One of them would have to die.

He might not have saved Kody at all—only delayed her death. Ambrose had talked about rearranging time frames. He could change when things happened, but not the things that were destined to happen.