Nick scowled at her.
“A few,” he said. “Where’s Wynter?”
The woman’s lips lifted in a warmer smile.
“Ms. James is perfectly fine,” she assured him. “I arranged to have my own people look at her, of course, at the hospital she was sent to. Her identity as a full-blooded human remains intact. I’ve also petitioned the school board to keep her on as school principal. I asked them to forgive her little transgression with you… especially given everything she went through, and the fact that the murderer lived right under their noses, accessing the dark networks from his dorm room without any of them being the wiser.”
She smiled wryly.
“Also,” she said with a graceful gesture. “She really is an excellent school principal—”
“How did you get the I.S.F. to drop charges against me?” Nick said, frowning.
She smiled at him, not answering.
Exhaling, human-fashion, Nick glanced around the jungle-like living room, nodding.
“Got it,” he muttered. “What are the chances they’ll listen to you? The school, I mean? About Wynter?”
“Good,” she said. “I run the board.”
Nick stared at her. Then the rest of it clicked.
“You got her the job up there.” He didn’t voice it as a question. “She came to you for help, and you got her the job up there, to get her away from your ex-husband.”
Lara St. Maarten nodded, her lips quirking in another smile.
“I did,” she acknowledged. “Prior to that, she worked as a secretary to my husband, where she was clearly underappreciated and overqualified for the job. She came to me for help when his attentions grew… insistent. When I found out her background was in education, the way forward seemed obvious. We had been looking for a qualified principal for months, after our last one retired, so the timing worked out quite well for both of us.”
“You didn’t think to tell me this before?” Nick growled.
Lara St. Maarten frowned, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
“Why would I?” she said. “That was Ms. James’ story to tell. I promised her I would be discreet. How would it be discreet to tell you she got the job in part because she came to me for help against my predatory ex-husband?”
Nick scowled, but only nodded.
“And your ex- told your son… what? That he’d screwed the hot teacher?”
The green eyes grew colder. “Presumably.”
Nick nodded, still thinking. “Harrison said he was the one who eavesdropped on our conversation. Who leaked the tape to the press.”
“Yes.” Ms. St. Maarten sighed, sounding tired now as she rubbed her temples briefly. Sighing, she let her hand drop back to the sofa. “Apparently Harry and his friends had quite a gift with electronics. They used that gift to hide surveillance all over the school. Part of their mission to ‘ferret out’ all the non-pure bloods, apparently.”
“And he was the extra person at the crime scene in the Bronx?” Nick said. “What? Did he go there to see all the dead hybrids? Gloat about being the cause of it all?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice a touch colder.
There was another silence.
“So?” Nick said finally. “Is that it? They told me you wanted to see me. Why? To tell me all this? Or did you want something more from me?”
Her lips quirked.
That time, the look in her green eyes was puzzlement.
“I called you here, Detective Tanaka, to thank you, of course,” she said, that puzzlement reaching her voice. “We owe you a huge debt.”
“I busted up your son’s face,” Nick reminded her sourly.
“You didn’t kill him,” she said, shrugging delicately.
“I could have,” he said. “Easily. I threw that gun at him pretty damned hard—”
“But you didn’t,” she said. “You didn’t kill him, Nick.”
There was another silence.
Nick frowned.
“What happens to him now?” he said. “Your son. The teenaged true believer. Does he take your place in prison? Are they going to rehabilitate him? Give him a chemical lobotomy? Or just kill him? Now that the cops know he tried to have his own mother executed for murders he committed, does that make his sentence better or worse?”
For the first time, the frown touched her eyes.
She stared at him, her expression decidedly less friendly.
“You needn’t concern yourself with my son any longer, detective,” she said.
“So that’s a no, then?” Nick’s jaw hardened. “He would have let you fry, you know. Your own son, and he would have let you fry… all because he blamed you for his dad’s wandering dick.”
She winced openly that time, looking away.
“Harrison is a minor,” she reminded him, her lip curling. “He will be dealt with as a minor, detective. I imagine the exact nature of those terms will be decided long before he sees the inside of a court room.”
She gave him a colder stare.
“…If it reassures you, he won’t be returning to Kellerman. He will likely be in a sanatorium until long after his college-prep years.”
Nick grunted, shaking his head.
“Yeah, well,” he said, not hiding his annoyance. “I guess the rich really are different.”
“Can I do anything for you, detective?” she said, her voice a touch sharper.
“Is that what this is?” he said. “Another bribe?”
“I’d like to express my thanks,” she began, her voice annoyed as she exchanged looks with Malek, who smiled, his expression amused. “You’re making it damned hard, truthfully, detective—”
“My job.” Nick gave her a hard look. “I’d like my job back.”
“Already taken care of.” Her puzzlement was back. “They didn’t tell you? You’re getting a month’s leave of absence, so they can realistically claim you have been ‘rehabilitated’ to make you safe for human society once more, but after that—”
“I have my job?” Nick stared at her, stunned in spite of himself. “Really?”
She blinked.
Then she shook her head, smiling as if amused, despite her best efforts. Exchanging another glance with Malek, she turned towards Nick, her voice wry.
“Yes. You get a month off, as I said. They had some questions about how you hacked your own G.P.S. chip, and the A.I. at the NYPD, but I managed to convince them my own people accomplished those things for you. After the month’s hiatus, you return to full status. Detective Midnight. I.S.F. cleared. In full.”
Nick frowned, staring at her.
“Seriously?” he said.
“It’s already done. Truthfully, I’m shocked they didn’t tell you. Your superior, Detective Morley, seemed determined to convey to you the importance of keeping a low profile for at least a few weeks, if only to keep you off the radar of the media. He muttered something about your habit of going surfing outside the protective dome.”
She paused meaningfully, as if waiting for him to confirm or deny his surfing habit.
When Nick did neither, she arched her eyebrow, glancing at Malek, who still hadn’t spoken, but who still looked amused.
It crossed Nick’s mind that the seer hadn’t spoken a single word since he’d entered the room through the panel in the wall.
“There is nothing else you need?” the seer said now, his voice polite, almost deferential. “Anything apart from the safety of your girlfriend, your reinstatement as a detective Midnight with the NYPD, and your freedom—”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Nick muttered.
Ms. St. Maarten and Malek exchanged amused looks.
“My apologies,” Malek said diplomatically, turning back to Nick. “Ms. James, then. Is there anything else we can do for you, brother?” he said respectfully.
Nick had thought of something by then.
“Yes,” he said. “There is something.”
Ms. St. Maarten and Malek exchanged looks.
Then she quirked an eyebrow, her gaze swiveling back towards Nick.
“Name it,” she said, waving towards him with ring-clad fingers.
“Tai,” he said.
Malek immediately frowned.
Nick saw the male seer fight an angry reaction, and probably an urge to tell him to go to hell. The black-haired male managed to keep the polite expression on his face and in his voice, but Nick could tell it was with an effort.
“What about Tai?” he said, a bare edge in his voice.
“She goes to school.”
At their silence, Nick’s jaw hardened.
He stared pointedly at Malek, right before he turned to glare at Ms. St. Maarten, daring either of them to argue with him.
“Tai goes to school,” he repeated, his voice harder. “A real fucking school. With other kids. Get her a hybrid tat… or hell, a human one. But she goes to school. Send her to Kellerman. Have Wynter look out for her. But she shouldn’t live in that shithole with traffickers and drug addicts and fucking criminals alongside her adult brother who likes to go wandering outside the fences at night.”
There was a silence.
In it, Malek frowned.
Ms. St. Maarten frowned, too.
The two of them exchanged looks.
Nick wondered if they were talking somehow, but neither of them appeared to be wearing headsets.
After a few seconds more, Nick saw the tall, male seer nod to her, if reluctantly.
Ms. St. Maarten looked back at Nick.
“Done,” she said, holding out her hand. “You have a deal, Detective Tanaka.”
Nick blinked.
After a bare pause, he walked to her, moving more vampire-speed than human, maybe because he was worried either or both of them might change their minds.
Taking her hand, he shook it, once.
“Thank you,” he said, gruff.
As he released her, he caught her smiling at him again, that quizzical look back in her bright green eyes.
Studying the look there, he frowned.
“What?” he grunted.
Her smile widened, growing warmer.
“Have I mentioned what a very unusual vampire you are, Detective Tanaka?”
Behind her, Malek burst out in a laugh.
It came out of him in a near-bark, as if he couldn’t help himself.
Nick didn’t answer.
Scowling at both of them, he gave them each a short bow.
Then, without another word, he left.
Laugh it up, assholes, he thought to himself as he punched the mother-of-pearl elevator button with his finger, summoning the gilded car back to the penthouse floor.
He’d gotten what he wanted.
Thinking about that—really thinking about it—he smiled.
When he remembered Kit was also off the hook, that he owed her a few dozen steak dinners, and that he might actually be able to make good on his promise to teach her to surf, his smile turned into a grin.
The elevators doors opened in front of him with a gentle ding.
And, just like that, as Wynter Ciara James would have said—
Nick Tanaka was released back into the wild.
What to read next
WANT TO READ MORE?
Check out the next book in the series:
EYES OF ICE
(Vampire Detective Midnight #2)
“Hey… you.” The man looked him over again. “You fight? Right?” His lips thinned, his eyes on Nick’s chest and arms. “…You look like you do. Frankly, you’re the first vampire I’ve seen in here who’s worth the cost of admission.”
At Nick’s blank stare, the man shrugged.
“A hundred thousand to fight. Twice that, if you win.”
Nick gets pulled into the world of underground boxing, first to support a friend, and then to help one of the homicide detectives in his precinct solve a case.
Things get personal, fast, when Nick gets drawn into the game himself, and into the sights of the killers, who appear to be targeting vampires, first draining them for blood and venom before extracting their hearts and tossing them outside the dome.
Nick is technically still suspended, but that doesn’t keep him out of the crosshairs with some of the biggest names in the criminal underground that runs New York Protected Area.
Nor does it reassure his new girlfriend, who by now is convinced he has a death wish, or at the very least will do just about anything to avoid talking to her about what’s going on between the two of them.
VAMPIRE DETECTIVE MIDNIGHT is a new romantic, science fiction and fantasy 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.
A spinoff of the Quentin Black Mystery series, it features vampire with a past and homicide detective, Naoko “Nick” Tanaka, who gets transferred to the NYPD after a bad incident in Los Angeles forces him to start a new life. Nick works as a “Midnight,” or vampire in the employ of the human police department, but when he arrives in New York, he really just wants to be left alone to work, surf, and deal with his immortality in peace.
Life, and the residents of New York, clearly have other ideas.
See below for sample pages!
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Sample Pages
EYES OF ICE (Vampire Detective Midnight #2)
Prologue / Demons
HE STOOD OVER THE BODY, smelling the blood. It filled his nostrils, nearly making him dizzy, somehow sweeter than the coppery smell of his own blood.
“Candy blood,” he muttered.
He said it soft, under his breath, but the woman standing next to him let out a low laugh.
Her pupils were dilated.
She’d been dipping in the stock again.
He frowned at her, disgusted by the spaced-out, sloppy grin on her face. He had nothing but contempt for product suppliers who grew dependent on their own product. If he didn’t need her right now, he would have cut her out totally.
Patience, a voice whispered in his mind.
Michael inhaled a heavy breath.
Patience, Michael, the voice murmured. Patience. All is going as it should.
The voice calmed him.
It always calmed him.
Michael exhaled tension he hadn’t known he held. The muscles in his shoulders, arms and neck softened, allowing him to breathe easier with the next breath… and the next.
He focused back on the job at hand, staring down at the increasingly pale face of the vampire locked down on the stainless-steel table.
He wondered what would happen if they just kept draining it.
What would the corpse look like, if they took all the blood… all the venom? If they just kept going? Would the whole thing just collapse into itself, like the fantastical vampires from old horror movies, leaving a desiccated pile of bone dust? Perhaps covered in a loose pile of skin? Or perhaps all of it, skin and all, nothing more than a chalky powder?
After all, it wasn’t alive.
Vampires looked alive, but they weren’t.
“How many more?” Michael said.
He turned, looking at the woman, who was staring down adoringly at the vampire’s face.
“Melissa,” he said, his
voice sharper. “How many?” He checked his watch. “We have to be out of here in five hours. We’re not even halfway to quota.”
“Six,” she said, her voice doubtful. “…I think.”
“Well, get in there,” he said, again keeping the distaste from his voice with an effort. “Go prep the next one. This one is almost done.”
Tearing her gaze off the vampire’s face, she looked up at him, eyes wide.
“No!” she protested. “You promised! You promised I could do this one!”
Michael followed her eyes to the long, black metal pole that stood on the table adjacent to the one where the vampire lay. A long-toothed claw adorned one side of the device, with razor-sharp, silver teeth with ragged edges.
They called it an “alligator.”
Michael had no idea where the nickname originated.
It could just as easily have been called a “shark,” or even a “tiger.”
It had been designed for a single purpose.
Looking at the alligator, he frowned, then glanced back at Melissa.
Realizing this wasn’t a battle worth fighting, he exhaled in annoyance.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go. Do it fast, and get him in the incinerator. We need to be working faster than this.” He checked his watch again, scowling. “We should have already had the next one prepped and ready to go before we got to this point. That’s the whole point of having two tables. Prep, drain, dispose. Got it?”
“We only had one rig tonight,” she mumbled, her voice still spacey, maddeningly distracted. She played with a long, stringy strand of her blond hair, swinging her hips slightly from side to side, as though she were rocking herself.
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