Vampire Detective Midnight

by J. C. Andrijeski

  To say it was a company with a shady past was putting it mildly.

  Archangel had gone legit, more or less, during the race wars, getting fat as hell on defense contracts from multiple countries and branching out into research and development, specifically artificial intelligence and organic tech design, as well as a number of other tech fields that lent themselves easily to military applications.

  Unlike most companies in existence during the pre-war period, they’d risen out of the ashes of that war even fatter, rapidly emerging as one of the largest global corporations in operation in the post-war period.

  Since then, they’d only branched out and diversified more, going into infrastructure design and environmental clean-up and control.

  Nick had only guesses as to their true reach nowadays, but he knew it was far.

  Damned far.

  Archangel Enterprises maintained a dominant role in numerous key sectors of the new global order, and that didn’t even include their smaller holdings.

  The implant in Nick’s arm was made by Archangel. The semi-organic tattoo on his arm was designed by them as well.

  So were his headset and gun. So was most of the testing equipment used on him for his check-ins at the Nineteenth Precinct.

  Staring out over the dark street, he frowned.

  Archangel.

  He knew he was playing with fire, but hell, he was already in this mess.

  Maybe it was time to poke the bear a little.

  “Send the request marked urgent,” he said into his headset, before he could second-guess what he was doing. “Send the following message with the contact request. Tell her, ‘I have baby bird. Looking for big brother.’” Grunting, he muttered under his breath, “…Let’s see what she makes of that.”

  “Yes, sir. Sending contact request now. Marked urgent.”

  “Send any response you get through to me immediately,” Nick said.

  “Understood, sir—”

  Without waiting for the rest of it, Nick clicked off the headset channel, then glanced back over his shoulder at the entrance gate to the Cauldron, his muscles tightening.

  He’d already decided he wouldn’t wait around for Ms. St. Maarten to give him a call back—assuming she ever did.

  Nick wasn’t very good at waiting.

  He needed to go look for this piece of shit seer on his own.

  “Yeah, this is Naoko Tanaka Midnight. Ident tag 9381T-112…”

  He renewed his grip on the male human he held in his hands, speaking out loud as he stared into the rapidly paling face.

  “I need permission for an interrogatory feed,” he said.

  The man let out a yelp, writhing in his hands.

  Nick gripped him tighter, baring his fangs at him menacingly as the voice rose in his headset.

  “Location?” the A.I. asked politely.

  “Devil’s Cauldron. Manhattan. I told Homicide Detective IV, Morley, where I’d be. This is follow-up to the murder case down in the Financial District earlier tonight. I didn’t get the case number, but it’s connected to the Bronx killing, Case #981—”

  “Confirmed. One moment for secondary check protocol.”

  There was a pause.

  In it, Nick gripped the human male tighter in his hands, glancing up and down the dark street. There were no streetlights in the Cauldron, not that were on all the time. They lit it up with drones when need be, or flood lights that lived on the steep exterior walls.

  Most of the time, when nothing was happening down here, like now, the only light came from ambient glows from the city outside the walls, coupled with open flames and the occasional electric lamp running off stolen power, or even a generator.

  Nick didn’t see anyone else out there, but he could smell them.

  A few felt afraid enough, they probably knew what he was.

  They likely even knew he was a Midnight, just from the fact that he was announcing his presence here so brazenly, and he wasn’t a regular visitor to the Cauldron. Vampires came in here to feed, sure, but not usually in the middle of the damned street.

  Nick had dragged this Cauldron rat out of his hole and into the middle of Amsterdam, which was basically Main Street in here.

  He’d come down here for the painting.

  He’d returned to where the mural covered most of one block, where he’d seen a tall male seer with a left arm covered in tattoos watching him from inside of a bombed-out church about fifteen hours earlier.

  He figured it couldn’t hurt to go back to the one place inside these walls he knew for certain Tai’s brother had been.

  The human he held writhed harder in his hands, letting out a terrified-sounding squeal.

  “You don’t have to, man,” he wheedled. “You don’t have to bite me, I swear. I’ll tell you anything you want to know—”

  “Shut up,” Nick growled, staring at him.

  A light flickered from one of the nearby buildings.

  It looked and smelled like an open flame, probably a makeshift fire pit someone built into one of the squatter dwellings for warmth.

  It shed enough illumination, Nick was pretty sure the human could see his face.

  He suspected his eyes were already scarlet, just from the way the human stared up at him, and the fear that made the human’s own eyes look like they might pop out of his skull.

  “Don’t bite me, man. You don’t have to. I swear, you don’t have to—”

  “What makes you think I wouldn’t rather bite you?” Nick growled. “Or that I’d believe anything you told me if I didn’t?”

  “Mister Midnight… sir. You don’t have to—”

  The female-sounding A.I. rose back in his headset.

  “Permission granted. Interrogatory rights confined to Devil’s Cauldron location. Drones have been notified of your revised status, Detective Midnight. No need to come in for status check at the Precinct for the next forty-eight hours.”

  “Thank you, Gertrude,” Nick said, his voice sweetly polite.

  Turning, he smiled down into the face of the human he gripped in his hands.

  “You ready to party, friend?”

  The male let out a terrified squeal when Nick shook him.

  “Have a pleasant evening, sir,” the A.I. said.

  “Oh, I will, Gertrude… I will. You have a pleasant evening, too.”

  The human male cried out, trying to twist out of his hands.

  “What did I ever do to you, man?” he complained. “I never did nothing to any of you! You could just ask me, you know! You could just ask—”

  Gripping the male by his long, blond and brown-streaked hair, Nick jerked his head sideways, and sank his fangs into the male’s dirty neck. He grimaced at little at the salty, sweaty taste, then forgot that when he got his first mouthful of blood.

  Injecting a solid dose of his venom, he drank for a full minute, feeling his cock gradually harden as he did. He was in full control of his reactions, though, even more than he had been with the woman, the previous afternoon.

  He had a solid line of demarcation in his mind between different types of feeds.

  Most vampires did.

  With Midnights, it was a job requirement.

  He might get a kick out of this, and it might get him off, in part because it was more like a real hunt than when he had the groceries delivered to his doorstep—but it was still work. He had to log everything he learned from it, and he couldn’t screw around with his food, or even fully approach it as food, given why he’d been authorized to do it.

  At the same time, it had already occurred to him that it wouldn’t hurt to load up on blood before he returned to an apartment that stank of young seer.

  That was only a side consideration, though.

  This was work.

  He had his work-face, just like any human.

  Although his human self might have found it counter-intuitive, with his for-pleasure kills, Nick did his best to respect the minds and autonomy of the humans he fed on.

&nb
sp; He didn’t get invasive through the blood connection with those humans.

  He hadn’t gotten invasive with that woman with the red hair.

  He didn’t try to read things off her she likely wouldn’t be comfortable with him seeing or knowing about her. He respected the fact that they’d just met, that she had a right to disclose things to him gradually, like any being.

  He didn’t invade her mind any more than he was invited.

  Generally, with all of his for-pleasure feeds, that meant he only looked at thoughts, feelings, memories, images, sensations, and experiences that came to him passively, organically, spontaneously… without him doing anything specific to draw those things to him.

  He didn’t dig. He didn’t probe. He didn’t even ask.

  He didn’t let himself get nosey or overly curious. He didn’t muck around in their personal lives or their phobias or families or kinks or pets or whatever else.

  He wasn’t a dick, in other words.

  With work feeds, that whole line got flipped.

  Work feeds were about getting information out of people who weren’t likely to give it to him if he asked nicely.

  Work feeds were about cutting through people’s rationalizations, their shitty, self-serving memories, their attempts to make themselves look more honest or noble or less criminal than they actually were—not to mention their attempts to hide or lie about their out-and-out complicity, conspiracy, or guilt.

  Work feeds were a tool to save time on the normal human b.s., in other words.

  Conversely, he didn’t ask work feeds for sex.

  That didn’t mean he always turned it down when it was offered to him.

  When he came up for air, the male human’s eyes had glazed.

  He stared up at Nick like he couldn’t comprehend who or what he was. Mixed with that confusion was a veneer of awe, of near-infatuation. Most of the fear was gone from his actual face, but Nick could still feel it vibrating through the human’s blood.

  “Okay,” Nick said, smiling without letting go of the male’s hair. “Let’s talk.”

  The male nodded, his mouth slack.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jerry.”

  “Okay, Jerry. You know someone who lives down here named Bird? Likes to paint pretty pictures? Has tattoos on his left arm, but no ident marker?”

  The male human frowned.

  His mouth worked briefly like a fish as he stared down the dark street.

  Nick didn’t wait, but took another bite of the human while he thought over his questions.

  After a few more seconds of feeding, he got images of Tai’s big brother walking down the street, wearing a gray, sleeveless hoodie sweatshirt, colorful tattoos covering his left arm.

  Christ, was that the only article of clothing this asshole owned?

  For the first time, Nick noticed that the tattoos covering the seer’s left arm consisted primarily of detailed drawings of bones and feathers—mostly brightly-colored feathers—woven together in an intricate pattern that was disturbingly life-like, as if his muscular arm was the folded, colorful wing of some tropical bird.

  Jack Bird. Cute.

  Do you know where he is, Jerry? Nick asked through the blood. Now? Do you know where he sleeps at night?

  No, the other’s blood spoke. No, I don’t know. No one knows.

  What about his sister? Do you know where she sleeps?

  Sister?

  There was a silence.

  In it, the human’s mind grew confused.

  Nick felt it happen.

  He felt the human’s mind change, but it was so rapid, so completely unprecedented, he could do nothing but watch and feel it happen in bewilderment.

  A blankness grew there, where the man’s mind had dwelled.

  It was like a black hole swallowing up information, creating a dark space in that part of the human’s mind.

  Right in the center of the man’s memories of Tai’s brother, of those colorful tattoos and the threadbare hoodie sweatshirt, a connecting tissue broke, severing the male human from Nick, from reality, from the pool of information right where Nick had been probing and feeding.

  Hey, Jerry. Nick sent another soft dose of venom, reassuring the other male even as he communicated more sharply through the blood. Focus, okay? Little girl. Blue eyes. A weird, pale blue, the color of ice. You must have seen her with this guy, Bird. You know, the guy Bird, who paints the pretty pictures—

  No. The man’s thoughts grew insistent through his blood, yet strangely deadened. There is no sister. There is no Bird. He is a ghost. He isn’t real.

  You just told me about him. You just showed me—

  No. No. None of that is real. It’s not real. Neither are you.

  Nick flinched.

  Unhooking his fangs from the human’s neck, he raised his head, frowning.

  “What?” he said.

  Jerry looked up at him, his eyes utterly blank.

  They weren’t just venom-blank now.

  They were blank-blank.

  Like someone or something had wiped away his entire personality with a psychic sponge.

  Nick considered feeding on him again, trying again, from a different angle, but he could feel already that it wouldn’t do any good.

  He’d fed on the male human enough by then, had probed enough of his mind, that the connection remained between them, even when he wasn’t actively drawing in more blood.

  Jerry had known Bird.

  He’d seen him around.

  There was a familiarity there, like he saw him fairly frequently.

  Nick had seen this seer, “Mal,” or “Malek,” or “Jack Bird,” through the male human’s mind, through his blood. There was no question in Nick’s mind—it had been the exact same guy, down to that filthy gray hoodie he wore, and the weird feather tattoos on his left arm.

  Jerry had known exactly who Nick was talking about.

  Only now he didn’t.

  Now Jerry didn’t know a “Bird.”

  He didn’t know anything about a seer who liked to paint pictures on walls.

  He especially didn’t know anything about that seer’s little sister.

  “Jesus.” Nick released the arms and sleeves of the ratty, filthy, flannel shirt he wore, staring at the human’s face as he stepped back.

  He could still feel that blankness through the human’s blood in his throat and stomach.

  Nick hadn’t felt so overtly disturbed by something he’d seen in another’s mind and blood since he accidentally fed on that necrophiliac serial killer a few years back.

  That kind of thing happened, now and then.

  Not often, thank the gods, but if you lived long enough, you saw some really dark shit in the human mind.

  This wasn’t like that.

  Nick had never seen anything like this before.

  It felt almost like he’d killed the man in some way, without meaning to at all.

  It felt like he’d inadvertently yanked down some kind of kill switch, and the man’s battery abruptly died, taking all of his memories and understandings with him.

  That feeling of death, of having annihilated another mind and personality, brought up a sharp, sickening wave of emotion in Nick himself.

  It hit too close to home, too close to things he’d spent a lifetime trying to forget. A dense roil of guilt knocked him briefly off his center. It knocked him out of rationality, out of any logical progression inside his own mind, filling his chest, belly, and head with self-loathing and a revulsion he hadn’t felt in longer than he cared to remember.

  Staring at the human, watching that blankness on the man’s face deepen, Nick took another step back.

  Then another.

  Fighting to keep his bile down, to keep from throwing up all the blood he’d just drank from the human’s neck, he stared up and down the street, feeling suddenly exposed, trying to distract himself from the emotions that rose around the human’s face.

  He fought to get his equili
brium back.

  He was still in the Cauldron.

  He was right in the middle of the Cauldron.

  He couldn’t afford to lose his shit out here.

  Especially not tonight. Especially with what waited for him in his apartment.

  He blinked, staring at the giant mural that covered the brick wall not far from where he stood. It was dark, but his vampire eyes were strong enough, he could see the painting almost as well now as he could when it shone in broad daylight.

  He stared at the image of the little girl, Tai.

  It was even stranger to look at the painting now, after staring into the real face of the little girl depicted there. Her hair was a bit shorter here, in the mural. It wasn’t exactly the same color, but it was close. She might be a few years older in the painting than she was now.

  Nick’s eyes scanned over the mural, then back to where she stood in the center of it, her face eerily calm as she formed the focal point of the painting.

  Around her, a crowd of painted humans ran away from her in terror.

  Fear contorted their expressions. Their eyes were wide in panic.

  Staring at the painted version of his new friend, it hit Nick again how strange it was, that the human, “Jerry,” had blanked out around one question about a little girl with ice-blue eyes.

  Even if Jerry had never seen the little girl in the flesh—a prospect Nick found highly unlikely, especially if Jerry was as familiar with Mal as it felt when Nick was first drinking from him—there she was, staring down at him, every day.

  It should have been a no-brainer that anyone who lived in this part of the Cauldron would know who she was, if only in mural form.

  How the hell had Jerry not known who he meant?

  But Nick knew what he’d felt.

  The mere mention of her acted as some kind of trigger. Would that be true of all the humans down here? Mention Mal’s little sister, and human minds automatically self-destructed?

  And had Mal done that, to protect the girl?

  Or had Tai done it?

  Staring at the mural, at the terror etched in those human faces, Nick frowned.

  That little ticking time bomb was currently sleeping on his couch.

  He’d invited her into his home.