Damon hesitated.
Nick did too. He lowered the mostly-empty blood bag, listening intently for the cop’s answer.
“No,” Jordan said after that beat. “He didn’t kill anyone…”
Nick felt a huge rush of relief.
He swore he felt the same on Wynter, even through the floor and ceiling.
Jordan’s voice grew harder.
“But he broke the collarbone of one of them,” the detective said. “He broke the leg of another. He threw them into walls. He picked one up and slammed him against the one-way window until we opened the door and let him out––”
Nick winced.
Wynter’s voice was stronger, though.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have imprisoned him, then,” she broke in angrily. “Maybe you should have taken him where he wanted to go.”
“He didn’t tell us where he wanted to go!” Jordan snapped back. “He wasn’t talking, lady! He went from lying there like a dead person to snarling at us like a fucking animal. The only words out of his mouth were ‘Open the door or I snap his neck…’ Other than that, we might as well have tried to reason with a damned lion––”
“He was traumatized!” she said. “Do you really not get that?”
“Calm down,” a third voice said. “Both of you. You know he’s upstairs.”
“He’s listening,” a fourth voice offered cheerfully. “He just ate a lot and he’s listening.”
Nick winced, recognizing that voice, too.
It was a little kid’s voice.
It was the voice of a young girl.
What the hell was she doing here?
Another, fifth voice rose from the kitchen.
Nick found himself recognizing that one, too.
“If he’s feeding himself,” Lara St. Maarten said. “And if Ms. James is certain she is not in any physical danger, perhaps we should simply let the two of them be. At least until he’s recovered enough that––”
“How can you say that?” Jordan said. “You saw what he was like––”
“He was down over three-fourths of his blood,” St. Maarten reminded him. “He was literally almost dead when we got to him, detective. He wasn’t in his right mind––”
“And just how did you get to him?” Jordan snapped. “Because I’m still not exactly clear on that part. How the hell did you even find him, much less get him out of there? And what are we supposed to do about I.S.F.? They’ve got to have alerts out on him by now. He’s been off their radar for almost four weeks––”
“Don’t worry about I.S.F.,” Ms. St. Maarten said. “I’ve got that end of things covered.”
“Because that’s not at all creepy,” Jordan said, angry.
“Damon… calm down.”
Morley’s voice. Jesus.
How many fucking people were down there?
“We don’t even know who tried to kill him!” Jordan burst out. “But you’re cool with this school principal, who’s got zero skills or qualifications to keep him, much less herself safe… no offense, lady… you want her taking on that risk, too? She’s a civilian, for fuck’s sake. What if Tanaka can I.D. the people who tried to kill him? Or hadn’t it occurred to you that he probably got picked up in the first place because he got too close to that vampire-harvesting group Charlie was going after?”
“I think she’s right,” the third voice spoke up, the one that told everyone to calm down before.
Nick realized it was Kit.
“…Ms. St. Maarten, I mean,” Kit clarified, her voice cautious. “Nick clearly wanted to come here. If this little kid’s right, and he’s awake and feeding himself and listening to us talk, then he’s one hundred percent better than he was when we last saw him at Phoenix Tower.
“Anyway,” she added, her voice matter-of-fact. “Even at his absolute worst, he didn’t kill anyone. He somehow managed to get on a train… and ride it up here… all without feeding on anyone. He found his way from the train station to here. So, some part of Nick was clearly still there, even when he was mostly dead––”
“Well, that’s fucking reassuring,” Jordan muttered.
“It should be,” Kit said, her voice sharper. “He could have killed all of us. Every damned one of us. And you know it.”
There was a silence.
“He hasn’t bit me,” Wynter said. “And believe me, he’s had plenty of opportunities. I as much as offered it to him.”
The kid laughed.
Nick knew for sure now that it was Tai.
Again, he wondered what the fuck she was doing here.
Was her asshole brother here, too? The prescient?
And what was Kit doing, talking about the kid being psychic in front of Jordan and Morley? Did Kit know she was a seer? Did everyone know she was a seer now?
He remembered then.
St. Maarten got the kid an ident-tattoo.
Tai was now, officially, a hybrid––according to the U.S. government, I.S.F. and the H.R.A. They must think she was more psychic than your average hybrid. Which was still risky as fuck, but it was better than anyone knowing the truth.
Labeling her a hybrid made sense. Tai wasn’t a very believable human.
Neither was her brother.
Despite all of his mental grumbling, Nick realized he wanted to see her. Tai. The thought filled him with a kind of longing pull, even as he finished off the last of the blood bag he’d been working on. He’d meant to visit her up here before now.
He’d meant to come up and see how she was doing in school.
He hadn’t seen the kid in ages.
He hadn’t really seen her since the night he’d first met her.
If they were right, that was even longer ago than he’d realized.
Had they really said it’d been four weeks since he’d last been in his apartment?
He had a vague memory of arriving here.
He had a memory of Wynter hitting him, of her saying…
“Two weeks.”
Nick turned at the voice.
His eyes connected with the small figure in the doorway.
It only occurred to him then that he’d spaced out, stopped listening to the conversation downstairs as he tried to recount the last month of his life.
Somewhere in that gap, the conversation must have ended.
“She said two weeks,” Tai repeated, smiling at him. “And I missed you, too.”
The kid just stood there in the doorway, her pale, blue-silver eyes shining.
When Nick didn’t speak, she walked over to him, sitting on the bed next to his legs. She bounced lightly on the mattress, a pleased smile growing on her kid-round face.
“This is a good bed,” she announced. “Perfect amount of bounce.”
It hit Nick uncomfortably that he was naked under the comforter. He looked under it briefly to confirm that, then pulled it higher up so that it covered his stomach, crossing his legs and sitting up straighter, his back leaning partly against the wall.
“What are you doing here?” he said to her.
“I wanted to see you,” she informed him. “Weren’t you just thinking you wanted to see me, too?”
“Don’t you have school?”
She shrugged. “It’s Saturday. Ms. St. Maarten said she was coming to visit you and the principal, so I asked if I could come, too.”
Nick nodded, frowning as he looked her over. He hugged the comforter to his chest, his voice gruff.
“You’re eating now, at least,” he observed. “Does it confuse your brother, to see what a normal, non-underfed kid looks like?”
She laughed, picking up one of Wynter’s pale blue throw pillows and chucking at him.
He batted it away, but smiled at her.
“How are your classes?” he said, his voice still gruff. “Or do you spend all of your time in the cafeteria, trying to scam food off the lunch lady?”
She laughed again, smacking him again with the pillow. “I like astronomy.”
“Astronomy,
huh?” He grunted. “Figures. That’s about as useful as studying philosophy, kid. You can’t even see the real stars in here.”
“We can!” she said, outraged in her little-kid way. “We can see satellite feeds––”
Nick rolled his eyes dramatically. “Awesome. You watch the sky on television. How utterly inspirational. Borderline spiritual, one might say––”
“Tai.” Another voice, male, from the doorway. “Come here.”
Tai turned around without getting up off the bed.
Staring at the tall form of her brother in the doorway of Wynter’s bedroom, she hugged Wynter’s other throw pillow to her chest. That one was a sharp, lime-green in color.
“Why?” she said, puzzled.
“Come here, Tai. Get off the bed and come here.”
“He’s fine!” Tai protested. “You’re being dumb, Mal.”
The male seer clenched his jaw. His mismatched eyes flickered to Nick’s.
Nick kept his face purposefully blank.
Still frowning at her brother, Tai looked back at Nick, too.
“You’re okay, aren’t you, Nick?”
Nick nodded, smiling at her. “More or less.”
“Tai…” the male seer growled.
“I wanted to come visit you earlier,” Tai said, ignoring her brother. “But Ms. James said I should wait. She said you were sleeping. I thought vampires don’t sleep?”
“We don’t… usually,” Nick said, ignoring the tall seer fuming by the door. “But if we get hurt or really tired we do. I guess I was tired.”
She laughed. “You must have been. Ms. James said you slept for two weeks. Two weeks! How does anyone sleep that long?”
Nick smiled, shrugging. “Dunno.”
“Did you dream all that time? What did you dream about?”
“Tai!” Malek snapped.
She jumped that time, still squeezing the lime-green pillow in her arms. Then she scowled. Giving Nick an apologetic look, she released the pillow, dropping it on the bed. She slid off the side of the bed and walked around it and back towards the door of the bedroom. Nick watched her go, deliberately ignoring the male seer until Malek cleared his throat pointedly.
Nick’s eyes flickered over then, meeting the male seer’s.
He’d forgotten how strange those eyes were.
Tai’s eyes were a silvery shade of blue, and more shocking on an initial glance than her brother’s, but Nick found he adjusted to Tai’s eyes pretty quickly. He generally got used to the unreal glow of Tai’s silvery irises after just a few minutes of talking to her.
Conversely, the eyes of Tai’s brother seemed to grow more unnerving and strange the longer Nick stared at them.
Malek’s eyes were two different colors.
That was part of it––but it wasn’t all of it.
One of Malek’s eyes shone a pale turquoise color; the other was a dark, near-black that reminded Nick of polished volcanic rock.
The contrast in those irises made them look like they were different sizes and shapes, not only different in color. Something about those eyes also had a way of making Malek himself appear unstable, as if two different people were staring out from inside that skull.
Which might be appropriate, really, given what Malek was.
Malek was a prescient.
Even for a seer, it was a highly unusual gift.
Malek saw the future. He didn’t always understand what he saw, from what Nick gathered, but the male seer got glimpses of the future, which he often painted or sketched, maybe in the hopes someone else might understand them.
Of course, Nick had reason to believe Tai had “unusual gifts” as well, but if she did, no one would admit to him what they were.
She could read vampires. That was strange enough.
Most seers couldn’t do that. Seers could read humans. Seers could also read other seers, for the most part; meaning, they could read other seers who let them, or who weren’t skilled enough to block them from reading them.
But they couldn’t read vampires.
Then again, as far as Nick knew, Tai and her big brother, Malek, were the only two seers left on the entire planet.
He watched the little girl seer vanish back out of Wynter’s bedroom.
Malek continued to stand there, in the doorway, as Nick listened to Tai clump down the stairs in her boots––boots he bought for her right after she first came up here to attend school at Kellerman Prep.
Nick frowned at Malek, folding his arms across his bare chest.
“Do I have you to thank?” he said, gruff. “For finding me?”
Malek blinked.
Some of the hardness grew less in his angular face.
“Yes,” he said.
Nick nodded, refolding his arms. “Thanks.” Pausing, he clenched his jaw briefly. “How did you get me out of there?”
“Do you remember where you were?”
Nick shook his head. “No. I just heard you talking about it downstairs.” He paused. “I remember the club in Queens. But Jordan mentioned a warehouse––”
“Don’t worry about any of that now,” Malek said, his voice warning. “Lara is looking into it.”
Nick frowned. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning, you don’t need to worry about it,” Malek said, his voice maddeningly immovable. “The people who had you are no longer in the picture. The ones in the warehouse, at least, the ones who could ID you––”
“You mean they’re dead,” Nick said, his voice equally warning.
“They are no longer your problem,” Malek corrected. “As for who hired them, or who might have really been behind it, we’re working on it. I.S.F. is working on it. Archangel is working on it. NYPD is working on it. You don’t need to be working on it, Nick. Not now.”
“Is Charlie okay? I didn’t hear her down there.”
“She’s fine.”
Nick waited for the seer to say more.
He didn’t.
“Is she still on the case?” Nick said. “Charlie.”
“Yes. She is still assigned to it.”
Nick frowned again.
He was about to try and follow up on that question too, when he heard more steps on the stairs. That time, they were going up, not down. They were also decidedly louder and heavier than Tai’s feet, and clumsier, which told Nick they belonged to a human.
Jordan’s face appeared in the doorway.
He gave Malek a wary look, definitely focusing a few beats too long on the oddity of his eyes. Then the human detective pushed past the ghost-like seer and into the bedroom.
For the first time, it occurred to Nick that Malek was wearing long sleeves.
Jordan likely didn’t have any idea who Malek was, in terms of the Kellerman case. He likely had no clue Malek was the mysterious “artist” who’d been leaving prescient paintings for them around the city for days while they hunted the killers.
Nick wondered how the hell St. Maarten had introduced them. He wondered how she explained what and who Malek and his sister were, and what they were doing there.
Jordan probably thought they were insane for bringing a kid here.
Nick wasn’t entirely sure he disagreed with him.
Jordan was staring at Nick now, his dark eyes taking in the length of him, and probably the shocking white of Nick’s bare upper body, not to mention the tattoos he wore on his arms and shoulders.
Nick frowned a little under that scrutiny, unable to help it.
“How many fucking people are going to come in here?” he grumbled. “I’m not exactly decent for guests. Someone could at least give me a shirt, if we’re going to have a tea party up here and exchange pleasantries––”
“How are you, man?” Jordan said, ignoring his grumble. “You look… almost sane again.”
Nick shook his head, half in humor, half in irritation, combing his fingers through his hair. It struck him to wonder how long it had been since he’d taken a shower. His hair was gritty, like he’d roll
ed in the dirt for a few hours.
“Gee, thanks, Damon,” he said, snorting.
When he glanced up at Jordan, he saw the human visibly relax.
“You are yourself again,” he said, that relief in his voice. “…Back to the grumpy old man vampire we all know and love.”
Malek frowned from the doorway.
Something about the expression on the seer’s face made Nick want to laugh.
He didn’t, though.
He focused on Jordan instead.
“Is Charlie okay?” he said.
Jordan’s scowl returned.
That time, it didn’t seem aimed at him, meaning Nick.
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me, man?” Jordan said, sounding openly annoyed. “Why didn’t you say anything? I can’t believe she roped you into this bullshit case of hers and you didn’t even fucking mention it when we spoke that morning.”
When Nick only blinked, Jordan’s voice sharpened.
“…I would have told you not to do it, by the way,” he added. “You know that, right? I would have told you, you’re out of your fucking mind, Midnight, getting into that ring. The vampire deaths have been all over the damned news channels. I would have told you to stay home. Hell, I would’ve called Ms. Wynter James and had her come to your place.”
Nick frowned back.
His mind clicked through the other’s words, fighting to keep up.
That time, it wasn’t him trying to figure out what had happened so much as him trying to figure out what the cover story was for Jordan and the NYPD.
It sounded like Charlie had taken the fall for him.
When Jordan fell silent, and clearly seemed to be waiting for Nick to say something in response, Nick shrugged.
“Well,” he said, wrapping his arms more tightly around his chest, still feeling weird about being shirtless for some reason. “It made sense to use me. You can’t exactly blame Charlie for that. Who else was going to do it?”
“How about not you,” Jordan said, angry. “How about a C.I.? Someone who was already in the circuit?”
“I’m a Midnight,” Nick reminded him. “I’m more or less owned by––”
But Jordan didn’t seem to hear him.
Or maybe he just didn’t care.
“––To throw you in the ring like that. In Farlucci’s fight crew. With vampires dying all over the city, every damned fight night. Just sheer fucking stupidity.”
Eyes of Ice Page 17
