Nick turned his back to them, staring out the bay window as he refocused on the image inside the virtual reality display of his headset, which showed the angular-faced seer with his two different-colored eyes. As usual, Nick found the paler, blue-white iris harder to look at than the nearly black one.
As usual, the sharply contrasting colors made his eyes appear to be two different sizes, staring out of two different minds and personalities.
“I’ve gathered this case is dangerous, Mal,” Nick growled, switching to sub-vocals. “I got a pretty big hint around that at the vault last night… not to mention what happened to Veronica Racine today.” Pausing, he added, “Your boss, St. Maarten, wants me to look into this. My boss wants me to look into this. Are you saying I shouldn’t look into this?”
“I need you to come see me,” Malek insisted. “I need you to come see something. With me. Today. Right now––”
“No,” Nick growled, speaking aloud.
Feeling as much as seeing the two uniforms jump, Nick switched back to sub-vocals.
“No, goddamn it,” he said, silently that time. “No more paintings, Mal. I mean it.”
“No paintings. We don’t have to look at paintings, if you don’t want to. I want you to come with me.” Malek hesitated, then finished, “…to see Tai.”
“Tai?” Nick frowned. “What do you mean, come with you to see Tai? What does Tai have to do with any of this?” Still thinking, he said, “Where is she? Is she down here, in New York? What is she doing in the city––”
“Now, Detective Tanaka,” the seer said, his voice urgent. “I need you to come right now.”
“Is she okay?”
Nick saw the tall seer blink, as if the question confused him.
“Okay?”
“Tai,” Nick growled. “Is your sister all right? Did something happen to her?”
Malek blinked again. “What would have happened to her?”
Nick stared into the virtual monitor, his jaw hardening. He fought with the impulse to make the hand gesture of strangling with both hands.
“Goodbye, Mal.”
“Wait!” the seer said, his voice rising. “Wait! It’s about the vault! The nanotech… the animal machines. She told you, yes? She told you about them? Lara did, na?”
Nick felt his jaw clench.
Goddamn it.
“Where is Tai?” he said after another beat.
“She’s in school.”
Nick’s jaw hardened more.
“Are we taking a train, Mal?”
The seer again looked baffled.
“Of course.”
Exhaling in frustration, Nick clicked over on his headset, opening another channel. As soon as it showed as “clear,” he hit in the ID markers for Morley and Jordan.
Neither of his two human partners were going to be thrilled with him leaving town, even if he told them it was for a lead in the case. Maybe especially if he told them it was for a lead––given Nick wasn’t going to be able to tell them jack shit about how this was going to help them solve the case none of them were supposed to be working on.
“This better add up to something,” he growled to the seer, staring at him through the monitor. “I’ll meet you at Grand Central. Thirty minutes.”
“Thank you, Nick. Thank you. This will help. I promise you, this is for the best, for all concerned. I vow it––”
Nick frowned. Some part of him wanted to parse out the language there.
A bigger part of him didn’t want to.
The latter won out, in part because Nick realized Malek was speaking Prexci, for fuck’s sake, the seer’s tongue, and a language that was supposed to be dead. That Nick understood the seer’s words anyway, well enough that he hadn’t even noticed the change in language, not at first, bothered him more than perhaps any of it.
Regardless, he’d heard enough seer-speak for one day, both in his head and from this asshole.
He cut the connection.
Nick’s guess had been right.
Jordan and Morley weren’t thrilled.
Morley, who’d been right where Nick suspected, in the other room looking at the murder scene and talking to the uniforms who arrived at the scene after Nick, gave him an earful first. Unfortunately, Nick couldn’t tell him much that would ease the detective’s mind.
He hinted that it was a confidential source, and Morley put that together, too.
“Is it that goddamned artist again?” he grumbled, openly annoyed.
Nick hesitated.
Apparently, he hesitated long enough to answer Morley’s question.
“Can’t he send you a damned image capture?” Morley said. “Like a normal person?”
“He says not,” Nick said, still not sure how much he should say. “He says I have to come with him.”
“And he won’t tell you why.”
“No.”
Morley swore for a few seconds more, but Nick could already tell the senior detective was going to give him permission to go, probably for the same reasons Nick agreed to go along with Malek and his cryptic b.s. in the first place. None of them––him, Jordie, Morley––could afford to turn down what might end up being a legitimate lead. Not now, not given how little they had, and the half-assed answers they’d gotten from St. Maarten, Archangel, I.S.F., and pretty much everyone connected to the vault break-in at Praetorian.
Nick was already on the train when he got the call from Jordan.
Jordan himself was en route to the Phoenix Building by then, after apparently being woken up by Morley, who’d asked him to come in early.
Nick felt a twinge of guilt when Damon told him that.
He knew Morley likely called the younger detective in to take Nick’s place as the secondary detective on the scene.
Morley dumped a bunch of intel on Nick on his way up to the Northeastern Protected Area, as well, starting before Nick even managed to board the train.
From what he sent, the older detective managed to get a lot more concrete information out of Lara St. Maarten than Nick himself had.
According to the testimony he shared, St. Maarten and Racine were in the apartment alone when a group of three vampires, none of them known to her, appeared in the virtual room where Nick found them. St. Maarten claimed no alarms were tripped prior to their arrival. No guards called up, or alerted them to a problem, not even when the suite’s front door locks were forcibly disengaged and the main security system shut down.
The three vampires threatened St. Maarten.
They’d wanted the names and residential addresses of two of St. Maarten’s research scientists: a thirty-six-year-old female human named Fredericka Lin, and a forty-eight-year-old male human named Howard Gossman.
They killed Ms. Racine when she attacked them.
Lara claimed Veronica had been trying to give her time to escape, which more or less matched up with the wounds Nick saw… but didn’t make it the truth. During the fight, St. Maarten managed to trigger the virtual room and hide from the vamps, locking herself into an organic cabinet and sealing herself inside when she wasn’t able to get past them.
Eventually, when they hadn’t been able to find her inside the virtual jungle, or anywhere else inside the apartment, they left.
Based on the timeline St. Maarten outlined, the NYPD squint team now believed Nick got there approximately five to ten minutes after the three vampire invaders left.
Supposedly, the surveillance system had been entirely shut off.
St. Maarten insisted she’d never seen them before, but she was already working with an A.I. sketch artist, in the hopes of finding a match in I.S.F. databases. Unfortunately, the DNA sweeps hadn’t produced a damned thing, not even in Veronica’s bite wounds.
When Nick asked how that could be, Morley didn’t have an answer.
“Where the fuck was her security team?” Nick growled after a silence. “The rest of them? That can’t be normal, her only having one staff person on site––”
“
Yeah,” Morley said, sounding angry again. “No good answer on that, Midnight. St. Maarten claims she gave the entire detail the day off. She claims she had a relationship with Racine… a sexual one. She said they wanted the place to themselves, so she dismissed the rest of her staff, including security, the kitchen staff, housekeeping. St. Maarten claimed Racine is generally ‘formidable enough on her own,’ when it comes to protecting her…”
“You don’t believe her?” Nick said.
“No,” Morley said. “Do you?”
Nick grunted. “No. But I rarely do.”
There was another silence.
Nick waited through it, walking down the aisle of the train, checking numbers on the different doors as he passed. Finding the right cabin, he hit the door release and entered the cubicle he was sharing with Malek. He glanced over to see the seer already strapped in, staring up at him with his odd, mismatched eyes.
“It’s pretty unlikely,” Nick admitted, frowning at the angular-featured seer. “Theories as to the real story?”
“A meet?” Morley said. “Blackmail?”
“You think they called ahead? That St. Maarten let them in?”
Nick’s brow cleared as he thought about that.
That made a lot more sense.
“So,” he continued. “They ordered her to dismiss security. All but one bodyguard, maybe. Or maybe St. Maarten pushed back on meeting with them alone. Insisted on having at least one of her people with her.”
“Makes more sense, doesn’t it?”
“It does.” Still thinking, Nick added, “It doesn’t explain the clothes. What I found both of them in… clothes-wise… it matches more with the intimate day alone.”
“Sure,” Morley said. “Or maybe her attackers were just being cautious.”
At Nick’s silence, Morley added,
“Might be, they were ordered to strip naked. Whoever these assholes were… White Death or whoever else… they had to know who they were dealing with. They probably made St. Maarten and Racine strip, then provided them with the clothes.”
Nick thought about that, too.
It was weird. It also made sense.
The longer he thought about it, and about Brick, the way Brick thought and operated, the more sense it made.
Frowning, he shook his head, mostly at himself.
“Fuck,” he muttered. “Stupid.”
“Excuse me?”
“Me,” Nick clarified. “I’m fucking stupid. I thought there was something weird about the clothes. They weren’t… expensive enough. They didn’t look high enough quality, even for sex clothes. I didn’t dwell on it at the time. But if asked, I would’ve said they weren’t really St. Maarten’s style. Not like I know her like that,” he added.
Morley grunted. “From what St. Maarten told me, you walked into a pre-war, Amazonian jungle, complete with monkeys and damned jaguars. Can’t say I’m all that surprised her tacky sex clothes weren’t at the top of your list of things to notice.”
Nick couldn’t really argue with that.
Still, he found himself frowning.
He also found himself thinking, not for the first time, that Morley was no dummy.
“So,” Nick said, his lips still firmed in a hard line. “A planned meet. Maybe St. Maarten went to them for help about the machine, like she said. The wanting them as allies part could be real… but then things went sideways. The names could still be real… the Archangel scientists. I’d guess they were on the nanotech project team.”
“My thought, too,” Morley conceded. “I’ve put them into protective custody.”
Nick nodded.
Again, Morley was no dummy.
“Why would St. Maarten agree to a meet like that?” he said. “Without security?”
“Why else?” Morley grunted. “Arrogance? Maybe she’s dealt with them before. Maybe she thought they’d never dare attack her, given who she is.”
Nick frowned.
He didn’t disagree… exactly.
Like when he’d been talking to St. Maarten, he could still feel a piece missing.
Whatever that piece was, if felt big. Nick felt like he was squinting at a massive picture-puzzle with a black hole in the center, in a shape that blurred out everything around it.
“Yeah,” Morley said, almost like he read his mind. “I feel it, too.”
“That we’re still on the outside of all this?” Nick muttered.
“Yeah. Like St. Maarten’s story stinks to high heaven… like whatever she’s really afraid of, she still hasn’t bothered to tell us.”
Nick’s frown deepened.
Hearing Morley voice it aloud didn’t make him feel any better.
“I could really use you down here,” Morley said next. “Tell me again what the hell you’re doing, going up to that Northern Protected Area, Midnight?”
Nick scowled for real at that.
His eyes shifted sideways, from the window to Malek’s face.
The seer sat there calmly, hands folded, his white and black eyes staring at Nick’s face. He just sat there, unapologetically watching him, like that wasn’t the slightest bit creepy, to stare at someone from a few feet away for no goddamned reason at all.
“I’ll let you know when I know,” he muttered.
Chapter 17
You Like Me
They got up there just before two o’clock on a cloudless day.
The sun shone down hotly, high in the sky from the Protected Area dome.
For the same reason, Nick lurked in the shadow of an overhanging roof while Malek went to find them a driverless taxi.
The damned seer still hadn’t told him where they were going.
He hadn’t even told Nick why they were there.
Sitting in the back of a metallic-blue robo-taxi, Malek pulled up to the curb in front of the train station, right next to the overhang where Nick stood. Nick waited for the sliding back door to open, then dove inside, more or less landing on Malek when the seer didn’t move out of the way.
Shoving the seer down on the seat, Nick scowled at him briefly, then arranged his weight on the taxi’s back bench as the sliding door closed behind him with a click.
The car pulled smoothly away from the curb.
It accelerated as it left the train station’s parking lot and began moving down the street.
“The school?” Nick said, giving the seer a hard look.
Malek blinked in surprise. He still seemed startled at how he’d ended up on the opposite side of the taxi’s passenger bench.
“Of course,” he said after a too-long pause.
“Of course.”
Nick bit his lip, fighting back and forth with a desire to cuss the other out.
Truthfully, he battled more with mixed feelings about being up here at all.
Wynter worked at the school.
Malek’s baby sister, Tai, was a student there, thanks to Nick, who more or less bullied Malek and Lara St. Maarten into registering her at Kellerman Prep, and paying for her tuition so she could have some semblance of a normal life. Nick wanted Tai to experience being an actual kid, at least for a little while, despite what she was.
As a part of that, Tai was forced to go on the grid.
For the first time in her life, the baby seer found herself registered under the I.S.F., and implanted with an identity tat. She was given a racial-cat tattoo, an ID number, a fake family, at least on paper, and an implant that tracked her as a minor.
She wasn’t registered as a seer, of course.
She was registered as a hybrid.
Tai confided to Nick that St. Maarten briefly considered having her register as a full-blooded human. She had her tech people look into setting up fake medical records, along with all of the accessories Tai would need to pull the deception off: high-grade contact lenses, blood patches, fake fingerprints, dental implants, probably one of those suits that could simulate organ placement, heartrate, body temperature.
There were advantages to being human.
She’d be a full citizen as a human.
Also, if something went terribly wrong, and they had to pull Tai off-grid, she could truly disappear. None of her recorded stats, including blood-type, DNA, or other bio-records would be real. None of her real stats would be known by the authorities, so any data they left behind would be utterly worthless.
Apparently, though, upon discussion, no one thought Tai could pull it off, at least not for a sustained period of time, not without raising questions… not even St. Maarten herself. None of the scientists or techs working for Archangel who were affiliated with the “Tai project” thought it was a good idea, either.
Even Malek, her brother, thought it was better to acknowledge that his sister wasn’t fully human.
Nick agreed, too, if maybe not for the same reasons as the others.
It was too much pressure to put on the kid.
Given Tai’s particular “talents,” putting too much pressure on her, especially at such a young age, didn’t strike Nick as the best idea.
That was even apart from the fact that he genuinely liked the kid.
For the first time in a while, Nick wondered how everything was going for her. He wondered how she was adjusting––not only to school, but to living in society more generally, to being a real person, one who legally existed.
For most of her life, Tai lived on the street.
She lived on the street and off the grid, with a brother who was about twenty steps shy of normal himself. Malek didn’t even seem to know how to fake being normal, not even for short periods of time. Even among seers, the dude was weird, at least compared to seers Nick had known prior to the war… and that was saying something.
Funnily enough, Tai was much better at acting normal.
She might not really know how to fake being human, though.
Until recently, Mal was her only real role model. He was the only real person in her life, apart from Archangel scientists and Lara St. Maarten.
Worse, now that the kid was tagged as a hybrid, she was bound to come across assholes at school who would give her shit for her race.
Fang & Metal: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 4) Page 15
