They left behind vampires.
They left behind full-blooded humans.
…and not much else.
Once the reality of the Exodus sank in, everyone thought the seers were completely gone. As in all of them gone. As in, not a single one stayed behind.
Until recently, Nick believed that, too.
He believed it right up until he moved to New York City, and happened upon two full-blooded seers living right here, off the grid, in the fenced-off part of the city known as The Devil’s Cauldron, or simply “The Cauldron.”
The only other person who knew about these two seers––at least as far as Nick was aware––was one Ms. Lara St. Maarten, majority stockholder and functional head of Archangel Industries.
Nick still hadn’t heard the story of how Lara St. Maarten met those two seers. He still didn’t know what her relationship to those two seers entailed exactly, either. The adult male seer, Malek, seemed to know St. Maarten pretty well. Malek had a kid sister, Tailaya, or “Tai.” In the wake of his first big case here, the Kellerman murders, Nick got St. Maarten to agree, and Tai’s big brother, Malek, to agree, to set the kid up with a fake identity and send her to school.
Still, he worried about her.
He worried about her in the school. He worried about her around humans.
He also wondered what Ms. St. Maarten’s ultimate agenda was for Tai and her brother, and why she was so involved in their lives in the first place.
He wondered this about Tai, in particular.
The fact that Archangel’s biggest profit centers remained in organic machinery and genetic tech didn’t exactly ease his mind.
“Anything you want to share?” Kit said, her voice studiously casual.
Nick snapped back to the present, frowning. “What?”
“You’ve got that look on your face again. You have suspicions about her already, don’t you? About St. Maarten?” She paused. “What are they?”
When Nick looked up, giving his friend a quizzical look, the twenty-something punk-tech exhaled in annoyance, rolling her eyes.
“Really?” she said. “Now I get the confused puppy look?”
Nick sighed. “I don’t know anything. My suspicions are there, but nonspecific.”
She nodded, but from her frown, she wasn’t wholly convinced.
“Just keep those cop senses honed, okay?” Kit said. “You’re taking a lot on faith already, Nick. With her, I mean. If she could get you reinstated as a Midnight after you went off the reservation last month… she could also get you locked up if you piss her off. Or if you just don’t want to do something she wants you to do.”
Kit shrugged, keeping her voice neutral.
“I mean… don’t you worry maybe you’re already a little too involved? Too obligated? Given what and who she is?”
Thinking about that, Nick grunted.
“Subtle,” he said, quirking a dark eyebrow at his friend.
She smiled. “I’m all kinds of subtle.”
“I could say the same about you, you know,” Nick said, jerking his chin towards the console she’d unrolled on his kitchen table. “You work for I.S.F., darling. There’s a reason most vampires call it ‘I.S. Fucked.’ If I piss you off, you could literally have one of I.S.F.’s enforcement teams pick me up. Hell, you could hand me over to one of their alligator-wielding psychopaths… and giggle while they rip the heart right out of my chest.”
She gave him a mock serious look.
“Oh, they wouldn’t do that, Nick. Not right away. You’d chill for a few months in an underground lab first, getting your blood drained, your venom harvested for ‘study’––”
“Yeah, yeah,” he grunted, rolling his eyes. “And my skin ripped off my body for ‘regenerative’ research, primarily for vain humans afraid of death––”
“Said like a cocky immortal,” she grinned, kicking him under the table.
Still thinking, he grunted, glancing up from where he’d been watching her hands glide over the paper-thin, organic-metal sheet she’d rolled out on his kitchen table.
“So who am I more stupid for befriending?” he said, gruff. “You, or the nice lady with the private army? Should I trust her less, just because she likes collecting favors from disgruntled vampires, and poaching my friends to do her dirty work for her?”
Kit snorted a laugh, shaking her head.
Her spiky white and blue hair rippled as she did. Glancing down, Nick noticed a fresh bruise on her arm past the sleeveless T-shirt she wore.
“Fair point,” she said, grinning at him.
“You been in the ring again?” he said, motioning with his chin at her arm. “Ow,” he added, wincing when she did something that made his tattoo shock him again. “Take it easy there, Dr. Frankenstein.”
She grunted, shaking her head. “Count on you to make a reference to something a few hundred years old.”
“A reference you got,” he reminded her. “What does that say about you?”
“That I’m a geek,” she replied promptly. “And I have an extensive movie collection.”
Nick nodded.
Even so, he found himself noticing that her face was slightly swollen on one side, too. It was subtle, and she’d covered it with make-up, but now he couldn’t un-see it. Now that he was looking, he noticed bruises all over her. One lower down on her other arm. One on her collarbone she’d also half-covered in make-up. One on her neck. A few red marks on her knuckles and fingers.
His vampire sight picked up on swellings and bruises under the shirt, too.
“Take it easy with the night boxing,” he said. “You look like you broke a few ribs.”
“Don’t use your X-ray specs on me, vampire,” she said, quirking a pierced eyebrow at him. “If you want to see naked women that badly, I can direct you to some great porn sites.”
“Why does everyone want to feed me porn?” he muttered. At her laugh, he nudged her arm. “Hey. I’m serious about the fighting. Take a few weeks off. I don’t care how good you are. You break your neck, I’m going to be pissed.”
She shrugged, but he saw her lips thin. A puzzled look rose slowly to her eyes as she continued to focus down on the screen.
“How did you know I fight?” she said after a pause. “I never told you that.”
He grunted a laugh.
“I knew it the first time I met you. I could see it on you… even while you were chewing me out for the crime of carrying a surfboard.”
She looked up, her enhanced eyes refocusing on his, even as the frown grew more prominent on her full lips.
“No, you didn’t,” she said.
“The hell I didn’t,” Nick said. “It was like the first thing I thought about you. I was a lot more surprised when I found out you were a tech-punk with the I.S.F…. I had you pegged as a semi-pro fighter who worked as a bartender in Queens during the week.”
“That’s… specific.”
Nick tapped his temple. “Cop brain. Old habit.”
She continued to frown, staring at him for a few seconds more before she shook her head, turning her gaze back down to the flat-screen terminal.
“So why don’t you come to a fight?” she said, her voice causal.
He smiled.
“When’s your next one?” he said. “I’ll come.”
“Tonight.”
Nick frowned. “No. Did you just fucking hear me? You need more recovery time, Kit. You’re not doing your career any favors if you give yourself brain damage.”
She shook her head, rolling her eyes at him.
“Relax, old man,” she said, exhaling. “We’re in the Protected Area championships this week. Everyone is beat to shit. That’s the point. I’m not about to give up my slot just because my grumpy vampire friend is having a parental moment. You can either come down and cheer me on, shouting out distracting and unhelpful fighting tips, like the rest of my family and friends… or you can yell at me afterwards while I’m spit-polishing my trophy.”
N
ick sat there, frowning.
After a pause, he conceded her point with a shrug of his own.
“Well, if it’s tonight, I can’t go,” he said, gruff. “I talked to Jordan. They want one more week of me indoors.”
Kit inclined her head, a gesture he couldn’t quite interpret. She didn’t look up from the keyboard she’d conjured on the lower part of her monitor’s screen as she did it. Her fingers glided over it while Nick watched, moving with the precision of a brain surgeon.
“If this patch works,” she said, her fingers still dancing over the keys. “They won’t know where you go tonight. Isn’t that the point, Naoko?”
Nick frowned.
Thinking about that, he frowned harder.
“True,” he said, cautious.
“In fact,” Kit went on, giving him a sideways smile. “If this patch works, Detective Midnight, you can program in any scenario you want, in terms of where you will be tonight. The I.S.F. and NYPD won’t know any different. Just set start and end times so it can construct a realistic-seeming log.”
Nick stared at her. “Are you serious?”
“Do I sound like I’m kidding?”
Nick thought about that.
“What about surveillance?” he said. “In here, I mean? The building?”
“Ms. St. Maarten assures me that won’t be a problem anymore. The I.S.F. has subcontracted routine vampire surveillance to Archangel, as of this week. St. Maarten’s arranged to have Red Sun––specifically, me––oversee the transition on the tech side.”
Grunting, she gave Nick a flickering glance.
“She’s already had me isolate your surveillance records from all other vampires living in this building,” Kit added. “She requested me as the project manager to oversee the contract full time. She got me a promotion in the process, and upped my security clearance.”
Nick frowned, staring at her. “Why?”
She snorted. “Gee, Nick. Dunno. Maybe I’m good at my job?”
“That’s not what I mean. Why is she doing all of this?”
There was a silence where Kit continued to work over the keyboard.
Then she shrugged.
“Well, you did get her out of a murder rap, Nick,” she said.
“That can’t be all of this,” Nick said. “It can’t be.”
“Nope. Probably not. That was kind of my point earlier.”
When he didn’t say anything, she shrugged.
“Then again,” she said cautiously. “Are you really going to look this particular gift horse in the mouth? From the way she was talking, if this works, you’ll be able to go pretty much wherever you want. You’ll be able to do whatever you want, see whoever you want. Which is something no vampire can say these days.”
“Some can,” Nick muttered.
“Yeah. Terrorists. And those scary fuckers in the vamp mafia.”
Nick thought about that.
She wasn’t wrong.
Still thinking about that, about everything she’d said, Nick frowned. As he continued to turn over his tech-punk friend’s words, however, that frown faded.
“You make very good points, Ms. Fiorantino,” he said, bowing his head formally.
“Thank you, Detective Tanaka. I believe I do.”
At that, he couldn’t help it.
Nick Tanaka, employment designation Midnight, chuckled.
Chapter 3
A Night Out
The foot-stomping grew louder ahead.
Music thumped heavily in time with those stamping feet, most of it bass. Shouts and screams rose and fell. They echoed up to a high ceiling in waves, interspersed by boos and catcalls, chants that aligned with the music, clapping, more foot-stomping.
Nick found a smile creeping wider on his face, the closer he got.
He probably looked like an asshole, grinning to himself with no one with him, but he still couldn’t quite wipe the smile off his face as he walked down a dimly-lit tunnel leading to the underground boxing auditorium. That tunnel was all that remained of an out-of-service subway station that once lived below Astoria, Queens.
The rounded, sloping tunnel, which had since been modified to serve as an entrance to the underground stadium from the train station, smelled like mold, stale cigarette smoke, sweat, alcohol, cat piss, blood, rotting food.
Even with his vampire sense of smell, none of it, even the dead blood, could touch his good mood, not right then.
The software patch on his implant and ident-tat worked.
As far as Kit could tell, it worked without a hitch.
He and Kit tested it a few times, with her tapping his GPS feed to the station and checking the transmission as they walked out through the garage-level of the I.S.F.-owned building, bypassing the living security guard even as Kit programmed in a masking feed for the electronic surveillance.
Nick took her out for food.
It was the least he could do.
Kit kept testing all the different feeds the whole time they sat in the diner.
Nick watched her fingers play over the holographic virtual display that hung over her wrist-band, all the while she stuffed fries in her mouth, occasionally taking slurps off a green tea and strawberry milkshake and huge bites off her “smart” burger, which was some kind of engineered meat made in a lab out of vegetable proteins.
The artificial burgers, unlike artificial coffee and a lot of other replacement foods, were actually pretty good. Nick remembered when non-meat burgers tasted like eating a slab of frozen cardboard mixed with freeze-dried potato chunks.
The ones now were different.
There must be more meat connoisseurs among food scientists than coffee addicts.
That, or they figured people would tolerate a lower bar for coffee.
A lot of food Nick used to eat as a human simply didn’t exist anymore. Real meat was even more rare than real coffee. Of course, as a vampire, Nick didn’t have to care, really. As much as he might miss real coffee now and then, he knew it wouldn’t taste the same to him now anyway, even if he could afford it.
The passage got more and more crowded as the sounds grew louder.
Most of the humans he saw were walking the same direction he was.
A group of school-aged kids ran past him, yelling drunkenly and laughing as their screams echoed down the concrete and tile tunnel. Clusters of humans also crouched or stood by the curved walls, adding to the smells in the tunnel with various drugs they were smoking, along with beer and hard alcohol concoctions they were drinking and spilling, most of them badly disguised with sweet drinks and morphing organic coffee mugs.
He also smelled a lot of fast food in self-disintegrating bags.
A lot of young people seemed to be lurking in the tunnel itself, hanging out on the partying fringes of the event, but Nick had his doubts the demographic would skew so young inside. Most of the older people probably cared more about the money they had on the fights than they did about getting high in a piss-smelling corridor.
In any case, Nick didn’t stand out. He looked roughly the age of a lot of them.
That didn’t stop him from feeling old, though.
The cheers and screams grew louder up ahead.
He heard more stomping feet, chants, music, and now the sing-song, echoing voice of an announcer rising above all of it.
He checked the timepiece inside his headset.
He had plenty of time.
Kit’s fight wasn’t scheduled for another hour, and she said the schedule usually ran late, especially later on in the program. Since the event as a whole started that morning, Kit was pretty much at the end of it, so she said to expect delays. Nick had seen some of that reflected in the electronic program already. They had age, weight, and point versus full-contact categories, in addition to boxing broken out from mixed martial arts.
Kit was in some of the higher-skill levels as an adult, which meant the crowds would be bigger too, especially for full-contact, mixed martial arts matches like hers.
> For most of the amateur matches, tonight was the trophy match.
Despite how nonchalant Kit pretended to be while they talked at that diner, Nick could tell she was nervous, and anxious to get down here for the pre-fight prep. He finally let her out of her misery by declaring he needed to take a real shower, basically kicking her out of his apartment after watching her spend about an hour checking her watch and muttering about how soon she should head back to Queens to watch some of the earlier matches.
By then, they knew the GPS blocker worked.
She’d just been hanging out, probably killing time so she wouldn’t show up at the stadium six or seven hours early.
Snorting a little at the thought, Nick shook his head.
The tunnel’s slope tipped steeper. The slight curve in the passage also straightened out, giving him a view of the auditorium ahead.
Flashes of blue, red, green, and white light grew visible.
Nick’s smile returned.
From the sounds and echoes up ahead, the space ahead must be huge.
He should have called Wynter.
The thought made him wince, then flush.
He wondered if she would have met him here.
Would she have taken the train down to New York, if he’d asked her to come?
Just thinking about seeing her, actually seeing her, not just on a monitor, made his muscles tense, enough that he deliberately cleared his mind. He didn’t want to out himself as a vampire down here, not if he could help it––even though Kit told him it wouldn’t matter, that there would be a lot of other vampires here.
Kit said they had a ring dedicated to vamp-fights, and one for hybrids. She said those were the biggest-draw fights of the night, and went later than the amateur matches.
Nick had to admit, he was hoping to get a look at those.
That being said, he was officially keeping a low profile.
He hadn’t forgotten what Jordan said.
He wasn’t supposed to be outside his apartment at all, much less in a place this public. He didn’t want to blow the whole GPS-rigging thing the first night he had it, and he didn’t want to give anyone a reason to give him a second look.
Eyes of Ice Page 4
