Vampire Detective Midnight

by J. C. Andrijeski

  “So?” Jordan held up his hands again, clearly unimpressed. “What makes you think they were looking at a bunch of white paint? Maybe a cow wandered by. Or a teacher they hate. Or a girl they think is cute. They could have been looking at the mountains, Tanaka. Hell, they could have been in VR and not seen a damned thing outside their headset projections.”

  Nick frowned.

  He knew Jordan was right.

  Still, something about the symbol bugged him.

  He was about to shake it off, to agree with Jordan, when his eyes fell to the stone pillar separating the long, thin windows.

  He’d forgotten about the blue-haired kid with the mohawk and the blue-ink pen.

  He’d forgotten that he’d seen the kid doing something with that pen.

  Staring at the white-gray surface of the pillar, he pointed.

  “Then what’s that?” he said, gruff, glancing at Jordan.

  Jordan again followed Nick’s pointing finger.

  On the flat part of the stone, between two tall, narrow panes of glass, someone had drawn a symbol in blue, metallic ink.

  It was the exact same symbol that had been painted on the barn.

  Jordan looked at the symbol, then out the window at the barn.

  He looked back at Nick, frowning.

  “Shit,” he said after a pause.

  Chapter 21

  A Work Question

  Nick winced, wiping a line of white skin crème off the edge of his jaw with a towel.

  He’d practically slathered himself in the stuff, but it wasn’t helping much yet, not in terms of the pain.

  On the plus side, he looked close to normal again.

  He looked flushed.

  The back of his neck was a few shades redder than his face, and one of his hands was roughly the same color—but for the most part, he looked normal. He looked like he’d gotten an odd sunburn, or maybe burned himself in a too-hot shower.

  If anything, it made him look more human.

  He walked out of the bathroom of his apartment, tossing the towel on the edge of the sink as he left. Wandering back into his living room, he contemplated heating up one of the blood-bags sitting in his fridge. He still had two left from the morning delivery.

  The headache he’d predicted made it hard to think straight.

  It also made him uncharacteristically not-hungry.

  Morley gave him the night off, presumably because he’d worked a full day already with Jordan. Nick didn’t know what, if anything, Jordan might end up telling Morley though, or if he was about to be served with some kind of sanction for his behavior that day. That was assuming they didn’t yank his Midnight license entirely, maybe send him in for “reeducation” while they were at it.

  Nick didn’t want to think about that, though.

  Not tonight. He was too fucking tired.

  He was actually considering going unconscious for a few hours, if only in the hopes he might heal a little faster, and sidestep the worst of the sun headache. While vampires didn’t have to sleep, they could go under if they wanted to. Sometimes they even went under when they didn’t want to, but that was pretty unusual.

  He didn’t want to do that either, though. Not tonight.

  When they first disembarked from the train at Grand Central, he’d spent about two seconds contemplating going back to the Cauldron.

  Then he said fuck it, and crawled back to his place.

  He also rescheduled his dinner with Kit for the following night.

  Luckily, she was cool with that. She even sounded sympathetic when he hinted he hadn’t had the best day, and wouldn’t be good company.

  Maybe he’d check out the Cauldron the next night, too—maybe after dinner with Kit.

  He wanted another crack at trying to talk to Jack Bird, a.k.a. Malek or “Mal.” He also wanted to get a look at that third painting. While he was there, maybe he’d say hi to the kid. Maybe he’d even bring her clothes back to her, assuming the cleaning service had taken care of that by now.

  That was all assuming there weren’t any more murders between now and then.

  Jordan had calmed down by the time they got on the train.

  He even transferred over all of the recordings from his interviews that day, giving Nick the unedited footage and bugging him for his take on a few of the kids in particular. Figuring he owed the guy, Nick listened to most of it on the train ride back, giving his opinions where it seemed warranted.

  Given all that, now that he was home, he could have just relaxed.

  Watched a movie. Listened to music. Lifted weights.

  Hell, he could have bought some porn and jerked off.

  He was having trouble shutting off his brain, though.

  The headache definitely wasn’t helping. He found himself pacing the living room of his government-owned apartment, barefoot on the dense, soft carpet, scowling to himself as he ran over the events of that day. He still winced now and then from spikes of pain at his temples, or from his face, neck and hands.

  He knew what he wanted to do.

  He knew it, although he didn’t really want to examine it.

  He also knew about a hundred thousand reasons why he shouldn’t do it.

  In the end, annoyed with himself and his own pacing, he flopped down on the couch in his living room. He didn’t turn on the wall monitor.

  He just sat there, scowling at the headset he’d thrown on the coffee table when he first got back, right before he’d taken a shower.

  After a few more minutes, he scooped the headset up with a scowl.

  He wrapped it back around his head and ear with a scowl, too.

  None of the scowling stopped him from clicking on the thin piece of organic metal.

  It didn’t stop him from flipping open his NYPD channel, either.

  “Gertrude?” he said. “This is Detective Naoko Tanaka Midnight, Ident tag 9381T—”

  “Of course, sir. We know who you are.”

  Nick bit his lip, then winced, stopping when it hurt.

  “Of course you do,” he muttered.

  For a pause, he just sat there.

  Then, still scowling, he gave in, half in anger, half in resignation.

  “Gertrude, I need you to look up a phone number for me.”

  “Of course, sir. Is this for a business, or—”

  “No,” Nick growled, his hands clenching on the sofa beside him. “It’s personal.”

  He sat there, staring at the damned entry in his headset, about two hours after Gertrude gave it to him.

  He was still sitting on his couch.

  He’d gotten up a few times since the first time he sat here.

  He’d gone to the bathroom.

  He’d gone to get blood.

  He’d washed his face, then remembered the crème as it came off on his fingers and applied more of it.

  Now he sat on his rust-colored couch, staring at a blank wall monitor, wearing sweat pants and a loose T-shirt with a stretched-out collar that wouldn’t chafe at the burns on his neck. He sipped at a cup of warm blood, more in the hopes it might speed up the healing process than because he was really hungry.

  Mostly, he stared at the phone number in his head set, and scowled.

  Impulsively, he hit the sequence to send it.

  It rang.

  Once.

  Twice.

  He was about to hang up on the third ring, when a breathless voice answered.

  “Hello?”

  Nick froze. He sat there, not hanging up, not speaking, somehow rendered silent by that one word.

  She waited a beat.

  “Who is this?” she said. “I’m not getting an I.D.”

  Remembering the I.D. on his phone would be blocked since he was routing it through the NYPD, he grimaced, then spoke.

  “It’s me. Nick. Tanaka. We met today.”

  Silence.

  Nick shifted in his seat, frowning.

  Briefly, he was tempted to turn on the visual mode in his headset, see if
she might do the same. He didn’t, though.

  When she still didn’t speak, he let out a low cough.

  “I wondered if I could ask you something,” he said, gruff. “It’s work-related, so—”

  “Are you okay?”

  Nick fell silent.

  Stumped by the question, he just sat there.

  “I saw you,” she explained. “On the school’s surveillance system. They brought me in to review the feed, since we had no official record of a vampire on campus that day.”

  She sounded concerned, not angry.

  “…Are you okay, Nick?”

  By then, understanding had clicked.

  Embarrassment flickered through him.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Completely fine. The myths about that, they aren’t—”

  “Can I see?”

  He fell silent, stumped again.

  Despite what he’d been thinking himself, only a few minutes before, the idea of turning the visuals on in his headset now struck him as a terrible one.

  “No,” he said, blunt.

  “Why not?”

  “Why?” he said, exasperated already. “I told you. I called for work. To ask you questions that are work-related.”

  “So it’s questions now? Plural?”

  “It might be,” he growled.

  “Yet you wouldn’t take my number. Today. When I offered it.” She paused, her voice holding a faint edge. “Why, Nick? Do you really need to control things that badly? You knew you could get my number on your own… so rather than accepting it when I offered it, you chose to get it on your own and call me anyway?”

  “I told you,” he repeated. “I called for work. I have a few questions—”

  “Bullshit,” she said, blunt.

  There was a silence.

  In it, Nick stared at the dead monitor in front of him, clenching his jaw.

  Still gritting his teeth, he said, “Are you going to let me ask the questions, Wynter? Or not? I can have Jordan call you tomorrow—”

  “Show me your face. Talk to me like an actual person, Nick, and I’ll think about answering your ‘work’ questions. How’s that?”

  Exhaling in exasperation, he clicked on the visual mode.

  “There,” he growled. “Happy?”

  There was barely a pause.

  Then she turned her visual mode on as well.

  He found himself staring at her face, that same face he’d barely been able to look away from when he first saw her in her principal’s office. She looked more relaxed now, her dark hair cascading over her shoulders, her feet tucked up under her where she lounged on some kind of soft-looking chair or couch.

  She looked like she was wearing a damned kimono.

  That, or some kind of silk bathrobe.

  More of her neck showed in the wraparound’s opening than it had with the dress she’d worn earlier, along with a V-shaped swath of skin, the color of pale honey, that slid down to a precise point between her breasts. He found himself staring at her collarbones, at the hollow at the base of her neck, at the line of her jaw up to her cheekbones.

  She didn’t seem to notice his stare.

  She was too busy staring at him.

  “It doesn’t look bad,” she decided, after a longish pause where they only looked at one another. “More like you just stayed out in the sun for a little too long.”

  Nick couldn’t quite bring himself to meet her gaze.

  He’d stopped staring at her, though.

  “Technically, I did,” he muttered.

  There was another silence.

  Then she surprised him, and laughed.

  He glanced over in spite of himself, watching as she leaned her shoulders against a smooth, black-matte wall behind whatever soft piece of furniture she sat on, which was white and looked vaguely fuzzy. It was covered with pillows, he noted, most of them bright colors. He wondered if she had a cat. She looked like the kind of person who would have one.

  Settling her spine and neck there more comfortably, she smiled at him, shaking her head bemusedly, her full mouth quirked as she exhaled.

  “Okay,” she said, folding her arms. “Ask me your work questions, Nick.”

  He nodded, wanting to exhale himself, although he didn’t need to.

  “Okay,” he said. “First off. What’s this symbol? Do you know?”

  He flashed the symbol he and Jordan had stared at out the second-story window of Kellerman Prep’s main campus building.

  He watched her gaze narrow as she looked at it, presumably in a monitor, since he didn’t see a headset wrapped around her ear.

  “It’s painted on a barn behind your campus,” he added. “One of your students also drew it on a wall on the second floor. This kid…” he said, flashing her a digital image of the Asian kid with the blue metallic mohawk and enhanced eyes. “He was hanging out with these two. And a couple others. They seemed like a clique of some kind. The blond one seemed to be their leader.”

  He flashed images of the blond kid, the girl with the yellow and orange hair, another girl with long, bright-green hair, an East Indian-looking boy with shaggy hair, an East Asian-looking girl with black and white hair, and a black kid wearing expensive, probably multiple-wavelength, enhanced VR goggles who’d dyed his hair gold and who wore gold contacts when Jordan interviewed him.

  As far as Nick and Jordan had been able to piece together on the train ride back to New York, this made up the group of kids they’d seen hanging out in the corridor right before the bell went off.

  “What do you know about it?” he said. “And about these kids?”

  Her blue-green eyes flickered up to his. Her mouth pursed.

  “You saw one of these kids drawing that symbol?” she said.

  Nick nodded. “They were on the second floor, right before the bell for lunch went off. They were all looking out the window, possibly at that symbol on the barn—”

  “That was supposed to be repainted,” she muttered, refolding her arms, still frowning. “This morning. Whoever did it had keys. They got into our security room and turned off surveillance.”

  “So it was vandalism?”

  She gave him an incredulous look. “Of course it was vandalism,” she retorted. “Do you think we’d allow someone to paint that damned mark on our grounds as an art project?”

  It was Nick’s turn to frown. “What does it mean? The mark?”

  Looking at him, she let out a humorless sound, then shook her head.

  “I forget you don’t work around kids…” she muttered under her breath.

  He watched her lean towards the monitor, which gave him a distracting view further down the robe she wore. He looked away, his jaw clenching slightly as she did something on the monitor she was using to talk to him.

  “It comes from here,” she said, leaning back, now holding a small earpiece in her hand. She fitted it to her ear, then directed a video screen to come up in Nick’s headset, a sub-screen that still showed her in the background.

  Nick watched a man in a dark red and black uniform appear.

  He was standing on a platform, speaking to a crowd.

  The sound was turned down, but the man spoke with a hard look in his eyes and on his face. At times he was clearly shouting, veins bulging in cords in his neck, and another on his forehead. The guy was solid muscle. He evoked military, even beyond the odd uniform, but the number and types of tattoos visible on his neck and hands—many of them symbols—made Nick wonder if the guy ended up in the black market or prison after whatever war he fought.

  Squinting, Nick noticed one symbol in particular on the guy’s chest.

  The front of his uniform shirt was open, seemingly in part to display that exact symbol, which ran from the base of this throat down his chest in black and white metallic ink.

  It was the same symbol Nick had seen at the school.

  The man also wore the symbol as an armband around his bicep over the uniform, Nick realized. That version was depicted in black and r
ed, which is why he hadn’t noticed it at first. Glancing at the altar-like table behind the thirties-something human, who was clearly shouting again, Nick saw the same symbol on a banner overhead, in gold on black.

  “Who is he?” Nick said.

  Wynter sighed, fingering hair out of her face.

  “That, dear Naoko, is Dimitry Yi.”

  “Is that a real name?”

  She shrugged. “Probably not.”

  “Who is he? What is the symbol?”

  Frowning, she looked away from Nick, focusing directly on the recording she’d brought up to show him, only from her side of their communication.

  “Dimitry Yi is a racial purist,” she said after a pause. “He started a movement based on a ‘philosophy’ he claims to have pioneered, but obviously is nothing new. He wrote a book that was a bestseller. You may have heard of it? It’s called Our Home is Ours.”

  Nick frowned. “Oh. That guy.”

  “Yeah,” she said, sighing as she clasped her hands together. “The movement is usually pronounced ‘Eifah.’ It stands for ‘Earth is for Humans.’”

  Nick frowned. “Let me guess—”

  “Yeah,” she said, still sounding tired. “It’s becoming a problem in school, unfortunately, which is why I’ve been forced to keep up with it to a degree. Eifah and Dimitry Yi’s so-called ‘philosophical teachings’ are trendy among a lot of teenagers, believe it or not. The new way to drive their parents insane, maybe. It’s wrapped in a kind of pseudo-intellectualism that allows them to use a lot of jargon and sound-bytes that sound smart to a kid… or someone without much education. Parents have told me that their kids often loftily tell them that they are simply ‘uniformed’ and tell them to listen to Dimitry Yi lectures, read his books, etc.—”

  “Fucking hell,” Nick muttered.

  “Yeah,” she said. “The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.”

  Still frowning, she met Nick’s gaze, looking away from the recording of Dimitry Yi.

  “Whatever the exact appeal, it’s disturbing how popular it’s gotten. That blond kid you asked about is Harrison Anthony Kingsworth… as in, son of Gavin Kingsworth, current Governor of New York Protected Area.”