She nodded, but from the hesitant look on her mouth, that hadn’t been what was on her mind. She stared at him, her blue eyes wide.
“Can I request you?” she said after a pause, flushing. “Can I request to come here again?”
He smiled at her, touched, in spite of himself.
He knew both of them were still reacting to the blood connection, and she was reacting to his venom, but still, it was nice.
And she wasn’t wrong. They’d been compatible.
Compatible was perfect.
Compatible, Nick could handle.
They’d been compatible—but nothing more than that.
After Los Angeles, the last thing Nick needed was anything more than compatible—with anything, in any part of his life, in any sense of the word. Getting involved is what got him sent out here in the first place.
He didn’t like to think about where he might end up next, if he screwed things up here, in New York.
Compatible was perfect.
Rising to his feet, he walked to her.
He knew he was moving more vampire-like than human, just from the way her eyes and even her facial expression followed him, growing more and more riveted. She watched his body and face in fascination, fear, and desire as he approached.
He reached her in a few darting steps, and gripped her arms briefly, then kissed her on the mouth, nipping at her tongue.
“Yes,” he said, pressing his forehead briefly to hers. “If you want to request me, please do. That was nice.”
“It was nice,” she said, her voice a near-whisper.
Smiling he kissed her again.
Then, stepping back, he motioned towards his door.
“I need to work now,” he told her apologetically.
She nodded, but he could see the reluctance on her face, and feel it through the blood connection they shared.
Again, it touched him more than annoyed him.
Truthfully, she needed affection as much as sex.
He could feel that strongly on her, too.
Like most humans in this post-war world, she was positively affection-starved, and connection-starved. Maybe that was the real reason she was doing this.
He couldn’t be the solution to her problem.
Even if he wanted it, even if he had any remote interest in such a thing, he’d never be allowed to start up something for real with her—never.
The best he could do was request her, knowing she was requesting him.
Then he’d just have to hope some fucker at I.S.F. didn’t decide that meant they’d developed an unhealthy fixation on one another and needed to be separated, rather than allowing them to go a few more rounds together until one or the other of them got bored.
With I.S.F., it so often seemed to depend on the asshole you got assigned to your case.
From Nick’s end, most of those people were faceless unless something went wrong.
So he walked her to the door.
He kissed her again.
Then he said goodbye to her, not knowing whether he’d ever see her again.
It only occurred to him after she’d left that he forgot to ask her name.
He lost track of time in front of the virtual monitor.
He was so absorbed in studying the painting he’d seen in the Cauldron, combined with running search-scans of the city’s buildings, looking for examples of similar artwork, he jumped when the call came in.
Then he frowned, checking the timepiece on his headset.
Christ. It was already dark out.
Checking the ID on the call, he picked up, checking the timepiece again. He wasn’t late. His internal clock hadn’t been that far off. But he needed to shower, and get dressed.
“Hey.” It was Jordan, the younger of the two detectives in the Bronx, his voice wary. “Can you come in early? Morley is asking.”
Nick immediately floated his idea to spend the night in the Cauldron.
“No,” Jordan said. Nick could almost see him shaking his head. “Not tonight, Midnight. We need you here. We need you to come in… now.”
Nick frowned, letting it turn into a near-scowl even though he knew there was some chance the human had his visuals switched on.
“Why?” he said after a pause. “I sent you the drone feed. Clearly there’s some connection between whoever left that painting at the scene in the Bronx and the one—”
“We have another one,” Jordan cut in.
His voice sounded harder that time, more grudging, like he was almost reluctant to bring him in on it.
Nick could relate to the feeling.
“Another what?” he said.
“Another bunch of dead hybrids,” the human retorted. “Another fucking painting, okay? We need you to come down here.” After a pause, he added, his voice subdued, “The brass is interested now. This one is in the Financial District. And it looks like most of these hybrids were passing as human, like the last bunch.”
“More rich socialite pets?”
“Yes. Well… not exactly. These ones were kids.”
Nick blinked. “Kids?”
“Yeah. Hybrid kids. Teenagers, really. They all went to the same fancy-schmancy boarding school in the Northeastern Protected District.”
Nick stared off, feeling that hardness return to his gut.
“Rich kid hybrids,” he muttered. “Jesus.”
Still, on some level, it made sense.
Rich humans would have been the ones who could afford to hire seers for sex, back when that kind of thing happened. At least some of those humans must have carried the gene that allowed them to reproduce with the glow-eyes, and later, with other humans that carried the seer blood forward.
“Yeah,” Jordan said, sighing.
The guarded, wary tone dropped marginally from his words, turning it into more of a regular cop-voice.
“…We’re thinking now the parents might’ve had some understanding in place with the school,” he said. “Just from the sheer number of them. Like it might be part of some black market network thing, where the rich get tipped off on where to send their hybrid kids. A place they could pay more, and not have their true parentage exposed.”
“So they’re dead now?” Nick said. “The kids?”
“Yup.”
“How old?”
“Ranging between thirteen and sixteen.”
“How many?”
“Eight this time.” Jordan’s voice developed another edge. “Look. Why don’t you just come down here? Look at the damned mess yourself? Why’re you wasting both of our time having me repeat all this stuff, when you’re just going to come down here and see it all, anyway?”
It was a good question.
Nick didn’t have a good answer.
He knew he was dragging his feet.
He also knew why.
He’d really wanted to scout the Cauldron, go looking for that joker with all the tattoos and the sleeveless gray sweatshirt.
It looked like he’d be stuck with his two-week-old handiwork, instead.
Exhaling in frustration, he nodded, mostly to himself.
“On my way,” he said.
Chapter 8
Red Cube
He ended up driving the Cougar, after all.
Even though he would have preferred not to.
He still had some hope of getting done early enough that he might be able to look around the Devil’s Cauldron for their street artist.
He supposed he could still do that, but it would mean either taking his car into the Cauldron again, and risking it being dismantled for parts, or driving back home after the crime scene work and catching the subway down to the 110th Street station, the closest station to the north entrance of the Cauldron, and just west of Central Park.
From there, he could walk to the security gates, and pass through on foot.
That, or he could take a cab from downtown, pick up the car tomorrow. Or he could try parking as close as he could get to the southern or northern gates,
but that meant entrusting his car to a public garage in the middle of the night, and in a not-great part of town.
None of those options really appealed to him.
He could possibly find a place to park just outside the River of Gold, the wealthy, high-security area directly adjacent to Central Park, but most of that area was gated, too, and Nick had his doubts he’d find anything he had access to.
Not without a warrant.
Or an invitation.
Pushing all of that from his mind as he parked on the street next to a number of black and whites with their lights flashing, he shoved open the driver’s-side door and stepped out.
He immediately regretted his parking choice, seeing a lot of eyes turn his way, taking in first him, then the vintage Cougar he was stepping out of.
Usually, he parked a few blocks away, to avoid calling attention to himself.
Really, to avoid calling attention to the car.
Now he saw envy and annoyance on a number of faces as they looked from him to the car and back again. The fact that most of them believed vampires got a free ride on their tax dollars didn’t exactly help with the image.
Nick didn’t bother to point out that he would have given up the fancy apartment in Washington Heights and the free blood-whores with nice breasts for even half the freedoms he used to enjoy back when he was human. These fuckers didn’t seem to get the I.S.F. paid for his cooperation and lack of freedom with things that really didn’t matter a hell of a lot in the larger scheme of things.
He would have preferred to hunt his own food, too.
He would also prefer to be able to ask it to stay, rather than having to kick it out when his time allotment was up. He would prefer to have one around long enough that he remembered to learn their damned name—and there was actually some point to learning their names.
He’d also like to keep one around long enough that there was some point to making them sad when he had to boot them out the door… and it didn’t just feel like random cruelty.
How things were now, under the I.S.F., made for a less-complicated life, sure.
It also meant Nick more or less lived in a cage.
Kind of like a pet tiger.
A pet tiger that hadn’t been on a real date in close to fifty years.
Firming his jaw, he ignored all the dirty looks, buttoning the front of his coat once he’d straightened to his full height and making his way across Church Street to Zuccotti Park, where Jordan said he and Morley would be waiting for him.
Jordan warned him to expect the Feds and a few others from the Midnight Homicide division, including Charlie and her partner, Natalie Villanova.
Nick found all of them—at least everyone from his precinct—not far from the Joie de Vivre sculpture, which was looking a bit worse for wear, now that he saw it up close.
This always struck him as a pretty piss-poor excuse for a park.
Most of it was paved. Even the rows of trees, now lit up for the night with small, white bulbs, like Christmas lights, seemed to grow out of the cement, since most of their roots lived under the flat walking area.
Still, it was pretty at night.
From Nick’s perspective, it just wasn’t a fucking park. Not a real one.
“Midnight!” Charlie yelled. “Over here.”
Nick fought not to roll his eyes, but walked over to where they were all standing, looking down at something on the ground.
Realizing he’d been able to smell it more or less as soon as he got out of his car, he grimaced once he got closer, putting his hand up to his nose and mouth in spite of himself.
Seeing him, Charlie burst out in a smile, knocking into him with her shoulder as she snickered.
“Squeamish, Midnight? Seriously?”
“Dead things don’t smell good,” he told her, giving her an annoyed look. “Don’t you have your cheat sheet on vampires?”
She stared at him blankly, then broke out in a laugh. “Isn’t that your job? Smelling dead things? What the hell do you do for us, if it isn’t that?”
“Just because we can smell a thing doesn’t mean we enjoy it.”
“You’re in the wrong line of work, Midnight,” she said cheerfully, thumping him on the shoulder again.
He wasn’t used to so much human contact, not since he’d been turned.
What was it with all of these fucking New Yorkers touching him all the time?
The women especially seemed to have their hands on him all the damned time.
He didn’t quite scowl at her, but he found himself walking out of range of her hands and body, making his way closer to the source of blood.
Once he saw Jordan and Morley standing together, he found himself shifting direction, walking over to the two of them.
Morley turned when Nick got closer.
The instant he did, he jumped a little, as if surprised to see Nick there—or maybe he was just surprised at how close Nick got to him before Morley felt or heard anything.
The tall, older African-American man recovered fast.
His eyes calmed in the next set of seconds, flickering over Nick as if taking his measure.
“What do you think?” he said, motioning with his chin and gray-haired head towards the ground. “That’s your artist again. Isn’t it?”
Nick frowned.
Taking a few steps forward, he looked in the direction Morley indicated.
This time, the image had been painted on the pavement itself.
Nick made a mental note to change the parameters of his city-wide search to include floor and ground surfaces when he got back to his research portal at home. He’d confined his original query to the walls of buildings, but maybe this guy wrote on all kinds of surfaces—the damned ground, the sides of trucks or trains, pipes, trees, park benches.
Pushing the thought from his mind, he concentrated on the painting in front of him.
Again, it looked like it predated the scene.
Speckles of blood made their way onto the depiction, just like before.
Because of where it was, shoe prints and scuff marks told Nick the painting had likely been there for at least a few days, despite the fact that the killings themselves looked recent—even more recent than the scene they’d found in the alley the night before.
“We had the techs bring a field test kit this time,” Morley told him, giving him a grim look. “DNA. They think the blood is hybrid again.”
Nick nodded, feeling a swell of nausea as he looked down at the young, broken bodies.
“Jordan told me,” he said only.
Eight of them, just like Jordan said on the line.
This time, they looked evenly broken out by sex—four boys and four girls.
They might technically be teenagers, but they looked like children.
To Nick’s possibly-jaded eyes, they looked like babies.
“What the fuck,” he muttered under his breath. “Who is doing this?”
That time, Jordan and Morley looked at him.
Both of their expressions reflected surprise, possibly at the emotion in Nick’s voice. Nick saw them exchange glances a few seconds later. He saw Morley’s eyebrows go up as he conveyed his surprise to the younger human.
Nick did his best to ignore all of it.
He knew it would have been completely pointless to remind them he’d been human once—that he wasn’t as different from them as they seemed to want to believe.
His eyes returned to the painting.
Even though it depicted the prelude to what he saw lying on the park floor, only about six yards from where he stood, it was easier to look at the scene through the eyes of the artist than the eyes of whoever had butchered those kids.
Nick imagined he could sense a kind of sympathy there, in those detailed brush strokes and lines.
Like last night, the painting showed the murder.
Four people, clearly the exact same four people—three male, one female, the female carrying the antique, police-issue shotgun—stoo
d in front of the eight hybrid kids. The kids were painted screaming and crying, holding their hands up as if to shield themselves from the guns.
One of them had already been shot.
Blood soaked through the school uniform shirt of the shot kid, right on the abdomen, and the others huddled around him, seemingly protectively, their hands held up to those guns.
Had they been asking them to stop?
Had they been asking them why?
Pleading with them?
Nick wondered if the killers bothered to explain. Did they tell them anything at all?
Or just gun down a bunch of kids like animals, without saying a word?
Did they apologize first?
“Why hybrids?” he muttered. “Are there really that many hybrids running around these days that someone felt threatened? Threatened enough to cull the herd?” Still frowning, he added, “Why not just call the authorities on them?”
Again, Morley and Jordan looked at him, then exchanged puzzled looks.
Again, Nick didn’t return their stares.
“Are they going through the rest of the kids at that school?” he asked after a pause.
“I.S.F is sending someone,” Jordan acknowledged. “I think the agency wants to surprise them with a DNA inspection from an outside branch… but given that this happened, there’s a good chance the school administration will get a head’s up.”
Nick nodded, still frowning, still staring down at the faces in the painting.
Like before, the killers all wore masks.
He wondered if the killers themselves had seen the painting. After all, unlike the last one, this one wasn’t hidden behind a dumpster. If they had seen it, assuming they didn’t make it themselves, what could have been going through their minds?
Did this happen every time they got hired to kill someone?
Or only when they murdered hybrids?
“Any solid IDs yet?” he said, still staring down at the painted masked faces. “You had the original painting from the CCTV in the Bronx, right? The one in the alley? You manage to pull any IDs off facial rec with that?”
Jordan shook his head, once.
“No,” he said.
“No?” Nick turned, frowning at him. “Not even of any of the vics? What about the woman in the dumpster?”
Vampire Detective Midnight Page 8