“Did they ID the bodies?” Nick said. “Any of them?”
“You mean the humans? We ID’d the humans, yeah. Some of the vamps… the ones who had barcodes and implants… we were also able to ID. The squints figure some of them were living off the grid. Maybe low-level White Death, but probably not. Probably just addicts and hustlers who sold their blood to people on the street. Whoever this group is, meaning the ones doing the extractions… they seem to have steered pretty far clear of anything to do with White Death, or anyone who worked for them.”
Nick grunted, pulling the warming mug out of the heater when it let out a low tone. Reconfiguring the semi-organic container, he took a few cautious sips off the newly-formed opening, then longer swallows when he realized the temperature was perfect.
Wynter had gotten it down to a science.
Shivering a little, he brushed off the thought.
Charlie kept talking.
“––The human woman was a junkie,” she added. “She’d been in and out of the system, but mostly little stuff. She’d been in rehab more recently for artificial opiate abuse, and… you’re going to love this… vampire venom addiction. They had her on one serious charge. Again, color me surprised… it was for smuggling illegal organic components. From the redacted records, it sounds like she was dealing in vampire blood, body parts, and artificially sustained live cells, which is pretty unusual, since they don’t use vampires for organic machines.”
Nick grimaced, but didn’t comment, taking another drink of blood.
“What about the male?” he said. “Anything more on him?”
“Felix Lee. He had a rap sheet––a long one. Lots of serious stuff on his, most of it current. His records stretched back at least fifteen years though, in all. Smuggling, including organics. Kidnapping, both hybrids and humans. Trafficking. He’d also done time for B&E, assault, possession of illegal weapons and organic machines. At least one murder charge, although he got off on a technicality––”
“‘At least’ one murder charge?” Nick frowned, taking another long drink off the mug as he leaned on the stone countertop, gazing sightlessly over the island in the middle of the kitchen. “What does that mean?”
“Like hers, his records were redacted. His were more heavily redacted, though… and parts were sealed. Something like thirty pages referred to in the directory were absent from his official file, despite this case receiving a high security clearance. Even Morley couldn’t look at those missing pages, and believe me, he tried. He brought the whole damned thing to a judge, trying to get a court order to see the unredacted version. No dice.”
Nick leaned on the counter, thinking.
“Who the hell has their criminal records sealed from the NYPD?” he said after a beat.
It was a rhetorical question, one he didn’t expect an answer to, but he found himself attempting to answer it, anyway.
“Military? I.S.F.?” He frowned, taking in another swallow of warm blood. “Could he have worked for one of those as a C.I.? Some kind of plant?”
“Possibly. Or he could have fought out in the frontiers.”
Nick thought about that, too.
Taking another few swallows of blood, he filed it away for later.
“So there were really only two of them?” he said. “That was their mastermind operation? A junkie human and some kind of spec-ops asshole? Handling all of those bodies?” Pausing, he grunted. “Did they have a crane?”
“One might have gotten away,” Charlie admitted. “We got DNA samples and prints on a third person. It’s possible they hid and Archangel missed them somehow.”
Nick frowned. “They managed to find the guys who drugged me at the club, but they missed a whole person at the warehouse operation?” He paused. “How?”
“No way of knowing. They didn’t tell us shit, Nick. They didn’t even call us directly after they pulled the extraction to get you out. We got an anonymous fucking tip. That’s about as much as they deigned to involve us in any of it.”
Nick scowled.
He wished he’d asked St. Maarten a lot more questions while she’d been here––and Malek, for that matter.
Hell, maybe he should have asked Tai.
At least Tai was honest with him.
“That’s not the only thing,” Charlie added. “The bodies… the human ones, that is… they were killed in a really weird way, Nick.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning… we have no record of a weapon that could have done to them what the autopsies found. Whatever it was, it basically liquified their brains. It liquified a lot of their internal organs. Hearts… kidneys. The woman had almost none of her organs left. The coroner told me she was basically a bag of bones with liquid sloshing around inside clumps of muscle.”
Nick grimaced, glancing at his mug of blood, then lowering it to the counter. “What did the entry wounds look like?”
“No entry wounds. Not a single one.”
“Some kind of sonic weapon?”
“Possibly. From what the coroner told us, that didn’t quite match with what they found, but it was the closest. She was really disturbed by it. According to her, whatever did that, it was completely off the books. She hadn’t even heard about experiments along those lines, and she’s pretty good about keeping up with current tech. She sees a lot what comes out of White Death and the black market, and I’ve never seen her that weirded out by a body before.”
Nick filed that away as another question for St. Maarten.
Knowing the Archangel exec, she wouldn’t tell him shit, of course––not unless he gave her a compelling reason to. He’d definitely noticed Lara St. Maarten wasn’t prone to share any more information than she absolutely had to.
She might tell Malek more.
She probably told Malek more.
Then again, Malek could probably read most of it off her, given what he was.
Malek definitely seemed to be in her inner circle, though, even if Nick couldn’t quite wrap his head around what their relationship entailed. The often homeless-looking and -acting seer seemed to spend a lot of time at Phoenix Tower.
When he wasn’t there, he lived like a vagrant in the Cauldron, painting pictures of the crazy shit he saw in his head.
Shaking off his annoyance around all of that, knowing he couldn’t share any of it with Charlie, he picked up his mug and finished off the last of the blood, leaning his palm on the stone-topped island in front of him.
“So what’s the plan with this?” he said into the silence, brusque. “With using me? You figure they’ll try to take me out again? Whoever’s behind this?”
Charlie didn’t answer.
Then again, she didn’t really have to.
Nick nodded, mostly to himself.
“How do you think they’ll come at me?” he said. “Through the fight? Try to make it look like an accident?”
Charlie exhaled. “Possibly. But doubtful. From what I saw, you’d be pretty hard to kill in a fight, Nick. I think, and Morley does too, they’re more likely to try for you afterwards. Or possibly before… but afterwards makes more sense, unless they’re trying to send a very particular kind of message.”
Pausing at Nick’s silence, she explained,
“The fight’s been promo’d quite a bit already, Nick. It would hit all the news channels if he killed you before you could fight, much less during the match. We’re assuming, whoever it is, they would want to avoid that kind of publicity.”
Nick frowned, silent.
After another pause, the human detective exhaled.
“But, yes… we think they’ll make a move on you. Whoever’s behind this ring has a pretty vested interest in taking you out, especially now. Whether it’s Farlucci or someone else, they’re going to be suspicious as fuck that you’d be willing to fight for Farlucci’s club after what happened to you. It makes sense they’d assume it was a set-up… that NYPD sent you back in. But we still think there’s a good chance they’ll try to take you o
ut. They likely have no idea how you got found in Queens, so they’re going to assume you know who they are. Also…”
Her voice grew more apologetic.
“…They know it’d be harder to build up much public outcry over a vampire death. Even a Midnight. Even a pro-fighter. They likely think you’re more dangerous to them alive than dead, given that you could testify in court if you were able to ID them. And right now, you’re still relatively unknown as an individual, Nick. The more well-known you get via the fight circuit, the more dangerous you are to them.”
Nick nodded.
Weirdly, her saying it out loud calmed him down, rather than angering him.
“Yeah,” he said. “Makes sense.” He paused. “So that’s the goal with the fights? You put me into play, wait for someone to make a move?”
Again, he almost saw her wince.
She didn’t get cagey on him, though.
He appreciated that, at least.
“More or less, yes,” she admitted, the guilt in her voice audible. “Morley made it pretty clear security would be there to keep an eye on you both before and after the fight. Security is most of what Morley, the I.S.F. and Farlucci have been arguing about for the past two weeks.”
Exhaling, she added,
“Farlucci wanted his own people to handle it. Morley, understandably, was not in favor of that. He also couldn’t appear to agree with it, even with undercover agents. Not without it looking suspicious. He kept his language vague with Farlucci… talked in terms of ‘credible threats’ against you, due to your involvement with a particular case, without going into detail. That way, if Farlucci knows what happened to you, we aren’t being too obvious about the infiltration. He’ll still have suspicions, of course. If he’s directly involved, they’ll be more than just suspicions––”
“Do you still think Farlucci’s behind this?” Nick said.
Charlie exhaled another sigh.
“Maybe,” she admitted. “Morley still thinks it’s a possibility.”
“What do you think?”
At that, Charlie hesitated.
Her voice grew thoughtful.
“Honestly? I’m a lot less sure than Morley and Jordie. I think if Farlucci is involved, it’s likely he’s working for someone else. He may not even know his precise role.”
“Any thoughts on who he could be working for?”
“There are a few human cartels that are on our short list,” she said.
“Any Farlucci has connections to?”
“That we can prove? No. But yes, there are connections. He’s a boxing promoter. He rubs shoulders with a lot of the underground. Especially here, in New York.”
“Which ones are high on the list?”
“You mean besides White Death?” she said, her voice faintly sarcastic. “There are a few, Nick––”
“Send me the list,” he said. “And the connections. I’ll look it over on the train ride back.”
She hesitated, then he heard her nod.
“Okay. I’ll send you everything we’ve been talking about for the past week or so.”
“Thanks.”
There was a silence.
He felt her thinking again.
When she spoke next, her voice was back to thoughtful.
“I will say one thing,” she said. “Farlucci’s a hell of an actor, if he is involved. He really seemed angry that Morley was giving him such a hard time about negotiating with the I.S.F. for part of your contract. He threatened lawsuits if they couldn’t produce a legal exception as to why you weren’t eligible… told them he had a verbal agreement with you, that they were impinging on your rights to legal employment. He threatened to involve the vampire rights’ groups, and said Morley was going to force him to make this into a civil rights case with the H.S.A. He seemed genuinely pissed a few times. He called Morley a racist to his face…”
Nick nodded to himself, thinking about that.
He knew what she was saying.
What she was implying, anyway.
“He doesn’t feel right to you,” he said. “Farlucci. You don’t like him for this, do you? You’re not buying that he was in on what happened to me?”
He heard her frown.
“No,” she said after a pause. “I guess I’m not.”
Nick nodded again.
He was about to speak, but she did before he could.
“––But Nick,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I think Farlucci’s harmless. Or clean. It definitely doesn’t mean I think you won’t be in danger if you do this. There’s a good chance he’s involved, knowingly or not. There’s a good chance if not him, someone in that circuit is behind it, even just as an employee of one of the cartels. Someone could be using his operation as cover. All of those vamps we found, in that cooler… as far as we can tell, they were all taken the same night you were, the night of the fights. That connection still hasn’t been explained.”
Nick nodded to that, too.
He suspected she was right.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m heading back to the city on the next train I can catch. Send me that stuff you mentioned. And the address of where I need to be… and what time.”
“Nick…”
She hesitated.
He waited.
While he waited, he picked the warming mug off the counter, hitting a pressure point on the side to open up the top. Sucking out the last few drops of blood as he walked to the sink, he stuck the top of the mug in the soap-scrubber and washed out the container.
He wondered if Charlie was going to tell him not to do this, too.
He wondered if she’d fall somewhere halfway, and just tell him he didn’t have to do it, that if he was having second thoughts, it was okay, that she’d understand.
Truthfully, he was growing a bit weary of the dance.
He waited, though, expecting it.
Instead, she sighed.
“Thanks,” she said. “Thanks for this. I’ll be there this time, Nick. You won’t be on your own. I swear to you, I’ll have back up there, and I’ll be there. I’ll be there. I promise.”
His shoulders relaxed.
He nodded.
“We’ll catch these fuckers,” he said only. “See you in a few hours, Charlie.”
Without waiting for her to answer, he cut the connection.
He stuck the mug on the drying rack and turned around.
As soon as he did, he froze.
Wynter stood there, in the doorway.
Like before, she’d snuck up on him without him hearing a damned thing. She leaned lightly on the door frame, wrapped in the same gauzy robe he remembered from the first night he’d shown up here, her feet, arms and legs bare.
Like that night, it immediately turned him on.
She was frowning, her arms folded in front of her body. Her black and color-streaked hair was mussed, her green and blue eyes glowing faintly from her face, from skin shades darker than his own when he saw it under the light.
She was so fucking beautiful he could barely stand it.
Some part of him didn’t even want to go there.
He didn’t want to acknowledge her like that in any way.
Not her mind. Not her presence. Not how he saw her physically. Not how she made him feel. Not how she’d been with him over the past few days. Not anything about her that reminded him that he wanted her, or how much… or how rarely that ever worked out for him.
Her race scared him.
The abilities she had, her race-based abilities, scared him.
How little he understood about her, and about the two of them, scared him.
Increasingly, he got the sense she knew more than she was saying, too.
There were things about herself she wasn’t telling him; things that confused him, that might have more to do with the connection between them than she was letting on.
He couldn’t explain that to himself, either.
It was a gut feeling, like everything with her.
He d
idn’t even know how much her race was exaggerating or amplifying the connection he felt between them… a connection that also increasingly scared him, and one that seemed to be strengthening.
Then there was the other thing.
Nick never got the women he wanted. Never.
He never got the people he wanted.
Not as a human.
Sure as hell not as a vampire.
Sex, sure. He got sex with the people he wanted.
But the ones he really wanted? They always wanted someone else. They always wanted something else. They sometimes wanted to fuck him, for a variety of different reasons, but in the end, they always wanted… not-him.
Not-Nick.
He had a friend who used to tell him that was his fault.
She called him a commitment-phobe, told him he deliberately chose people who were already spoken for, or who could never want him.
He didn’t know if that was true or not.
He just knew he didn’t seem to have any control over any of it.
Even with Wynter angry with him, standing there in front of him, understanding and anger burning in her stunning eyes as she clenched her jaw at him, he struggled with his own reactions. The truth was, he wanted more than anything to curl his arms around her, pull her back to her living room, back to her couch, where he could lie down with her and kiss her until she stopped being angry at him.
He wished there was something he could say, at least.
He wished there were some magical, reasonable-sounding words he could use that would make her not care he was doing this.
He had no idea what those would be, though.
Truthfully, if their positions were reversed, he would be a lot less rational.
He would probably be a full-blown asshole about it.
Before he could come close to finding some way to express any of that, she spoke.
“Are you going?” she said. “Now, Nick. Are you going now?”
Eyes of Ice Page 22