Of course, someone else could have stolen the keys before forensics got there.
Someone else might have stolen them before the girl got there, too.
It struck Nick as unlikely, though.
For one thing, they probably would have found his car.
It was the only antique on the street.
Unless the person was an idiot, they would know keys like that couldn’t belong to anything built in the last century. Nick had been forced, via regulations, to convert the Cougar’s engine to a partial electric and attach a filter system to eliminate emissions, but the steel-frame body with its old-school key doors stood out like a sore thumb.
Reaching the driver’s side of his car, Nick glanced around, making sure no one was paying attention to him right then, and tried the handle.
Hopefully, if anyone was watching, they’d just think he had a DNA or fingerprint lock on the thing.
The door opened with a soft click.
Without looking inside, Nick opened it just enough to insert himself through the opening.
Dropping his weight into the driver’s seat, he shut the door behind him and forced himself to relax, untensing the hardest of his muscles.
Only then did he look in the rearview mirror.
A pair of bright, silver-blue eyes stared back at him.
Nick flinched.
Then he turned his head all the way around, staring at her.
He couldn’t believe it at first.
That, or maybe he just didn’t want to believe it.
It was the little girl from the mural.
It had to be her. She looked exactly like the girl he’d seen depicted on that brick wall inside the Devil’s Cauldron.
He stared at her, at her inhuman, ice-blue eyes, and watched her stare back at him. As they just sat there, staring at one another, it struck him that she didn’t look afraid.
Nervous maybe, but not afraid.
She looked even younger than he remembered from the painting.
Seeing the nerves in her face blooming into something a lot closer to anxiety, he held up a hand in a seer’s peace gesture then motioned a seer’s reassurance with his fingers.
“Hand over the keys,” he said, gruff. “So I can get us out of here.”
She blinked, staring at him with wide eyes.
Looking at those stunning irises, Nick frowned.
“You speak English?” he said. He switched to Prexci, the seer tongue, although he knew his Prexci had never been good to begin with, and now was rusty as shit. “I won’t hurt you,” he told her. “I vow it. You’re okay with me.”
Her eyes flinched violently, maybe from the Prexci, which she clearly recognized.
“Just give me the keys, little girl,” he said, switching back to English in a growl. “We need to get the fuck out of here. Preferably before someone walks over here and asks me if anything’s wrong. Preferably before someone sees me driving off with you.”
There was a bare pause that time.
She reached out her hand gingerly, and dropped his car keys into his palm.
Feeling a tension in his shoulders lift, he nodded.
“Thanks,” he said.
Turning around in the leather seat, he jammed the keys into the ignition, then, despite what he’d said about needing to get her out of there, he just sat there for a few seconds, fighting to collect his thoughts.
What the hell was he going to do with her?
He couldn’t bring her back to his apartment.
Even if the I.S.F. spooks didn’t know what she was, they’d still think he brought a human kid back to his lair to feed on. That would never fly, no matter how hard he tried to convince them the kid wasn’t a snack, but some kind of twisted houseguest.
No, he had to find somewhere else to stash the kid.
Realizing there was only one option for that really, he scowled.
He didn’t like leaving a kid in the Cauldron, no matter who she was—particularly not alone. Particularly not a young girl, who was as likely to be sold as she was raped if the humans living in there managed to overpower her.
Thinking about that a minute longer—thinking about the reality of that—he realized he couldn’t do it.
Maybe he needed to risk his apartment, after all.
He’d have to figure out some way to smuggle her inside.
He’d also need to do something about surveillance. But there was some chance he might have an option for that second part. Maybe.
Still frowning, he turned the key in the ignition, glancing at the girl in the rearview mirror.
“How good are you at the psychic stuff, kid?” he said, gruff. “You any good at pushing humans? Making them see things that aren’t there? Or, more to the point… making them not-see things that are there?”
There was a bare pause.
Then the kid did the damnedest thing, still holding Nick’s gaze in the review mirror.
She smiled.
Chapter 10
I Like You
He got her upstairs.
It wasn’t easy.
Luckily, it was still the middle of the night.
All the vamps who lived in his building had jobs via I.S.F., so they were out working. The corridors were completely devoid of life when he brought her into the building and they pushed their way past the human doorman and the woman working in the lobby below.
He got the young seer into his apartment after he unlocked everything with his ident-tag and his bio-identifiers.
He still worried the corridor might smell of her.
In the end, he walked up and down spraying cologne someone had given him as a goodbye present when he left the precinct in L.A. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thrown the foul stuff away rather than dragging it all the way here, to New York with him.
Nostalgia, he supposed.
The cop who gave it to him had been a friend.
She’d also been a damned good cop, and one of the few who didn’t treat him like shit, in spite of what he was—in spite of what he’d done to get thrown out of there.
He knew the cologne would get some complaints once vampires started returning from their places of employment. He also knew the rooms were all scent-sealed, given who lived inside them, so their complaints would be perfunctory, at best.
If pressed, Nick would blame it on getting doused with perfume by a human blood-whore he’d picked up in a fetish club—one he’d been forced to make shower before he could feed on him, due to his over-fondness for chemical-smelling male perfumes.
After that, it was really only the surveillance feed he had to worry about.
He got her on the first ring.
She picked up so quickly, Nick started a little.
“Hey,” he said. “This is Nick. The vampire. The weirdo. We met this morning. You tried to save my life. Remember?”
There was a silence.
He wondered if he’d woken her up.
Then he wondered if he’d freaked her out, calling her at home.
“Jesus,” she said then, yawning audibly. “You weren’t kidding about using your cop superpowers to hunt me down.”
“Yeah, well.” Nick didn’t have much to follow on from that.
Doubting himself suddenly, and his ability to judge character, he hesitated.
This could get him thrown into an I.S.F. cell tonight, if he was wrong about her. It could get the baby seer he’d brought home with him thrown into an underground lab and vivisected while she was still alive.
Moreover, Kit didn’t know him from Adam.
She’d be a fool to trust him, based on a single interaction.
Despite the completely logical complaints of his mind, Nick barely hesitated.
In a single, reckless, snap-second, he decided to risk it.
“I need a favor,” he said.
Immediately, her voice grew wary.
“What kind of favor?”
“Surveillance feed.” He hesitated. “You work for I.S.F., right?
Surveillance of tame vampires? Vampires like me?”
Her voice shifted. Grew businesslike.
“Enhanced?”
“Yeah. I need it gone. Or,” he amended. “Revised maybe. I have a visitor here I’d rather if the I.S.F. didn’t know about. So, if you could erase her, that would be great. It’s a quiet time of day. Shouldn’t be hard.”
Nick could practically see her frown.
“What kind of visitor?” she said.
“She’s young.”
“How young?”
Nick felt his jaw harden. “I’m not going to fuck her, Katrina. I’m not going to feed on her, either. She needs a safe place to lay low for a little while, and I had nowhere else to take her.”
“Kit,” she said, her voice annoyed. “Wow. You really did look into me, didn’t you?”
“I’m assuming you looked into me, too. Given your job. Probably looked at a few months’ worth of feed on my building. Possibly even the feed I’m not supposed to know about. The technically illegal one. The one inside my apartment, that they use to do spot checks on me, and to spy on my personal life.”
There was a silence.
In it, Nick was even more sure he was right.
“Look,” he said. “Apart from some of my weird sex shit, you must know I’m not doing anything too fucked up in my spare time. I play by the rules.”
She burst out in a laugh, as if she couldn’t help herself.
“You can say that again. On the weird sex shit,” she clarified humorously. “Although I guess I was a little less offended you blew me off for coffee, given what you were going home to.”
Checking his watch, he let his voice shift to a growl.
“Come on. The delay prior to send is only about forty minutes. It’s been twenty already. I need the feed doctored before it gets sent to D.C.”
“You worried they’ll think you’re a pedo, Nick Tanaka, vampire detective?” she said mildly.
“Among other things… yes,” he said, annoyed. “Can you do it or not?”
“You promise you aren’t just jonesing for some young blood, Nick?”
“Jesus fucking Christ… yes. I promise, all right? I’m not going to bite her. I’m sure as hell not going to fuck her. She’s like eleven years old.”
“Where are her parents?”
“I don’t know.” He clenched his jaw, running a hand through his hair. “That’s why I have her. I was going to go out again… look for the parents tonight. They might be in the Cauldron. It’s where she told me to take her. But I’m not about to just leave her there. Not alone. Not without knowing who they are or how she got out. I didn’t want to turn her in to the authorities, either. I know kids disappear in that system.”
All of which was true.
More or less.
Clearing his throat, Nick added,
“I thought I’d go inside and check it out, first. If I find her parents, and it’s safe, I’ll bring her back to them. Or maybe try to get them out, if I can.”
Again, Nick told himself, it wasn’t all lies.
There was a silence.
Then Kit exhaled, loudly, through the line.
“Christ, Naoko,” she said.
He flinched, startled when she used his Japanese name.
If she’d done it to rattle him, her voice showed no indication.
“You have to know that sounds sketchy as fuck,” she said. “Even if you were human that would sound sketchy as fuck. You holing up with some little kid in your apartment. What the hell am I supposed to think?”
“Did you hear anything I said?” Nick said, annoyed. “I won’t even be here the rest of the night. I’m just stashing her here, hopefully for a few hours. You can watch her on the damned cameras, if you’re worried I might do something to her.”
“You’re leaving her there. A little kid. In a building filled with vampires.”
“They can’t get into my apartment,” Nick growled. “They won’t even know she’s there. No one will, not if I find her parents tonight—”
“How the hell did you even get her in there?” she cut in, her voice a frown. “How did you get her past the front desk, Nick the vampire?”
There was a silence.
Nick fumbled for a good story there.
He came up blank.
“Do you want to talk to her?” he said finally. “The kid? She’ll tell you I found her. I found her at a crime scene—”
“You should have turned her in,” Kit scolded.
“And I just told you why I didn’t—”
“Yeah,” she cut in. “I heard you, Nick. I also know you’re not telling me something. And that you might be a cute, kinky, kind of boyscout-y vampire… but you’re still a vampire. A vampire who’s been on the leash for a long time now. One who wasn’t super nice before he went on the leash. Not according to your official file.”
At his silence, she exhaled in frustration.
“Damn it, Nick. How stupid do you think I am?”
“I won’t hurt her. I am trying to help her. That’s the important part, isn’t it?”
“I guess…?”
“You guess?” He checked his watch again, scowling. “Clock’s ticking, Kit. If you can’t do this, I need to get her out of here. Now. And you’ll be responsible for me leaving a kid out in the Cauldron by herself. A little girl. Or at the mercy of the New York Protective Area’s foster care system—”
She exhaled in exasperation.
“Drama much? Jesus.” She sounded angry now. “Fine. I’ll fix the tape. But you have to know I don’t work in a vacuum, right? I wouldn’t keep her there more than a few days, Nick. I mean it. You will get caught. And if you give me up under interrogation, I’ll make your life a living hell… assuming you ever get out of I.S.F. detention alive.”
Nodding absently, and frowning more to himself that time, Nick glanced at the blue and silver-eyed girl who now sat on his couch, bouncing up and down on it lightly, like she’d never sat on one before.
“Yeah,” he muttered, more to himself than her. “I hear you. Loud and clear.”
“Does she even know what you are? This little human chicklet you’ve stolen?”
Nick frowned, looking at the girl.
“She must,” he said. “I’m not wearing contact lenses.”
“So she’s just stupid, then? Or did you enthrall her?”
“Neither, look… just call me when it’s done,” he said, exasperated.
“You owe me, Nick the vampire. Big time.”
“No shit,” he said. “What do you have in mind?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” she retorted. “But it won’t be a cup of coffee, Nick. It won’t even be a steak dinner… or dinner and a show. Hear me?”
“I hear you. I owe you. Bigtime.” At her silence, he frowned, checking his timepiece before he growled, “Less than fifteen minutes now until send. Go deal with the damned tapes, Kit. Or I won’t be around to owe you shit.”
Without waiting for her answer that time, he hung up.
“Everyone’s got an opinion,” he grumbled, turning the face the girl.
She smiled up at him.
“Do you have cookies?” she said.
Nick stared at her for a moment.
Then, shaking his head, he frowned. “No.”
He hadn’t thought about food.
He’d have to find some way to deal with that, too.
The kid was already too skinny. He hadn’t really noticed with the layers of clothes she had wrapped around her small form, but he could see it now, from the size of her small hands and bony wrists and the prominence of her cheekbones. Some of that could be from the angular bone structure that tended to go along with being seer, but that wasn’t all of it.
She was definitely underfed.
He checked his headset’s timepiece. It wasn’t even midnight yet, despite how much time he wasted at that crime scene, trying not to look suspicious.
Walking over to the kid, he sat on one of th
e chairs across from the couch.
For the first time, he noticed the rest of her.
Long, irregularly-cut black hair that was spiky at the bottoms from having been cut in uneven spears. It fell past her shoulders, Asian-straight, and someone dyed it silver at the tips, and at her bangs, making those ice-like eyes of hers stand out more.
She wore clothes that looked a few sizes too big for her, so were likely found or stolen or rummaged from somewhere.
Kids. What was it about him and kids?
He was like a damned magnet for the messed-up strays.
Scowling, he tried not to think about how much this was starting to feel like L.A.
Leaning forward, he rested his arms on his thighs, staring at her across the coffee table.
It weirded him out a little that she was sitting on the same couch he’d had sex on a few hours earlier. He wondered if she would pick up on that, being seer.
He considered asking her to move to the opposite chair, then decided that would be weirder.
Shoving the thought from his mind, he grimaced, meeting those ice-blue eyes.
“Okay, kid,” he said. “Twenty questions time.”
He showed her his old-fashioned watch, which he still wore on his wrist, though he normally used the more precise timepiece in his headset.
“If I’m going to go out again,” he said. “Look for your people, and try to find you some food, I need some information first.”
She nodded, still bouncing up and down on the rust-colored couch.
He considered asking her to cut it out, then reminded himself she was a kid, whatever race she was. There was no reason to rag on her for acting like one.
“You’re seer,” he said.
She smiled, nodding. “Yes.”
“That wasn’t a question,” he said sourly. “So where are your parents, kid?”
A faint frown formed at her full mouth, which already showed that odd shaping of seer mouths—whatever it was about their lips that made them look so marble-statue-esque when they became adults.
Seer mouths often looked faintly Grecian to Nick, like they’d been chiseled out of stone.
“I don’t know,” she said after a pause.
Vampire Detective Midnight Page 10