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

by JC Andrijeski

  When Nick touched Morley now, however, Morley didn’t flinch. He didn’t move at all, or even look up from the spoon swirling in his mug of diner coffee.

  Nick hesitated, still watching those dark eyes.

  It occurred to him that those eyes were the exact same color as the coffee.

  “You okay, boss?” he said finally. “You don’t look so good.”

  Morley’s eyes flickered to Nick’s.

  They still looked angry, but Nick didn’t get the sense that anger was aimed at him. Rather, he saw a powerless fury there, mixed with a need to connect in some way, to express that frustration to another living being in some way, any way.

  “I don’t think I can let this go,” Morley said.

  Nick frowned.

  His eyes darted sideways, giving Jordan a bare look, but his attention never really left the senior detective’s face. Gripping the human’s arm a little tighter, Nick shook him lightly, his voice turning gruff.

  “You might have to,” he said. “You get that. Right, boss?”

  Morley only shook his head, his jaw hardening.

  When Nick glanced at Jordan that time, the younger detective looked puzzled, verging on alarmed. He was staring at Morley, his mouth curled in a frown, like he couldn’t decide what he was seeing in the old man, either, or what it meant.

  “No,” Morley said, before Nick could speak.

  He shook his head decisively, his jaw hard enough to push out one side of his cheek.

  He met Nick’s gaze, that anger in his dark eyes colder.

  “No,” he said only.

  He held Nick’s gaze, and Nick saw the frustration shining there, a wanting for Nick to understand, to feel what he was feeling, or to at least comprehend why he felt it.

  Nick wished he could give that to him.

  He really, really wished he could give that to the other male.

  But he honestly couldn’t.

  Chapter 9

  Daydreams

  Nick got out of the 17th Precinct building right as the sun was starting to come up.

  He’d missed his on-duty, I.S.F. bio and psych checks for a full week. They made sure to punish him for that, hitting him up with a shit-ton of extra monitoring protocols after he, Morley, and Jordan walked through the locked security doors that morning.

  That kind of heavy-handed “we own you” crap was irritating, but hardly unexpected. Nick was just glad that, for once, he hadn’t missed those checks for anything but legitimate reasons. He hadn’t even been trying to hide anything.

  He suspected they knew that.

  Despite the excessive hoop-jumping, the check-in went relatively smooth.

  His reasons for missing his mandated assessments had all been technical, stemming from having an unusually high number of vampire interrogations that week. “Vampire interrogations” meant feeding on the job––for the NYPD––something he didn’t like doing these days, given how his girlfriend normally reacted to the news.

  When he fed as part of the job, that generally meant no check-in.

  Normally, that was no big deal.

  Nick just made up the check-in at the end of his next shift. But if the next shift had an interrogation… and the next one…

  Well, it could add up, in a bad week.

  Their caution wasn’t fully racism, Nick had to admit.

  It was realism.

  The human authorities were more than aware of the cruder effects vampire venom had on most humans. They didn’t want vamps using venom or other forms of thrall to twist their human “sponsors” to their will––whether it was to coerce confessions, manipulate their handlers, or fuck with their co-workers. If they let that kind of thing go unchecked, it wasn’t inconceivable that vamps could take over the very institutions that owned them.

  But authorized feeding generally got vamps off the hook.

  Then Nick had two days off.

  Thank the seer gods, they didn’t test him on his days off.

  Nick wouldn’t have cared as much about that, even just four months ago.

  Now, he cared a lot.

  Having a girlfriend changed everything for him.

  Everything.

  Still, on this day at least, he had nothing to hide. He spent most of his days off in the vamp fighting ring in Queens, and whatever amount of Wynter’s hybrid blood might have been in his system a few days ago, he was clean now. Foreign blood generally became undetectable in his system after anywhere between seven to ten hours.

  So Nick got a clean bill of health.

  He was just walking back out through the main security door and retrieving his gun from the A.I. at the front desk., when his headset pinged.

  Nick triggered the response without thought.

  He assumed it would be Jordan again.

  “Midnight,” Nick said. “You still up? I just got out of there, believe it or not…”

  He trailed, listening to the silence.

  Then Nick heard a yawn in his ear.

  “Am I still up?” a female voice said. “As of the last five minutes, yeah.”

  Nick started, then smiled, in spite of himself. “What’s up, kid?” He checked the timepiece inside his headset. “It’s awfully early for you, isn’t it? I thought all you tech-punk weirdos were night owls.”

  Kit Fiorantino, the twenty-three-year-old human hacker kid he’d befriended when he first moved to New York, yawned again, her face and upper shoulders growing visible in his virtual view. Nick was still leaving the I.S.F. check-in station, heading for the elevators down to the underground garage when her spiky hair grew visible.

  She’d dyed it white again, he noticed.

  The ends were bright purple this time, though, instead of neon green.

  “Are we doing it today, old man?” she said, blinking at him blearily through the screen. “You said today was probably good. You said to call. You said to call before I left Queens this time… make sure there wasn’t some crazy murder case you couldn’t leave––”

  “Right. Right.”

  “You forgot?” A faint accusation lived in her voice.

  “It’s been a long night, kid,” he said, exhaling.

  “So that’s a no, then? For today?”

  He heard the disappointment plainly in her voice.

  Thinking about the reality of their tentative plans, his mouth twisted in a frown.

  In some ways, the timing sucked.

  He wasn’t in the best mental space to play crotchety surf instructor to a toddler human, not after the night before. Not after Nuñez and that damned sentient wall. Not after Morley, and whatever was going on with him.

  In other ways, the timing was fucking perfect.

  Going out on the water sounded heavenly right then. Even if the waves were fake. Even if the beach and sun and sky were fake… it all sounded heavenly.

  He needed to talk to the kid, anyway.

  “Sure,” he said after that too-long pause. “I mean no…it’s not a no. Let’s do this. You just caught me off guard. I had to think about the logistics…”

  She smiled at him, her face lighting up. “Really?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded decisively. “I’m just leaving the precinct now. How long will it take you to get here? To the place, I mean?”

  “Forty minutes?” she ventured, rubbing her face with a hand half-covered in tattoos. “That too long? I just need to throw on clothes. Most of that time’ll be the train ride.”

  “Forty minutes is fine,” he assured her. “Meet you at the water.”

  “I’ll be there, old man,” she said. “You’d better be.”

  Before he could retort anything back, she hung up.

  Nick leaned back on a bright pink sun lounger, wearing nothing but dark red swimming shorts, his ankles crossed where he stretched out his legs.

  Damn, he was pale.

  He remembered, vaguely anyway, when his legs were dark brown, for half the year, anyway. Back then, he surfed every chance he got.

  Even
the tips of his raven-black hair bleached out.

  He let his eyes roam up the high dome of the indoor city recreation park, wondering where the actual dimensions of the walls ended and the virtual kicked in.

  He wasn’t looking at the dome of the New York Protected Area itself, but the visuals looked realistic enough to be confusing. He was indoors here, lounging by a fake beach that stretched in a half-moon before a simulated ocean, which is why he didn’t have to hide under an umbrella. Everything in front of him, including the perfect, curling, blue-green waves, including the clouds in the sky, including the sea birds, including the dolphins he could see jumping in the background of the surf, lived inside an underground recreation area in Midtown Manhattan.

  Unlike the dome that protected New York City as a whole, the artificial sun and sky in here was vampire-friendly.

  Nick closed his eyes, letting the rays beat down on him, smiling faintly in spite of himself. As far as illusions went, this one didn’t suck.

  Dragging one of the two towels he’d grabbed out of a bin on his way up here from the locker rooms, he shoved it under his head, using it as a pillow. He lay the second one over his lap and legs, almost like a blanket.

  His mind drifted, as he lay there.

  Vampires didn’t sleep…

  …but he’d spent too much time in that floating in-between, of late.

  It was like an addiction. It tugged at his subconscious, coaxing him to return.

  Maybe he could actually use it now, he rationalized.

  Maybe he could use it for the case.

  After all, the subconscious mind was good at puzzles, right? As a human, as a cop, he’d used it all the time––to bring up details he’d noticed without tracking them consciously. To pull together threads or assemble disparate occurrences and connections in ways that were too complex for the more linear parts of his psyche.

  He closed his eyes, resting his head on the wad of fluffy towel, shifting his skull around until he found the perfect spot.

  He exhaled, though he didn’t need air.

  He didn’t know when he went from telling himself he was going to look at the case… to all of those images melting away.

  Flickering snatches of Morley, of Jordan, of Nuñez’s blank face and her hand reaching down, the human cop’s raw red skin… Morley’s spoon as he stirred his black coffee in even, unending circles…

  It all dissipated like smoke.

  Nick was somewhere else.

  He was in a restaurant.

  Something about it was vaguely familiar.

  Nick’s head tilted back, his eyes aiming upward as he let out a gasp. A green-glass chandelier hung from a gold-painted ceiling. A decorative, sun-like design in plaster radiated out from the chandelier; Nick saw glass walls all around them, like they were eating inside a greenhouse, or a terrarium, or a fishbowl.

  It was night outside.

  Torches covered an outdoor patio, more tables. On their own table, he smelled steak, potatoes, mushrooms, yellow squash, red wine…

  His food was for show, though. He wasn’t eating.

  He was a vampire.

  He was a vampire, and he wasn’t alone.

  Us. Them.

  They were there together.

  He knew that damned face so well, that smile, the sharper glints when Nick angered him, the purse of those marble-statue-like lips. Nick knew that face in other ways too, how it changed when the other got turned on, how his throat moved, those green eyes sliding out of focus, the hardness of the long jaw.

  Nick knew the darting, mischievous look that lived there now, even before the green eyes narrowed, the pale violet rings around each iris visible in the firelight that glinted through the outside windows.

  Want me to? an achingly familiar voice asked through the blood. That glint of perversion sharpened in his eyes and on his lips. Well? Do you want me to, or not? I can push them to look away. Or I can make them watch… if you prefer.

  He studied Nick’s face.

  Slowly, the smile slid into a grin.

  A hand fell heavily on Nick’s thigh, massaging the muscle.

  Oh… I can definitely tell you want me to.

  That face… it was maddening.

  Nick knew that fucking face. He knew it so goddamned well.

  Why in the gods couldn’t he remember it?

  The pale eyes shone at him. The mouth quirked, close enough to touch. The prominent jaw, the lifted eyebrow, his almost irritatingly beautiful features… the green of his eyes made somehow greener by the violet ring circling each iris.

  It was such an odd, mesmerizing thing––those rings in his irises.

  They turned his already beautiful and otherworldly eyes even more beautiful and otherworldly. Nick knew those eyes better than he knew his own.

  At the same time, he…

  Gaos. He fought to remember.

  He had no name to put them with, nothing but a guess.

  He had no understanding, no feeling of closure.

  There was no story attached specifically to that face, no timeline, no sense of completion… only a rough guess based on what he knew of his own personal timeline, meaning the bare facts of his life. Nick could guess at the historical period, too, but only from everything he saw around them.

  In some ways, being able to guess these things made it worse.

  In some inexplicable way, that ability to guess who the other male was without knowing who he was, hurt Nick more.

  How could only guess at the owner of this face?

  And why now? Why was this coming up now, when he was finally with someone again, when he’d finally created something real in his life, something that meant something to him… something he was desperately afraid of losing?

  Gaos.

  That’s what this was. It was fear.

  It was fear of being hurt.

  The barest whisper of memory around that hurt was damned bad enough; it hurt without him truly remembering a fucking thing. All he knew for certain was… he didn’t want to feel that again. He didn’t even really want to remember this.

  Pain rose in his chest, a flicker of smile on a preternaturally handsome face.

  Green eyes flashed at him. That mouth… those lips and tongue. Familiarity alone sent a harder shard of pain through his chest, paralyzing him.

  Gaos.

  The fucker would screw with him.

  He would do it to him in public settings, like this expensive, trendy, hyper-urbane restaurant with the green chandelier, where they must have gone for dinner. He would screw with Nick’s head, mess with his mind and emotions, any chance he got. He thought it was hilarious. He got off on seeing Nick squirm, on seeing him lose it––

  Gaos. Why was he thinking about this?

  What the fuck was wrong with him?

  “Hey!”

  Nick jerked, violently, half jumping off the sun lounger.

  His eyes snapped open. He sat up, relieved when he saw he’d left the towel in his lap, mostly covering his crotch. He stared up at the human female standing there, noting the faint slant in her lips, the lifted eyebrow as she stared down at him pointedly.

  “Some dream, eh, vampire?” Her smile widened as she raised her eyebrows at him suggestively. “Do I even want to know?”

  “Vampires don’t dream,” he said in rote, scowling.

  She let out an expressive snort, sitting down on the lounger next to his and tossing down her own two towels, which she must have gotten from the same bin.

  “Sure they don’t,” she scoffed. “Well, whatever you were doing… don’t tell me.” Thinking, she snorted a second time. “If you do, I might be tempted to tell Ms. James I found you out here having sex dreams in the middle of a public recreation area.”

  Nick’s jaw hardened.

  Damned kid.

  She laughed, still looking him over.

  “You should see your face right now. If you were human, it would be bright red. You’ve got ‘caught’ written all over you.�
� Reaching over, she clapped him on the shoulder. “You sure you’re okay, buddy? Maybe I should have left you alone. Clearly you need to go visit your girlfriend. Badly,” she added.

  He rolled his eyes, rubbing his face with a hand.

  “Just a bad night,” he muttered.

  “Sure it was, big guy.”

  He gave her a harder look, lifting an eyebrow. “You sure you want to antagonize the guy who might ‘accidentally’ let you drown out there?”

  She laughed, punching at his shoulder.

  “Relax, Tanaka,” she said. “I won’t tell. Promise. You’re entitled.”

  Nick grunted.

  He didn’t really want to know what, exactly, she thought he was entitled to.

  “So?” she said. “Are we doing this? Or what?”

  Nick glanced at the waves, then exhaled again.

  Glancing at the end of the sun loungers, he saw that she’d grabbed a board already. Her rented, deep blue and green board glinted under the fake morning sun, right next to his silver, custom-built titanium board, the one he’d had made specifically for surfing the waves of the real ocean, as in, the one that still lived outside the protective dome of the human-safe areas.

  He hadn’t been out there in a while.

  Maybe he’d do that tomorrow, if he wasn’t up in the Northern Protected Area with Wynter.

  Thinking about Wynter brought a pain to his chest all over again.

  Despite his weird fucking daydreams… or maybe because of them… the kid wasn’t wrong. He missed Wynter so badly it physically hurt.

  He needed to see her. He needed to see her soon.

  Maybe he could talk her into coming down here over the weekend.

  She’d have to hang at his apartment until he got done with his shift each night, but they’d have two full days, even if he had to work both nights. Maybe I.S.F. would even give him one of those nights off, assuming they bounced Morley’s homicide unit off the Praetorian case.

  Wynter came down for one of his fights the previous week.

  He’d gotten to spend most of that night with her.

  It still wasn’t anywhere near enough.

  Kit’s sharper, younger voice cut through his thoughts a second time.