He refused to think about why.
He also refused to think about the fact that the person he’d done it for might be sleeping with someone else at that very moment.
For now, blood-bags were less complicated.
They were less complicated than even posing the question.
Clenching his jaw, he glanced at Morley, the senior detective in Nick’s department and the closest thing he had to a direct boss at the NYPD. Jordan might technically have authority over him as well, but Morley, and Jordan himself, treated Nick more like Jordan’s partner than his “outside consultant,” which is how the I.S.F. viewed Nick legally.
Morley more or less treated Nick like any other homicide detective in his precinct these days, which made the human damned unusual.
It also made Nick extremely lucky.
“What’s going on?” he said, gruff. “Why do you even need me here?”
Morley rolled his eyes.
“Well, good evening to you, too, Midnight.” He quirked a dark eyebrow decorated with healthy streaks of grey. “Where’s my fucking coffee?”
Jordan burst out in a laugh.
Nick rolled his eyes. “I’ll get you one. But I should warn you, I might have to whine at my next I.S.F. check-in that my human colleagues are using their Midnight resource in inappropriate ways. Start muttering about vampire rights. Attempts to undermine my authority. Mocking my expertise. Racial discrimination—”
Morley snorted, waving him off.
“We got uniforms for that.”
He jerked his head towards the door, towards the uniform cop Nick just left.
“Hey! Fight Club!” he yelled, as loudly as Jordan had before. The senior detective pointed at Jordan’s drink. “Get me one of those. Same size. No damned chocolate sprinkles or any of that crap. Coffee. Black. No sugar. Got it?”
The uniformed cop, red-faced all over again, nodded.
Nick snorted a half laugh as he watched the human disappear through the glass doors.
“Is that why I’m here?” he said, looking back at Morley. “As a foil so you can torture newbie cops? Or is there some actual blood you want me to look at?”
Morley grunted.
“Come on,” he said, motioned his head towards the back door. “We’ll take you up.”
“Up?” Nick frowned, looking up in reflex. “Is the suite accessible?”
Morley snorted, glancing back at him as he headed for the elevator bank. He scrubbed his short, curly, salt-and-pepper hair with his fingers, his mouth pursed.
“Are you kidding?” the older African-American man said. “This place was built to withstand a damned nuclear war. Literally, in this case. The emergency systems had the fire out before the fire department drones could even get here. They ended up recording the whole thing and leaving… not long after we determined the motive likely wasn’t political.”
“Do you have the surveillance tapes?” Nick said. “The private-sec ones? Jordan mentioned them, but he didn’t send anything over before—”
“Yeah. He couldn’t.” Morley leaned down to hit the button to call the elevator to the lobby floor. “Everything in this damned building is proprietary. Every. Damned. Thing. We’re still working on getting access to surveillance. I’ve got someone knocking on a judge’s door in the next hour or so. The security guys here won’t give us jack shit without a warrant, and even then, they’ll probably want us to sign something. They can’t get ahold of the building’s owners… apparently, they’re in one of the Protected Areas in Europe right now, for some big business conference. They probably don’t know what happened yet, with the delay.”
Nick nodded, frowning.
Significant delays still existed in news transmissions between the different continents.
Ever since the wars, all protected regions suffered from the same paranoias around utilizing orbiting satellites for anything non-critical. The major remaining human governments flat-out wouldn’t grant access to their military satellites, not for any commercial purpose, not even for the transmission of news.
For the most part, that meant no one could access any satellites at all, not without a specific military purpose. No unencrypted, non-military-approved information could be transmitted to other protected areas or economic regions—not unless it was a damned emergency, and sometimes not even then.
If they were ever attacked by aliens, they were screwed.
The call button in the elevator lobby pinged, going dark, and the doors to the nearest elevator car opened. Nick followed Jordan and Morley in, still surprised so much of the building remained operational, particularly after the footage he’d seen.
“How’s that cop going to find you for your coffee?” Nick said.
Morley grunted in amusement. “Shut up, Midnight.” He nodded towards the control panel. “Hit the button for eighty-eight.”
Leaning down, Nick jabbed at it with a finger.
The doors closed soundlessly.
The elevator was fast.
Fast enough, Nick felt it in his gut when the stainless-steel car slid up its rails to the floor just below the famous observatory on the eighty-ninth. According to the news briefs Nick watched on the way here, the very top of the building, what was technically the roof, housed a garden and multiple pools, along with three restaurants and two bars. While considered the ninetieth floor, it didn’t have a full roof, just transparent organic shielding.
The photos made it look like a tropical resort.
The largest of the pools, a lagoon-shaped oasis with a waterfall, lived inside a palm forest dotted with deck chairs, hammocks, swing chairs, tables, a full bar, and employed a half-dozen full-time masseuses, all of them at the beck and call of the tired and chronically rich.
If one wanted sun, or to stare up at the stars, a manicured flower garden stood between the palm forest and the second pool, filled with real-live birds, fruit trees, rose bushes, and an assortment of other living creatures and plant-life you normally didn’t find these days outside a few select protected areas, I.S.F.-owned zoos, botanical research gardens, and underground laboratories.
The Northeastern Protected Area still had a lot of nature.
They even had wild birds.
Wynter told Nick she even saw a fox outside her window once… and a full-grown deer. She claimed to have seen raccoons, squirrels, rats, lizards, mice, even dragonflies and turtles by a lake a few miles from her house.
Shoving Wynter from his mind with a grimace, he fought back a swell of anger.
Why was he thinking about her so goddamned much tonight?
He wanted to blame Malek.
He wanted to blame the tall, weirdly goth, weirdly emotionless, prescient seer for showing up in his dressing area at the fight club, for asking about her, for bugging him to go visit her, for telling him to visit Tai.
He knew that wasn’t all of it, though.
He didn’t know what the rest of it was, but he could feel it.
Maybe Wynter herself was pulling on him.
Nick grimaced, closing his eyes. Just letting that possibility run through his mind already had his back molars grinding, his head throbbing with a dull ache.
The door pinged in front of him.
Nick didn’t really think about how quiet he’d been during the elevator ride up until the ride ended.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d been aware Jordan and Morley were talking to one another behind him, noticing him not joining in. He’d barely tracked it until those doors opened and suddenly he was in a crime scene.
Now he could feel the two detectives staring at him, wondering what was wrong.
Pretending not to notice, Nick exited the elevator without looking back, or answering their puzzled stares.
The smell of smoke was overpowering, as soon as the doors opened.
Strangely, though, this part of the floor didn’t look as bad as he’d expected.
It was wet.
The carpet squelched under his feet, sloshi
ng water onto his anti-grav boots. He could smell chemical dousing agents, along with burnt plastic, plaster, light ash, charred wood, and harder materials that were probably organics, semi-organics and dead metal.
The organics smelled strange to his nose. Definitely not like burned flesh, or even bone or teeth… but not quite like scorched dead-metal or plastic, either.
He glanced at Morley and Jordan, just in time to see them flick on the lights of their headsets. It didn’t occur to him until then how dark it would be in here to human eyes.
“Doesn’t look that bad here,” Jordan observed.
“Yeah,” Morley said, frowning.
“You guys haven’t been up here before now?” Nick looked between them. “I just assumed you’d been here for a while already.”
Morley shook his head, still staring around, aiming his headset light at the walls, where an organic fixture dripped some kind of chemical. The bright pink fluid ran down from a hole in the ceiling, staining the light blue carpet below.
“Where are we going?” Jordan said, pulling up a virtual, 3D representation of the blueprints for the floor. “Does this corridor take us to the office suites?”
Nick nodded.
He already knew where they were going.
He’d oriented himself based on that same set of blueprints, which Jordan sent him while he was riding down here in the robo-taxi. Nick’s vampire memory wasn’t quite photographic, like a seer’s, but it was significantly better than his human memory had been.
“We’re going the right way,” he said. He inclined his head towards the passageway to the left of the elevator lobby. “Silverton’s office was down here.”
Jordan and Morley exchanged looks.
They aimed their headset lamps back down the corridor an instant later, following as Nick began picking his way carefully down the hallway.
The liquid on the floor made it impossible to move silently.
All of their feet continued to squelch, suck into, and eventually splash over the carpet as they walked, as the chemical compound grew deeper. By the time they’d walked a dozen yards, the liquid filled almost two inches along the bottom of the floor.
Further into the suite, the damage grew significantly more apparent.
Nick saw sections of wall blackened from smoke. A monitor stuck out of one segment of plaster and metal, where it had been embedded from the force of one of the blasts. Glancing at where it stuck out around shoulder-height for him, he pointed it out to the two detectives.
“Watch out for that,” he commented.
They nodded without answering or slowing their steps, staring around with the lights on their headsets.
Past the next row of doors, Nick saw a whole section of wall missing, exposing a long, wide room to the right of the corridor. Something about the layout made him think of a break room, or, even more likely, a conference room. He found himself thinking about the twisted, broken table he’d seen down on the ground below.
It was a strange thought that it might have come from up here.
He kept walking, hearing Jordan whistle when his light picked up the same missing section of wall, and the dripping pipes exposed by the broken ceiling.
“Fuck,” Jordan said. “How many people were in here? When it happened?”
“Only three we know of for sure.” Morley’s voice was grim, like his jaw clenched as he spoke. “That’s why we need access to that surveillance. Right now, they’ve only admitted that Silverton was here, plus the two people they believe were the thieves.”
“Human?” Jordan said. “The thieves?”
Nick practically felt the detective glance at his back.
“Far as I know,” Morley said, looking up through a second hole in the ceiling that showed all the way up to the roof. “Where’s that pool?” he commented. “Is any part of that over this end of the suite? Do we need to worry about a few hundred gallons of salt water dumping down on our heads?”
Jordan grunted. “They’d only say, serves you right, if it did. They didn’t want us up here at all. Not without the okay from the building inspectors. But technically we’re search and rescue personnel, so they couldn’t block us from checking out the scene.”
“Where is search and rescue?” Morley muttered. “Did they clear this area?”
“They were here,” Jordan confirmed with a nod. “Nothing’s cleared though, ‘far as I know. They came up looking for survivors.”
Nick pointed to their right and up.
“Pool’s on the other side, I think,” he said, stuffing his hand back in his coat pocket. “But I’d be surprised if they weren’t getting leaks, at least.”
“Maybe that’s how they got the fire out so fast,” Jordan joked.
Nick grunted. “Maybe.”
He could smell it now.
The odor was getting more and more pungent up ahead.
They were definitely getting closer to the blast site.
“Be careful,” he said, glancing backwards at the other two men. “There could be missing sections of floor up here… or things that look like floor but aren’t. You might want to let me get a little ahead of you. And don’t wander off the corridor without really looking at and testing where you’re about to step. I can feel a lot of air circulating in here… more than there should be. If anything looks off to you, don’t put your full weight on it.”
Jordan smiled, looking like he was about to crack a joke, but Morley met Nick’s gaze, nodding, eyes serious.
“You go on up ahead, Midnight. You’re less breakable than the two of us.” He glanced at Jordan, giving him a sideways frown. “…I’ll try to keep this jackass from falling through the damned floor to meet his maker.”
Nick snorted a half laugh.
He never took his eyes off the floor as he continued forward, though, and he was actively using more than one light spectrum of his vampire vision.
He glanced away every so often to check something in his periphery on the ceiling or walls, but mostly focused on where he placed his feet, looking and feeling for structural damage, or any indication the floor might be unstable up ahead.
Truthfully, it was a little easier to see without the glare of the light from the two headsets flickering around directly behind him. When he got a good ten or twelve yards ahead of the two human detectives, he felt a real shock of cold wind and froze.
He looked down.
The floor looked stable enough.
Even so, he kept his attention on the air currents. Moving forward more slowly, he placed his feet with care, positioning himself more to the right side of the corridor, away from the side where Silverton’s office had been.
“I think the whole fucking office is gone,” he called back, edging forward without taking his eyes off the carpeted floor.
It hit him after he’d walked a few more feet—the liquid fire-retardant on the floor was gone, too.
He glanced up then, and saw stars.
He knew they weren’t real stars—they shone at him as part of the virtual projection inside the artificial sky of the New York Protected Area dome.
He also knew he shouldn’t be able to see them, not from inside the building.
Grimacing at the view of burned, explosion-flattened, and water-saturated plants he could see through the opening in the roof, he realized he was looking up at what remained of the elegant gardens he’d been looking at in videos he watched on the newsfeeds.
“Sorry, Straven,” Nick muttered under his breath, referring to the famous designer and architect who’d made this building, and made it famous in the process.
Nick only knew the name before today because the same individual designed Phoenix Tower, where Lara St. Maarten, majority owner and C.E.O. of Archangel Industries, lived.
That was the same Lara St. Maarten who acted as Nick’s sometimes sponsor, and Malek’s sometimes roommate, sometimes leash-holder, and possible sometimes girlfriend, at least from what Nick could gather in watching the two of them interact.
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He’d never really wanted or needed that last part confirmed.
For the same reason, he’d never asked.
He was still easing forward, moving even slower now, gazing up through those holes in the ceiling, when—
The floor dropped out from under him.
Feeling himself fall, Nick leapt back in reflex, catching hold of a chunk of wall that more or less ended where the floor did.
Pulling himself back, using his feet to find firm floor to stand on, he gripped the wall tighter in his hands, using the leverage to pull himself back a few more feet before looking behind him.
“Okay,” he called out. “I found the end. Whatever you do, don’t walk past where I am.”
Jordan chuckled. “You fall off, Midnight?”
Nick leaned over the edge of floor, still gripping the same chunk of wall as he stared down the two or three missing floors below him.
“More or less,” he muttered, frowning.
He felt the humans approach behind him, and held up a hand.
“Don’t get much closer,” Nick warned. “I mean it. And stay on this side of the corridor. Don’t walk on the left side at all, if you can help it—”
But Morley had already upped the beam of his headset light, and was shining it into the empty space in front of Nick.
He whistled, longer and louder than Jordan had earlier.
“Damn,” he said, his voice full of wonder.
Nick followed the course of the light.
On the other side of the massive hole between floors, he saw the continuation of the suite on the other side, and a blown-out window beyond that.
Fixtures stuck out of the wall along the remaining segments, along with parts of desks, tables, more high-tech monitors, and what looked like an old-style painting, like the ones Malek did, only on actual canvas… not on the walls of a bombed-out church.
Just about everything Nick could see was either scorched black, or coated in white powder from extinguishing chemicals—and likely from plaster, glass, cement, plastic, paper, and other materials that had been pulverized from the walls and ceilings.
Nick stared out over the massive crater in the building.
He tried to look around the corner, to where Silverton’s office had been.
The Prescient: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 3) Page 4
