“We all told you someone was trying to kill you,” she said, taking the stairs in front of him. “Everyone told you to stay home, to stay the fuck away… to let us handle it. Wynter told you. Ms. St. Maarten told you. I told you.”
She turned her head, reaching out to smack him again as she walked.
Nick winced, in spite of himself.
“…And here you come,” she finished angrily. “Like an asshole. Like an asshole.”
When she glanced over her shoulder at him a second time, Nick quirked an eyebrow at her, without slowing his pace.
“Watch where you’re walking,” he grumbled. “You’ll fall down the stairs and break your damned leg. Then I’ll get stuck carrying you.”
She gave him another incredulous look.
“ASSHOLE,” she proclaimed.
That time, Nick just exhaled, averting his gaze.
He didn’t bother to argue.
Really, there was nothing to argue about.
They went down four flights.
Nick was getting nervous by the time they reached the bottom.
He found himself urging the security guard, in a not-altogether friendly way, to open the fucking door when they reached the end of the stairs. A metal door stood there, one that reassured him only slightly in that it shimmered a dark green, and a black, featureless panel stuck out of the wall to the left of the handle.
Then again, that whole damned vault had been dark green, and a fat lot of good that’d done.
“Open the fucking thing,” he urged, staring up the cement stairs.
He swore he could hear something up there.
It was faint, but it tensed every muscle in his body.
“Open it.” He nudged the guard again, still staring up the cement stairs. “Open the fucking thing. Now––”
“If you’d leave me alone for ten seconds, I could,” the guard retorted, his face bright red as he stared down at the featureless panel.
Nick bit his tongue, forcing himself silent.
He only managed it for a few seconds.
“Do you have it open yet?” he growled. “What’s the fucking problem?”
“Do you hear something?” Kit said.
Nick turned, tearing his eyes off the stairwell and the guard––long enough that the latter was finally able to focus on the access panel for more than two seconds, at least without getting smacked by a vampire’s stone-like hand.
Nick’s eyes found Kit.
She was looking up the stairwell, her head with its spiky, white, purple-tipped hair cocked in a way that told him she was likely listening to someone on her headset. The slight off-kilter focus of her eyes told him she was at least splitting her attention between a screen projected by her headset and the stairwell.
“You getting anything on that?” he said, gruff.
He nudged her with his hand that time, instead of the guard.
“Stop pushing people,” she grumped back at him. Her hand rose to her ear with the headset, even as she frowned. “Tai says they’re doing something to the door. She wanted to know if you could physically hear them, so I told her I’d ask.”
“Tell her yes,” Nick growled. “And tell her she shouldn’t fucking be here… that she’s just a little goddamned pup.”
Kit rolled her eyes. “Sure thing, Nick. I’ll get on that right away.”
“Everyone acts like I’m the crazy one,” he growled. “Jesus fucking Christ. We’ve got a schoolkid, a teenager, a civilian, a whacko, a middle-aged rich lady, a vampire with a contract out on his life, an old man who should be home drinking his sorrows after his girlfriend died––”
“Excuse the fuck out of me?” Morley broke in, his voice holding more Bronx than usual. “Did you really just say that, Midnight?”
Jordan broke out in a laugh, almost like he couldn’t help himself.
It hadn’t really occurred to Nick until then, just how uncharacteristically quiet the younger detective had been. He glanced at Jordan as he thought it, and saw him holding his arm still, his face uncharacteristically pale.
“Did I hurt your arm?” he said, gruff. “For real?”
Jordan glanced down at where he held it, then shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Did I break it?” Nick said.
Jordan hesitated, then shrugged again, reluctant that time. “Fractured it a tad, maybe.”
Kit snorted, pulling Nick’s eyes back to her.
“Did I mention you were an asshole?” she said, her voice haughty.
“You might have,” he growled back. “Zip it, punk.”
He might have said more, but just then, the door emitted a low tone, right before it opened, pulling away from the wall on its own. Nick glanced at the security guard, who was grinning at all of them triumphantly.
“Inside,” he said, gripping the handle and stepping to the side to swing open the door. “Everyone… even the cranky vampire.”
Again, like he couldn’t help it, Jordan burst out in a laugh.
Chapter 32
Hacking The Light
Nick followed Kit, Morley, Jordan, and the museum security guard into the bunker, looking back to see the door close behind him as he brought up the rear.
He could still hear something higher up the staircase.
Whatever the something was, it seemed louder now.
Dripping, metal bending, creaking.
A silence hung between sounds as they echoed on the cement. He knew they must be soft, maybe too soft for a human to hear, even standing right in front of whatever it was, but some trick in the acoustics brought them to his vampire ears. Nick listened past his friends’ heartbeats and footsteps, straining to make out every fragment, every nuance…
…until the dark green door closed, cutting off every trace of noise from outside.
For the first time, he looked around at where he was.
The rectangular room reminded him of an old bomb shelter.
While the walls, ceiling, panels, and support structures had been enhanced and reinforced with organic metal, the original cement walls still showed through here and there, giving a glimpse of what it probably looked like when it was built.
Nick glanced at two human-looking techs who sat in chairs in front of screens, then glanced around at the dark green metal, some of it so vibrant it shone like a liquid mirror, shimmered under the lights from the adjacent monitors.
Some of that metal appeared to be moving, vibrating, shimmering, and pooling like what he’d seen the nanotech machine doing upstairs.
Staring at it, Nick stepped back in spite of himself.
“What is this place?” he said, wondering suddenly why the museum had such a top of the line security outpost. “Who owns all of this shit? Archangel?”
He didn’t really expect an answer.
He was about to speak again, when a voice rose from the other end of the room.
“Yes,” Lara St. Maarten said, from where she stood on the far side of the security panel, her narrow form bathed in blue light. “As a matter of fact, ‘this shit,’ as you put it, belongs to us. We had it installed here for other purposes… and when Gavin called me, asking to hold his little political pow-wow here, I made our staffing this facility my condition.”
Nick frowned, staring at her angular face in the reflection from the screens.
She still looked like some kind of fifties movie star to him.
As in the 1950s… according to the pre-war calendar.
“Kingsworth asked you if he could hold it here?” Nick frowned. “Why?”
“Because I own it,” she said, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. “Did you not know this was one of my private holdings, Detective Tanaka?”
Nick frowned.
He opened his mouth to answer, then felt another pair of eyes on him.
That second set of eyes felt like it was burning a hole through his skin.
He knew who it was even before he turned.
Once he was looking at her, his fa
ngs extended fully, before he could stop them.
Wynter stared back at him, fury in her eyes, which shone nearly white in the light of the blue-green screens.
He watched her bite the inside of her cheek, knew it was at least partly to keep from yelling at him, and found himself fighting an urge to bite her that was almost more than he could control. His eyes flickered down the dress she wore, the same one he’d glimpsed through her eyes while she’d been walking up the stairs to this building, and had to fight even harder to suppress a growl.
When he opened his mouth a second time, that time to speak to her, Wynter held up a hand, her voice cutting into his like glass.
“Not one fucking word, Nick,” she said, cold.
Nick hesitated.
Then his jaw hardened.
He opened his mouth, about to try again, but that time, a different voice cut him off, a much younger voice.
“She’s right,” Tai said, apologetic. “We can’t talk right now, Nick. We’re working. You’re distracting her… and I really need her right now.”
Gauging Nick’s face when he turned to stare at her, Tai added, even more apologetically,
“We need her. You need her, too. She’s the only one who’s been able to talk to them. And you… distract her. You break her concentration.”
“So shut your mouth,” St. Maarten added, her voice significantly less apologetic than Tai’s. “Immediately. Before you get us all killed.”
Nick’s jaw clenched hard enough to hurt.
Even so, after the barest pause, where he gave Wynter only the barest glance, he nodded. Stepping back from the control panel, which he’d by now realized they all stood behind––Tai, Lara St. Maarten, Malek, Wynter, and now Kit, who had joined them all since entering the room––he receded into a darker area by the wall.
He picked an un-enhanced segment of that wall, where the cement remained bare, before he leaned up against it.
He focused on the screens, and realized they all showed different views of the museum. They showed views of the stairwell, too, and the lobby, including the outside door. His eyes picked out views of the various wings and exhibit halls, including the one filled with round tables, which was now more or less destroyed. Bodies lay on the floor here and there, and Nick swallowed, looking for Charlie’s in spite of himself.
He saw at least one door open out to the city streets at the back of one wing. People were still streaming out of it, which explained why the rest of the museum appeared to be mostly empty. No way were there enough bodies that every person who attended––or even every vampire––had been killed, but he counted at least a few dozen who wouldn’t get up again.
His jaw hardened at the thought.
He forced his eyes to the next screen and saw the first exhibit hall, with its domed roof and granite pillars. It was empty now, even of dinosaur bones and living metal, but he stared at the half-destroyed space, the broken granite pillars, the bodies strewn around platforms that once held dinosaur bones.
None of the dinosaurs were there now. He did pick out some fossilized bones scattered by one wall, and a few sticking out of the granite pillars.
Something else occurred to him.
They’d seen him from down here.
They’d seen him running from those mechanical things… watched him run up the walls and ceiling in his anti-grav boots. At least one of them had likely been tracking him since he passed through security.
The realization soured his mood all over again.
Why hadn’t someone gone upstairs to get him?
Remembering then, that Jordan supposedly had been upstairs doing just that, he glanced at the two human detectives standing a little ways away from the control panel.
From the expressions on their faces and darting, exchanged looks, they were talking to one another on their headsets, likely using a police channel.
Again, Nick felt cut off from the rest of the world, in a way that was maddening.
He glanced at the back of Wynter’s head and the part of her profile he could see, and again had to suppress an urge to bite her.
He forgot that a few seconds later, when he made sense of the look on her face.
She was sweating.
Her eyes were out of focus.
She stared at a subset of the monitors, but she didn’t appear to be fully seeing them. Her expression was taut, strained. Her hands had curled into fists on either side of her thighs in that dress with slits up her legs.
Something about her looked like an inhaled breath.
He’d never seen her look like that before… yet something about the expression there, on her sharp jaw and the curve of her too-symmetrical lips, was disturbingly familiar.
He glanced at Malek at the thought, and found the prescient looking not at the screens, but at Wynter. For a brief flash, it irritated Nick… then he realized the seer was looking through her the same way Wynter looked through those security monitors.
Nick glanced at Tai, and found the pre-teen staring at Wynter, too.
He wanted to ask.
He really wanted to ask what the fuck was going on, but he didn’t want to get in the way. Without knowing any of the specifics, he knew Wynter must be trying to do something to those living machines.
Although how the fuck she could influence them, given what they were, he had no––
“It’s like hacking,” Tai said, her voice calm.
Nick looked at her, jerking his eyes off Wynter’s face. Tai’s eyes remained on Wynter, her pale blue irises swallowed by deep black pupils.
“It’s like hacking,” she repeated. “Only mind-to-mind. It’s like finding the locks and trying different keys until you get inside.” Pausing, she added, “Ms. James is best at it. Me and Mal are protecting her. We’re also boosting her light with ours.”
Realizing the kid was explaining out loud for his benefit, Nick felt a flush of gratitude, even as he glanced nervously at Wynter.
“Can they hurt her?” he said.
Lara gave him a death stare. “Shut. Up.”
Nick scowled at her, but didn’t speak.
He knew she was right.
He knew St. Maarten was right, but he wanted to press Tai, anyway.
Like, what exactly were they going to do if they hacked that damned thing? Order it to stand down? Convince it to flip its own kill switch? Get it to go after Dimitry Yi instead? Assuming he was the one who stole the damned thing in the first place?
“They have a seer,” Wynter said, making Nick jump.
His eyes jerked back to her face.
Like Tai, her blue-green irises were swallowed in black pupil. Her voice was that same calm, flat tone the younger seer had been using.
“I’m trying to get around him––”
“Let Mal do that,” St. Maarten said, her voice stern.
“I can’t,” Wynter said, with the patience of explaining to a small child. “I don’t think Mal or Tai can see him. He’s doing a really good job of camouflaging his light by making it resonate with that of the machine. He’s shielding the living metal.”
Wynter paused, then went on, her voice unchanging.
“I think you’re right, Lara,” she said calmly. “He is likely the one who activated it in the first place, to get it out of the vault.”
“Is that true?” St. Maarten said, turning on Mal. “Jack? Is it true you can’t see this seer? The one protecting the A.I.?”
“Ms. James is showing us,” Malek said.
Unlike Wynter and Tai, his voice registered doubt, despite his taut expression.
“Ms. James is showing us the anomalies… the ripples caused by his light. But it’s like watching shadows play on the water. Like a distortion in a mirror. I can only see it when she points it out. Or when it changes. Otherwise, it blends totally into the background of the A.I.”
Tai nodded to her brother’s words.
“Yes,” she said calmly. “This is true for me, too.”
The young seer�
�s expression didn’t change.
Nick followed the direction of her gaze.
Then he, too, was staring at Wynter.
Like the facial expression he recognized but didn’t, something in the tone of her voice had resonated at a level he couldn’t explain, even to himself. It was like catching a fragment of a dream, or a memory of a dream, but only its flavor, nothing in the specifics.
He bit his tongue with one fang, forcing himself to remain silent.
“I still can’t see it,” Malek said, now sounding frustrated. “How will we neutralize him to get to the A.I., if none of us can see it without Ms. James? Tai can’t target him with us this close. Not without pulling us into her frequency.”
Remembering what happened when Tai pulled other beings into her “frequency,” Nick bit down harder on his tongue, looking between the three seers with his jaw clenched so hard his back teeth hurt.
“Can you see it, Tailaya?” Malek said, a beat later.
“No.”
Wynter frowned, and Nick’s eyes shifted instinctively back to her.
He could feel everyone else in the room staring at her as well.
“Maybe I can get more of an emotional reaction out of him,” she said, her voice low, close to a murmur. “Something to make him more visible… so Tai can see him.”
“Good,” Mal said, sounding relieved. “Like what?”
Wynter’s lips firmed.
She didn’t turn, didn’t look at Nick in any way, but he briefly got the impression her mind was on him, her attention on him. Whatever it was about, it lasted only a second before she was back to concentrating on the monitors––and presumably, on the sentient machine.
Nick’s eyes followed hers.
For the first time, he realized something had changed in the stairwell, specifically on the metal door that opened out to the lobby.
He swallowed, watching liquid metal seep through a new round hole in the center of the door. Pale green, faintly glowing, the substance swam out over the bar he’d twisted over the frame to lock it, engulfing it slowly.
Nick watched, sickly fascinated.
It occurred to him that the seeping metal must have been what he’d heard.
Fang & Metal: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 4) Page 30