Nick picked up his container of blood, popping open the top and taking a sip.
He paused at the sip, surprised at how good it tasted.
Damn, their “fresh” might really be fresh.
Then again, he thought, glancing around their loungers, maybe it wasn’t so weird.
This place was vamp catnip, at least for vamps with money to spend.
A simulated outdoors, a simulated beach with waves. Simulated daylight that didn’t hurt vamp skin… not to mention acres of human flesh in bikinis and beach shorts, showing off a lot of veins and velvety skin. Really, now that he was thinking about it, he was surprised the place wasn’t wall-to-wall vampires, lying on sun loungers and trying to pick up humans to fuck.
Glancing towards Kit, he saw her frowning.
She was clearly thinking, so he waited, taking a few more swallows of blood, keeping his mouth closed as he drank so he wouldn’t gross her out.
“I don’t know, Nick,” she said at the end of that pause. “I get that it’s fucked up… and sure, I could ask.” She frowned, giving him a direct look. “What do you hope to get out of this? I mean, you pretty much know the score. Your friend… that Midnight… she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It sucks, but I don’t see you bringing down some murderer here, or a criminal mastermind of some kind.”
Nick frowned.
It was more or less exactly what Jordan said to Morley.
Neither of them was wrong.
At Nick’s silence, Kit shrugged, still holding her knife and fork in her two hands. She finished chewing her current mouthful of pancake even as she sawed off another bite with the utensils.
“I mean, isn’t this what governments do?” she said a little sourly. “I mean, they all have their little arms races going on the side. The richer they are, the more likely that is. And you know damned well most humans, especially humans in government and the military, are still paranoid about vamps.”
Nick frowned. “So you agree with Jordan? You think this thing was programed to kill vampires?”
“Sure. I mean, it sounds like it, right?” Studying Nick’s face, she frowned. “That doesn’t mean they plan on using the tech, Nick. But humans get scared. Especially about the other races. Especially about vampires… and the White Death is getting bigger and scarier every year. Maybe they’re hoping it’ll keep the less cuddly vamps from attacking them.”
Nick nodded.
He didn’t bother commenting on what he thought of that strategy.
“Still,” he countered. “Someone died. Shouldn’t someone be held accountable for that? I mean… I get why Morley’s pissed, on that level, at least. We’re not at war. There shouldn’t be ‘collateral damage’ like you’d find on a battlefield.”
Kit nodded, but he saw a flicker of exasperation on her face.
“Okay,” she said. “But what would that actually do, Nick?” Watching his face, she swallowed another mouthful of buttery, syrupy pancake. “I mean, your friend Jordie’s right. This is more in the ‘wrongful death’ category. It’s not even manslaughter really. It’s like when any machine malfunctions, and kills someone. The scientists go ‘oops,’ and they go back to the drawing board, try to make sure it doesn’t happen again––”
“But what the fuck kind of machine was that, Kit?” he said, cutting her off. His voice grew an edge, even as it occurred to him that her cynicism was actually bothering him. “Where did it even come from? Did the A.I. in the wall freak out? Did someone on the outside trigger it? Was it a robbery gone wrong? Or was that just some glitch in the security system?”
Kit’s eyes narrowed as he spoke.
She chewed, letting him finish, the look in her eyes making it clear she heard the harder edge in his words, even though he’d kept his voice low.
“You want to know what I think?” she said, swallowing. “About what it was? Is that what you’re asking me?”
“Well… yes.” Nick blinked, staring at her. “Of course I want to know what you think. What the hell are we talking about here?”
She nodded, taking a long drink of the lemonade, then setting down the glass.
“Sounds like nanotech,” she said next, picking up her fork, which she’d put down to grab the lemonade glass. She went back to sawing into her mountain of blueberry pancakes. Most of the butter was melted now, soaked up by the spongey cakes.
“Sounds like it’s not just A.I., Nick,” she added. “A.I. wouldn’t be able to control the morph of the wall. Not to that extent. From what you’re describing, I think the wall’s probably made up of nanotech machines. That, or nanotech somehow got all over the wall and replicated enough to transform it. That’s what swallowed that human cop… and the Praetorian guard. And likely what killed your vampire friend.”
Nick had an urge to tell her Ana Nuñez hadn’t been his friend.
He didn’t, though.
“So what was in the body bag? The one we saw upstairs?” Thinking, he frowned at her, watching her eat. “Another person? Part of a person?” Pausing, he added, “Or part of that nano-machine? Is that why the scene felt scrubbed? Because they took it out?”
Kit finished up another bite of pancake and swallowed, frowning.
“I’d guess part of the machine?” she said, still swallowing. “You said it was heavy, right? And smelled like blood? Sounds like someone removed some of the tech. Maybe part of the tech that killed those two vamps. Or part of the wall that got infiltrated by the tech.”
“Why?” Nick said, blunt. “Why remove it? It’s not like we didn’t have the bodies.”
She shrugged, sawing into the pancakes again. “Dunno. To study it? Maybe to avoid having it studied by anyone else? It really depends who took it, Nick.”
Setting down her utensils briefly, she picked up the lemonade, staring at him as she drank from the glass. She put it down with a slight gasp.
“You’re going to make yourself sick,” he informed her.
She waved him off. “I’ll nap for an hour, then go back out.” She motioned with her chin towards the ocean. “I decided not to bring the food home. The Cuban sandwich is for when I get out of the water the next time.”
Nick grunted, rolling his eyes.
He considered arguing with her, then didn’t.
What the hell. He’d bought day passes. Why shouldn’t the kid enjoy them? She could hang out here until hers expired at the stroke of midnight, for all he cared.
Next time, Nick would invite Wynter, though.
He wished like hell he’d invited her this time, and not only because he would pay good money to see her in a bikini. Wynter would know what questions to ask, too, questions that might get at the heart of last night’s shit-show. Wynter would likely have her own ideas about what killed the Midnight, and why.
“You want me to look into this,” Kit said, pulling Nick’s mind back to her. “You want me to risk both of our asses, and look into this.”
Nick frowned.
Turning over her words, he nodded, if reluctantly.
“I guess I do,” he said.
Giving her a harder look, he added,
“Don’t put yourself in harm’s way, kid. I mean it. See what you can find out without calling attention to yourself, okay? Anything that might shed light on what this was. Like if it was nanotech, like you say, where it came from. Who made it. And maybe who stole it in that body bag. And if it looks like it got released inside that vault on purpose, or it was just some kind of malfunction, or glitch. See if you can find something concrete I can give Morley. Something that might calm him down.”
…Something, Nick’s mind added silently. That will keep that fucker from doing something monumentally stupid. Something that will likely get him killed.
He didn’t speak the soft part out loud, but something in Kit’s eyes told Nick that she understood why he was asking her to do this.
Pushing her sunglasses up, she angled them to rest comfortably on her head, half-buried in her bleached white hair wit
h its purple tips.
“Can I ask Ms. St. Maarten about it?” she said.
Nick thought about that.
He frowned.
Still thinking, he nodded, but not really in a yes, at least not for the question she’d actually asked. Talking to Ms. St. Maarten was a good idea… just not for her.
“I’ll do that part, kid,” he said, gruff.
He took another long drink off the container of blood. Again, the freshness of it shocked him, making his eyes close briefly, his fangs extend as the still-warm liquid coated his throat. It also drew his mind back to Wynter.
Licking his teeth before he opened his mouth, he added to Kit,
“You just do your magic on the back end. Let me worry about interviewing international defense contractors who might get weird about you asking questions about their potential involvement in treaty-breaking illegal tech.”
Kit grunted, shoving another bite of pancake in her mouth.
“Right,” she said, her mouth full of pancake. “Sure, Nick.”
But Nick was remembering something else.
As he did, he felt his frown deepen.
Malek.
That damned prescient seer called him, right when all this started.
The same damned prescient seer who happened to work with Lara St. Maarten, CEO and majority stockholder of Archangel Industries.
Tilting his head back, Nick finished off the last of the blood.
He gasped a little in spite of himself, if only because it tasted better than anything he’d managed to get in his stomach for at least forty-eight hours… basically since he last saw Wynter.
Feeling his cock stir at the memory, he shoved that out of his mind, too.
He set the container down on the table, keeping his lips closed over his extended fangs, cleaning off his teeth more thoroughly with his tongue. As he did, he pressed his thumb down firmly on the depression in the mug’s top, activating the mug to close.
Once he’d cleaned off his teeth enough to worry less about freaking the kid out, or any other humans who might see him, he rose to his feet and grabbed his bag from under the lounger. Gripping the strap in one hand, he walked to his custom titanium board, which had already dried in the artificial sun.
Bending down, he grabbed the board with his free arm and hefted it up.
Once he had it, he looked back at Kit.
The young human was frowning at him, chewing the last bite of blueberry pancake. She swallowed that bite, the frown still on her lips.
“You’re leaving?” she said. “Seriously?”
He nodded, feeling a faint guilt at the disappointment in her eyes.
“I’ve got a few things to check out,” he said. “Work stuff.”
“You mean, work stuff that’s off the books work stuff,” she corrected.
He shrugged, not bothering to lie. “Mostly. Yeah.”
Motioning towards her with a few flicks of his fingers, using the hand holding the strap of his bag, he stopped in midair when it hit him where the mannerism came from.
He felt his face grow hot.
For a human breath he just stood there, half-paralyzed by the memory. Then, pushing the violet-ringed eyes out of his mind, angrily that time, he lowered his voice to a growl.
“You stay,” he said. “Order whatever you want, Miss Stomach of Iron. Put it on my tab. All of it. Massage, pedicure, facial… whatever you want. Make a day of it. A night, too.”
Grunting, he added a little sourly,
“Just don’t drown in the fucking pool. Take that nap after you finish stuffing your face. Digest some of that carbohydrate nightmare before you try any more waves… I mean it. I’m going to be really mad if you die on my dime.”
“Dime.” She scoffed at him openly. “You are such an old man.”
He still saw disappointment in her eyes, despite her snarky tone.
He also saw her eyes light up a little at his mention of a massage.
“…and don’t get too crazy with my credits,” he warned, scowling. “Don’t start giving massages to all of your friends, or invite half your crazy family to come meet you here, or let them invite all of their friends here on my tab…”
She laughed loudly that time, giving a derisive snort.
“Okay… Dad,” she said, rolling her eyes.
Hefting up the board, he gave her a faint smile in return.
“Next time I’ll stay longer,” he promised, still feeling a lingering guilt. “I’ll bring Wynter, and the two of you can talk shit about me together. Okay?” Hesitating, he added, “You can bring one of your roller derby-boxer girlfriends too, if you want. Deal?”
Kit’s eyes lit up for real that time.
Her smile lost most of its disappointment, too.
“Deal,” she said. She pointed at him with a finger with morphing midnight-blue nail polish. “I’m holding you to that, Tanaka. I mean it.”
Relaxing back on the lounger and crossing her ankles with a sigh, she flipped down the sunglasses from where they’d perched in her bleached and dyed hair, aiming her face back up for the artificial sun.
The slight bloat in her belly from the pancakes made her look even younger to him, like a little kid playing grown up with her lime-green bikini.
Fucking baby humans.
He hoped like hell he hadn’t just asked her a favor that would get her killed.
Chapter 11
The Jungle
Brick… Nick typed his sire’s name mentally via his headset, staring sightlessly out a robo-taxi window.
Father Brick, he amended a beat later, changing the text. You said to contact you, if I ever needed anything. You said to let you know if I stumbled onto anything through my work in the NYPD that might affect you, or the race as a whole. You promised you would do the same…
Hesitating, Nick frowned.
His sire didn’t take well to hints that he owed anyone anything.
Brick especially didn’t like having his own words or promises repeated back at him.
Deleting all that, Nick started again.
Father Brick… I apologize for contacting you, but I really need to talk. Please call when you get a chance. I would be most grateful.
After another bare pause, he hit send.
It wasn’t ideal.
Brick didn’t respond well to neediness or vague nagging, either, but after his talk with Kit, Nick had serious questions around White Death’s involvement in all of this.
He’d already called St. Maarten.
He’d called her first.
He’d been surprised, truthfully, when she agreed to see him right away.
He wanted to find out something, anything, before Morley was back on the clock. It was one advantage of not needing sleep; he could keep working while the humans crashed.
The robo-taxi dropped him off outside the gated River of Gold neighborhood where St. Maarten lived. The guard already had his name, and let him inside after a retinal check and a barcode scan, verifying who he was.
Despite the guard, and his name being left at the gate, Nick found himself questioning if he was in the wrong place when he got to the actual building. For the first time, no one was waiting for him in the Phoenix Tower lobby when he walked through the front doors. He didn’t see any security people waiting at the station. The whole place felt deserted. After waiting and looking around for a few minutes, Nick finally gave up. He walked into her private elevator and hit through the sequence to reach the Penthouse, something he’d watched her assistant, Veronica Racine, do about a dozen times.
The doors closed.
No alarms went off, no gas was triggered.
No one tried to stop him.
The elevator car simply began to rise.
When it reached the top floor, a handful of seconds later, he exited out the front warily, entering the elaborate foyer of her massive penthouse.
No one waited for him in the foyer.
No one came out to greet him either, even after he’d be
en standing there for a full minute. He knew the elevator let out a decently-loud tone from the inside of the penthouse, almost like a doorbell, when it reached the top floor. The fact that no one had come out to see who it was, struck him as more than a little odd.
“Ms. Racine?” he called out, listening to the sound of splashing water in the stone basin of the foyer fountain. “Lara? It’s Nick. Nick Tanaka.”
No one answered.
Cocking his head, he stood in front of the phoenix fountain a few beats more, listening for movement, for any sound at all in the rest of the apartment.
Apart from the fountain itself, a trickle of water from another sculpture, and a distant hum of electricity in the walls… it was deathly quiet.
That had never happened before, either.
There was always someone guarding Lara St. Maarten, and St. Maarten’s home. Usually that someone came from Archangel’s private security team. Usually at least one of those people was St. Maarten’s personal bodyguard and assistant, Veronica Racine.
He checked his timepiece, then the call log, to see how much time had passed since he called her.
Roughly forty minutes.
He’d told her it might take him as much as an hour to get here, and it hadn’t seemed to bother her; he’d called from the locker room at the rec center, right before he took a shower, changed, then made his way upstairs to hail a robo-taxi.
He wasn’t excessively late, or even late at all.
St. Maarten simply wasn’t here.
Glancing around the opulent foyer of her top floor mansion, he paused on the stone phoenix with its widespread wings. His eyes shifted down by his boots next, tracing imported tiles decorated with semi-precious stones depicting another phoenix on the floor. He walked past mirrors with gilded, antique frames, past palm trees, past antique chairs from the Renaissance, from Imperial China, from Japan prior to the wars, from South Africa.
He entered her living room. It was the same room where he’d first met her.
“Hello?” he said, his voice sharp.
Nothing.
He walked to the enormous bay window, staring out over a stunning view of the city. Most of that view was dominated by Central Park.
Fang & Metal: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 4) Page 10
