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

by JC Andrijeski

  Reluctantly, Nick looked back up at the ceiling.

  Vampire Detective Ana Nuñez stared back at him.

  Her open eyes met his, unblinking, colored faintly blue with enhanced contact lenses. Black hair hung down on either side of her taut, heart-shaped face. One hand reached towards them, her fingers asking a question of the air.

  Everything about her looked strangely frozen in time, frozen in place.

  She didn’t look afraid. She didn’t look angry.

  She just looked… vacant. Hollowed out.

  Most of her body was embedded in the bronze ceiling. It was like the dead metal melted, sucked her in, then cooled instantly around her limbs and torso, suspending her a good fifteen feet above the vault floor.

  Given how little of her body showed, there was no way to pinpoint a precise cause of death. Her chest was covered in smooth, unmarked metal, so Nick had to assume something must have removed her heart… that, or severed her head from her torso in a way that wasn’t obvious from the ground.

  The invisible parts of her, however, were less disturbing than how weirdly intact she looked, down to her outstretched hand––which, for some reason, never went limp.

  It was unnerving as hell.

  “That other body, in the bag… it must have been Ming,” Jordan muttered.

  Nick frowned, glancing at Morley.

  Remembering the heaviness of the body bag, the tattoos on the I.S.F. vampire, he wondered. Maybe it was Ming… only Ming encased in metal. Nick had thought the blood smelled female at the time, but he could have been mistaken. Maybe they found him like Nuñez and cut him out of the floor or ceiling.

  It would explain what he saw, in part at least.

  Refocusing back on the vault door, he glanced at Morley.

  The old man still hadn’t taken his eyes off the ceiling, off Nuñez’s face.

  “Do we know what’s missing from the vault?” Nick muttered, looking at Jordan when the old man didn’t glance his way. “This was a robbery. It had to be, right?”

  Jordan tore his eyes off the suspended vampire.

  He met Nick’s gaze, a faint grimace coloring his expression.

  “They don’t know,” he said. “At least, not that they’d tell me.”

  Nick glanced at Morley again.

  Something in the old man’s expression genuinely worried Nick. It bothered him enough, he had to stop himself from grabbing Morley’s shoulder, maybe slinging an arm around him in a half-hug. Morley’s complexion looked gray, his eyes glazed and distant, even as his dark irises glimmered with a spark of anger mixed with resignation… even despair.

  Looking at him, Nick wondered if the old man was going to pass out.

  Or maybe start yelling.

  Or, even more likely, Nick realized… burst into tears.

  The last one felt the most true.

  It also disturbed Nick the most.

  Morley was usually the logical one, the stoic one, the guy who never got rattled or lost his cop-brain, or forgot why they were there. The senior detective’s demeanor came across as borderline Zen a lot of the time. Zen mixed with dry humor, insight, even the occasional flash of warmth… and an unflagging “by the book”-ness that Nick found comforting, if only because it always made Morley seem like a white hat, in the old-school, honest-cop sense.

  Clearly, he wasn’t taking Nuñez’s death well.

  Nick wondered why. She’d only come to the precinct about two weeks ago.

  The old man cleared his throat.

  “They don’t know if anything’s been stolen?” he said, gruff. “What in the seven hells does that mean?”

  Jordan glanced at Nick.

  From his expression, Nick strongly got the impression Jordan was wondering a lot of the same things about Morley that Nick was.

  Jordan’s eyes held a faint worry when he returned the senior detective’s gaze.

  “If anything was taken, no one’s admitting to it, boss. That includes building security.”

  Nick frowned, following Jordan’s eyes to the open vault door.

  “And that was closed when they got here? You said everything was locked down still, right? That no one actually got inside?”

  Jordan shrugged, aiming his flat stare at Nick. “Unless they’re lying.”

  Nick frowned.

  So did Morley.

  “You think Praetorian is lying?” Nick said finally. “The company? Or––”

  Jordan was already shaking his head.

  “Not necessarily, no,” the younger detective said, waving him off. “Anyway, I was more thinking about the customers when I said that. The rich guys who pay for this shit. In vaults like this, even the company doesn’t know what’s inside a lot of the time. This isn’t a bank.”

  Nick frowned, turning over his words.

  He knew Jordan was right.

  “We got a list of customers yet?” he said.

  Jordan hesitated, then nodded, hitting through a few keys on his headset projection and sending Nick the files. Nick picked up the packet and opened it as Jordan kept talking.

  “About what you’d expect. Mostly tech developers and corporate bigwigs. I gave the list to Gertrude to process…” Jordan added, referring to the NYPD’s artificial intelligence. “But I recognized a few publicly held R&D firms and defense contractors, not to mention a number of foreign government heads, rich dignitaries. The Governor.”

  His lips quirked as he looked at Nick.

  “I told Gertrude to go through the list of holdings, too, but I’d be willing to bet those lists are at least half garbage. This place is likely chock full of illegal and quasi-legal contraband and tech. Experimental bio-weapons. Preserved illegal specimens. Stuff stolen during the wars. Pieces of art and other valuables that were never reported to the authorities when the war ended. Even dead bodies.”

  Jordan shrugged at their expressions.

  “I got a buddy who works for a similar outfit,” he explained. “Praetorian’s main competitor.”

  Nick nodded to that, too.

  He was tempted to call his one and only real contact in the tech and defense industry, Lara St. Maarten, and ask her about what Jordan just said. St. Maarten would know all about Praetorian, and its owner, Risa Price. As majority shareholder and CEO of Archangel, a major defense contractor and experimental tech company, she was probably one of Price’s best customers.

  Maybe that’s why Malek called him.

  Maybe St. Maarten was missing something from the vault.

  Nick’s eyes flickered back up to the ceiling. He paused on Ana’s face, then scanned over the remainder of the bronze panels, until something caught his eye and he stopped, only a few yards from the edge of the vault door.

  He zeroed in on the second body embedded there.

  Without saying a word to Morley or Jordan, he glided over to it, until he stood directly under it. He barely noticed when the two humans joined him, staring up at that second face.

  More of this one had been swallowed by the ceiling.

  Like Ana, however, he was clearly vampire.

  His unadorned, cracked-crystal eyes stared out of the bronze metal, his black hair hanging down in metal-tipped clumps, like he’d tried to break free at one point and failed.

  It had to be Ming, the private-sec specialist.

  Like Ana Nuñez, Ming stared down, his face chalk-white, a color even a vampire’s skin could only attain when their bodies, their veins, even their flesh, heart, and brain, were completely drained of blood.

  Only his face and hair were visible, and part of one boot, which is why Nick hadn’t noticed him until now. That half-moon of his face got lost in the splatters of blood and guts all over the ceiling and walls. Surprise remained etched in the faint details of his expression––surprise, and a kind of childlike disbelief.

  It reminded Nick of those dinosaurs in the tarpits of Los Angeles.

  “What the fuck was in that body bag?” Nick muttered, to no one really. “Upstairs. Who th
e fuck were they carrying?”

  Morley and Jordan both looked at him, frowning.

  Neither one of them answered.

  Chapter 6

  The Wall

  In some ways, it was the weirdest damned crime scene Nick had ever seen.

  Obviously, objective-speaking, the people embedded in the ceiling outside was weirder. But the inside of the vault was strange in a different way.

  For one thing, it was empty.

  Not just of objects… of people.

  No other law enforcement awaited them inside; it was just him, Jordan, and Morley. They had no equipment apart from their headsets and gloves, no forensics team, no NYPD drones documenting or scanning for trace evidence. No building security.

  Not so much as a single Praetorian employee.

  Nick thought at least they might have sent someone to watch them, to make sure they didn’t mess with any of the lock-boxes––or hell, a few engineers, given the mystery of how the structure had been breached.

  There was no one. No Praetorian people at all.

  They were completely alone.

  After a few minutes of wandering the silent, warehouse-sized vault with its humming, living walls, Nick wondered they were even doing in there––meaning inside the vault itself. Clearly, the crime scene was outside. According to the cops, the I.S.F., Praetorian, and whoever else had been down here, no one had even breached the vault.

  Even if they were all wrong––or, more likely, lying––Nick had his doubts they’d find anything the Praetorian guys missed.

  Still, there was something weird about all this.

  Something Nick couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  Despite the mess outside, Nick increasingly got the feeling they were being shown a scrubbed-down version. Like, despite the weirdness of the bodies and the blood, they were still, somehow, seeing it only after most of the truly damning elements had been edited out.

  Nick wondered if they would’ve been called down here at all, if Nuñez hadn’t been one of those dead bodies.

  It still begged the question of who was in charge, if not them.

  Nick wondered if Morley knew.

  Maybe that was what was bothering the old man.

  Thinking about that as he stared around at the silent walls of the vault, Nick focused on a row of black metal lock-boxes directly in front of him. As he did, the vault’s internal air system kicked on, bringing him a faint whiff of…

  Blood?

  He smelled blood. Human blood, not vampire.

  Definitely inside, meaning inside the vault.

  But that wasn’t possible. Not in here.

  Tilting his head, he walked back towards the vault door, trying to decide if he was wrong, if the air current had changed, bringing him the scent from outside.

  But the scent faded… as soon as he left the middle of the vault.

  Slowly, still smelling the air, he walked back to where he’d started.

  He wasn’t hallucinating; it was still there.

  Whatever it was, it was so faint, even his vampire senses had trouble identifying it with any certainty, but it definitely smelled a lot more like food than anything he’d smelled outside the vault door. That meant human blood, most likely. Possibly hybrid.

  Nick guessed human.

  Shifting directions, he began to follow it.

  He walked slowly down the length of the vault’s longest wall, pausing at the head of each aisle of lock-boxes, trying to discern where the odor was strongest.

  The vault was much bigger than it looked from the outside.

  It was definitely bigger than Nick expected, reminding him more of an airplane hangar than any kind of ordinary bank vault. Inside that cavernous space, the lockboxes and storage cabinets were laid out in an odd combination of arcs, circles and straight lines, closer to a maze or labyrinth than a normal warehouse.

  Inside those circles, row upon row of black metal boxes hung suspended on transparent walls, holes cut out for the locked doors on each end. No numbers adorned any of the boxes Nick saw, no features or markings made one stand out from the next. Each box looked roughly five feet by four feet by two feet wide. They hung in rows with the openings facing inward, towards narrow aisles between thick, not-glass walls.

  When Nick looked up, the boxes extended all the way to the ceiling, the equivalent of at least three, possibly four floors above.

  He’d seen smaller boxes too, on the opposite wall from where they first walked in.

  He’d seen larger boxes as well, including a row roughly ten by nine feet deep and tall, and over six feet wide. He’d noted doors of various sizes, also featureless and unnumbered, some large enough for two full-grown men to walk through, one standing on the other’s shoulders, without either having to duck down.

  When Nick asked Gertrude, the NYPD A.I., she told him those were privately-leased vaults, and only accessible to those with the correct DNA, the correct bio-scanning surfaces (irises, retinas, faces, handprints), and the correct sequence of passwords.

  Thinking about that now, he wondered if they had access to the Praetorian A.I.

  The damned thing hadn’t said a word since they got in here; usually systems were more chatty and helpful, even with visitors with low-level clearance.

  It let them into the vault, so it definitely knew they were here.

  “It’s all controlled here,” Morley had said, before they first walked through the shielded security door.

  The older detective had been standing beside a featureless segment of wall when he said it, one that appeared more silver-green in color where it caught the light. That lighter, shinier segment was roughly two by two feet, and stood directly to the left of the open doorway.

  Once Morley knew he had Jordan and Nick’s attention, he removed one of his gloves, placing his bare hand on that same, shiny segment of wall.

  Black lines erupted on the silver-green surface.

  Liquid light, pale green in color, traced the outline of Morley’s fingers, even as text warnings to remain still began scrolling down the wall to the right of his hand.

  More lights blinked on when the hand-scan was complete.

  Morley’s irises and barcode were scanned, as was his face.

  Then a crisp, male-sounding voice rose from the wall.

  “Morely, James Vincent. Detective IV, Homicide Division. Race: Human. Age: 62 years old. New York Protected Area Police. Ident tag 05391H-99. Security level 4. Pre-cleared, by order of Praetorian Security. No client-specific access granted. No current Praetorian client account. Vault access granted for purposes of investigation #9882-910K-336. No black box access without specific warrant. Upon entry, security countermeasures stand down.”

  “Jesus H.,” Jordan breathed from beside Nick.

  Morley gave them both warning looks.

  There was the barest pause.

  Then that deep, male-sounding voice spoke to Morley directly.

  “Permission to enter granted. Thank you for your assistance, Detective.”

  Nick glanced at Jordan with a frown.

  Jordan quirked an eyebrow expressively in response. Neither of them said anything, but Nick wondered if they were thinking the same thing.

  What if this dick A.I. hadn’t granted Morley access?

  What would have happened if they’d all just walked inside, ignoring the wall entirely?

  Apparently, something similar crossed Morley’s mind.

  Turning, he scowled at the two of them.

  “Put your hands on the damned thing, too,” he told them. “I don’t want to be putting bits of you in plastic baggies next.”

  Nick and Jordan exchanged another look.

  Then Nick stepped forward, placing his hand on the shiny green material, only an inch or two from where Morley had placed his.

  The wall went through the same routine of scanning Nick’s hand, fingers, eyes, face.

  The A.I.’s voice rose, sounding exactly as it had before.

  “Midnigh
t, Naoko Derek Tanaka. Detective II, Midnight Class. Homicide Division. Race: Vampire. Approximate Age: 274 years old…”

  Jordan whistled, letting out a disbelieving and delighted laugh.

  Nick gave him a fair bit of side-eye, but didn’t bother to comment as the A.I. continued its litany of stats.

  “…Year of change: 197 B.D. New York Protected Area Police. Ident tag 9381T-112. Security Level 8…”

  Jordan’s humor evaporated. “Wait. What? What did that thing say?”

  Nick scowled, but didn’t answer.

  The A.I. continued, indifferent to their reactions.

  “…Pre-cleared, by order of Praetorian Security. No client-specific access granted. No current Praetorian client account. Security Level 8 privileges waived, due to specifics of the case. Vault access granted for purposes of investigation #9882-910K-336. No black box access without specific warrant. Security countermeasures stand down. Security level 8 clearance inapplicable.”

  There was another pause, then the same, deep, male-sounding voice spoke to Nick.

  “Permission to enter granted. Thank you for your assistance, Detective.”

  By then, Morley and Jordan were both staring openly at Nick, their eyebrows more or less kissing their hairlines.

  “Security Level 8?” Jordan said finally, when Morley didn’t say it. The younger detective glanced at Morley, then back at Nick. “The old man gets a 4, and you get an 8? Seriously? Who the fuck are you blowing on the side, Tanaka?”

  Nick frowned.

  Truthfully, he was as baffled as they were by what he’d just heard.

  Well… almost as baffled.

  He might have a slightly better idea of where that higher-level clearance came from, but that didn’t mean he’d had the slightest clue he had it until now.

  When he glanced over, Morley and Jordan were still staring at him.

  Nick wondered if they seriously expected him to explain this.

  Here, of all places.

  Still scowling, he took his hand off the wall.

  “Well,” Jordan said wryly. “I guess we know why they’ve got the Artist calling you. Not me. And not the old man.”