Despite her neutral expression, and those slow, casual strides, every muscle abruptly clenched on Nick’s body. He watched her approach, bracing himself as if for an attack.
She didn’t touch him, despite what he more than halfway expected.
She walked directly up to him until she stood too close—way too fucking close, in Nick’s view—but she stopped short of laying a hand on him, or so much as brushing up against him.
Somehow, that managed to anger him more.
She didn’t even speak, not right away. She just stood there, too close, leaning a hand on the back of a nearby chair and looking up at him.
He stared back at her.
“You don’t want my number?” she said after that too-long pause, pursing her lips.
Her blue-green eyes studied his.
Nick stared back at her.
Then he shook his head, frowning.
“That’s a terrible idea,” he told her.
“Why?”
He let out a half-laugh. The sound was mostly disbelief.
“I already told you why. You already know why.”
“So tell me again. So I can argue with you.”
“It’s illegal,” he growled.
“So is not turning me in,” she reminded him.
He gave her a harder look.
Her expression didn’t flinch.
When he didn’t speak, she let out an exasperated sigh, fingering her hair out of her face.
“You want me,” she said, blunt, letting her hand fall back to the chair. “It’s stupid to be racist about it. You want me, Nick.”
“Racist?” His eyebrows went up. “Did you really just call me racist?”
“You’re assuming I’m going to turn into some kind of junkie. You’re assuming, based solely on my race, that after just one bite—”
“That’s not racism, darling. That’s biology—”
“I looked up your biology,” she cut in, raising her voice. “While you were in here, playing vampire detective, I looked up this great horror you’ve been warning me about. I even read a few of the scientific studies on the subject.”
When he frowned, falling silent, she sighed, shaking her head, her small hand still gripping the back of the leather chair.
Taking another breath, she deliberately calmed her voice.
“It’s not one hundred percent, Naoko. It’s a higher probability, sure, but—”
“Not one hundred percent?” he said, letting out another half-laugh of disbelief. “Jesus fucking Christ, Wynter… you’re psychic!”
Frowning at him, she shrugged elaborately.
“So?”
“So? So that means you’ve got more seer traits. More than the vast majority of hybrids. That means you’re probably even more likely to have trouble with vampire venom.”
“It’s not a given,” she repeated stubbornly. “It’s not one hundred percent.”
“That’s like saying not all humans get addicted to heroin. You really want to throw the dice on that? Really?”
Her mouth hardened.
He watched her stare up at him defiantly, the look in her eyes and the set of her jaw growing even more stubborn as the seconds ticked by.
“Why not?” she said.
“Why?” he said, giving her an equally exasperated look.
“Just take my number,” she said. “Take it, Nick. Go home. Think about it. My private line is 091-938—“
“La-la-la-la-la.” Nick held his hands over his ears until she fell silent, scowling at him. “I didn’t catch any of that. Sorry.”
“That’s very childish.”
“No,” Nick growled. “It’s fucking responsible. This isn’t happening, honey. It’s not.”
He scowled.
“Not to mention it’s illegal, Wynter. As in, I could end up on a slab. My heart ripped out of my chest. You could end up in jail.”
She surveyed him with those aquamarine eyes.
For a few seconds, she didn’t speak.
Even so, he felt picked apart under a microscope by that stare.
He was still watching her warily, trying to follow the thoughts running behind her unnervingly calm and even more unnervingly intelligent gaze, when she gave him another of those eloquent shrugs.
“Okay,” she said, smiling.
Looking at her, Nick had to fight every instinct in his body to keep from grabbing her and shaking her.
He knew what really lay behind that impulse, too.
He knew there was a better than small chance he’d throw her over the table if he got his hands on her. He’d throw her over the table, grip her ass, kick apart her legs. Yank that fucking wraparound dress up to her hips, and—
“You can go,” she said.
He looked up, frowning.
Her eyes and voice unreadable, despite her polite smile, she shooed him with a hand.
“I release you back into the wild, Naoko Tanaka. That was all I wanted.”
He stared at her, again fighting the impulse to touch her.
Or maybe just to yell at her.
In the end, he nodded to her, once.
Then, not trusting himself to so much as shake her hand, he turned on his heel, and walked out of the room.
Chapter 20
Going All Vampire
He nearly ran into Jordan on the other side of the wall.
It was so obvious the other man had been trying to eavesdrop, Nick actually got nervous. He found himself glancing at the door, frowning despite how thick the semi-organic metal looked.
He couldn’t hear anything inside the room behind him now, but he couldn’t be sure how loud he and Wynter been talking while he was inside—or arguing.
He knew he’d called her psychic.
He’d called her a hybrid and a psychic.
Fuck.
He found himself trying to gauge the human’s face, using as much of his vision as he could to assess Jordan’s emotions.
The detective looked pretty normal. No weird heat spikes, but then, he was a cop, and he knew Nick was a vampire, so he might have some idea how to mask his physiological tells. His heartbeat seemed normal. The only thing Nick could really see on him was amusement, tinted with a healthy dose of cynicism.
“Jesus,” Jordan said, looking him over with a faint grin. “I was joking about the blowjob, but now I’m starting to wonder. What the fuck is going on with you two?”
Nick frowned, then rolled his eyes a little.
“Enjoy yourself?” he said, inclining his head towards the door.
“Are you accusing me of eavesdropping, Midnight?”
Nick laughed. “Oh, I’m sure you were standing that close to the door just to inspect the metal for clues. Right?”
Jordan had the grace to flush, right before he shrugged. “I would have enjoyed myself a lot more if they had surveillance in there I could hack.”
Nick grunted, shaking his head, then started walking back towards the stairs.
Jordan followed along after him.
“You’re really not going to tell me?” he said.
“Tell you what?” Nick said.
“You know what.”
Nick shrugged. “There’s nothing to tell. Nothing happened.”
“Why did she ask you to stay behind?”
Nick exhaled, still wondering how much Jordan heard. He was smart enough to pretend he’d heard nothing, even if he had. Still, Nick had his doubts any human could hide it so completely from their physical reactions.
Then again, some people could.
Nick had known some who could.
He’d known humans who could hide their emotions and truths really, really damned well—freakishly well, disturbingly well. But they’d been specially trained to do so.
Also, that had been during wartime.
Jordan was too young for any of that.
Well, probably. He was too young for the wars. He was also too young to have gotten much life or death practice with that kind of skill,
unless he spent time in the military hunting vampire terrorists or something.
Thinking about that, and about the human detective’s question, Nick ended up going with a partial truth.
“She asked for my number,” he said, shrugging, darting a glance back towards the library-like conference room. “Offered to give me hers, anyway.”
Jordan shook his head, grunting. “Did you give it to her?”
“No.”
At Jordan’s incredulous look, Nick gave him a human-like exhale.
“Look,” he said. “Yeah, okay, she was attractive—”
Jordan laughed. “Attractive? Dude, she was hot.”
“—It’s just not that flattering, getting hit on only because you’re a vampire. Trust me, you’d understand if you’d been through a few hundred years of that kind of thing already. It always leads to the same damned thing—”
“A lot of hot sex? With hot women?” Jordan said, quirking an eyebrow.
Nick ignored that, too.
“—Besides,” he went on. “Until we clear her, until we know the exact connection between her school and these murders, she’s still a part of this case. So yeah… I said no. As in fuck no. And that was pretty much the end of it.”
Jordan frowned.
Nick could almost see him thinking about his words.
“That happen to you a lot?” he said as they rounded the corner for the stairs.
“Too fucking much,” Nick muttered.
He glanced at the male human as he began descending the stairs towards the ground floor, adding,
“Let’s just say, it’s pretty much the only way I get hit on. Ninety-nine percent of the time, anyway. It’s probably why I’m not as nice about it as I should be.”
Jordan frowned, taking the stairs down rapidly next to him.
“Don’t vampires hit on other vampires?” he said, as they reached the next landing.
Nick frowned, thinking about that without slowing his pace.
After a moment, he shrugged.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “But vampires are a pain in the ass, too. Just for different reasons.”
Jordan snorted aloud at that.
When Nick glanced sideways at him, quirking an eyebrow, the human burst out in a real laugh. Nick frowned when the young detective didn’t stop laughing. By the time they reached the next landing, and Jordan was still laughing, shaking his head to himself, Nick was staring at the other detective in disbelief.
Noticing Nick’s stare, Jordan held up a hand in a half-apology.
He was still laughing though, if quieter.
“What?” Nick said, when the other still hadn’t stopped. “Nothing I said could possibly be that funny.”
“It’s nothing, man,” Jordan said, still smiling and shaking his head. “Really. It’s nothing.” At Nick’s pointed stare, the human burst out in another laugh. “Nothing, man. I swear. You’re just such… a grumpy old man,” he laughed. “You sound like my uncle griping about women who wanted him for his money.”
Nick scowled a little, but Jordan held up a hand, adding.
“It’s just… I’m beginning to think vampires aren’t that different from people, after all,” Jordan said.
Nick grunted at that.
But Jordan wasn’t done.
“…And you need to get out more, man,” he said more seriously. “You’ve got a chip on your shoulder the size of a boulder. Maybe you got your reasons,” he added, shrugging. “I don’t know. But I think you need to ride that vampire thing, not be such a stickler for why hot women want you, or always assuming everyone’s motives are shit.”
Nick rolled his eyes, grunting. “Sure, kid,” he said.
Jordan laughed at that, too.
When he went on, however, his voice remained serious.
“You need to lighten up, Tanaka,” he said. “People just approach each other for stupid reasons sometimes. Doesn’t mean nothing good can come of it. Doesn’t have to mean they’re using you… or you’re using them. Doesn’t have to be nefarious. Sometimes it’s just humanity. Fallible, stupid, confused, black, white and gray humanity.”
Nick grunted.
He wasn’t about to argue the point, or to tell the other male he had no fucking idea what he was talking about—or that he might feel differently if he had the capacity, just from the way he was built biologically, to turn his romantic partners into junkies, or ruin their fucking lives—or end up getting his heart ripped out, literally, if he fell for the wrong person.
Thinking about the way Wynter had been looking at him, that flat, judgmental stare she gave him as she dismissed him, he clenched his jaw.
She was as dumb as Jordan.
“Hey,” Jordan said, clapping him on the back. “I first asked out my ex-wife because I liked her ass. Not the most enlightened of motives… but it turned out I liked her brain a hell of a lot more than her ass, so I lucked out. Still, that ass, though.” Smiling, he shrugged. “Humans are just dumb, Tanaka. Deal with it. Don’t cut yourself off from life because of it.”
Nick grunted at that, too.
He didn’t bother to point out that the woman, and her ass, just divorced him.
He was about to change the subject altogether, when his eyes and attention got pulled down the hall as he and Jordan were about to reach the third floor.
He came to a stop.
At first he didn’t even know why he stopped.
A group of uniformed kids stood there. He stared at them, frowning, trying to decide what was wrong with what he was seeing. Class was back in session; maybe that was it.
The corridor should have been empty, but it wasn’t.
Maybe it was that simple.
There were six of them in total. Four were looking out the narrow, vertical windows, even as they huddled together, talking in low voices.
One of them, an Asian-looking kid with strange, silvery-metal enhanced eyes and indigo-blue dyed hair, appeared to be looking out the window as well, but he was hunched over, doing something with one hand. Nick looked down and saw him gripping a blue pen in that same hand, a blue that almost exactly matched the color of his hair.
Like his long, shag-cut hair, the pen’s ink sparkled like it was metallic, shimmering inside the clear casing.
Nick watched the kid’s hand move up and down as he sketched or painted something on the stone column directly in front of where they stood.
Frowning, Nick glanced out the window, trying to decide what they were looking at.
When he looked back at them, to get a better idea of where their gazes were trained, they were all staring at him.
A few of them looked vaguely caught, like they weren’t where they were supposed to be, and they knew it. But unlike the kids Nick had seen watching them earlier that day, this group didn’t look afraid of him, or even curious about who he was.
Rather, they stared at Nick with a kind of guarded hostility.
They stared at him almost like they knew who he was.
Or, his mind muttered cynically. Like they knew what he was.
The one in front struck Nick as their leader.
Taller than the rest of them by at least a few inches, he looked like money to Nick, at least in the pre-war sense. A handsome, tow-headed boy with blue eyes, he had a well-formed nose and mouth, an expensive haircut, a perfectly tailored uniform with what looked like gold cufflinks—not to mention the expensive wrist-band and headset he wore, both of them a pale green that indicated full organics.
On one finger, he wore a ring with some kind of symbol on it.
Even with his vampire vision, Nick couldn’t see it well enough, or at the right angle, to discern what the symbol was.
The blond kid stared at Nick especially hard, a frown decorating his bow-like lips.
Nick hadn’t moved from where he’d originally come to a stop. It occurred to him only now that Jordan stopped when he did, and was now looking up at him from a few stairs below, his eyes puzzled as he watched Nick stare a
t those uniformed kids.
Nick switched to his headset.
You recognize that group? he said. Any of them?
Jordan frowned, then followed the direction of Nick’s stare.
Some of them— Jordan began.
That blond kid?
No. Jordan shook his head, barely perceptible. Not him—
Before he could get any more out, the bell rang.
The sound was so loud, and seemed to come from so close, both Nick and Jordan jumped, flinching into near-defensive postures. Jordan actually reached for his sidearm, Nick noticed, gripping it instinctively where it lived in a camouflaged holster under his jacket.
Nick wondered if Jordan even knew he’d done it.
Remembering the kids, Nick looked back down the corridor, only to find the kids still staring at the two of them.
The tow-headed one was staring at Jordan now, that frown still etched into his lips. From the look on his face, Nick found himself thinking the kid saw Jordan’s reflex, and figured out they were cops—assuming his friends hadn’t told him that already, given that Jordan said he’d interviewed a few of them earlier.
All of this happened in seconds.
The loud trilling of the bell echoed up and down the corridors—on the floor they were on, and the floors above and below, signaling the end of a period.
Doors flung open along the corridor.
Nick heard doors open on every floor in the building.
His vampire hearing could be downright distracting at times.
“Lunch,” Jordan grunted, causing Nick to give him another bare glance.
By the time he looked back down the corridor, kids were pouring out of those opening doors. The clique by the windows with their blond leader broke apart, melting out of their huddle and disappearing into the crowd of students who were leaving classrooms.
Talking loudly, laughing and knocking into one another, most of those kids who’d just left class were making their way towards the staircase. Presumably, the cafeteria lived somewhere on the ground floor, although Nick saw some kids walking the other direction too, towards the door on the other end of the long corridor with the narrow windows.
One of them was taller than the others, with white-blond hair.
“There another staircase that way?” Nick said to Jordan, louder over the din.
Vampire Detective Midnight Page 21
