Nocturne | ONC 2024

Eleven: Confrontation

"Why did we leave this way?"

Aaron glanced down at his dad, leaning on his arm and shivering slightly in a sharp breeze. They were concealed behind the kitchen bins in the alley behind the restaurant, standing beneath the vent so that it didn't blow their scent into the street. Nikolai had assured him that the Nocturnes weren't watching the back entrance, but Aaron had still made him double check before he went to get his car from wherever he'd left it. It seemed strange that the vamps wouldn't be watching the back entrance, considering it was daylight and they'd look highly suspicious loitering in shadows and concealed head to toe.

He supposed they hadn't betted on Nikolai giving Aaron any warning.

With every minute Nikolai was gone, Aaron grew more tense, eyes darting between the alley entrance and the roofline overhead, one hand on the handle of a silver flip-knife in his pocket. Off-duty or not, he always carried something on him.

"Aaron?"

He dragged his eyes from the frayed edge of a binbag fluttering in the wind, his heart still hammering from the fright it had given him. "Mm? Oh. Sorry. It's just easier to park around the back."

It sounded flimsy even to him, considering it didn't explain why they were hiding among the rubbish like fugitives. His father offered a look that said plainly he didn't believe him, but Aaron was grateful that he didn't press.

His muscles were locked like coiled springs by the time Nikolai pulled up outside the alley, blacked-out windows gleaming. The vampire got out and opened the back passenger door, offering his arm to help Aaron's father get inside. Aaron stayed on the street outside, torn between keeping an eye out for approaching danger and staring in disbelief at the vampire being positively gentlemanly.

"You didn't tell me the whole plan," Aaron demanded, as soon as the door was closed behind his father. He couldn't keep the bite out of his voice. "I suppose you're going to befuddle them or something?"

Even behind the scarves he'd replaced around his face, Nikolai's raised eyebrow made itself felt.

"Simms told us you're a sorcerer," Aaron said. "Why would you hide something like that?"

It wasn't the time to be questioning it, it really wasn't. But with his own and his father's life potentially in this man's hands, he couldn't help airing out the worries that had been festering inside him since the interview with Simms. Since Bill's warnings. He was as angry at himself as he was at Nikolai.

"I doubt he said that," Nikolai replied after a moment. "I'm not a sorcerer, Evans. I just have some latent ability. I did tell you my mother was a sorceress."

"That just sounds like semantics."

"It isn't. I don't have enough power to be considered a sorcerer in legal terms. I have some useful party tricks, that's all."

"Party tricks," Aaron scoffed. "Is that what Coran Simms hires you for? Balloon animals and magic bubbles?"

"Coran Simms hires me for intruder identification and tracking, since I have no affiliations with any particular faction and so can cross territory lines without problems," Nikolai replied, as close to snapping as he'd ever come. "Which is incidentally the same reason your supervisor accepted my proposal. I don't consider myself responsible for the fact that neither of you asked why I was good at that kind of thing. You were only interested in the fact that I could. Understandably, circumstances considered, but nevertheless everyone was quite happy to take it at face value when it suited them."

"So you put intruders in the hands of men like Simms for money?"

Nikolai stared at him. "What are you going to do when we find the perpetrator for these Nocturne deaths, Evans? You think you're solving this so the human justice system can decide what happens as a consequence? That's not how it works. Our killer will be handed over to the Nocturnes for appeasement, and you will go home with your pay at the end of the month for finding them." A shrug. "If you want a kinder system, you got into the wrong field."