It was mid-afternoon, so the virtual advertisements were relatively muted in the bright sun of the dome. Even so, he could see three-dimensional ads climbing over buildings on Fifth Avenue, along with the string of clubs, restaurants, and galleries on Second and Third across the park. They stopped entirely in the neighborhood where he was, however; the buildings on either side of him were bare.
Hardly a surprise.
Rich people didn’t want that shit in their neighborhoods.
“Hello?” he said again.
Turning his head, he looked up towards the antique sofa and chairs situated artfully on a raised segment of floor. The furniture backed a small alcove that Nick happened to know was a false-wall; it slid sideways as a door, leading to another part of the penthouse.
Nick always figured St. Maarten positioned herself in those antique-styled furniture pieces as a psychological ploy.
In his mind, he called this her throne room.
All the potted trees, antique weapons and chess sets, aboriginal art from three different continents, stone statues, and woven tapestries only added to that impression.
Nick eyed what was probably a hand-forged Samurai katana with a flicker of envy, then looked back towards the window, before returning his gaze to St. Maarten’s throne dais.
He clicked on his headset, sending a brief text to the same channel he’d used to contact St. Maarten from the rec center.
I’m here, he typed, using his mind. In your living room. No one met me at the door. Should I be somewhere else?
He waited, jaw hard.
He waited four minutes.
On impulse, he tried Malek.
Hey, he wrote to the seer. Are you at Phoenix Tower? I’m looking for your girlfriend. I’m in her apartment, but no one’s here.
Nick stood there, waiting.
His unease grew as he looked around the circular room.
After pacing back and forth in front of the window, he decided no one was going to answer. He could either search the place and risk being tased by security and/or ending up in a holding cell… or he could just leave.
Caught somewhere between annoyed, worried, and increasingly paranoid, Nick made up his mind when a few more minutes passed.
He hit in a new number that time, letting it ring live.
She picked up after only a few tones.
“Kit,” he said, not giving her a chance to speak. “Something’s wrong. I’m in St. Maarten’s place. She was supposed to be waiting for me.”
“She’s not?”
“No one’s here.”
Nick frowned, glancing up at the elevated couch where he’d first met Ms. Lara St. Maarten. He found himself speaking loudly, maybe in the hopes that someone inside the penthouse would hear him.
“I can’t get St. Maarten on the line. I can’t get Malek. The elevator let me right in, brought me right up to the penthouse, but there was no one at the desk downstairs. The security guy at the front gate had my name, so she told someone to expect me––”
“I’m looking, Nick. Chill, okay?”
He could hear the note of worry in the kid’s voice.
He also knew her well enough to know she’d be finding some way to break into the security system up here.
Making another line through the thick carpet with his police-issue boots, he walked across the length of the enormous, curved window. Reaching the end of that arc, he glanced down the hallway, listening.
Still staring towards the foyer, he made up his mind again.
“I’m going to go check it out. Ping me if you learn anything.”
“Nick, damn it. Give me a second first––”
He clicked off.
Walking back towards the elevator, he stopped moving like a human.
He passed the stone fountain and the skylight, walking straight down a long, narrow hallway with dark green, Victorian-looking wallpaper.
His eyes noted paintings, here and there, more skylights.
An eight-foot tall sculpture of a dragon lived in another alcove, made of what looked like green copper and bronze. Blinking up at it briefly, Nick frowned.
That was too damned familiar, too.
He tried the handles of a few doors.
The first two were locked.
The third was a bathroom––large, strangely oval in shape, it was designed to give the illusion of being wrapped in peacock feathers. An augmented reality enhancement made the fronds sway gently, an effect that disoriented him.
He shut the door.
The next door was also locked.
His headset let off a hard ping, loud-feeling in the silence of the hall. He answered it without taking his eyes off the gold carpet, or the real-wood doors.
“Nick?” Kit’s voice rose, all business. “There’s someone in there with you. At least one other person.”
Nick switched to sub-vocals.
“St. Maarten?” he said.
“I can’t tell. I’m getting at least one heat signature, but it’s faint, and there’s interference from some kind of field over the room. The implant is a positive I.D. on a human being, and it says they’re authorized to be there… but it won’t give me a name. I assume it’s some kind of security protocol she has. It might be her––”
“What do you mean the heat signature is faint?” Nick frowned. “Are they dead, Kit?”
There was a brief silence.
He could almost see her scanning through her virtual screens.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve never seen a security program like this before, Nick. It’s really fucking bizarre, how people register. For all I know, it’s a total smokescreen, and nothing I’m looking at is real––”
“Okay,” Nick said, still using sub-vocals. “Where’s this other person? Am I walking in the right direction?”
“Yes,” she affirmed. “Three more doors. On your right. There should be a big room there. Again, I can’t tell what kind of room, exactly. There seems to be a virtual field over the entire space. So it might look weird inside. Also, the real, physical layout and dimensions might not be the same as what you see––”
“Got it,” Nick said, zeroing in on the door.
He hesitated, his hand on the handle.
“You sure nothing in there’s going to kill me?” Nick said to Kit.
“Uh. Pretty sure?”
Nick grunted. “Great. Thanks a lot, kid.”
Hesitating a moment, he moved out of the door’s path, sliding behind the wall. Letting his muscles tense, he jerked down on the handle, shoving the door open without poking his head around to peer inside.
The door swung inward without resistance. He waited to hear it hit the wall––but it never did, not that his vampire ears could pick up. The panel seemed to simply disappear into the contours of the room.
With the door open, even with the wall blocking his view, his vampire senses were already being flooded with new information.
Blood.
He definitely smelled blood. Human blood.
He heard a faint dripping sound… and something else. Heartbeat?
He swore he heard a heartbeat. Faint. Thread-y.
Breath. Also faint.
At least one person was alive in there. From the weakness of their breath and heart, he had to assume it was the person whose blood he smelled.
“Kit,” he sent through the link. “Send for medical emergency services. And the police.”
“Jesus,” she said, fear audible in her voice. “Seriously?”
“Yes. Right now. Do it, Kit. I’m going in.”
Unholstering his gun, the same NYPD-issued weapon he’d gotten back from I.S.F. after that morning’s state-sanctioned strip-search and professional headfuck, he held it up, peering around the edge of the wall and into the room.
He blinked into the view that met his eyes.
It wasn’t a bedroom. It wasn’t even one of her weird laboratory-type spaces.
It was a fucking Amazonian jungle.
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It was the Amazon he remembered from before the war.
Dense, hardwood trees surrounded him on three sides, leaving only the open door where he stood and the corridor behind him. Nick saw no walls inside the room, nothing but palm fronds, thick cypress trunks, ferns, mossy boulders, dripping water, and dark, wet earth.
The air was humid.
When he looked up, tree trunks, branches, and leaves obscured his view, covering most of the sky with a lush canopy covered in vines and moss.
Nick saw monkeys up there, leaping from tree to tree.
Nothing he saw could possibly reflect the real contours of the room.
“Kit,” he said, still using sub-vocals. “You got blueprints on this place? On the penthouse? Anything on this room, specifically?”
There was a silence.
Then she exhaled.
“No. Everything on this entire floor is classified. For that level of detail, anyway.”
Nick frowned. From what he knew of St. Maarten, though, that tracked.
“Okay. Just call the emergency services.”
Raising his gun higher, aiming it forward, he ventured in.
His first booted foot sank into soft, wet-feeling earth.
At each step, the virtual projections around him captured more of his senses, more of his sense of spatial orientation. It was so real, it was already confusing his mind.
He smelled wet earth now, mixed in the with blood.
Birds called to one another overhead, gliding from tree to tree as he edged cautiously forward. The program was disturbingly accurate, at least in everything but two respects––while more humid than the rest of the house, it wasn’t the hot, sticky-wet climate Nick remembered from soldiering in the real Amazon, back when he was human.
There also weren’t any insects.
Ducking down under palm fronds and sliding between close-growing trees, he made his way deeper into the room. He glanced up, noting glimpses of sky between the branches and leaves, seeing more monkeys, and even a jaguar lounging on a thick branch a dozen feet overhead, its black and tawny feet dangling down.
The jaguar yawned when Nick looked at it, exposing fangs longer than his.
Feeling a flicker of predatory interest run through him, Nick tore his eyes off the large cat, trying to see ahead through the dark jungle floor.
He started feeling claustrophobic.
The last time he remembered being human was in a jungle like this.
Not exactly like this… but damned well close enough.
It was strange how that memory still triggered something in him, given how much time had passed. He still hated fire. He still hated jungles. He still wasn’t a fan of climbing trees. Hundreds of years gone by, and he still acted like a human with PTSD.
He tried to keep the blood scent directly in front of him.
“Can you see me, kid?” he asked Kit. “How far am I into the room?”
Silence.
He tried pinging her again, using his headset, but the silence that greeted him sounded deadened, like there was nothing there.
Fuck. He’d been cut off.
The damned program must have hijacked his headset.
For all he knew, it was leading him around in here in circles.
He came to a stop, frowning.
Gazing carefully around where he stood, he peered through jungle fronds and vines, trying to see anything that might help orient him.
The door to the corridor behind him had disappeared.
“Hello?” he said, speaking impulsively, and loudly. “Ms. St. Maarten? Are you in here? It’s Nick… Nick Tanaka.”
Only the jungle answered.
The wind stirred branches and leaves overhead, sounding like the ocean.
The screech of monkeys rose and fell.
Nick heard a closer call of tropical birds. A group of them darted past, their plumages green, blue, red. A black toucan with a bright yellow bill flapped from one moss-covered tree to another. It perched on a thick branch, just above a bush with dark, waxy-looking leaves. Looking straight at Nick, it let out a series of croaking, clicking, clattering sounds, almost like a frog.
Nick raised his voice louder.
“Ms. St. Maarten?” He infused his words with thrall, aiming his gun forward, his jaw hardening as he slid between trees. “It’s Nick. Nick Tanaka. Are you in here? Are you hurt?”
The jungle swallowed his words.
He tried pinging Kit again, got nothing.
Cursing under his breath, he began moving faster, throwing caution to the wind as he made a beeline for the scent of blood. It was so strong now, his body was reacting, his fangs extending inside his mouth.
He nearly tripped over her.
As it was, he came to a dead stop.
Draped over a mossy boulder at the edge of a small clearing, her body looked like a virgin sacrifice in some medieval pagan ritual. She wore a cheap-looking white gown––dated-looking, like a nightgown worn by a lady locked up in a high castle. The gown was ragged-looking, cut low in front, but it covered most of her body, even her legs.
It was stained dark red.
The largest of those stains lived on her abdomen, where the blood pooled and dripped down the side of her body, coursing down towards the earth.
A knife stuck out of the center.
Nick’s nose wrinkled, but he forced himself to approach.
She was definitely dead.
Cuts and nicks covered her arms, legs, shoulders… even one of her feet. The white nightgown was slashed in places, exposing more sliced skin. The bleeding had mostly stopped, but staring down at her, he wondered if it had stopped recently. The dripping he’d heard when he stood at the door might have been the blood still running out of her.
Then he saw it.
Vampire fang-marks.
He saw them on her neck, her exposed shoulder… on one brown arm.
He hadn’t been looking for vampire tell-tales, or he might have noticed them sooner. The sheer amount of blood had thrown him; vampire kills didn’t usually leave this much blood. Either they’d been interrupted, or they’d been in too much of a hurry to feed.
That, or they’d wanted to send a message.
Nick frowned, walking around her, looking for anything else the killer might have left behind. Despite the cheap-looking nightgown and its threadbare material, she looked like she’d been in a knife fight.
Most of the injuries Nick saw looked defensive.
Gritting his teeth, Nick paused over her face, staring down at her vacant eyes. She looked beautiful, even in death. Her hair flowed across the mossy rock like it had been arranged there.
It wasn’t Lara St. Maarten.
It was Veronica Racine.
Nick turned up the volume on his headset, changing channels a few times, trying to hear even the hint of a signal. “Kit?”
He clicked to another station, turning off the sub-vocals to speak aloud.
“KIT! CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
He couldn’t smell any other blood in here. He couldn’t smell fresh vampire, either. Whoever killed Racine probably wasn’t still in the room.
“KIT!” he half-shouted into the headset.
It was as if the headset microphone swallowed his words.
His eyes shifted back to where he remembered the door. He wondered if he had a chance in hell of finding it again through this maze––
––when a loud clanking sound broke into his thoughts.
It didn’t mesh with the jungle, with any of the sounds he’d heard since he walked through that door. The image that came to mind was mechanical, like someone shutting down an ancient circuit breaker in an old mad scientist movie.
Before Nick could decide what that could possibly mean––
The jungle around him shimmered.
Then, it abruptly vanished.
Chapter 12
Panic Room
“NICK!”
The voice screamed at him.
Nick jumped,
straight up in the air. He whirled before his feet touched the ground, bringing up the gun as he blinked at his new surroundings.
The jungle was gone.
All around him stretched shimmering green mirrors.
“NICK! NICK!”
He stared around at the space where the jungle had been.
The room now appeared both larger and smaller. Featureless, or damned near. Every surface he saw was covered by those confusing, pale-green mirrors. A high, arched ceiling rose up to a rounded point, something about it disturbingly organic, almost egg-like.
Nick took that much in with a few confused turns of his head.
Then he saw her.
The woman he’d come here to see, a woman he’d rarely seen anything but utterly composed––borderline sociopathic in her obsessive put-togetherness, really––stared at him with eyes so wide, they seemed to swallow her face.
Weirder still, she appeared to be climbing out of a hole in the wall.
Staring at her as she dragged herself out of the small opening, like a child emerging from a hidden cupboard after a game of hide and seek, he lowered the gun, glancing around the room, still looking for threats.
He didn’t see any.
Apart from the dead body next to him––because yes, it was still there––he saw no one in the room apart from him and Lara St. Maarten. Those silvery-green, mirrored panels shimmered at him from all sides, including from the floor and ceiling.
After the Praetorian vault, all that green metal made Nick nervous.
The blood distracted him more.
The smell of the fresh kill filled his nose; he kept his grip on the gun as he glanced down at the corpse of Veronica Racine.
She looked more or less the same.
She even wore the same tattered nightdress.
Instead of a boulder, she lay in the exact same position over the end of a king-sized bed. The mattress, the sheets, the frame––every part of it not covered in blood shimmered with that green, organic metal. Tall bedposts adorned each corner, and a sheer canopy, also pale green, rippled high above the mattress.
The canopy looked like yet another liquid screen.
Blood dripped down the side of the bed. It beat a slow, deadening rhythm on the floor, where a pool had already formed.
Nick took it all in, his vampire eyes absorbing every detail before he shifted his gaze back to Lara St. Maarten.
Fang & Metal: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 4) Page 11