Eyes of Ice

by J. C. Andrijeski

  He and the guard sprinted for the eaves of the building.

  The cop couldn’t help noticing the other man moved a hell of a lot faster going that direction. They got under the protection of the building’s eaves and by then the cop heard sirens, along with the buzz of drones as they got called over by the blast.

  Standing in an alcove of reinforced organic beams and transparent panes, he gaped up, seeing the reflection of the blast in the adjacent tower, even from where he stood. Despite being in relative shelter, he still gripped his uniform hat in his hand as he stared up, flinching at smaller, subsequent explosions that followed the first.

  The ground trembled under him at those, too.

  The building trembled even more, behind his back and where his hands gripped the smooth beam between windows.

  He stared up, lost in disbelief as the whole floor seemed to be engulfed in flames.

  That sideways column of fire continued to pour out of the opening the explosion created in the wall, along with a massive cloud of black smoke.

  He could hear chatter exploding in his headset, but for a long-feeling few seconds, he couldn’t make himself focus on it.

  He could only stare at that giant rosette of flames, watching them punch a hole in the night sky, illuminating everything in their path.

  It felt like being back in the war.

  It felt like someone had just declared war.

  1 / It’s Starting, Isn’t it?

  “CAN I TALK TO YOU?”

  Nick looked up.

  He’d paused where he’d been drying himself off with a towel, startled more because he didn’t immediately recognize the voice of whoever spoke. Generally speaking, no one got in here but Farlucci’s people, his fighters, and Farlucci himself.

  When Nick saw who it was, he scowled.

  He also found himself understanding how they got past security.

  Tossing the towel down on the bench, he reached for his bag, yanking it closer to him from the bench.

  “Do I have any fucking choice?” he muttered, yanking his pile of street clothes out of the bag and tossing them down on the bench. Scowling at the inhumanly tall, gaunt form of the male seer, Nick saw him staring at his naked body and scowled deeper.

  “Do you mind?” he said, shoving first one, then another foot into pantlegs and pulling up the light combat pants, the same thing he often wore on the job.

  “You just curious about vampire cock? Or did you come down here for some other reason?” Nick grumbled, sitting down on the bench and glaring up at the seer.

  “Does that hurt?” Malek said.

  Nick glanced down at himself. Seeing the darkening bruise on his upper chest, he shrugged, looking back up.

  “It’s not a kiss,” he observed, pulling on his first sock. “But vampires heal fast. It’ll be fine by tomorrow.” Pulling on his second sock, and reaching for his boots, he lifted an eyebrow, giving the male seer a slightly harder look. “What do you want, Malek? I’m assuming this isn’t a social call?”

  “It’s not.”

  Nick shoved his foot into the first boot, hitting a pressure panel on the side and watching the boot tighten around his foot, ankle and lower calf. Stomping down on it briefly to make sure the fit was right, he reached for his second boot and repeated the exercise.

  When the seer still hadn’t spoken, Nick felt his patience begin to ebb.

  “I’m going home after this,” he said. “I’m going to sit on the couch, eat a few blood bags… watch a bunch of bad television.” He glanced up at Malek, his stare flat. “Whatever you want, you better spit it out, friend. Because it’s going to take a lot more than you leering at my pearly white vampire skin and asking about my bruises to keep me from the exciting evening I have planned when I get out of here––”

  “I can’t just tell you,” the seer blurted. “I need to show you.”

  Nick frowned, stomping down the heel on his second boot.

  Glancing up at the seer, he tried to read something off his face.

  As usual, it was an exercise in futility.

  He could deduce it must be somewhat urgent, or the seer wouldn’t have hunted him down here, at Nick’s “second” job, which he’d been contracted out for by the government agency that oversaw vampires. His first job, his real job, was as a “Midnight,” or vampire who worked for the homicide division of the NYPD.

  Ironically, this fighting gig was something he got roped into as part of a case.

  The contract holder, David Farlucci, strangely hadn’t been all that interested in how the contract came about. The contract was signed.

  Farlucci expected Nick to honor it.

  Nick didn’t mind.

  These days, he could use the distraction.

  “What is it you have to show me?” he said, scowling a little as he glanced up at the seer again. “Are you painting again, Malek?”

  “Yes.” The seer nodded, emphatic. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”

  Nick’s scowl deepened.

  He’d been being sarcastic.

  Still, he should have realized that’s what this was about.

  Malek was a damned prescient. It was an exceedingly rare gift in a species that was incredibly rare even apart from that––these days, at least. Seers used to share the world alongside humans and vampires. The three races fought a war that lasted almost a hundred years. They managed to fuck up a good portion of the planet in the process.

  Then the seers left.

  They just… left.

  Like everyone else, Nick thought they’d all left… as in every single one… and about a hundred years ago.

  Then he met Malek.

  Well, really, he met Malek’s baby sister, Tai.

  Then he met Malek.

  Nick still hadn’t made up his mind what he felt about either meeting, especially now.

  “Where is this new masterpiece,” he grunted, pulling a T-shirt down over his head. Yanking it down over his damp back, he adjusted the fabric with a shake of his shoulders and reached for his coat. “…Can I look at it while I pick out what I’m going to watch on the network when I get home?”

  Malek didn’t smile.

  He didn’t even blink.

  He just turned around, and aimed his feet for the door to the shower and changing area, clearly expecting Nick to follow.

  After an annoyed exhale of his own, one that was entirely unnecessary, since Nick didn’t have to breathe, Nick found himself following him.

  AT THE END OF HIS TRAIN RIDE from Queens, a good ten or twelve-block walk, and a delay where Nick had to walk through the lock system to enter the Devil’s Cauldron, around fifty minutes had passed, which already had Nick in a foul mood.

  He was never all that thrilled to visit the Devil’s Cauldron.

  He found it depressing, especially now.

  The Cauldron was a locked-down, segregated “security” zone inside Manhattan that mostly consisted of burnt-out buildings that never got fixed when the war ended, along with a lot of refugees, homeless people, junkies and those who rushed the gates to get into New York Protected Area when the atmosphere grew too toxic to live outside the dome.

  Malek lived here.

  Part of the time, at least.

  His sister used to live here, too, but last Nick knew, Tai had gone back to Kellerman Prep School in the Northeaster Protected area, where he’d gotten her installed as a full-time student.

  But he couldn’t think about that.

  He couldn’t think about anything to do with Kellerman Prep, or the Northeastern Protected Area, or Tai… or anything to do with that place.

  “What am I looking at?” he grunted, shoving his hands in his coat pockets.

  The seer had brought him back to the same bombed-out church that seemed to be one of his favorite canvases, for reasons Nick didn’t even want to understand.

  The old wall that used to separate the church from Amsterdam Avenue still wore a giant mural of Malek’s sister, Tai.

  This t
ime, however, Malek brought him into the church itself.

  Using a light from his headset, the seer illuminated a wall inside what looked like the original structure of the church itself, given that Nick could see kindling scattered around the stone floor, pieces of wood that looked like it might have been pews once.

  “Malek?” he prompted, when the seer didn’t speak. “What the fuck am I looking at?”

  The male seer was staring at him when Nick turned.

  Something about that stare annoyed Nick before the seer even spoke.

  “You should go see her,” Malek said.

  Nick felt every muscle in his body clench, seemingly in the same instant.

  He glared at the tall seer.

  “Tai doesn’t want to see me,” he said, deliberately misunderstanding him, even as he laced a hard warning into his words.

  “Tai does want to see you,” Malek said, his voice immovable. “She’s sad. She thinks she scared you. But she misses you, Nick.” He paused, then said the thing that Nick had been warning him not to say. “…I didn’t mean Tai, though. I meant your mate. Ms. James.”

  Nick scowled at him openly.

  “Shut up about her.”

  Malek blinked, unmoved by Nick’s anger.

  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? Just as emotional, anyway? The seer couldn’t read him, not technically, but he seemed to see something in Nick’s face, regardless.

  “Prescients are different,” he said, shrugging.

  “Just shut up about her,” Nick growled.

  “Why?” Malek said. “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.

  When the seer flinched, Nick subdued his voice, but not by much. The open threat still lived in his words when he added, colder,

  “Shut up about Wynter, Malek. 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 clear enough?”

  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 really seeing it. 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, but lower than before. “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 an almost 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 explained, motioning over the expanse of the painting, which looked about six feet across, and another four feet in height, at least.

  “This is the most recent,” the seer added, looking over his shoulder at Nick. “I keep dreaming this,” he explained. “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. He 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 the face Malek pointed to.

  It was a vampire.

  There was absolutely no doubt in Nick’s mind it was a vampire.

  The pale skin, the crystal-like irises, the hint of fangs in a smirking smile stared out of the painting, disturbingly lifelike… disturbingly filled with a kind of presence that also struck Nick as exceedingly vampire-like.

  “Who is it?” he said. “Did he do this?” Nick took his hand out of his coat pocket, gesturing vaguely 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 growing patient. “I’ve told you how this works. I’ve told you I just get the pictures. I don’t get explanations. I don’t get a narrative. I get pictures, Detective. Wherever they come from, they don’t come with captions.”

  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, when he remembered what the seer had just said and bit his tongue briefly in annoyance, stopping only when he felt his fangs, which were sharper than his ordinary teeth, lightly pierce the 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 the rest of the painting at the other glimpses of faces and profiles among the brushstrokes and careful lines.

  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.

  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 his movements.

  “Not yet,” Malek said. “I haven’t told Lara yet.”

  Nick glanced at him in surprise. “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 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 said, grunting again. “Her private-sec weirdos work directly with I.S.F. and H.R.A. all the time. That includes terrorism stuff… 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.

  “Midnight,” he said.

  He spoke out loud so Malek would hear him and know he was on the line. The seer stepped closer, as if to listen in, and Nick gave him a what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you look, stepping back. Malek looked about to speak, but Nick shushed him, holding up a hand as he listened to the voice on the other side of the line.

  “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.” Damon Jordan, Nick’s friend and one of the human homicide detectives he technically worked under, being a Midnight, let out a tired-sounding sigh. “They think it was a hit. According to surveillance, the bomb might even have been accidental.”

  “Accidental?” Nick frowned. “Who was the target?”

  “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, one that managed to get everything onto the network before the building blew. His desk was a full organic or something… so it got imaging and audio from the whole job.”

  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 “Sure. I bet I know exactly what it is you pulled.”

  Sharpening his voice, he 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 you every night. It’s not good for you, Naoko. We’re worried. Truly. You need us to 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 now and then.”

  “Tell him 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 Brenner. Or maybe Madam Butterfly.”