Rubbing his eyes, he sank backwards into the seat, gripping the coffee mug in his hand on the armrest.
“Three,” he said after a pause.
Taking a sip of the coffee, he looked at Nick directly.
“You get through those?” he said, motioning towards the stack at Nick’s feet with the hand holding the coffee mug. “All of them?”
“Not really,” Nick said. “Enough to see all the faces, get an idea of the reach of the files. All of those are from some part of the United States.” Motioning vaguely at the file he now had open in his lap, he added, “These seem to be Europe so far.”
Jordan grunted, nodding. “I didn’t get a chance to look at much. I wanted to re-read about the kids from the school before we get there.” Pausing, he added, “That them, there?”
Nick looked up, meeting his gaze.
Picking up the file at his feet, he handed it over the table to Jordan.
“The kids are on top,” Nick said, as Jordan took it from him, setting down his coffee long enough to grab the thick file with both hands.
“…Archangel must have separated out the vics from the Financial District murders and put them where we’d see them first. I didn’t see the adults from the Bronx,” he added. “But it’s possible they’re in another of these folders.”
Jordan nodded, picking up his coffee again once he had the file resting on his lap.
“They’re hybrids,” Nick said, blunt. “Right? All of them?”
Jordan shrugged, his eyes flickering briefly towards Nick.
“The boss thinks so,” he said after a pause. “He wanted you to know as many of the young ones as possible. He wants you to sniff out this school… see if you can verify whether there are any more there.”
Nick nodded. “Makes sense.”
“He also wants you to suss out any interviews we do. Stay in the background, see if you can use your vampire sight to catch anyone in a lie.” Jordan glanced up, looking at him longer that time. Studying Nick’s eyes, he scowled a little. “Did you forget the contacts?”
Nick fought not to frown, managing it with an effort.
He’d gotten the message on his headset earlier that morning, not long after Tai left with her big brother, Malek.
“I brought them.”
“Why aren’t you wearing them?”
“Because they annoy the shit out of me,” Nick said, his voice a touch harder. “I’ll put them in before we get to the school.”
Jordan looked like he wanted to make a crack.
To his credit, he didn’t.
Nodding, his face carefully neutral, he returned his gaze to the files in his lap.
“Can’t you see the same as me?” Nick said after a pause.
When Jordan looked up, frowning,
Nick motioned towards his own eyes, nodding towards Jordan.
“The enhancements,” he clarified. “Can’t you see the same wavelengths I can? I thought you could see even more with those.”
Jordan’s expression cleared.
“Oh. Yeah. Well… technically, yes. But they’re pretty new. I’m still learning the functional aspects. Morley said a vampire of your age would probably be able to tell if most humans were lying, just from changes in heart-rate, temperature, and so on. He said you’d be more accurate than me, even if I was more used to these, because you also have hearing and smell.”
Grunting a little, Jordan gave him a bare smile.
Nick couldn’t hide his flicker of surprise.
It was the closest to a real smile he’d gotten from anyone at the precinct, apart from Charlie.
“…He says you’re like a goddamned walking lie detector,” Jordan added wryly. “He told me to watch my ass around you. That you see and hear a lot more than you’ll ever let on.”
Nick grunted, smiling back in spite of himself.
“Morley’s no idiot, is he?” he said.
“No.” Jordan snorted a faint laugh, shaking his head, once. “No, he most definitely is not. I heard a rumor he’s got some kind of genius I.Q., actually. Like he tested off the charts, and they basically gave him his pick of jobs in the Protected Area. Hell, according to the person who told me that, Morley had different regions competing for him.”
“He Columbo’s that shit, doesn’t he?” Nick muttered.
At Jordan’s puzzled look, Nick clarified.
“…He plays dumb.”
Jordan gave him a real smile at that, shaking his head.
“What?” Nick said.
Still, he found himself smiling back again, in surprise as much as anything.
“Nothing,” Jordan said, half-hiding his smile with a hand. “It’s just he said the same fucking thing about you. He said not to assume you’re like the last Midnight. He read your file. Said you were a decorated vet, even before you got turned. Said you were a cop for a long time after that. Homicide. Like over two hundred years ago.”
Nick nodded. “That’s right.”
There was a silence.
Looking down, Jordan began flipping through the file in his lap, a frown on his full lips, his enhanced eyes concentrated as he stared down at the pages in his lap.
Nick had just returned his attention back to his own file folder, deciding the conversation was over, when Jordan spoke up again, his voice studiously casual.
“Pretty tough break,” the human said. “Getting turned.”
Nick went utterly still.
When the other man didn’t go on, he looked up, staring at Damon Jordan’s downturned head in disbelief.
After a few seconds—after studying what he could see of Jordan’s face, hearing his heart beat, smelling the scent of his skin—Nick felt his shoulders relax for real.
“Yeah,” he said, mimicking a human exhale. “You have no fucking idea, man.”
Chapter 16
Truce
Nick blinked, fighting to adjust to the difference in his vision while wearing the brown-tinted contact lenses.
Wearing the damned things always put him in a foul mood.
Moreover, he found it ironic humans always wanted him to wear them when they needed him to assess possible suspects and unreliable witnesses—basically, when he most needed the pinpoint precision of his unobstructed vampire senses, including his sight.
Blinking again, he fought to adjust, putting one foot in front of the other, being careful to walk slowly, pacing Jordan who walked beside him as they made their way down the covered walkway on the way to the school’s main building, where the principal was supposedly waiting for them.
Nick and Jordan had already broken out their respective roles.
They decided they’d conduct the interviews together, requesting a conference room in the main building.
Nick would take a back seat, let Jordan do the talking.
If he needed a redirect and couldn’t convey it to Jordan, he’d jump in, but otherwise, he’d focus more on the truthfulness of the answers they got to Jordan’s questions. Nick would look for other red flags too, anything that might hint the interviewee could be hiding something, and, of course, any tell-tales the subject’s race might not be one hundred percent human.
It wasn’t a perfect system, and they’d alter it if they had to, but for now, Nick was just glad they had some kind of plan—and that Jordan was the planning type.
He was also glad Jordan seemed pretty cognizant of Nick’s limitations and strengths.
Most humans tended to forget inconvenient things about Nick’s make-up… like sunlight, and the fact that he wasn’t too fond of fire.
Of course, Nick had personal reasons for not being crazy about fire, even beyond the normal vampire reasons.
Fire was pretty much how he ended up a vampire in the first place.
Reaching the end of the covered walkway, Nick followed Jordan into the main building, walking in behind him and nodding a thanks when Jordan held open the door.
Their steps in the regulation anti-grav footwear echoed strangely in the
stone corridor of the ground floor. The campuses’ main building was a castle-like structure that was closer to how Nick pictured private colleges in Scotland or England than even a highbrow school in this part of the United States.
The building smelled damp—and old.
Stained-glass windows lived under stone arches on the high part of the eastern corridor. Polished, dark grey, spotlessly-clean flagstones made up the floor.
On their right, the lower walls were interrupted by tall, narrow windows with thick panes of clear glass; on the left, a series of doors presumably leading to classrooms broke up the rough-hewn wall.
Nick began scouting the interior of the school as soon as they passed through the metal outer door, in habit as much as anything. He focused his vampire senses first on the muffled sounds coming from behind the closed doors of the classrooms they passed, then on the smells that wafted through the hall.
It certainly didn’t smell like his public high school in Hunter’s Point, San Francisco.
It didn’t look anything like his high school, either.
Then again, nothing looked like that anymore.
No rows of blue-painted lockers with round combination locks under the handles jutted out of cinderblock walls. No hand-painted banners for basketball games and homecoming and bake sales for the marching band hung on the walls or over the arched doors. No graffiti marked the stone walls, much less got painted on lockers by kids who broke in on the weekends and got drunk with spray-paint cans. Nick saw no gang tags or pieces of paper ripped from spiral-bound notebooks or drying spitballs or gum. He didn’t see the random gym sock or food wrapper on the floor—or even a garbage can for that matter, overflowing or not.
Not like Nick missed most of those things.
Hell, he’d joined the army to get away from everything in high school, to wipe his mind and his memory slate clean.
At the same time, something about the sterility of this place bugged him.
Kellerman Prep practically screamed money, so maybe that was part of it. Nick had a bit of the reverse snob thing; he always had.
He had his doubts that was all of it, though.
The building looked simultaneously too old, too new, too fucking clean, and too still to house so many kids, rich or otherwise. Even with his vampire hearing, the only voices he heard out of any of the classrooms they passed belonged either to teachers or to a kid reciting something, or answering something, or describing something they’d read.
He heard fingers on screens, a few electronic tones, the rustle of clothes and hair and the occasional cough, squeak of a chair, cleared throat, or swallow—so he knew the rooms weren’t empty. Class was definitely in session.
Given that, the quiet was unnerving.
Nick hadn’t been a vampire when he was in high school, but he suspected the sounds would be deafening if he could walk those halls now.
Catcalls and laughs, teachers yelling at kids to calm the fuck down or go to the principal’s office, whispers from the back rows, kids flirting with other kids and harassing the ones that didn’t fit in and starting shit out of jealousy or pettiness or sheer boredom.
Jesus. Why was he thinking about this bullshit?
Shaking his head to clear it, he grimaced, then glanced at Jordan, feeling the other male’s eyes on him.
“What?” Damon said.
“Nothing.” Nick grimaced again, then glanced back at the human male. “It’s just so quiet. Was your school this quiet? Is this just how kids are now?”
Jordan laughed. “Hell, no! Not in Jamaica.”
Nick knew he meant Jamaica, Queens, not the island, which no longer existed.
He grunted, nodding.
“Good. I was starting to feel really old.”
Damon laughed again, then shocked the hell out of Nick when he thumped him on the arm in a friendly way.
“You are really old, man,” he said, smiling. “You’re fucking ancient. Like a dinosaur.”
For some reason, the other’s words didn’t bug Nick, even if they did reference him being a vampire. Being touched by a human he barely knew didn’t bug him that time, either. It actually made him relax, maybe more than he had since he’d moved to New York.
Maybe he wouldn’t end up hating it here, after all.
Maybe he didn’t have to hole himself up in an anti-social dungeon just to survive.
Not entirely, anyway.
His mind flickered back to Kit, the street fighter who worked for the I.S.F. who saved his ass the night before… the same person he now owed a serious favor.
On a whim, he sent her a text message, using sub-vocals and his headset.
Hey, he sent. Dinner tonight? It can be steak. I’ll even spring for pie.
There was a pause.
Nick figured she wasn’t on, or might be busy.
He was about to log off, to check back in when he and Jordan got done here, when pale green, cursive-looking text began forming on the screen in his virtual view.
Nice try, the text read. I told you steak wasn’t going to cut it, old man. You’re cute, but not that cute. The very least you could do is teach me how to surf.
Nick grunted a smile, in spite of himself.
I’ll teach you to surf, he wrote back. You might need some good sunscreen—
Not outside the dome, dumbass. At one of the inside places.
Ah. Gotcha. Well, you’ll have to deal with my blinding white skin. More of it, that is.
He practically saw her roll her eyes.
I’ll survive. As long as it involves a swimsuit of some kind.
Grunting another laugh, he added,
Anyway, tonight. Dinner. It’s not a favor-paying dinner, he clarified. It’s a thank you dinner.
You mean a “I saved your ass, you creepy, pedo motherfucker” dinner?
Nick rolled his own eyes. Like you didn’t watch my place every second she was in it. Up until and including the very instant she left my building.
You mean after you dressed her up like a drunk hobo and let her go out on the street like that? After you gave her a giant bag of junk food? Kit wrote back. Yeah, that was real “charitable” of you, Nick.
You want to have dinner or not? Nick wrote back. You can say no. I’ll still ask you again sometime. Maybe after I go surfing this weekend.
There was a pause.
Then the pale green text emerged again.
Are you planning to do anything that might get me thrown in jail this time?
Tonight? Wasn’t planning on it, no.
Is it likely to happen anyway?
Nick shook his head, smiling in spite of himself.
I’ll do my level best to avoid getting either of us gunned down like dogs and/or imprisoned in a government lab, he wrote back. It’s the best I can do, kid. And no promises.
There was another pause.
Then the light green text formed again, in the same precise cursive letters.
Fine. But this settles nothing, vampire boy.
Makalo’s, Nick sent. It’s on Second and Twenty-third. Eight o’clock. Try not to embarrass me.
Fine. I’ll wear my fancy shit. I might even brush my hair.
Nick grunted another half-laugh, clicking off.
When he glanced at Jordan, the other man was looking at him curiously.
They were most of the way to the center of the building, between the two wings. Nick’s feet had followed the other man’s in rote, so that he still paced him now.
“Girlfriend?” Damon ventured after a pause.
Nick glanced at him, then shook his head.
“Naw. Just a friend.” Thinking about Kit, he smiled.
She really was a friend. Somehow, between that initial meeting out by the external force fields and her helping him out last night, they’d become actual friends.
“…A smart-ass friend,” he added wryly, under his breath.
Jordan laughed. He clearly didn’t fully get the joke, but something about Nick’s words seemed to put the
other man even more at ease.
Nick’s mind dwelled briefly on dinner.
He didn’t eat human food when he was on his own, of course, but he could eat it. It was just kind of tasteless and had a tendency to make him more hungry, not less, since it woke up his appetite without satiating him.
And it could give him gas, depending on what he ate.
Still, he was in a good place to take a human out for a meal.
He’d gotten his blood-bag delivery that morning, about an hour before he left for the train station. He’d downed two in a row while he watched the news on the wall monitor, despite having eaten a lot from the red-headed woman the day before.
It was more food than he really needed for less than two days.
Because of that, he was still full.
He’d make it easily through dinner.
“So where is this principal?” Nick said, glancing at Jordan as they approached another elaborately-carved arch at the end of their segment of corridor.
He could sense more activity up ahead.
He wondered if that meant they were getting close.
“…Is his office on this floor?” he said.
Jordan shook his head.
“No. Fourth. We need to find the main stairwell.” He gave Nick a sideways look. “And I think he’s a her. The principal. I think he’s a she.”
Nick nodded.
He glanced up as they walked under the arch and into a high-ceilinged entryway with a double waterfall staircase leading up to the second floor. The front door to the building stood to his left, a massive slab of what looked like real wood, aged and stained the same color as the bannister on the marble staircase and decorated in black wrought iron.
A green and blue rug, what looked like a real antique, covered the marble tile floor up to the base of the staircase. Tapestries hung on the stone walls, one of them so large it covered most of the two stories of wall between the twin staircases.
Nick glanced at Damon, who raised an eyebrow, his hands on his hips.
“Up there, I guess?” Nick said.
Jordan let out a snort of a laugh, then stepped forward, aiming his feet for the base of the stairs. Nick followed him, still walking deliberately slow. He didn’t fully get what he’d said that time that amused the other man, but he supposed it didn’t matter.
Vampire Detective Midnight Page 17