In fact, now that I thought about it, Jem probably hadn’t woken up yet because this was probably the first time he’d slept in a week.
He’d been pacing this room and the outside corridors since they brought Nick in.
The other seers made him eat.
I saw Jax more or less force-feed him a tuna sandwich while Mika looking on approvingly.
It was touching and heartbreaking and adorable all at the same time.
When Black tugged at my hand, nudging me to leave the room with him, I gave both men a last look, feeling a sharp wave of love for both of them.
Then, smiling a little, I followed Black to the door.
I could wait a little longer.
It was worth the wait.
Space cakes, and all.
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BLACK IS MAGIC
(Quentin Black Mystery #15)
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**Brand new installment in the Quentin Black Mystery series by USA Today & Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author, JC Andrijeski!**
The cat is out of the bag. Humans know about seers.
Whatever few still believed it was a giant hoax, a lie perpetuated by the powers that be, all of that got wiped away in the last, epic battle over Los Angeles.
Now the seer race is on trial, along with its two faces:
Charles “Lucky Lucifer” and his seer terrorists who want to wipe out the vampire race, enslave humans, and rule over all…
…and Black’s hodge-podge band of seers and vampires, who wants the races to co-exist peacefully, who want the world to embrace a new way of existence.
Funnily enough, it turns out Black is the optimist.
Even among his own people, who witnessed how badly things can go wrong between seers and humans on another, now-destroyed world, Black’s idealistic wish for a “live and let live” society generates more than a small amount of resistance. Even for those who want peace as badly as he does, Black’s goals of a transparent, world-wide kumbaya strikes them as naïve in the extreme.
Even his own wife, Miri, worries that things won’t go the way her husband hopes… even before Charles whips his followers into a murderous, fear-filled frenzy, plunging half the world into chaos and what might be the beginnings of its first real race war.
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Want to learn more about what happens to Nick Tnnaka? Check out the VAMPIRE DETECTIVE MIDNIGHT series:
VAMPIRE DETECTIVE MIDNIGHT
(Vampire Detective Midnight #1)
Link: http://bit.ly/VDM-1
Nick Midnight, homicide detective, had his heart ripped out, stomped on, destroyed. It nearly killed him.
He doesn’t talk about that. Anyway, things will be different in New York. No complications. No kids needing his help. No relationships. None of that human-vampire-psychic crap that got him in trouble in the past, or turned him evil for nearly a century. He’d toe the line, keep his head down, and do his job for the NYPD, where he works as a Midnight, a vampire who helps humans hunt down murderers.
Then Wynter James shows up.
A gorgeous, sexy, disturbingly intuitive, seer-human hybrid, Wynter treats Nick like she already knows him, like they’ve known one another for years. Nick wants her, bad, but he knows it’s an absolutely terrible idea, and not only because they’re not even legally allowed to date.
Everything’s already going sideways with his first, big case––dead hybrids, a seer kid who needs his help, graffiti that tells the future, and Wynter, a woman he’s so drawn to, it makes him actually insane. Oh, and a possible conspiracy involving the richest humans in New York.
In other words, it’s Nick’s worst nightmare. It’s everything he swore he’d never do again.
Now he’s going rogue, likely to get himself killed for a woman he just met––or end up back on the run, in that dark place he thought he’d finally left behind.
VAMPIRE DETECTIVE MIDNIGHT is a gritty, romantic new series set in a futuristic, dystopian New York populated by vampires, humans and psychics trying to rebuild their world after a devastating race war nearly obliterates the previous one. Written by USA TODAY and WALL STREET JOURNAL bestselling author, JC Andrijeski, it features vampire homicide detective, Nick Tanaka, who works as a “Midnight,” or vampire in the employ of the human police department. Perfect for fans of paranormal mystery and sexy urban fantasy!
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SAMPLE PAGES
VAMPIRE DETECTIVE MIDNIGHT
(Vampire Detective Midnight #1)
1 / Smells Too Good
HE SMELLED THE BLOOD, even before he turned the corner into the alley.
He heard them talking about him only a few steps after that.
That was the problem with working with humans.
One problem, anyway.
They had shitty hearing, so they assumed everyone else did, too.
“Where’s Midnight?” he heard the lead detective say.
Nick heard the man’s clothing move as he looked around, maybe making sure a random vampire wasn’t lurking next to him already, or that he didn’t see Nick himself walking towards him in the dark.
“I thought he was coming to this?” the detective muttered, taking a sip of something—something hot from the quick, cut-off way he sipped it, likely artificial coffee given that Nick could make out the faint, bitter-tinged odor of that, too.
Of course, no one called it “artificial coffee” anymore.
They just called it coffee.
But Nick remembered real coffee, well enough to know the bilge they drank now wasn’t it.
It was an insult to coffee.
The lead detective glanced around where he stood a second time. He checked his watch again.
“Where the hell is he?” he muttered. “We could use a blood-sniffer right now. Christ. Look at this mess.”
The man standing next to him grunted. “Fucking bloodsuckers. He’s probably paying a blood whore to jerk him off while he drains her dry in a dark alley somewhere…”
The man trailed, mid-thought, flushing as Nick rounded the corner of the building.
Nick stepped deliberately into the light, right as he entered the narrow alley where they were all crouched, standing over something he could smell but not yet see.
He’d been right about the artificial coffee.
The detective standing closest to the scene, closest to the female tech leaning over the nearest body, collecting samples and photographing it from all angles, took another sip of the watered-down crap, gripping one of those semi-organic, morphing cups in his left hand.
Damn, Nick missed real coffee.
He knew it wouldn’t taste right to him anymore, not as a vampire, but he missed it anyway.
Only the truly rich could afford real coffee these days. The few plants still in existence were tended meticulously in greenhouses run by boutique farmers who catered exclusively to the super-rich—the same handful of people who basically ran everything.
“You’re late,” the lead detective, a tall, scarecrow-thin black man with gray hair named Morley, declared neutrally.
Nick ignored the dig, looking around the scene.
Six. He smelled six.
He only saw five bodies, three female and two male, but he smelled six different types of blood, six different DNA imprints. The sixth, another female, could be one of the killers, but it didn’t smell like it.
She smelled dead.
“Check th
e dumpster,” he said.
He motioned towards the bin shoved against the wall to the left and a few meters behind where the techs and detectives were focused.
“You’ve got six bodies,” Nick added, hands still in his pockets.
He continued to walk the scene, his nose wrinkling as he got closer.
As he did, he was even more sure of the sixth body.
He was still looking around, smelling the air, when he felt his fangs start to extend.
In reflex, he clenched his jaw, repressing it. Even as he did, he glanced around surreptitiously, checking faces, although the likelihood one of the humans might have noticed was pretty much nil.
Fuck, had he come here hungry?
Why was his stomach getting weird on him all of a sudden?
Shoving the thought from his mind before it started to affect his eye color, or his overall demeanor, he focused his attention back on the scene.
From what he could tell, apart from the woman they’d thrown in the dumpster, the killers didn’t get near enough to touch any of the other five bodies. They didn’t leave much in the way of trace imprints as a result. They definitely hadn’t gotten into any kind of physical fight with the victims, not enough to leave blood, or anything with DNA.
At best, the techs might find some fibers or a few stray hairs in the mix.
Nick had his doubts they would.
Whoever these assholes were, apart from the anomaly with the woman in the dumpster, they seemed to know what they were doing. Anyway, if there was hair here, he likely would have smelled that, too, despite the overpowering smell of blood.
Sniffing the air again, he frowned.
The blood in the alley was really damned pungent, even for how much of it there was. It struck him as somehow more pungent than usual.
It bothered him, how pungent it was.
Shoving the thought from his mind, he focused back on whoever had done this.
He smelled four of them.
He smelled someone else, as well.
Someone more recent.
“The scene’s been contaminated,” he commented sourly.
Without waiting for an answer, he walked past the other detectives, aiming his feet for the dumpster he’d motioned towards earlier. He wasn’t thrilled with rooting around a dumpster that smelled like dead blood, or even being this close to a bunch of dead bodies, but the sooner he got his part of the job out of the way, the sooner he could get the hell out of there.
Like most vampires, he hated being around dead things.
The irony didn’t escape him, which is why he didn’t bother to mention that fact to most humans.
Most of them would look at him like he was nuts.
Well, that, and, generally speaking, explaining to a human how differently their blood smelled to him alive, versus how their blood smelled to him dead, tended to make most humans more than a little uncomfortable.
Donning latex gloves of his own, he lifted the lid of the dumpster gingerly once he got close enough, and stared down at the contents.
A clump of black hair greeted him, long and tangled over a back wearing a faux-leather jacket with a brightly colored, virtual reality (VR)-enhanced cartoon dog on the back.
Someone had thrown her into the dumpster, face-down.
The cartoon dog bounced around her back in the dim light, oblivious to its owner’s death. When Nick lifted the lid higher, it triggered the VR sensors a second time, and the cartoon dog started barking at him, wagging its butt and tail playfully.
It didn’t make any sound.
Something about that silent, dancing cartoon dog and the crumpled corpse smelling too-pungently of blood and death made Nick grimace.
Holding his breath, he lifted the lid higher.
Definitely a woman, from the curve of her hip in the form-fitting, shiny pants she wore, and the high-heeled, VR-enhanced pink and purple boots.
She smelled relatively young.
Twenties. Possibly early thirties.
He sniffed again and frowned.
It wasn’t fake leather. It was the real thing.
He glanced down the rest of her clothes, taking a second look at her metallic-sheen pants. They fit her perfectly. The pants also had a more subtle virtual enhancement, one that sent shimmers of sparkles down her long, toned-looking legs and curve of well-exercised butt.
Her knee-high boots looked expensive, and shimmered with virtual cartoon dogs that matched the one on her real-leather jacket. The boots might be real leather, too, under the VR panels. Her hair, where it wasn’t matted with blood, was silky and expensively cut.
Whoever she was, she had money.
He glanced around the rest of the dim space of the dumpster.
It was empty.
No purse. No headset, or armband.
The only thing in there was the woman.
So why had they bothered trying to hide the body?
He squinted down at her, tilting his head to see her from the side, to try and get a better look at her profile.
“They destroyed her face,” he announced after another minute. “Her teeth, too, it looks like. They might have even removed them. I don’t see an ident-tat.”
Frowning, he leaned closer, squinting down at one of her leather-clad arms. He stared down at the hand at the end of that arm.
“…They took her fingers, too,” he added.
“Fantastic,” Morley muttered from behind him.
Nick carefully lowered the lid to the dumpster, stepping back.
“Better photograph it,” he said. “Whoever she was, she had money. Someone’s probably looking for her.”
Three police techs in white, semi-transparent decontamination suits were standing at a safe distance behind him, presumably waiting for him to move away before they started photographing and taking samples.
One of them cleared their throat, speaking up.
“Those too,” she said, blanching when Nick turned.
She motioned towards the bodies on the floor of the alley.
“…They have money, too,” she clarified. “Expensive clothes. Manicures. Some plastic surgery treatments. At least one pair of diamond earrings—”
“They left all that?” the younger detective said, puzzled. “Why?”
The tech looked at him, then back to Nick.
She didn’t answer.
Realizing he stood between the techs and the woman in the dumpster even now, Nick backed off to give them room. From the looks on their faces, they weren’t about to approach with him standing there, no matter how fuzzy and cute he tried to make himself.
Frowning up and down the alley, he looked for signs of tampering with the scene.
Who was the contaminant? Did a beat cop walk through here?
It didn’t smell like a cop. He couldn’t quite explain that to himself, not in so many words, but cops had a particular imprint, and he didn’t get it off this person.
He didn’t like the anomaly of the woman.
“It’s likely she was the primary target,” he muttered, mostly to himself as he continued to scan the scene. “The others may have been incidental.”
“Cause of death?” Morley said, his voice pointed. “They all die by plasma rifle? Or did the one in the dumpster die by something else?”
Nick glanced at him, then frowned.
“Plasmas, yes. The woman in the dumpster, too. They hit her in the face.” He motioned towards his own face in rote. “That doesn’t strike me as an accident. They tried to use the rifle to hide it, but the superficial damage to hide her ID all looked post-mortem to me.”
Still thinking, he added,
“At least one of the killers carried an old-school projectile. He shot the one in the dumpster at least once, possibly twice. At least once in the head. That shot didn’t go all the way through.”
At Morley’s puzzled look, Nick jerked his chin towards the metal container.
“I can smell the metal slug,” he explained. “Smells differen
t than blood.”
Morley grimaced.
Turning away, he muttered something in Russian, sipping at his coffee.
Nick pretended not to notice the grimace, or the Russian, or that both things were aimed at him.
Stepping back into the main part of the alley, he went back to walking the scene. Using his eyes now, as much as his nose, he carefully skirted the pools of blood and smaller chunks of flesh to keep it off his shoes.
He frowned down at the next body he encountered, a male, adding,
“I don’t think you’ll find much DNA from the killers, not even with them having screwed around with the one body.”
He motioned behind him vaguely, in the direction of the dumpster.
“This looks to me like a professional hit. At the very least, these are smarter than average killers. They wore gloves—real ones, the kind we use. That, or they’ve had their fingerprints professionally removed. I don’t smell hair or skin fragments. I don’t see any shoeprints, so they must have known to wear flatteners. That, or they had someone come clean up, but I don’t see any evidence of a blower.”
Nick motioned towards the walls, where the blood-spatter remained intact.
“See that? That’s natural blood spray,” he said. “A blower would have pitted all of that with dirt, and fucked up the pattern. I don’t see any of that here.”
Black Of Wing: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery Romance (Quentin Black Mystery Book 14) Page 28