“I’ve got a hard-on you wouldn’t believe,” the human confessed, laughing a little, as if partly drunk and partly embarrassed. “Isn’t that extraordinary? Were we really in a car crash just now? I feel so… odd.”
He was looking at Nick with an open interest, a darker lust clouding his eyes. “My god, you are beautiful, aren’t you?”
Nick’s lips twitched in a smile, but he didn’t comment.
He released the human’s forearm instead, stepping back.
“All right,” he told the man, now looking him over more clinically, measuring his arms, his legs, the width of his shoulders. His voice dropped the melodious thrall; he didn’t need it anymore. With how much venom Nick just pumped into his veins, the male human probably would’ve lit himself on fire if Nick asked.
Luckily, he didn’t need anything so extreme.
“Take off your clothes,” Nick said.
The man blinked.
Then a slow smile bloomed over that handsome face.
Chapter 28
Looking For Wynter
Nick slipped through the entrance, past all the security measures, earning only a few curious glances in his direction.
He was invited, after all.
He was a Midnight, after all.
Whoever ran the surveillance at the front end of the building let him pass through with nothing but an ident scan, a short bow, and a polite smile. They even greeted him by his name––his real name, not just the Midnight moniker––after scanning his barcode and glancing at the readout that came up in their headsets once his ID registered.
Clearly, they hadn’t gotten the memo Nick had been uninvited.
Well, that, or the Governor hadn’t gotten that memo, either.
That, or the people who wanted to kill him were running security.
The last thought brought a cynical smile to his lips.
Whatever the reasoning, whoever was behind it, no one at the door had Nick’s name with a big black mark next to it. The human security official read Nick’s name off the screen with a complete lack of reaction––something, as a human, he most likely couldn’t have faked without Nick noticing.
At the very least, that told Nick that Archangel likely wasn’t in charge of security.
They also probably weren’t NYPD.
Whoever they were, he was glad he’d opted to use the front door. He hadn’t been so sure about trying to break in, and a hunch told him the governor might let him through.
While he was still in Central Park, Nick unbent and removed the curved panel of metal he’d molded around his forearm. Then, while the venomed human watched adoringly, wearing only a pair of boxer briefs and his socks, Nick wrangled himself into the human’s old-fashioned tuxedo, handing the man his own clothes as he did.
He wasn’t keen on handing over his favorite shirt and a nearly-new set of pants, much less the coat… but he couldn’t bring himself not to, given how cold the night air was, or the fact that he’d lit the guy’s car on fire.
“You need to go home,” Nick told the human, as he tied his tie. “You and your friends. You can take care of that, right? Grab a robo-taxi?”
The human nodded, but Nick had seen the reluctance there, even as the man shouldered on Nick’s shirt, shivering in the sharp breeze. Nick’s new friend was still in that venom buzz that told his impressionable human mind that Nick was the bee’s knees, and also that he wanted to spend every minute he could with his new crush.
As for Nick himself, he was glad he’d watched the human undress.
He hadn’t worn a tuxedo like this in years. He might not have remembered how to assemble the whole thing if he hadn’t just seen it all done in reverse.
The suit fit him reasonably well, which was a relief.
Nick considered leaving the hat behind. He’d never worn one, even back when he was human, and it made him feel conspicuous as hell, but in the end, he figured he might look stranger without it, seeing as it fit the time period.
Funnily enough, he ended up not being conspicuous at all.
Nick didn’t know if it was the current style among the River of Gold types, to go out of their way to be outrageous in their clothing, but he saw everything from painted-on VR panels, to a dress shaped like a high-heeled shoe, to a man wrapped in what looked like a Persian carpet, to a woman wearing a transparent tank over her naked body, filled with what appeared to be real, living fish. The neon-blue and yellow creatures swam around her in an elongated school, providing glimpses of her various body parts as they flickered around her with flashing silver bellies and colorful, striped backs.
Few people gave Nick more than a glance.
Once past the security station, Nick found himself keeping to the shadows and walls anyway.
Wynter?
Silence.
Wynter? Nick pushed at the blood connection. I’m here. Where are you?
Silence.
Nick frowned. His eyes never left the crowd.
He looked for her face and figure in the faces and bodies that flowed past the dark alcove where he stood. He watched them oohhh and ahhh at the dinosaur bones filling the first high-ceilinged chamber, even as they laughed at one another’s jokes and lifted drinks from silver trays borne by tuxedo-clad waiters.
He tried to feel his girlfriend, and couldn’t.
Fuck.
The guy in the park.
He’d bitten him. He drank from him.
Having another person’s blood in his system was probably just enough interference that Wynter could block him now. That, or she’d figured out some way to do it on her own.
That, or one of the Archangel vamps taught her how to do it.
Scowling at the thought, Nick continued to scan the crowd with his eyes and ears.
WYNTER, he sent, feeling for her through the blood. WYNTER. I’LL COME TO YOU. JUST TELL ME WHERE YOU ARE.
Silence.
Nick bit his tongue with slightly extended fangs.
He watched people pass by for a few more seconds, then pulled his back off the wall. Waiting for a break in the crowd’s thickening stream, he merged with their easy steps, reentering the dimly-lit passage just enough to follow warily as they wandered deeper into the candlelit museum.
He couldn’t help glancing at a few exhibits.
He found himself staring too long at the newer-looking and more high-tech seer exhibits, including a virtual reality display reenacting the myth of the origins of the seer race. He wanted to walk closer, to study it for real, but now definitely wasn’t the time.
He needed to find Wynter and get the fuck out of here.
Even so, he paused long enough to wonder if she’d been raised on those myths.
Thinking about that, he frowned.
Had Dalejem been raised in those myths?
For some reason, Nick strongly suspected he had been… although he had absolutely no basis for thinking it. It was maddening not remembering.
Shoving the thought from his mind, he let his eyes return to the high-ceilinged exhibit hall. He glanced around at the passageways on four sides leading deeper into different parts of the museum, and wondered which one he should take.
There must be a vampire exhibit in here somewhere.
Truthfully, he was more amazed that the antique exhibits still existed, the ones he remembered from back when he was a human, a young human even, maybe in high school, maybe even younger. He remembered flipping through books on the museum after hearing about it from his older sister, who came to New York to go to law school.
From what Nick remembered, those portions of the exhibit hadn’t changed much at all. How they’d escaped being bombed during the war baffled him, but maybe everything had simply been reconstructed in the post-war period.
By the time he’d made it past the dinosaur bones and into primeval humans, he was starting to think Wynter may not be in the museum at all.
Maybe St. Maarten was telling the truth.
Maybe they were somewhere nearby, b
ut off-site.
But if that was the case, why the fancy clothes? Why Malek’s monkey-suit?
No, they had to be here… somewhere.
It was maddening not being able to feel her.
It felt like being blind… or really, like being deaf, like that feeling after he’d blown out his eardrums with an explosion or gunfire or even just loud music, like he didn’t quite know where he was or what was happening around him.
He walked straight ahead through the crowd.
He got to the aquarium part of the museum, where a giant, virtual reproduction of a blue whale swam around the high ceiling, full size so that everyone in the lowered floor would get the immensity of scale. They stared up at it in awed delight, even as jellyfish, sunfish, giant rays, tuna, parrot fish, anchovies, hammerhead sharks, and barracudas all swam through the virtual water around them.
One woman shrieked when a shark got close, and her companions laughed, even as her date pulled her closer and gave her a reassuring hug.
The display made Nick’s job easier, at least.
Their upturned faces, bathed in blue and white light, gave him a perfect view of every single person on that floor.
Within seconds, he’d discerned Wynter wasn’t among them.
Where the fuck was she?
The museum wasn’t that big.
Had St. Maarten taken them to a back area somewhere?
That was the most likely explanation. They’d obviously been heading for the building when Nick last saw her. The clothes could have been to blend, to get them past the front door.
Where would St. Maarten have taken them?
Security station made the most sense.
They’d have access to surveillance in there, and security measures, and presumably even audio. They might even know Nick was here.
The thought reassured him a little.
If Wynter knew he was here, she would likely come for him. That, or St. Maarten would send someone, drag him back to wherever they were.
More importantly, Wynter would be safe.
She’d at least be a lot safer there than she would be out on the floor. If an attack came, it was much more likely to come here, in the display areas of the museum, where all the guests were. Nick being out here might even make that more likely, if it was true he was somehow being singled out.
Nick didn’t feel all that reassured though, even with those thoughts.
He couldn’t feel her.
Also, whatever hit them in here, it was likely to knock out security.
It might even take out the security station first.
Turning away from the lowered platform, Nick walked rapidly back into the main part of the museum, moving a lot faster than he had in the other direction.
He hung a right, entering a different wing.
Whatever this had looked like prior to the wars, clearly, the exhibits had gotten a facelift.
The massive hall was filled with exhibits on the race wars.
Nick didn’t know what normally stood in the center of the room, but for tonight, it was the space they’d carved out for the banquet dinner. Probably fifty large rounds faced a stage they’d erected at one end of the room, in front of a row of dioramas of different areas of the globe during the wars.
Infused with a mixture of models, artifacts, real bones and clothes draped and modified by virtual reality, those dioramas slid into life as soon as Nick walked close enough to any one of them. He found himself thrown into the sounds, smells, and even the feel of the battles. They were disturbingly real, down to explosions so close that Nick ducked in reflex, and sand peppering his face from inside a hot wind blown out by a sound charge.
He found himself on the shores of San Francisco, surrounded by running evacuees, then on the banks of the Seine, watching missiles hit at the opposite shore as fire bombs rained down around him. One exhibit even depicted the frozen tundra of the Himalayas with the Potala Palace in the distance, surrounded by uniformed seer troops.
It was too real.
It was way too fucking real.
It also hit Nick what insanely poor taste it was, to have a banquet honoring interracial cooperation with vampires––who’d more or less been enslaved since the end of the wars––in the middle of a fucking exhibit displaying interracial carnage.
Some part of Nick wanted to read a message into that, but his more logical mind knew it was much more likely simply stupidity.
He walked into a few more exhibits, ending up in the battle for the Amazon basin, then in the deserts of Egypt where the seer army was firing from behind the Great Pyramid.
Nick flashed to a very different desert, one that definitely struck him as somewhere in North America. New Mexico, maybe? Arizona? Either way, he remembered riding horses there, riding hard across dark red earth, riding towards the mountains.
Had that been during the wars, too?
Frowning, he stepped back, moving his whole body back far enough that he wouldn’t trigger any more virtual landscapes. He found himself directly under the stage, where a sound tech was running checks on the microphone system.
Nick gazed out over tables that were gradually starting to fill with people.
Still no fucking Wynter.
If something was going to happen here, it would likely happen once everyone was seated.
He stuck to the shadows again when he began to move, skirting around the stage, hoping no one would notice as he went back to scanning faces.
She definitely wasn’t here.
He needed to try one of the other wings.
As he made his way to the door, more people began pouring in, heading for the tables. Nick noted a few cops he recognized, and even a few he actually knew––Charlie among them, another homicide detective out of the 19th. He’d seen her in street clothes before, but it still took him a second look to recognize her in formal wear, with her long tresses curled and flowing down her back, halfway to her waist.
Below the hair and a heavily made-up face, she wore a blood-red gown with a long train. Like that woman in the Rolls, Charlie’s dress was open in the back, but instead of the bow that covered the other woman’s ass, Charlie’s cut away around her hips, showing off a narrow waist and accentuating her round butt.
More eye-candy.
Was she working? Was the dress a distraction?
Or was she just having a bit of fun?
Nick looked away, even as he wondered if Morley and Jordan were here. Jordan would have a heart attack if he saw Charlie in that dress––Damon had been harboring a crush on her the entire time Nick had known him.
Thinking about that, Nick smiled a little, in spite of himself.
He hadn’t been able to convince Jordan to ask her out yet.
If the fucker was here, he was going to make Damon ask her out, even if he had to bite him. Frowning a little at the thought, Nick went back to scanning faces, only now he was looking for Jordan and Morley, in addition to Wynter, Malek, Tai, and St. Maarten.
Jordan and Morley should be here.
Of course, Nick didn’t really want them here either, or Charlie.
He should have tried harder to get in touch with them before he ditched the headset. He should have found some way to talk to Morley at least, if only to convince him what a bad idea it would be for him to come to this, whatever his obsession with catching these guys.
He would have told Morley to keep Charlie and Jordan home, too.
Nick realized his anxiety was starting to spike.
The thought of all these people here––of Wynter here, of Charlie here, not to mention Tai, Jordan, Morley, Malek––it was starting to make him spin out.
How the fuck was he going to clear this place out?
Pull a fire alarm? Start an actual fire?
Maybe Kingsworth was in on it.
Was it really so far-fetched? His own damned son was a Dimitry Yi fanatic.
Remembering that… really remembering that… Nick realized it wasn’t just an idle thoug
ht, or a paranoid suspicion about someone he didn’t like.
It was a real fucking possibility.
Clenching his jaw harder, he left his shadowed area by the stage, walking straight for Charlie. As he approached her, she threw back her dark head in a full-throated laugh, reaching out a hand with fingernails that matched her dress to push at the chest of a blond vampire standing in front of her.
The vampire looked vaguely familiar to Nick, too.
He must be another Midnight.
It was hard to tell, given what the vamp wore now: a dark blue and very expensive-looking tuxedo with a blood-red shirt and a perfectly tied black bow tie.
Nick walked up to Charlie, nodded briefly to the vampire, then spoke to her before she’d fully taken in that he was there.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, low.
She looked him over in the old-fashioned tuxedo, the top hat and white shirt and gray striped vest, and she threw back her head, laughing again.
“Do you have any idea how many people are looking for you?” she said, recovering enough to turn her laugh into a darker chuckle. “And you waltz up to me, dressed like that, and announce ‘you need to talk to me’? Nick, for crying out loud––”
“I do need to talk to you,” he insisted, catching hold of her arm. “Where’s Morley? Is he here? Is Jordan?”
She blinked at him, and it hit Nick that she was drunk… heavily buzzed, at least.
She couldn’t be here on duty.
Well, not unless she was faking it again. He’d seen her do it before.
Remembering that, he scowled.
“Are you really drunk?” he said. “Or is this bullshit? If it’s bullshit, I need you to drop it. Right now, Charlie. This is important.”
Her dark eyes met his.
The second they did, he realized she had been faking. Moreover, she was deeply annoyed with him for blowing her cover.
She must have been trying to get information off the clearly horny, blond vampire who was still staring at her neck, and probably didn’t give two shits if she was really drunk or not, especially since he was already fantasizing about pumping her blood full of his venom.
“It’s important, Charlie,” Nick repeated, his voice lower.
Fang & Metal: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 4) Page 27