Nick scowled at him openly.
“Shut up about her.”
Malek blinked.
He didn’t look angry though, or even surprised. He definitely didn’t look afraid of Nick, or of his anger, or of anything he might say.
What kind of fucking seer was this, anyway? Nick thought angrily, staring up at him. Weren’t seers supposed to be even more emotional than vampires? At the very least, they were supposed to be just as emotional, if in slightly different ways.
Malek couldn’t read him, not technically, but he seemed to see something in Nick’s face.
That, or maybe he really could read him, just like his sister Tai, only he was a dishonest asshole about it.
Either way, when Malek spoke, he might as well have read him.
“Prescients are different,” the seer said, shrugging.
“Different as in bigger assholes?” Nick snapped. “Or just robots?”
“We show emotion differently—”
“Just shut up about her,” Nick growled.
“Why?” Malek said, still unmoved. “You obviously want to see her. You obviously are doing everything in your power to not think about the fact that—”
“Shut up about her,” Nick snarled. He closed the distance between them, glaring up at that pale, expressionless face. “Right now, Malek! I mean it!”
When the seer flinched, Nick stepped back.
He also subdued his voice, but not by much.
That open threat still vibrated his words.
“Shut up about Wynter, Malek,” he said, quieter. “I mean it. I’m not going to see her. I don’t want to talk about her. I don’t want to know how she’s doing… or who she’s seeing… or who she’s fucking. I don’t want to know shit. Okay? Is that crystal-fucking-clear enough for you? You keep talking about her and I’m out of here. As in now. As in, before I look at your newest finger-painting. As in, I won’t be back here again.”
Fighting back a stronger reaction at the seer’s blank, unmoving stare, Nick forced himself to look away.
Embarrassment warred with anger as he focused on the painting in front of him without seeing it at first. He found himself looking at the crumbled stone instead, the way the paint interacted with the rough texture of the old wall.
“What is this, Malek?” he growled, his voice still hard. “What the hell am I looking at? What am I even doing here? Tell me, or I’m leaving. I wasn’t kidding about wanting to go home.”
“To eat blood bags,” Malek said. “And watch bad television.”
Nick glared at him.
“Where it’s fucking quiet,” he growled. “Where I don’t have to listen to editorializing by annoying non-humans who clearly have way too much time on their hands…”
That time, Malek surprised him.
He smiled.
Patting Nick on the back in a friendly way, he smiled wider.
Before Nick could decide how to react to that, the seer walked closer to the painting on the wall, illuminating more of it with the light from his headset.
“I have a few of these,” he said, motioning over the expanse of the painting, which looked about six feet across, and another eight or nine feet in height.
“This is the most recent,” the seer added, looking over his shoulder at Nick. “I keep dreaming this. This in particular… this face.”
His long fingers brushed over a portion of the stone wall, where images started to coalesce in a way that Nick found he was really seeing them. Frowning, Nick walked closer, looked over what appeared to be explosions coming off the sides of tall buildings. He saw smoke and fire exploding outward, darkening a night sky…
Then he saw where Malek was pointing, the face he’d painted, ghostlike, hovering in the sky over the burning buildings.
It was a vampire.
There was absolutely no doubt in Nick’s mind that it was a vampire.
The pale skin, the crystal-like irises, the hint of fangs in a smirking smile all looked out from the painting, disturbingly lifelike despite their ghostly quality… disturbingly filled with a kind of presence that also struck Nick as exceedingly vampire-like.
“Who is it?” Nick said. “Did he do this?”
Nick took his hand out of his coat pocket, gesturing towards the explosions.
When Malek didn’t answer, Nick glanced at the seer, who shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Nick scowled. “Seriously?”
Malek sighed, his words and expression patient.
“I’ve told you how this works. I’ve explained everything to you before. I only get pictures, Nick. I don’t get explanations. I don’t get a narrative. I get pictures. Wherever they come from, they don’t come with captions. They don’t come with names… or titles.”
Nick scowled, staring at the painting more carefully now, walking along the length of it, taking in more details.
“This looks like downtown,” he muttered.
He was about to ask the seer when this was going to happen, then remembered what Malek just said and bit his tongue in annoyance. He stopped only when his fangs, which were sharper than his ordinary teeth, lightly pierced his flesh.
“I need to photograph this one,” he said, glancing at the seer. “Is that okay?”
At Malek’s silence, he added,
“This looks like a terrorist attack, Mal. Not exactly my jurisdiction. I do homicide, remember? Something like this… all I can do is pass it along. Tell them to keep an eye out for that particular vampire. And whatever other faces they can I.D. in this.”
He motioned around at the other glimpses of faces and profiles among the brushstrokes and careful lines.
“…This collection of weirdos you have here,” he finished sourly.
Malek shrugged.
“Do whatever you need to do with it, Nick,” he said simply. “That’s why I brought you.”
“Did you show this one to Lara?” Nick said, turning.
He switched his headset over to its recording function as he spoke. Turning off the sound capture, he panned the camera over every inch of the seer’s painting, moving slowly enough for the auto-focus to keep up with the motion of his head.
“Not yet,” Malek said. “I haven’t told Lara yet.”
Nick glanced at him, quirking an eyebrow. “Why not?”
Again, Malek just shrugged.
“I’m showing you,” he said. “I’ll show her too, if you think I should.”
Nick grunted, looking back at the image.
He couldn’t say why, precisely, it reassured him that Malek didn’t show every one of his prescient paintings to his patron, Lara St. Maarten, but it did. Then again, St. Maarten, who ran the largest defense and bio-research tech corporation in what remained of the United States, was patron to both Nick and Malek these days.
Nick sent an impulse to have the recording excise out the snippet he’d just accidentally recorded of Malek’s face, deleting that part of the file without thought.
“This is definitely more her area than mine,” Nick admitted grudgingly. “Her private-sec weirdos partner directly with I.S.F. and H.R.A., not to mention the government of the United States. They probably work terrorism cases and potential terrorism cases all the time. They also have access to a hell of a lot of more intel than I do… both from their status as military contractors, and via NDAs and the resulting security clearances they get as part of individual contracts. That includes military intel, Malek. Especially when it involves non-humans. I really just do murders. They don’t call me in for anything bigger than that—”
A tone went off in Nick’s ear.
Priority code.
NYPD.
Fuck.
There went his nice, relaxing evening of doing jack-all.
Giving Malek a sideways look, he picked up, holding up a hand to indicate to the seer that he should remain silent.
“Midnight,” he said.
He spoke out loud so Malek would hear him and know he wa
s talking to other cops.
Instead of taking the hint and moving away, the seer stepped closer.
Nick gave him a what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you look, stepping back and holding up his hand again. Malek looked about to speak, but Nick shushed him with another hard gesture, holding his hand higher as he listened to the voice on the other end.
“Nick?”
“Yeah. Jordan. What’s up?”
“Did you see the news? About the explosion at the Straven building downtown? The one owned by Goassam Industries?”
Nick froze.
He looked at the painting in front of him.
“Big building? Half-naked woman on front of it?”
“The Sphinx design, yeah. They want us down there.”
Nick frowned, glancing at Malek in spite of himself.
“They do? Why?”
“They don’t think this was terrorism.”
At Nick’s silence, Damon Jordan, Nick’s friend and one of the human homicide detectives he technically worked under, let out a tired-sounding sigh.
“They think it was a hit gone wrong, Nick. Either a hit and a burglary… or a burglary with a murder that happened as a consequence of them trying to rip the guy off while he was there. According to surveillance, the bomb might even have been accidental.”
“Accidental?” Nick frowned. “Who was the target? For the hit?”
“Abe Silverton. The venture capitalist.”
Waiting for a reaction from Nick, he went on when he didn’t get one.
“…Apparently he had some high-tech surveillance thing in his office. Audio and visual. The system managed to upload everything onto the network before the building blew. His desk was a full organic. The building’s private-sec says it got imaging and audio from the whole job. Which is why they don’t think it was terrorism.”
Nick nodded. “You’re down there now?”
“Yeah. You coming?”
Nick frowned. “No blood, right?” he said, half-hopefully. “You don’t really need me?”
He practically heard the human roll his eyes, even with the visuals shut off.
“Tanaka, get your ass down here,” Jordan said. “Now.”
“Why?” Nick said stubbornly. “I had a fight tonight.”
“I know. I saw. It was a short fight.”
“Still tiring,” Nick said. “I might have pulled something.”
“Yeah.” Jordan snorted “I bet I know exactly what it is you pulled.”
Sharpening his voice, Jordan hammered his words.
“Get your ass down here, Nick. Morley asked for you specifically. I think he’s worried you’ve forgotten who you work for. Morley thinks… and he’s not alone… all that glory and those cheering crowds are turning your head into a pumpkin…”
Nick snorted, but the human detective went on without a pause.
“…pretty soon it’s going to be so big and fat you won’t be able to make it through the precinct security door. Not to mention all those vamp-fetish chicks throwing themselves at your feet every night. It’s not good for you, Naoko. We’re worried. Truly. You need to let us help you, so you don’t just float off into the ether with that giant head of yours… if only by reminding you what a grumpy old man you are under all that fame and glory.”
“Tell Morley me and my giant head are just fine,” Nick grunted. “Tell him I was looking forward to a night of lukewarm blood bags and a pre-war movie involving some kind of sappy love story. Preferably one where someone dies. I was considering a musical. Maybe The King and I. The good one… with Yul Brynner. Or maybe Madam Butterfly.”
“You’re old as fuck, Tanaka. You know that, right?”
Nick rolled his eyes.
“It’s been mentioned.”
Jordan snorted. “Get your ass down here. And if you stop for coffee, grab me one. Two sugars. A few sprinkles of chocolate. Maybe a dollop of whipped cream, if you can spare any of that big fight money you’re earning these days—”
“Bite me.”
“That’s your department,” the other returned without a pause. “Get down here. Now. I mean it. Morley wants you here.”
Before Nick could reply to that, Jordan hung up.
Scowling a little, Nick glanced at Malek.
“I have to go,” he said.
“It’s starting, isn’t it?” Malek said.
Nick frowned, staring up at him.
The seer didn’t point at his painting when he said it.
Then again, he didn’t need to.
Exhaling, human-fashion, Nick ran a hand through his black hair, still damp from the shower at the fight club. He could already feel a headache coming on.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess it is.”
Chapter 2
Sorry, Straven
Nick found Jordan and Morley in the Sphinx building’s lobby.
To get there, Nick had to duck and weave around chunks of asphalt and glass, part of what looked like an organic desk, twisted into a bizarre shape by the explosion and fire—not to mention the eighty or so story drop.
By the time Nick saw it, the largest piece of it remaining looked like the corpse of a screaming, broken animal.
Nick also saw bent pieces of steel, broken virtual-reality chairs, yards of glass crushed to powder, what looked like it might have been one of those high-tech water converters and coolers, a number of heavy, featureless machines he didn’t recognize, part of a large, expensive-looking conference table, several chunks of wall and decorative stone, lots of burnt and twisted monitors and headsets… a high-end coffee maker that looked bizarrely intact.
Most of the debris trail was concentrated on the northeast side of the building, which made sense, given what Nick saw on the news networks as he rode a driver-less taxi downtown.
The blast originated in a corner office on that same side of the building.
He’d left Malek in the Cauldron.
As he rode down to the crime scene, he found himself split-screening the news with what the seer showed him, studying the painting and comparing it to the real-time images of the actual building being imaged by media drones in the wake of the blast.
He couldn’t help but note the similarities between some of the images, including in Malek’s depiction of the explosion itself.
Those parallels were close enough to be unnerving at times.
Some of the images were practically identical.
Fucking seers.
Nick studied the face of the vampire depicted there, too.
Nick didn’t think he knew him.
Still, there was something about him.
Something that bordered on familiar without actually being familiar.
Nick wondered if he was involved in the nonhuman fight circuit in some way. He looked like someone whose image Nick might have seen at least once before, but not in a personal way—more like he’d glimpsed his face on a billboard or in a newsfeed somewhere and hadn’t really tracked it.
Shoving all of that from his mind as he reached the glass doors to the building, he nodded to the uniform cop who held one of those doors open for him, lifting the line of police tape to let Nick through. From the faintly excited look in the cop’s eyes, Nick found himself thinking the guy must be a fight fan.
His suspicion was confirmed with the officer grinned at him.
“Hell of a short fight tonight, sir,” he said, beaming.
Nick forced himself to smile, nodding his thanks.
Farlucci, his boss at the fights, already chewed him out once this week for not being friendlier to the fans.
“Yeah,” he said, noncommittal. “Good luck for me.”
“Luck? Hardly, sir! That misdirect was amazing, not to mention—”
“Is that my fucking coffee?” Jordan yelled from over by the security desk. “How about leaving your fans long enough to bring it over here before it gets cold, dickhead? Or is that Mr. Bigshot Fighter Dickhead now?”
Nick fought not to laugh.
Giving the uniform cop a deadpan shrug, he ignored the beet-red complexion the male developed from Jordan’s shouted words and patted the human on the shoulder.
“Thanks,” he said. “Gotta go.”
The uniform nodded, still bright red, but smiled at Nick anyway, still obviously star-struck, and now mortally embarrassed at being called out for it.
Nick couldn’t help but find the whole thing ludicrous.
Humans, Jesus.
It seemed like the majority of them either wanted to kill him for what he was, wanted him defanged and in a box somewhere… or now, in some weird twist of fate, wanted his fucking autograph. He was increasingly convinced all of those different race-related wants were essentially the same thing only in different permutations, but he couldn’t make himself care enough to puzzle it out.
He reached Jordan and thrust out his hand holding the coffee.
“You’re the dick,” he said simply.
Jordan laughed, taking the mug from his fingers. “I suppose you want money for this? You cheap, old-as-dirt, crotchety misanthrope?”
“You already owe me for dinner last night.”
“See? Cheap.”
“I don’t eat,” Nick reminded him pointedly. “And blood’s expensive.”
“You get that for free, asshole. Or, actually, not for free… my tax dollars pay for that shit. Along with your rent. And your twice-weekly jerkoff sessions, courtesy of the I.S.F.”
Nick shrugged, stuffing his hands into his coat pockets.
He didn’t bother to correct the human on that last part.
He still hadn’t reinstated the live feeds he was entitled to as a vampire registered through the I.S.F. According to current ration levels, he was technically entitled to three a week, not two, so Jordan was off by one neck. That meant three actual humans who came to his door and willingly offered him their blood—and often other parts of their bodies—were budgeted for Nick by the I.S.F., and, like Jordan said, paid for by taxpayers.
Like most vampires, Nick tended to like to fuck his food.
Well, he liked to fuck the bodies that inevitably came with that food.
But he’d shut that particular spigot off over a month ago, and he hadn’t quite managed to turn it back on again.
The Prescient: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 3) Page 3
