“Eight years ago? So… she was a kid?”
“Her neighbor and close friend was a hybrid, sir. The I.S.F. had just taken him away for re-registration and his new implant. The police filed the complaint more as a warning, adding the second charge for her throwing projectiles at them—”
Nick chuckled again. Jesus. She threw rocks at cops aiming plasma rifles at her.
Kid had balls, he’d give her that.
“—However,” the A.I. continued. “She has no current official political affiliations, nor has she engaged in any anti-state activity in the time since, so the assumption by I.S.F. is that this was a personal issue for her, and therefore, her threat status is currently deemed low. No other instances of violence have been attributed to her in the time since.”
“Other than kicking ass in the ring,” Nick corrected.
“Other than that, sir.”
Nick had reached the southern gate of the Cauldron.
Pulling up to the security station, he rolled down his window and flashed his ID.
The guard looked over Nick in his sunglasses, then looked over his car, and frowned. He gave Nick a look that roughly translated as, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Nick shrugged it off, gunning the engine a little for good measure after the guy waved him through, opening the security gate to get him to the first set of secure locks that stood between the main street and the interior of the Cauldron itself.
Nick came to a stop in front of the second, electrified gate, and waited for the guard to shut the first gate behind him.
Once he had, the gate in front of him lit up, the red lights on top warning against getting too close as the perimeter fence began to open.
He did that two more times.
As the third gate opened, Nick finally got a glimpse of the Cauldron.
Already, there were humans waiting on the other side.
He didn’t wait, but gunned the engine, making them scatter as he floored it through their attempts to block his way. He glimpsed faces as he went by, and scowled when one of them thumped at one of the side panels with a baseball bat as he zoomed past.
He didn’t take his foot off the gas the rest of the way up 10th Avenue.
Well, not until he hit the first roadblock.
He didn’t hesitate, but brought the car to a screeching halt in the long patch of shade that covered that part of the avenue.
He knew they’d picked that spot because the shade would decrease visibility for most humans. For Nick, it made things easier.
Removing his sunglasses, he got out of the car, unholstering his gun.
He held it out where it was easily visible. Stepped forward, he walked fast, not hiding his vampire reflexes or gait. He made a point of finding the bodies and weapons of every human he could smell, making eye contact where he could, seeking them out in the darkness under the mostly bombed-out building providing the shade.
From the struts, it had once been a steel skyscraper.
“Drop the barricade!” Nick shouted, displaying the “V” tattoo on his arm, even as he used the same hand to display his badge. “I’m a Midnight. Do it now. Or I call my friends.”
There was a silence.
Then a ragged and underfed group of humans wearing oversized clothes appeared out of the ruins of the nearby building. Nick watched as they began pushing back the truck that made up the bulk of the barricade, the muscles on their bony frames straining from the effort.
They worked silently, without looking at him.
They weren’t allowed to have weapons in the Cauldron.
That didn’t stop some of them from obtaining weapons anyway, of course, but they weren’t about to risk losing those weapons to a Midnight, or provoke a raid that would get a bunch of them killed.
Even if human cops didn’t come here in person much anymore, that didn’t mean Nick’s threat about his “friends” was toothless.
Nick, vampire or not, was still part of the blue brotherhood.
The NYPD might resent Nick’s presence, but they would close ranks, fast, if outsiders fucked with him, whatever they thought of vampires themselves, or Nick as an individual. If the Cauldron-dwellers crossed that line, Nick’s coworkers would likely schedule a real raid in retaliation—a prospect that never went well for the locals.
Moreover, NYPD drones patrolled the skies above the Cauldron day and night. For the same reason, Nick could have rained hell down on all of them with one command via his headset—even if they did nothing more than piss him off.
The sad fact was, Nick could act pretty much with total impunity in here.
He could beat them up, feed on them, kill them, fuck them, steal their children to fuck and kill them, likely with or without permission, and no one would give him shit about it, simply because it was the Cauldron.
The combination of those threats hung over Nick even now, and pretty much guaranteed they would back off, no matter how shiny or enticing his car.
They couldn’t do much with the car, anyway.
Rip it apart and sell it for parts—that was about it.
Ninety percent of them wouldn’t have any means at all of selling a car like this on the outside, much less driving it. The Cauldron was cut off almost entirely from the outside world, and the black market in and out was mostly limited to smaller items, including trafficked children.
Grimacing at the thought, Nick climbed back into his car.
Shoving his mirrored sunglasses back over his eyes, he locked the doors.
Seconds later, he gunned the motor, roaring up the newly-cleared avenue.
After he’d dealt with that first barricade, brandishing his gun and badge, news must have spread up the road about who and what he was.
He didn’t encounter any other roadblocks on his way up the now-empty street.
He was about two thirds of the way through the length of the Cauldron when his eyes caught something to his left and he slammed on the brakes.
He hadn’t realized how fast he was going.
That was another thing about the Cauldron—no speed limits.
In this case, that meant his vampire reflexes had him fishtailing the car to a diagonal stop in the middle of the road.
For a few seconds, he just sat in his car, staring out through the tinted glass of the windshield and driver’s-side window.
It couldn’t be.
It just couldn’t be.
His vampire eyes stared out through his sunglasses and the darkened, protective glass at a painting done over the length of what remained of a brick wall.
It had probably been part of the outside of an apartment building once, maybe even a church. Now most of the building was gone, leaving only that rough surface of reddish-brown brick, which tapered off to choked weeds and dirt half a block up the avenue.
A few walls inside the rubble remained standing, but they evoked more of a ruin than a functional, modern building.
More than anything, the whole site reminded Nick of something he would have seen on a tourist trip to Europe, prior to the seer wars.
On that long piece of brick wall that ran alongside the road, someone had painted a hyper-realistic mural in what looked like oil paint. The painting covered most of the length of the wall, even down to the part where it tapered towards the road, breaking down to expose individual bricks and a young tree growing behind it.
The style of the painting looked identical to what Nick had seen in that alley filled with murdered hybrids in the Bronx.
The realism was just as disconcerting.
Nick gazed over the length of the brightly-colored painting, taking his foot off the brake to roll forward so he could take it all in as he inched by.
Apart from the painting style—which was pretty damned close to identical, and looked more so, the longer Nick stared at it—the painting had little in common with the one he’d seen in the alley the night before.
It was also a lot more ambiguous in meaning.
Really, it bo
rdered on a stylistic paradox.
The vast majority of the people depicted in those meticulous, precise brush-strokes were running away, terror etched into their hyper-realistic features.
Some were drawn large, and close-by.
Others were drawn in a more distant perspective, running far away, emphasizing the three-dimensional nature of the painting. All of them were running, screaming, falling down and stumbling in their haste to escape.
Some had blood on their faces.
Some had blood running from their ears and the corners of their eyes.
They weren’t running from guns, bombs, soldiers—or drones.
They weren’t even running from a vampire, or any other kind of monster.
At the very center of the panoramic image, the exact focal point from which all of them ran, a small, harmless-looking figure stood on a hill covered in grass.
It was a little girl.
Nick stared at her, at the bright, silver-blue, ice-like eyes the artist had painted on her, the blue-black hair with streaks of silver, along with silver, spiky bangs, the small body inside ripped jean shorts and a threadbare T-shirt and combat boots.
She looked about eleven years old.
Nick couldn’t see anything about her in the painting that would make people run, apart from those silver-blue eyes.
Those shocking, ice-blue eyes, just the color alone, made Nick stare.
They might be drawn that way to suggest some kind of enhancement—like Jordan at the precinct, or the girl Kit he’d met while he’d been out surfing—but it didn’t look like that to Nick.
Those eyes looked seer.
They look distinctly like seer eyes.
Not hybrid—seer.
The depth and light the artist somehow imparted into the depiction of the girl’s face, especially her eyes, suggested seer even more. The girl’s image seemed to positively radiate with light, making her look even more lifelike, and so real, Nick found he couldn’t tear his eyes from that round, little-girl face.
But the seers were all gone.
No seers had been ID’d, not one, anywhere on the planet, in almost one hundred years.
Even the hybrids were disappearing now, slowly going extinct between the crackdowns by I.S.F. and the fact that no new ones could be born without any seers around to give birth to them, or to impregnate compatible female humans.
Hell, there weren’t even any seers left here who weren’t compatible to breed with humans, much less the kind that were.
Frowning, Nick stared up and down the length of the painting.
He knew what he should do.
Even so, he hesitated a few seconds longer before he did it.
Shaking his head, half in annoyance with himself for following the regs, and half in annoyance with himself for hesitating to follow the regs, he plucked his headset up off the car’s passenger seat and fitted it into his ear, activating the open channel he accessed as a Midnight.
“Hey, Gertrude,” he said, as soon as he felt the channel click in. “Send me a drone. I’m inside the Cauldron. You should be able to track me via my implant—”
“We have you, Detective Midnight,” the metallic-sounding voice of the A.I. answered. “Just a drone, sir?” Gertrude queried politely. “Would you like me to pass on instructions? Are you in need of security backup, or—”
“No. Nothing like that.” Nick’s eyes returned to the mural. “I’d like image capture of the stretch of road I’m on. Specifically, the mural on the west side of the road from where my car is standing right now. Any bystanders should be scanned and ID’d as well.”
“Acknowledged. Sending a surveillance drone now, sir. Where would you like me to send the results of the capture once it’s completed?”
Nick hesitated again, scowling as he thought.
Like before, he knew what he was supposed to do.
A beat later, he found himself doing exactly that.
“Send it to the 17th Precinct,” he said. “Make it to the attention of Detectives Morley and Jordan. From Naoko Tanaka Midnight. Homicide division. Ident tag 9381T-112.”
“Affirmative, sir,” the female-sounding voice said pleasantly. “Is there anything else I can do for you while you’re down there, sir?”
Nick stared out the window of his car, frowning at the girl painted on the brick wall.
His eyes returned to those shocking blue eyes.
“No,” he said, memorizing her features, every detail of her appearance. “Not unless you can explain to me whatever it is that I’m looking at right now.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir,” the A.I. said, still polite.
Nick grunted, nodding before he placed both hands back on the steering wheel.
“Nothing more, then,” he said. “Thanks, Gertrude. I’m leaving the area now, but send those images back to the 17th, like I said.” On a whim, he added, “And to my headset, if you don’t mind. I’d like to look at them before I return to duty.”
“As you wish, sir,” the voice said, as chipper and metallic-sounding as before. “Have a good day, Detective Naoko Tanaka Midnight.”
Nick didn’t bother to answer, but frowned a little at her use of his full name.
Was that some new protocol, meant to be polite?
Shrugging it off, he gazed back at the painting on the brick wall, looking at the girl a last time before gunning the engine and taking his foot off the brake.
He was about to leave the area entirely when he hit the brakes again, noticing a figure staring at his car from the shadows behind the brick wall.
Nick again fishtailed the car to a dead stop.
He just left the car there, idling, as he tried to make out the form in more detail.
If the sun had been further down in the sky, or if this part of the road had been protected from the sun’s rays more than, say, not at all, Nick would have gotten out of his car altogether.
He would have approached the man standing there and tried to talk to him. If nothing else, he would have asked him about the mural and the girl it depicted.
But the sun beat directly down on his dark green, 1970 Mercury Cougar Eliminator 428 Super Cobra Jet with the white racing stripes, aiming down at the tinted glass with all the force, heat and confidence of midday.
The New York Protected Area’s interior dome sun was designed to mimic the real sun’s rays almost exactly, making them direct enough, and hot enough, that Nick was reluctant to even roll down the window to call out to the other person.
He found himself wondering if they would answer him if he did call out.
Whoever they were, they stood just inside the crumbling opening of what had been a window, in what remained of one of those ruin-like, free-standing walls. The window stood only about twenty feet behind where someone had covered a wall in a disturbingly-realistic mural of adult humans running away from what appeared to be a child seer.
Now that he was closer, Nick found himself thinking most of the building looked like it’d been destroyed by a tank, or possibly a bomb. Given the area of the city, the seer fighting force, the Army of the Resurrected Fallen (A.R.F.) had likely done it.
It was a weird fucking thought.
Nick stared at the figure standing there.
Something about their stillness disturbed him.
Could they be a vampire?
Now that he could almost see their face, Nick could have sworn they weren’t staring at his car, unlike most of the humans Nick had glimpsed in here. Instead, they appeared to be staring directly at him, meaning Nick himself.
After a few more seconds, Nick grew even more sure of that.
They were staring at him.
When the lanky form moved slightly to one side, making more of itself visible inside the opening, and more of its skin kissed by sun, Nick realized something else.
The person standing there wore a gray, sleeveless sweatshirt with a hood.
Now that Nick could see more of his outline inside the rectangular w
indow frame, it looked like a man, likely a human given the colorful swirl of tattoos covering nearly the entire outside of the man’s left arm.
Like the gray sweatshirt, the pattern of tattoos was eerie in its familiarity.
It had to be him.
Nick’s mystery voyeur had to be the same artist he’d seen on the CCTV footage painting a mural in the Bronx two weeks ago.
What in the ever-living fuck was going on?
As Nick stared, he again grew tempted to risk leaving the car.
Glancing around the back seat, and then thinking about what he had in the trunk, he realized he really couldn’t. He had nothing with him to shield himself from the sun, nothing at all. The stretch of open ground between himself and the tattoo-covered human was too long.
Still, he sat there, muscles tensed, trying to decide.
Could he really risk losing him?
The whole thing was impossible.
It was just… impossible.
How had he gotten out of the Cauldron to paint that mural?
Could he really have a pass-card to get through the gates? If he did, that would make him different than every other resident of the Cauldron Nick had ever encountered.
How had he gotten to the Bronx?
The only way there was by train. You needed an ident-tat to ride the train. How the hell had he gotten on… or off… an intra-area train without one?
If he really lived here, inside the Devil’s Cauldron, how had none of the patrol drones picked him up for being un-reg’d?
Nick was still staring at the figure in the building’s shadow when the drone he’d called for swooped down. Nick glanced up, frowning, as the squat, beetle-like machine hovered, then floated slowly across the length of the brick wall, no doubt photographing every inch of it, just as Nick had requested.
Nick only watched it for a second.
Then his eyes returned to the opening in the wall where the man had been standing, staring at Nick’s car, staring at Nick.
But the man was gone.
Nick saw nothing at all when he looked into that dark opening.
Nothing but shadows and crumbling brick.
Chapter 6
Feeding
Vampire Detective Midnight Page 6