Even more luckily, those small wheels under the chrome dumpster still functioned.
Nick stopped thinking about any of that as the wall gradually became exposed.
The meticulously-drawn brush strokes, what he’d only glimpsed when the dumpster stood in the way, grew into a full, coherent image, unfolding into an elaborate painting that covered a few feet of the back wall.
Now, instead of the one masked face, Nick saw four masked figures, each of them holding guns. The other three carried plasma-rifles.
The figure holding the antique gun turned out to be shorter than the others, and drawn in such a way that Nick now wondered if his gunman was actually a gun-woman.
So, the female carried the shotgun.
A pretty weird choice in weapons.
A sniper rifle would have made more sense. Long-distance shooting was an unusual skill set nowadays, but still practical, even with the proliferation of drones.
The shotgun was just… idiosyncratic.
After the techs finished moving the dumpster, they walked back around to stare at the image along with the detectives and Nick.
For a long-feeling few moments, no one spoke, or moved.
The image was disconcertingly life-like.
Unlike most street art, it didn’t appear to have been done either in that newer, metallic, VR paint, or even in old-school spray paint.
Instead, it looked like some more “classic” painting material—maybe acrylic, or even some kind of oil paint. Nick didn’t know paint well enough to know for sure. It smelled pungent, which made him think it might be oil-based.
Whatever it was, the deep blacks and brighter colors stood out, giving it a strangely three-dimensional effect, even without the added dimension of virtual enhancement. That effect managed to add to the realism of the painting itself.
It showed the gunmen—with possibly one gun-woman—aiming their weapons at five figures, two male and three female, who stood halfway down a narrow alley with a chrome dumpster. The dumpster stood against the metal-coated back wall of the alley, just like this one, only in the painting, the container was shiny and pristine, with no splashes of blood. The lid was open, and from the angle, which was slightly elevated, Nick could see black hair, along with the vague outline of a body crumpled inside the metal container.
If the image was right, the woman in the dumpster died first.
She may even have been killed somewhere else.
But why? Was she bait to get the others here?
And why destroy her face?
Nick’s eyes flickered back to the killers.
He found himself examining the antique shotgun a second time.
It was such a strange choice, for this time period. Since the seer wars, guns like that had more or less disappeared. Ironically, it was probably worth a lot of money, as a bona fide antique, and if the painting was accurate, it was in good shape.
Still, it was strange to think of the weapon that way too, when such things had been a part of his everyday life, once upon a time.
From next to him, Jordan muttered under his breath again.
“What’s the point?” he said. “I mean, fuck. Why go to all the trouble? Is it a warning? Some kind of taunt?”
Next to him, Morley grunted.
“Maybe we’ll have a better idea once we ID the one in the dumpster,” he said, his voice diplomatic. “DNA should give us a hit. Face or no face.”
Nick didn’t bother to point out the obvious fact that if she was really a hybrid, and unreg’d, all of her DNA and medical records would be bullshit, and might not tell them a damned thing about who she’d been before this.
Jordan glanced at Morley, his enhanced eyes openly skeptical.
From the look there, the same thing had already occurred to the younger detective.
Of course, they had other ways to track her down—including through the other victims—but if everything legal about her had been falsified, it might not be all that easy to ID her. The fact that she clearly came from money could either help them or hurt them, depending on who was behind this, and who wanted it covered up.
That wasn’t what had Nick’s attention right then, anyway.
The attempt to hide the woman’s identity, while unusual, made sense.
What made a lot less sense, and was a hell of a lot more disturbing, was the reality of the painting itself—and what it meant once he’d glanced over the physical details more closely.
Blood spatter covered part of the image.
Parts of the painting had been worn away and discolored by dirt.
Other parts had been pitted and scratched, likely by street cleaners, or maybe by the prongs of the garbage truck as it emptied the chrome dumpster on its weekly rounds.
The painting wasn’t done by a witness to the crime.
It had been here before the murders happened.
It looked like it predated the murders by at least a few days.
Possibly longer.
Staring at the painting, Nick felt a vague sickness grow in his gut.
He couldn’t have said why, exactly.
The painting should have piqued his interest, like it clearly had the interest of the two human detectives. Nick should have seen it as a clue, perhaps even as proof of premeditation. At the very least, he should have been curious, the way he could feel a buzz of curiosity growing among the humans staring at the image alongside him.
He couldn’t get onboard with any of that, though.
Truthfully, he just wanted to get the fuck out of there.
Maybe spend an hour or two inhaling bleach.
Anything to get the smell of that seer-infused blood out of his head.
Anything to wash the view of that painting from where it wanted to burn itself into the dark spaces behind his eyes.
3 / Midnight
“IDENTIFICATION, PLEASE.”
The female-sounding voice droned the words from the other side of transparent, semi-organic shielding. It didn’t sound like a question.
It really wasn’t a question.
“Naoko Tanaka Midnight.” Nick unholstered his sidearm, laying it on the round, greenish-silver plate in front of the speaker. “Homicide division. Ident tag 9381T-112.”
“Year of change?”
“197 B.D.”
The woman behind the organic nodded, once.
Nick honestly couldn’t tell if she was an image implanted in his mind through his semi-organic headset, a hologram, or a robot.
He guessed a robot.
Maybe he just liked the idea of a robot best, of the three options.
“Stand for retinal and ident scan,” the voice droned.
Nick froze in place in front of the scanner’s multiple eyes, unblinking as the organic arm emerged from the wall by the transparent cubicle, its blue light flickering over his face, temporarily blinding his sensitive vampire eyes before sliding over the rest of him.
He held his inner arm out and flat, so the tattoo showed up easily, and the implant would be readable without multiple passes.
The bar code on his arm stood out on his pale skin, next to a dark red “V” about two inches long and painted with organic metal to counteract his skin’s natural healing abilities.
For the same reason, his “tattoos” were really more like another form of implant.
Like his deeper implant, they were designed via organic tech to fool his vampire body into thinking they belonged there.
Both scanners flickered over every inch of his skin, then clicked off.
“You may enter,” the voice said.
Nick grunted, watching his sidearm disappear into the morphing, full-organic metal of the round plate outside the registration cubicle.
Even now, after more than ten years of this gig, he never expected to get that gun back.
Hell, he never fully expected to be allowed to leave the building, not once he’d walked through one of those outer security doors.
He did it anyway.
He didn’t have a lot of choice.
Well, he didn’t have a lot of good choices.
The door buzzed then clicked, just like doors had back in the time when he’d been a human cop, in San Francisco, what felt like a million years ago now. Grabbing the unlocked handle, he jerked open the heavy, bulletproof, semi-organic panel after the buzz, and stepped inside before the sensor started beeping at him again.
Immediately, the sounds of the police station washed over him.
Those sounds were eerily timeless.
Letting the door fall shut behind him, Nick made his way down the featureless corridor towards the origin of those sounds.
His vampire senses of smell and hearing kicked in, telling him most of what he needed to know before he entered the main bullpen beyond the corridor.
He heard them talking about him again.
He was still the new guy.
This time, he got to hear about how the “new blood-sniffer” who’d recently transferred here from “fuckin’ L.A.” got in a few lucky hits out at that mess in the Bronx.
Some just called him “the new Midnight,” which, honestly, Nick preferred.
In this new world, vampires got assigned government-issued surnames to make them more easily distinguishable from their human counterparts who worked roughly the same jobs.
Nick supposed it reassured humans, to make vamps as easily identifiable as possible.
There seemed to be some fear that random vampires could slip past them otherwise, maybe by wearing contact lenses over their crystal-colored irises, or long sleeves to cover the telltale “V” ident-tats and barcodes—as if vampires weren’t segregated, regulated, tested, blood-checked and surveilled in every other fucking way, as a condition of being allowed to roam free.
As if vampires might start dating their cousin, or fucking their wife, and no one in the global or local interspecies enforcement bodies would notice.
The thought was laughable.
For the same reason, Nick strongly suspected a fair-few of these rules, including the name-tagging system, served more political functions than anything. Enforcement bodies did it to normalize the whole set-up, and render it more “polite.”
Whatever the exact logic of the Human Racial Authority, or H.R.A., in coming up with the name-coding, vamps who worked for the police—at least those in homicide and interspecies relations, which was most of them—all got tagged with the surname “Midnight.”
It was a better name than a lot of vamps got stuck with.
Then again, the H.R.A. had to pick surnames not in common use by humans.
Vamps working in medicine got tagged with the surname “Serpent,” presumably in honor of the Rod of Asclepius and/or the Caduceus, both symbols of medicine and healing and both containing serpents.
Engineers were all “Machine.”
Research and development got the moniker “Galileo,” unless they worked in weapons, then they got “Supernova.” Career military vamps, the only other option offered to Nick by the H.R.A. when they were assigning employment, were all “Centurion.”
Teachers and professors got “Library.”
Those pulled into think-tanks and strategy got “Chessboard.”
Those in full-time sex and blood work were “Incubus,” or “Succubus,” the only surnames that depended on the claimed sex of the individual vampire.
Nick had most of the list memorized.
Then again, so did most people, human and vamp.
The Inter-Species Friendship Council, or “I.S.F.,” as most humans called it—or “I.S. Fucked,” as most vampires called it—was technically responsible for vampire code enforcement on United States soil. While the I.S.F. fell under the authority of the H.R.A., at least on paper, they also designed and rolled out policy, whether official or not, and far more quickly than the H.R.A., which tended to move at the speed of your average glacier.
Often, the H.R.A. adopted changes after I.S. Fucked was already enforcing those changes on U.S. soil. By the time the rule change was legally in the books, other countries were often already following the United States’ lead.
Most of the vampire code surnames were country-specific, so the I.S.F. likely had a hand in designing the specific names now in use in the States.
Supposedly, all of this worked out to make the system easier on everyone.
Nick didn’t see a lot of “easy” in the system, though.
Well, not for vampires.
He couldn’t exactly blame humans for taking the steps they did to ensure their safety. Despite their vastly superior numbers, humans were still, after all, food, to Nick and his people. That simple fact pretty much annihilated any basis for trust that may have existed between the two species. But the realities of the system meant to keep humans safe still kept vampires a semi-enslaved class.
At the very least, they were something significantly less than full citizens.
Of course, like most things, that relationship was complicated.
Organized crime and the black market were riddled with vamps.
A lot of those outfits were led by ex-military, too—with some of those vamps being shockingly well-connected, and closer to terrorists than simply crime lords. Some of those militias grew right out of the seer wars.
Even the whole hunter-prey dynamic got pretty fuzzy these days.
Plenty of humans liked being bit by vampires.
Enough of them liked it, in fact, that vampires could make a full-time living charging for the privilege, especially if they mixed bloodletting with sex.
And that was just pureblood humans.
Hybrids, back when more of those existed, got full-blown addicted to vampire venom.
They got addicted to the point where the I.S.F.—followed by the H.R.A.—were eventually forced to pass regulations forbidding hybrids from offering vampires their blood, or for soliciting vampires for sex, which was more or less the same thing.
Vampires were also explicitly forbidden from feeding on hybrids. The difference being, of course, that hybrids, if caught, would get hit with a fine and maybe do a stint in human jail.
Vampires, on the other hand, would be thrown in a government lab somewhere for what was politely termed “reprogramming.” Or, if they were considered “incurable,” they would have their hearts removed from their bodies with these claw-like, retractable tools the government created expressly for the purpose, called “alligators.”
Nick had seen those things in action a few times, while he was still in L.A.
A few times, as it turned out, was more than enough.
It was gross as hell.
It still didn’t entirely discourage vamps from biting, fucking and even dating hybrids, of course. It still happened. Meaning, hybrid and vampire sex and feeding still happened.
Even now, it still happened.
Hybrids were rare as hell, but they were still around, as the killing in the Bronx clearly demonstrated. But it was nothing like the early years, before the I.S.F. started passing regulations against hybrids and vampires more generally.
Seers, the other race that briefly shared a history with this world, had been even more vulnerable to the effects of vampire venom than their hybrid offspring.
Seers, well…
Seers lost their damned minds, when it came to vampires.
If a vampire wasn’t too scrupulous, they could turn a seer into a literal slave.
A venom-addicted seer would do pretty much anything a vampire wanted—a difficult temptation to fight given how fucking amazing seer blood tasted to your average vampire, not to mention how incredible sex could be with one of their kind.
A seer’s blood was Grade-A prime rib.
It was steak dinner, a fine wine… real coffee and chocolate rolled into one.
Compared to that, human blood was more like a defrosted tofu burger on soggy bread, covered in fake ketchup, with artificial coffee to wash it down.
Luckily, most vampires these days didn’t know that.
>
Unfortunately for Nick, he did.
Shoving the thought from his mind with an effort, he didn’t manage it successfully before a pair of pale green eyes rose briefly to the spaces behind his eyes. With that image of stunning, violet-ringed green eyes, came a flood of unwelcome memory, along with something that was nearly pain to his chest and gut.
By the time he forced the memory out for real, he was already in a foul mood.
He was also hungry.
Because of both things, his face was set in a hard scowl when he reached the end of the featureless corridor and the space opened up, revealing the main offices of the 17th Precinct of the New York Police Department.
He didn’t want to be here at all, but he had no choice.
This was where the inter-species offices were located for Manhattan, and where Nick had to check in every night he was on duty. It was also one of only two precincts in the city that Midnight detectives were cleared to work out of, as of about six years ago.
They liked to keep everything pretty tightly controlled, when it came to vamps.
The wider jurisdiction for Midnights also gave them the freedom to assign him to cases in any part of the city, not just those that fell within a particular geographical area.
Very few vamps got cleared to work on the kinds of cases they gave Nick. For the same reason, he was under constant, intense scrutiny—too much scrutiny to let himself start thinking about food while he was on the job.
The very last thing he needed was some human cop getting jumpy because they happened to notice Nick’s eyes were redder than usual, or his canines happened to be extended the slightest bit, just because his stomach was a little rumbly.
As for his food-obsession right then, Nick still blamed that damned alley hit, if only for putting the thought of hybrid and seer blood in his head.
Still, after what they found in that alley, he was interested enough that he couldn’t help wondering if they’d gotten the lab results back on the victims yet.
Even more than the victims, he was damned interested in that painting.
He wondered if they’d managed to get anything on the artist.
Back at the crime scene in the Bronx, Nick stuck around the alley long enough to see the lab techs run spectrometer scans and take scrapings off the alley wall, hoping to pick up enough DNA or other trace evidence to ID whoever made the mural.
Black Of Wing: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery Romance (Quentin Black Mystery Book 14) Page 30
