Fang & Metal: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 4)

by JC Andrijeski

  Wynter looked at Nick. When he met her gaze, she raised an eyebrow, and Nick scowled… right before he turned, aiming that scowl at St. Maarten.

  “What if that’s not okay with the rest of us?” he growled.

  “Then we can part company right now.” St. Maarten rearranged her body on the lounger, her jaw hardening as she stared out at the artificial sea. “We are on the verge of another race war, Detective Tanaka… in case you haven’t noticed. One that is being pushed into motion deliberately this time, by actors unknown, who are growing increasingly aggressive. I will take whatever alliances or détentes I can get, until I understand more about this… and how to stop it.”

  She leaned back in her white deck chair, balancing the champagne flute on one metal arm, her green eyes piercing as she looked around at them.

  “I don’t have time to play footsie with you any more, Detective,” she added. “You are either in this fight, or you are not. If you are not, I will take care of that today. We will part company and we will darken one another’s doors no longer. I will arrange to have your memory wiped… along with the memories of anyone else who decides they would rather not be involved. I will need an answer on where you stand with this, however, before you leave this building. Things have changed too much with recent events. I can no longer allow you to know as much as you do unless I am sure I can rely on you.”

  Nick let out a disbelieving grunt. “Do I even want to know what that fucking means?” he growled.

  She raised her voice, speaking over him.

  “I have given you the option to walk away, Detective Tanaka,” she said, sharp. “I would not take a single memory from you apart from what transpired over the last two days, and then only what I required to keep me safe. You may walk out of here… completely un-obligated to me, or anyone else in this room. Go back to your life as a Midnight and a prize fighter. Enjoy being a celebrity without the added stress of additional information… information that clearly seems to be more than you can handle.”

  When Nick scowled, opening his mouth, she spoke over him.

  “I will need your answer today, Detective,” she repeated.

  She glared around at all of them, including Jordan and Morley.

  “…That includes you, too, Detectives.” She glanced at Kit. “And you, Ms. Fiorantino.”

  Another silence fell.

  Nick continued to scowl at St. Maarten.

  He hadn’t missed that she hadn’t addressed Wynter in her ultimatum.

  She hadn’t included Malek, either.

  So was he supposed to assume the seers had no choice? Was it just assumed they’d be on board, given what they were? Because there was at least one seer who wasn’t about to become St. Maarten’s plaything, not if Nick had anything to say about it.

  Morley, Jordan, Wynter, and Kit all exchanged looks.

  Only Malek didn’t join them.

  The tall seer still appeared to be somewhere else in his mind, maybe with his sister, or maybe somewhere even further.

  Remembering Tai, remembering she was in an Archangel lab somewhere, remembering the look on Malek’s face when his kid sister first went down, Nick felt a pain harden in his chest. Malek might work for St. Maarten, but he didn’t do it for Archangel.

  He did it for her––Tai.

  He did it for his kid sister.

  In return, St. Maarten more or less owned him.

  The realization made Nick grimace.

  Then it brought understanding, in a way he never had before.

  God. How had he never seen it? Malek had gone to St. Maarten out of desperation, looking for a way to help his sister. Back then, Tai had been a walking nuclear bomb. She’d killed their parents… not on purpose, but like that probably fucking mattered to either of them. It devastated Tai.

  Nick knew that. Tai told him.

  For the first time, Nick realized it must have devastated Malek, too. It probably devastated him more. He’d been older. He would have known them better, been more connected to them, to their light. Moreover, he would have been thrust into the role of parent, even as he was probably little more than a kid himself.

  An odd kid, even for a seer.

  A prescient burdened with things even most seers didn’t have to see.

  Malek turned his head, meeting Nick’s gaze.

  The look didn’t last long, but there was so much in it, Nick felt his chest clench even harder. His sudden, diamond-clear understanding nearly overwhelmed him, bringing his own emotions up so intensely he could only sit there, saying nothing.

  He understood.

  He finally understood.

  He turned, his eyes hard on St. Maarten.

  She quirked an eyebrow in return, like she’d heard everything that passed through Nick’s mind… like Malek was reporting Nick’s thoughts to her even now, even when they pertained to him, meaning Malek himself.

  Yeah, St. Maarten owned him all right.

  All this time, Nick assumed Malek and St. Maarten had some sort of mutual understanding, an agreement born out of aligned goals, even mutual need. Hell, Nick thought the two of them were fucking… or probably fucking… at least casually.

  Seer sex drives were notorious, so hell, why not?

  But now, all of that looked very, very different to Nick, and not only because it turned out Lara St. Maarten already had a lover, and that lover had been Veronica Racine.

  Thinking back on every interaction he’d witnessed between the four of them––St. Maarten, Malek, Tai, Veronica––Nick found himself reevaluating all of it. He found himself thinking differently about Malek most of all, and just how much the prescient had given up to save his sister.

  Then there was Morley, and what Nick had just learned about him, about his possibly decades-long relationship with Ana Nuñez.

  He hadn’t even begun to reevaluate the thing with him and Wynter yet, given what he’d just learned about the two of them.

  All of that churned through Nick’s mind, making him feel increasingly sick.

  He glanced at Wynter, and found her watching him.

  When he met her gaze, a question in his, her lips pursed.

  Then she nodded, barely, and only once.

  Nick felt his jaw clench to the point of hurting.

  Wynter was already in. She’d already made up her mind.

  She was going to see this thing through to the end.

  Nick suspected Morley would be on board, too.

  He was less sure about Damon and Kit, but he suspected Kit would follow whatever he did, meaning Nick… and Jordan would follow Morley.

  Exhaling in frustration, and now a kind of sick grief, Nick ran his fingers through his hair, looking at St. Maarten.

  “So you think you own all of us now?” he said. “Is that it?”

  Still frowning at the Archangel CEO, he nodded towards Malek, without taking his vampire eyes off her green ones.

  “Not just Mal. Not just Tai,” he growled. “But all of us. You think you own all of us now? Is that why you’ve made us your accomplices? Jordan? Morley? Me?” His jaw hardened. He felt his fangs lengthen in his mouth. “…Ms. James?”

  For a few seconds, Lara St. Maarten’s expression didn’t move.

  Then she exhaled.

  Every ounce of that exhale expressed her annoyance fast tipping into anger.

  Setting her champagne flute down on the glass table, harder than necessary, she stared at Nick with an openly exasperated expression.

  “Must you always be so dramatic, Detective?” Firming her narrow lips, she folded her arms over the glittering dinner gown she still wore, staring at him coldly in the pause. “Are all vampires as needlessly dramatic as you?”

  “Most are worse,” Morley offered, his voice deadpan.

  Nick glanced up at him, suppressing an irrational desire to laugh.

  Before he could turn back to St. Maarten, Kit spoke up, butting in between the two of them a second time.

  “Where is he?” she said. “Yi?
Where did the vampires take him?”

  Everyone looked at her.

  Kit glanced around at those stares, swallowed, then looked back at St. Maarten.

  “You know his followers are, like, rabid… right?” she said. “He’s not the kind of guy you can just take and no one’s going to notice. His disappearance is going to be major news. Like, covered on every station news. Everyone will know. All the vamps will know, too. Including those in the White Death.”

  The twenty-something tech-punk paused, maybe to let her words sink in.

  “Plus,” she added, combing her fingers through her spiky, purple-tipped hair. “There must be some who know where he was last night, right? Not to mention what he is? I mean, he has a whole organization behind him. A whole team. There must be some in his inner circle who know about him. They’re going to go nuts. All of them. They will come looking for him. And they’ll start with you. With us. With Archangel.”

  Nick frowned, looking at her.

  He hadn’t had time to think about that yet, either.

  Hell, he hadn’t had time to think about any of this.

  Before he could wrap his mind around Kit’s words, Morley added to them.

  The older detective nodded to Kit, his arms folded over the black tuxedo jacket he wore.

  “We don’t even know if he’s the only one,” he said, his deep voice resonant. “There could be more of them. Hell, there could be a whole colony.”

  Morley motioned at Malek, then at Wynter.

  “I’ve already surmised you’ve got a few seers of your own on the payroll, Ms. St. Maarten,” Morley added, coolly polite. “What makes you think Yi is working on his own? Or that his people might not have infiltrated your organization already?”

  Morley paused meaningfully.

  “After all,” he added. “They knew about the tech you were building, right? We’re going on the assumption that seers… or at least a seer… got that thing to free itself from the vault. That they told it to kill vampires––”

  “And hybrids,” Kit blurted. “I saw it on the screen. Downstairs in the museum. It killed at least one person with a hybrid tag, too.”

  Jordan grimaced, glancing at Wynter before looking at Nick.

  “That would follow,” he said. “It’s Yi’s schtick, isn’t it? He must not like his seers with mixed blood.”

  Nick scowled.

  All of this was suddenly sounding really fucking familiar… in the decidedly not-good sense of really fucking familiar.

  As in, a lot of this bullshit was how the first race war started.

  Mixed blood. Stupid religions. Fanatical ideologies.

  People willing to kill and die for blood and race shit that didn’t matter to probably seventy or eighty percent of the people of any race, people who just wanted to live their lives and be left the fuck alone.

  He was too old for another fucking war.

  He was way too old for that shit.

  When he looked back at St. Maarten, a faint smile ghosted her narrow lips.

  Something in the look there, in the understanding in that look, told him that Malek was still telling that bitch at least some of his thoughts.

  At any rate, looking at her, he found himself thinking he, like Malek, was likely to come to some kind of “understanding” of his own with Lara St. Maarten. His reasons might be different, and decidedly less noble than Mal’s had been.

  But the end result would be the same.

  What to read next

  WANT TO READ MORE?

  Check out the first book in the Quentin Black Mystery series, staring seer P.I., Quentin Black, who lives and works on a different version of Earth - a version very similar to our own.

  BLACK IN WHITE

  (Quentin Black Mystery #1)

  "My name is Black. Quentin Black."

  Gifted with an uncanny sense about people, psychologist Miri Fox works as an off and on profiler for the police. So when they think they finally nailed the "Wedding Killer," she agrees to check him out, using her gift to discover the truth.

  But the suspect, Quentin Black, isn't anything like Miri expects.

  He claims to be hunting the killer too, and the longer Miri talks to him, the more determined she becomes to uncover his secrets.

  When he confronts her about the nature of her peculiar "insight," Miri gets pulled into Black's bizarre world, and embroiled in a game of cat and mouse with a deadly killer--who might just be Black himself.

  Worse, she finds herself irresistibly drawn to Black, a complication she doesn't need with a best friend who's a homicide cop and a boyfriend in intelligence.

  Can Miriam see a way out or is her future covered in Black?

  THE QUENTIN BLACK MYSTERY SERIES encompasses a number of dark, gritty paranormal mystery arcs with science fiction elements, starring brilliant and mysterious Quentin Black and forensic psychologist Miriam Fox. For fans of realistic paranormal mysteries with romantic elements, the series spans continents and dimensions as Black solves crimes, takes on other races and tries to keep his and Miri's true identities secret to keep them both alive.

  See below for sample pages!

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  Sample Pages

  BLACK IN WHITE (A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery)

  Prologue / Palace

  FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD Janine Rico was having a good night.

  Scratch that.

  She was having a great night.

  An epically awesome night, by pretty much any standard.

  First of all, getting alcohol was easy, for a change. She and her pals Hannah and Keeley managed to shoulder-tap some epically challenged, can-I-come-party-with-you-kids loser on their very first try, outside a seedy liquor store on Fillmore. The owner, an older Indian man, didn’t care—so loser boy emerged five minutes later with one of the big bottles of peppermint schnapps and another of cheap rum. They ditched him in the park minutes later, running off with two guys from their school and laughing their asses off.

  That was like, hours ago now.

  The boys had gone home.

  They’d been wandering the city most of the night since, determined to make the most of Keeley’s mom being out of town and letting them stay in her condo in the Marina District. They’d stopped at a few parks to pass the bottles around and talk and snap pictures with their smart phones, watching the orange-tinted fog billow in odd, smoke-like exhales across the wet grass. They’d already discussed their plans for the next day...which mostly involved sleeping in, along with ordering pizza and movies with Keeley’s mom’s credit card.

  An epic weekend, all in all. Awesomely flawless.

  Janine was tired now, though. The cold wind cut her too, even through the down jacket she wore over her hoodie sweatshirt and multicolored knit tights.

  It was Keeley’s idea to stop at the Palace of Fine Arts before they headed back.

  “Nooooo,” Janine whined, flopping her arms dramatically. “I’m ready to pass out. I’m cold. I have to pee...this is stupid!”

  “Come on,” Keeley cajoled. “It’s totally cool! Look...it’s all lit up!”

  “It’s lit up every night,” Janine grumbled.

  Hannah hooked Janine’s arm, but sided with Keeley. “We can take pictures...send them to Kristi in Tahoe and make her craz
y jealous!”

  Hannah always wanted to dig at Kristi. Maybe because Kristi’s family was rich, or maybe because Hannah was jealous that Kristi and Janine were best friends.

  Either way, Janine couldn’t fight both of them.

  Her eyes shifted to the orange-lit, fifty-foot-tall, Roman-esque columns. They stood on the other side of a man-made lake covered in sleeping ducks and swans, making a disjointed crescent like ancient ruins from an old amphitheater. The fountain in the lake was turned off, so the columns reflected a near-perfect mirror on the glass surface of the water.

  As they tromped over slippery grass, Janine found herself thinking it did look pretty cool, with the robe-draped stone ladies resting their arms on top of each column, showing their stone backs to the world. Broken by deep black shadows, the stone faces looked otherworldly. Willow trees hung over the lake, rustling over the water as the wind lifted their pale leaves.

  “All right,” she mumbled, rolling her eyes to let them know they owed her.

  Hannah broke out the last of the peppermint schnapps, handing around the bottle by the neck. Shivering and pulling her down jacket tighter against the wind, Janine took a long drink, choking a bit. The warmth of the burn was welcome.

  She thought about school on Monday, and telling the other kids about their night.

  Hannah was right. This was so going to blow Kristi’s mind.

  Cheered at the thought, Janine grinned, taking another slug of the schnapps and shuddering when it wanted to come back up her throat.

  “I think I’m done,” she said, handing the bottle to Keeley and wiping her mouth.

  “I soooo want to get married here!” Keeley said, after taking her own drink.