Then a light blinked in the opposite corner of his virtual screen.
Seeing the code behind it, he cut Kit off in the middle of her speech.
“––One sec.”
“Nick––”
“Just hang on a sec! It’s Wynter. Stay on the line, damn it.”
“No,” Kit cut in.
“Yes! This won’t take long. I swear.”
“You’re such a liar, Nick––”
But he was already switching over.
Wynter’s face appeared on the left.
“Where are you,” she said.
Nick grunted. “You know exactly where I am.”
“Where are you going, then?” she amended, her perfect lips hardening where they pinched at the edges. “What are you doing right now, Nick?”
“I’m walking north on Columbus,” he growled. “Where are you? Are you really going to give me the live feed you promised?”
There was a silence, then Wynter exhaled, her expression obviously displeased.
“I shouldn’t,” she said after a pause. “They just told me they moved the banquet.”
“I already know that. Where did they move it? And where’s Morley? Are he and Jordan meeting you there?”
Wynter sniffed. “I’m amazed you haven’t called them yet.”
“Are you with them? In the back of that limo? Are they watching you talk to me right now?”
“I’m on sub-vocals,” Wynter said, annoyed. “And yes, I’m in the back of the limousine. Malek and Tai might know I’m talking to you, but Lara doesn’t. Well,” she amended. “Not unless one of them told her.”
“Who’s driving?”
“A vampire,” Wynter said, sounding even more annoyed. “Anything else? Maybe you’d rather talk to him?”
“Where are you going, Wynter?”
He could feel her gearing up to yell at him again, and cut her off.
“Tell me where you’re going. At least give me that. You know it’ll take me a half-hour to get to my car under the building as it is… you might as well tell me.”
“No, Nick,” she said, exasperated. “Absolutely not.”
“When does it start? Are you going to the banquet itself? Or working remotely? Can you tell me fucking anything?”
“I’ll give you the live feed. As soon as we get somewhere.”
There was a silence where he just clenched his jaw.
“Fine,” he growled. “Just remember this. Remember this exact moment, Wynter. Remember it. Because if I did this to you, you’d probably try to gouge out my heart while I slept. I mean really try. Not just threaten to.”
The silence deepened.
He thought at first she’d hung up on him.
Then she sighed, and the sound seemed to hit him straight in the chest.
“I know,” she said, her voice losing some of its anger. “I know, Nick. But I’m sorry, I’m not going to say I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry you’re not going to say you’re sorry?” he grunted. “What the fuck is that?”
“It’s exactly what it sounds like. I might be wrong, but I’m not sorry. I don’t want you anywhere near this thing––”
“I offered to stay away,” Nick growled. “I offered. I wanted you to come with me.”
“And I said no.”
There was another silence.
Nick knew she had every right to say no. He knew that with every fiber of his being. At the same time, he wanted to scream at her for doing it anyway.
“Fine,” he said. “You said no.”
“I did. Yes.”
Nick’s jaw hardened more.
Strangely, his voice came out absurdly polite.
“I’m going to go, Wynter,” he said, still halfway clenching his jaw. “I’d still appreciate the live feed. Please.”
“I’ll send it.”
“Thank you.”
The silence grew awkward.
Nick found himself flashing to those pale green eyes he’d been dreaming about for weeks, their odd violet rings, a stubborn, similarly prominent jaw on a very different face. The same emotion coursed through him, though. That same feeling of wanting to fucking strangle someone, even if he wasn’t totally sure which of them it was he wanted to strangle.
Both of them. Either of them… a voice whispered in the back of his mind. It doesn’t matter. It makes no difference at all.
Nick didn’t know if it was his voice, or that fucker Malek.
Somehow, that only angered him more.
Before he let himself think about whether or not it was a good idea…
He terminated the call.
For the first time he could remember, in all the months since they’d met…
He just fucking hung up on her.
And he wasn’t even a little bit sorry.
Chapter 25
Making A Run For It
He clicked over to Kit without taking a breath.
“Where is it, Kit?” he growled. “Tell me. Now. Or you won’t like how I find out.”
“Nick, no. NO! Don’t pull me into your batshit crazy crap with Wynter––”
Nick frowned.
Then he frowned a lot harder.
“You were listening to that?” he said.
“Yes! You’re acting like a psycho right now! And…” Kit hesitated, swallowing so that Nick heard it, even through the link. “I’m running the drones, Nick. The ones following you.”
Nick opened his mouth, but she cut him off.
“––I’m not the only one,” she warned. “There’s a team of us. I have no control over it, all right? They can hear me right now.”
“Goddamn it.”
Without thought, Nick hung up again.
Staring at the dark red “V” on his arm, he scowled up at the night sky. Tall, pencil-thin buildings making up the River of Gold filled his view to the right. To his left, the wall around the Devil’s Cauldron stretched up a good sixty feet, with electric razor wire at the top, along with two more rows of cameras––one pointing out of the Cauldron, at the street where Nick walked, the other pointing in.
Nick continued to walk uptown, fighting to think.
No Kit.
Surveillance all over him.
Wynter… gods knew where she was by now.
He could still feel her. He could likely still track her through the blood, if he worked at it, if he concentrated… but he was running out of time.
Scowling as his narrowing options sank in, he went back to scanning his surroundings as he walked. He saw what he was looking for after he made it another two blocks, closing in on the northern end of the Cauldron and the gated car entrance there. A receptacle sat on the corner––a dead metal disposal unit for pedestrians, specifically those walking dogs and other animals.
The metal wasn’t ideal. It was thicker than he would have liked, and didn’t look particularly flexible, but it would have to do.
Walking up to the container, he dug his fingers into the edges under the lid, and ripped the front of it off.
Immediately, his headset flared to life.
“Nick?” Kit’s voice alarmed. “What the fuck are you doing? I’m going to have to report that. That’s vandalism!”
“Bite me,” he muttered, yanking a second time on the metal casing.
After a few more hard pulls, he managed to rip off the whole front panel away from the the flat, thicker lid, and the metal pole where the receptacle lived. A few dozen organic-matter, disintegrating bags spilled out onto the sidewalk, all of them likely filled with animal shit.
At least with the modern, specially-made bags, they didn’t smell.
None of the shit seemed to have gotten on the metal, either.
“Nick!” Kit yelled. “What are you doing?”
“Improvising,” he muttered.
Turning over the metal, he decided it might work better than he’d thought.
He pressed it down on top of his left arm, the one with the implant and the race-cat tattoo, and
began bending it around and over his flesh, using his side, the wall, the pole, and his hands to mold and bend and knock the damned thing into a new shape, until he’d managed to fashion a kind of metal sleeve over his whole forearm.
Kit remained silent through all of this.
Once he had the sleeve on his arm in a more-or-less secure fashion, her voice rose in his ear again.
“Nick. This isn’t going to work. You’ve got to know this isn’t going to work. I told you, they have drones. I have drones. We’re watching you right now––”
“Yeah,” Nick muttered. “I know.”
He swung his arm a few times, making sure he had the metal sleeve on securely, that it wouldn’t come off on its own.
“Nick––”
But he didn’t listen to whatever she was going to say next.
In that relative silence while he swung his arm, he’d been listening, and looking.
He knew where the two of the armed drones were, the larger ones that hovered like small spaceships overhead. Those were loud, almost insultingly loud to his vampire hearing, and easy to locate on sound alone, although he confirmed the exact positions with a bare glance overhead and his infrared vision. He had to guess Kit wasn’t operating either of those, since they hovered in relative proximity to one another.
He tagged them both with his eyes.
Roughly six feet apart. Less than fifteen feet overhead, with the one closer to the building hovering almost directly over him.
Nick tracked two more drones purely with his hearing.
Both of those were miniatures, and surveillance only––what they called “hummers,” in police-speak, probably after hummingbirds. While they were a little smaller than the tiny, jeweled birds Nick used to see in his mother’s garden while he was growing up, there was definitely a resemblance in terms of design.
Those two were likely Kit’s.
Neither the I.S.F. nor Archangel would trust a twenty-something tech-punk to shoot a vampire cop––even if that tech-punk didn’t happen to be one of the vampire’s best friends.
Also, Nick figured they were Kit’s because they were positioned a lot smarter for surveilling a vampire. Whoever drove the two hummers kept them well apart, on either side of him, with about twelve feet between them.
They also hovered at different altitudes.
Adjusting the metal sleeve a final time, and knocking on it with his knuckles for no good reason at all, Nick bunched up his muscles.
Without waiting, he leapt straight up in the air.
He hoped he’d done it fast enough, without any warning to whoever watched.
If those were human eyes, he figured he had a good chance.
In midair, he grabbed the closest of the two drones, the one hovering by the building where the animal-shit receptacle used to live. Twisting in midair, Nick kicked off the brick wall and grabbed the second drone with his other hand.
While he was still in the air, he threw them both down, as hard as he could.
Gravity brought his weight down with them, even as his arms blurred on either side of his head, slamming them into the sidewalk with his vampire strength.
The first drone more or less exploded.
The force of his throw turned it into a twisted curl of busted casing, bleeding circuits onto the granite-like, reinforced cement. One of the small jets that propelled the thing continued to spin it in a jerking circle on the ground, but it couldn’t rise, and the circle only spewed more parts out of the broken casing.
The other one broke in three pieces, one of which skidded out into the middle of the street, right as a robo-taxi was going by, forcing the vehicle to swerve to avoid it. The biggest of the three pieces immediately began to smoke.
Nick landed on top of it with his grav-boots, finishing it off.
He leapt over to the second drone, and stomped a foot down on that one a few times for good measure.
Then, tracking the nearer of the smaller drones with his ears, he leapt up again.
Kit actually tried to evade him––it had to be Kit––but she was still human, and still couldn’t move as fast with a joystick (or her computer eye-board, or mind-board or whatever she used these days), as Nick could with his body.
He snatched the first hummer drone out of the air with his hand and crushed it in his fist before he’d hit the ground.
He let the pieces fall from his fingers as he looked up, scanning the night sky.
The last hummer drone might be a non-starter, but he’d more or less calculated for that. He knew he’d be lucky to knock out three of them.
He confirmed it anyway, hearing the second hummer’s faint engine whine as Kit lifted it higher, too high for him to jump, even if he used the brick building to get some additional height.
They’d be sending for reinforcements now, likely police drones patrolling the area.
He didn’t have a lot of time.
But he’d calculated for that, too.
All he needed was an opening––a few extra seconds.
Luckily, Kit was cautious, and overcompensated for what he’d done. He waited until she stopped the hummer’s ascent, and by then, the tiny drone glinted and reflected dully against the window on the sixth story of the nearby brick building.
He knew, from her perspective, she was still close enough.
She was thinking she only had to have visuals on him. From her perspective, she could have gone twice as high and still kept him in range of the powerful cameras on the hummer.
Once the drone stabilized, Nick moved again.
He ran for the flat, red disk of a modern man-hole cover.
He practically felt it when Kit realized what he was doing.
“Goddamn it!” she snapped in his ear. “No, Nick! Stop!”
He didn’t even slow down.
Reaching the brick-red disk, which was weirdly artistic compared to the old-school, iron lids he remembered from when he was a kid, he smashed a boot down on one edge to lift the cover on the opposite side. Gripping it with his fingers, he pried it up, keeping a tight hold of it in one hand as he threw himself down the ladder.
He crammed his body into the hole as fast as he could, and let the lid drop over him.
It landed with a hollow clang, cutting him off from the upstairs world.
Chapter 26
Memories In The Dark
He knew he’d made it before the hummer could dive after him, but he crouched under the lid anyway, listening.
He couldn’t hear anything but the drip of water below him.
He heard the distant pulse of an underground train, insects, the softer gust of damp and mold-smelling air.
Somewhere further away, he heard light splashes, and a faster flow of water.
But no drone.
He didn’t hear the hum of a drone anywhere.
When Kit spoke up in his ear, he jumped.
Her voice sounded so loud in that silence, it nearly made him let go of the ladder.
“Nick, they’ll send more drones,” she said, her voice hard.
He could hear more underneath her words. She sounded shaken, jacked up on adrenaline, maybe even like he’d shocked her, or scared her. He heard enough there, enough wound into and behind her words that he winced in spite of himself, feeling almost guilty.
Almost.
“They’re sending more now,” she said, sharper, and even more audibly shaken. “Just what exactly do you think you’re––”
He ripped off the headset.
This was going to hurt more, but it had to be done.
Dropping down from the ladder with a heavy splash at the bottom of the ancient cement pipe, he gripped the organic headset in both hands and ripped it apart. It took more to kill the damned thing, so he ripped it in a few more pieces with an effort, then dropped those pieces in the water. There was some chance they could still track the damned thing, even now, but at least Nick wouldn’t have it on him.
Reaching into the inside pocket of his coat,
he pulled out a flat cylinder he’d carried on his person ever since someone (Dalejem?) got him in the habit.
That must have been during the wars.
Before the wars, maybe.
Nick frowned, staring briefly down the nearly black tunnel as he tried to remember.
He wished he could fucking remember.
Shaking it off, he looked down at the cylinder in his hand. Positioning it between his fingers, he pressed a slight indentation on one side, and inserting the fingernail of his right hand. A blade popped out of one end, a straight-edge knife that stayed perpetually sharp inside its organic casing.
Leaning against the ladder, he began cutting the GPS sensors out of his NYPD-issue grav boots, one at a time.
He left those in the water, too.
The next one would be tougher.
Unholstering the gun that had been given to him, also NYPD, he used the damned-near indestructible blade to dig open the panel at the bottom of the handgrip, finding the GPS chip lodged there with the tip of the blade and his vampire vision, which picked up the faint blue pulse. He ripped it out seconds later, but already felt like he’d been here too long.
Dropping the last chip in the water––the last one he knew of, at any rate––he took off down the sewer pipe, heading north. His boots splashed through the five or six inches of stagnant water living in the bottom curve of cement, sounding excruciatingly loud to his vampire ears, but he didn’t let the sound slow him down.
Reaching the first fork in the tunnel after about three hundred yards, he paused long enough to find Wynter through the connection between their blood.
He felt her flinch, wherever she was.
He felt her flinch, realizing who it was, what he was doing.
He felt her panic, knowing at once that he was tracking her.
The speed with which she figured it out was impressive, if somewhat maddening; still, it didn’t seem to do her a lot of good. He felt her trying various seer things to push him out, but the blood connection and seer connections weren’t the same.
She couldn’t use her seer tricks on him.
He felt her try harder, frustrated, trying to obscure her position from him.
She couldn’t do it.
Fang & Metal: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 4) Page 24