Fang & Metal: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 4)

by JC Andrijeski

  She could still smell blood.

  She should have asked that guard where the electrician got hurt. Maybe she should ask Morley to have the A.I. run a scan now.

  “Let me know when your backup gets there,” Morley said, gruff. “And let us know when you get any leads on that second guard.”

  Ana frowned.

  The second guard. The vampire.

  That really bothered her.

  “Could he be in on it, do you think?” she said.

  Morley grunted. “It’s not outside the realm of possibility. Would he be able to modify the sensor log? Make it seem like the door hadn’t been opened?”

  She frowned, scanning through the log on the virtual screen.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “It strikes me as unlikely. But maybe get the tech guys to check on that? They could contact the company.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Morley said. “Get back to that damned elevator. Now.”

  “James––” she began, exasperated.

  “Don’t ‘James’ me,” he cut in, still sounding annoyed. “I’m not coddling you, damn it. I’m allowed to worry about you. Whatever’s going on down there, I don’t like it. Those high-tech security companies house a hell of a lot more than just stolen jewelry and pre-war bonds. Just do me a favor and humor an old man. Pretend I’m your boss.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t be saying this to the other one. Nick-whatever-his-name-is––”

  “The hell I wouldn’t. He’s even more of an insubordinate asshole than you are. Now do what I say, Ana. Please.” His tone darkened. “Or I’ll write you up. I mean it.”

  She let out a disbelieving “Oohf!”

  He disconnected before she could answer him for real.

  Frowning, yet still fighting amusement, she stood there a beat longer, thinking.

  She wasn’t mad at Morley, or trying to defy him, or make his job harder. She wasn’t even trying to prove anything to him, not anymore.

  Something else was making it hard for her walk away.

  Glancing up and down the corridor, she bit her lip. Her fangs had extended slightly from the back and forth with James, heightening her vampire senses.

  She sniffed, trying to ID that faint whiff of blood.

  It was male.

  It didn’t smell quite human to her, now that she was down here.

  Hybrid? Vampire?

  Of course, it could still be the electrician the guard mentioned, but it smelled too fresh for that. It didn’t smell like dried, cleaned-up blood from an accident that took place hours ago. It smelled cold to her, dead; definitely not enticing in any way, but not as old as what that security guard, Horace, described.

  She also smelled another, fainter whiff of blood. Human.

  Maybe that was the electrician.

  The fresher, less-human scent was stronger here, near the vault hatch.

  It was stronger than when she first caught the scent.

  Walking closer, she sniffed again, her gun still aimed at the massive security door.

  It was definitely stronger here. So why couldn’t she see anything? Her vampire eyes should have been able to pick up traces of organic matter.

  Frowning, she looked back down the corridor.

  The entire hallway between the door and the elevator appeared to be completely empty. The walls and floor smelled of a bleach-like cleaner, probably the same cleaner they used to get rid of the blood. There was nothing else down here––no doors, no furniture, no windows, no visible panels, no fixtures. The walls were unmarked.

  Still frowning, she glanced up.

  She didn’t really think about why she looked up.

  The instant her eyes hit the ceiling…

  She froze.

  As a vampire, she didn’t need to breathe.

  Even so, there were times where it felt like she was holding her breath. Staring up, she held absolutely still, fighting to wrap her mind around what her eyes told her.

  The whole ceiling was covered with them.

  It was covered with them.

  How had the motion sensors not warned her?

  But she couldn’t think about that.

  For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt like prey.

  She stared up at them, statue-still.

  Like her, the creatures didn’t move.

  Their long, inhuman limbs and digits held a body. Most of its blood was gone, or she would have smelled it a lot more.

  She also would have definitely ID’d it as a vampire.

  They gripped him tightly, possessively, like a spider gripping a fly wrapped in silk. She saw no eyes on the body-like shapes, or on their elongated heads. Despite that, despite the stillness of the jointed, pale green limbs, Ana felt the creature staring at her. Perhaps the metallic skin was all eyes, or just one enormous eye, one unbroken panel of sensory flesh.

  It rippled as she watched, like watery skin.

  The long fingers tightened around the vampire even more, pulling it close, like a lover.

  As Ana stared, she found herself understanding how she hadn’t seen them. They were cold, invisible to her infrared vision, invisible to every sensor in her headset. When they weren’t moving, they were no more noticeable to her than the walls themselves.

  Even their color blended into the ceiling.

  If they hadn’t held the vampire, she might not have seen them at all.

  Ana’s eyes shifted to the body.

  Only pieces of him were still visible; they held his remains, cradling him in multiple limbs, possibly multiple limbs on multiple beings. They covered him with what looked like eyeless and earless heads, those long, jointed arms, bony shoulders, narrow legs, insect-like clawed feet.

  As for the vampire himself, she could only really see his face and part of one arm.

  He appeared to be naked, a male.

  Asian in ethnicity.

  She could see now, what her nose already told her.

  From the way his face and body looked, he had been drained of blood.

  It was a look she’d seen before, but rarely––very rarely––on a vampire. The male vamp stared back at her, his face hollow and slack, his eyes pleading with her, holding a desperate, knowing despair mixed with involuntary hope.

  Looking up at him, Ana realized he was alive.

  He was alive, but they had taken so much of him, he couldn’t move, not even to mouth words.

  She couldn’t tear her eyes off his sunken face, his too-wide, crystal-colored eyes, drained even of their crimson. Her mind told her to remain frozen, to not make a single move.

  She was still staring up, when those metal fingers tightened more.

  One of them split; both sides penetrated the vampire’s chest.

  Ana stared up in horror, watching the machine remove the vampire’s heart.

  It held it over the floor.

  The organ didn’t drip blood; there was nothing left to drip.

  It didn’t beat; there was nothing left to pump.

  The metal lizard gripped the dead organ, silent… and Ana watched the vampire die, his eyes go muddy and gray, the last of his flesh and bone collapse inward.

  She was still staring up…

  …when the metal lizard holding the heart opened its eyes.

  It stared down at her.

  Ana stared back.

  “James,” she whispered. “James––”

  It was all she got out.

  Chapter 3

  Vampires Don’t Dream

  Vampires don’t sleep.

  It was an oft-repeated truism.

  It also happened to not be totally true.

  Well… not consistently true.

  Vampires had several different ways they could more or less check out––put themselves into states somewhat less than fully conscious.

  Some of those ways were more “on purpose” than others.

  Some verged on a form of meditation.

  Others felt more like avo
idance––turning off one’s conscious mind when one hit their mental or emotional limit, or simply needed a break that physical distance couldn’t fix. Even those were milder versions of semi-consciousness, however.

  Vampires also had a way of turning off entirely––flipping a master off-switch.

  That one, once triggered, put the vamp into a state that might be described better as a coma. That one, the vampire usually couldn’t control.

  The master off-switch, or nuclear option, generally only happened after a vampire had been badly injured, usually to the point of death. Sometimes a psychological event could trigger it as well, if that event were intense enough––like, say, if the vampire met with some horrible shock, or incurred some debilitating trauma.

  Some psychological events could feel like death.

  Right now, Nick wasn’t in that state, though.

  He wasn’t in any of those states.

  He was in some strange in-between––not asleep, not awake, not meditating, not in a coma, but also not fully “here,” either.

  He’d been watching television.

  He got home from his fight, laid on his couch with a heated blood-bag. He’d tried to watch a movie, in part to distract himself from thinking about his girlfriend. He hadn’t wanted to just sit there all night and stew about his girlfriend, Wynter James, who’d been forced to return to the Northeastern Protected Area the previous day.

  He missed her.

  He already missed her.

  He hadn’t wanted her to leave.

  It actually, physically pained him when she left.

  While he’d been trying not to think about that, or about her, or about how many hours he might have to wait before he saw her again, some part of him just…

  …floated away.

  It just checked out.

  Something about the state felt familiar. That familiarity disconcerted him. Even so, he couldn’t quite bring himself to snap himself out.

  He couldn’t quite bring himself to want to.

  His mind felt drugged. It felt drugged in that way it did when he was with Wynter. He wanted to blame Wynter’s absence on that, too. He wanted to blame Wynter herself.

  He wanted to, but guilt overpowered him, anyway.

  It wasn’t Wynter’s gorgeous, blue-green eyes he saw behind his.

  It was someone else’s.

  Pale green irises shone there. They stared at him, alien, but heartbreakingly familiar, that sharp green with vibrant, violet rings like a mark on his heart. He saw a flash of smile, and pain writhed through him, making his chest hurt where he lay on the couch, a blood-bag resting on his chest.

  He could no longer see or hear the old movie he’d been watching.

  He was hard.

  He was really fucking hard.

  He tried to blame the blood.

  He wanted to blame Wynter for that, too, but…

  Wynter wasn’t there.

  The pain worsened, even as he saw more of that face, a face he knew, even as he felt the part of him that wanted to forget, that begged to forget. He wanted it gone; he wanted someone, anyone… anything… to come down, to dig into his skull, to take that face away, take the feelings it evoked away, take those washed-out half-glimpses away. He could feel that want. It was so intense, it was like a hunger, and he remembered that, too. He remembered lying alone, starving to death… for days, weeks, months.

  Years.

  Decades.

  How long had it been? How long had it gone on?

  Nick didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.

  Then, like now, he would have done anything to make it stop. He would do anything, promise anything, if only it would stop.

  But he had done something, hadn’t he? Something bad.

  He’d sent himself to hell.

  He told himself it wasn’t real. He told himself it was a dream, a hallucination, a false memory, a vampire short circuit of some kind. He told himself he was overworked, overstressed, or maybe, hell, he was still adjusting to being in a relationship at all.

  He avoided. He minimized.

  He lied.

  To Wynter, he lied. He hadn’t meant to, but he’d spent so many years minimizing, avoiding, pretending none of it was real. He lied so effortlessly now, even just to himself, even when he had no reason to feel guilt about the truth.

  He’d rewritten all those histories, years ago.

  Now he fought endlessly to believe that rewriting.

  Funnily enough, she’d known. She called him a liar.

  She’d known before Nick himself knew, and now he just resented her for it.

  He resented her for reminding him, for reminding him of the lie.

  He just wanted to forget.

  More than anything, he wanted to forget.

  “Nick?” The voice was sharp. It was too fucking loud.

  It was way too fucking loud for his vampire ears.

  It also brought him completely back into the room.

  It brought him back shockingly fast, leaving him lying on the couch, muscles tense, staring up at the ceiling. His whole body remained taut as a bowstring.

  Bowstring.

  Archaic fucking weapon… who used such an archaic fucking weapon anymore?

  He was hard. His fangs were extended.

  Remembering what he’d been “dreaming” about––if you could call it that––Nick grimaced, feeling a dense shame.

  He focused on the voice.

  He focused on the voice because it was the only goddamned thing to distract him.

  “Jordan.”

  Wincing, he sat up, rubbing his eyes. He tossed the now-cold blood bag from his chest to the coffee table, squinting at the clock inside his headset. He noted the channel the human detective used to call him.

  “What is it?” Nick said. “Did someone die?”

  He meant it halfway as a joke, but Jordan didn’t laugh.

  There was a silence.

  Then the human detective exhaled.

  “Is that the first thing you ask people when they call, Midnight?”

  Nick grunted, blinking into the overhead light.

  “When I work in homicide, and you’re calling from the NYPD channel at two in the morning on my day off… yeah.” Still trying to snap himself out of his weird, disconcertingly sexual hallucination, or dream, or whatever the hell it was, Nick sat the rest of the way up, combing his fingers through his black hair.

  “Where’s Nuñez?” he said, flexing his jaw. “I thought she was on tonight. Didn’t Morley say he wanted to give the rook a few test runs in the field without me breathing down her neck?”

  Jordan didn’t answer at first.

  That was unlike him.

  It was unlike him to be so quiet in general, but especially when it came to work. Nick found his attention now one hundred percent focused on his friend.

  “Wait,” he said. “What is it? What the fuck happened?”

  There was another silence.

  That one, Nick had to bite his tongue not to break. Since his fangs were still extended, he winced when the sharper teeth nicked his tongue.

  “It’s Nuñez,” Jordan said. “We need you to come in, Midnight.”

  “The new fanger not quite cuttin’ it?” Nick said, still trying to make it a joke. “So I guess Morley might have to stop threatening to replace me with her––”

  “She’s dead, Nick.”

  Nick tensed. “What?”

  “We need you to come down here, Midnight,” Jordan said. “Morley really wants you to come. Now. Can you come?”

  Nick frowned, staring sightlessly at the old movie still playing on his wall monitor. It was one he’d seen before, an old detective movie he’d first watched as a human on his crappy television in an even crappier apartment in South San Francisco. He couldn’t remember watching more than the credits this time, but it already looked to be more than halfway over.

  Jesus. How long had he been lying there?

  How long had he been lying
there, paralyzed, while he got ghost blowjobs from people who’d probably been dead for over a hundred years?

  Nick winced, pushing the image from his mind.

  Then he wanted to ask Jordan questions.

  He wanted to know who or what would or could have killed a vampire cop, even a rook vampire cop. In the end, he didn’t ask. Something in Jordan’s tone, in his uncharacteristic quiet, made Nick not want to go there, not on an open line.

  Instead he did the obvious thing, the thing Jordan clearly wanted him to do.

  “On my way,” he said.

  Chapter 4

  A Weird Scene

  Finding the building was easy, at least.

  The whole street, in both directions, was blocked off by law enforcement.

  Drones patrolled the skies overhead so thickly, Nick figured there had to be as much media up there as NYPD and other law enforcement.

  Whatever this was, it couldn’t be all about one dead vampire cop.

  Humans didn’t like vampires this much.

  Nick had to show his badge, along with his race-cat tattoo and barcode, four times just to get past the first line of uniforms protecting the scene. He frowned as he glanced around, noting just how many different uniforms there were, swarming over the front of the building; he ID’d at least six different branches of global and protected area law enforcement and investigators.

  Homeland Defense and Regional Anti-Terrorism Squad agents, which belonged to what remained of the United States, stood alongside NYPD officers, and pretty much every racial relations body in existence, most prominently the Inter-Species Friendship Council, or I.S.F. (“I.S. Fucked” to vampires and other half-breeds), and the Human Racial Authority, or H.R.A. Most of the H.R.A. Nick saw wore uniforms for Intereb, the Interracial Enforcement Bureau, which most non-humans referred to as “The Leash.”

  That couldn’t be good.

  The H.R.A. had global authority, in addition to local branches operating out of New York. The Leash was its enforcement arm, and made the American I.S.F. seem like nothing but puppies and kittens and rainbows.

  Truthfully, Nick still got nervous as hell around The Leash.

  Even when he hadn’t done anything wrong, he felt like he was about to get his heart ripped out of his chest by a mechanical alligator.