The Prescient: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 3)

by JC Andrijeski

  “You tried to reach him up there?” the cop said. “To get him out?”

  The guard nodded.

  His expression bordered on impatient now.

  “Of course. I called him first. He didn’t pick up. That’s when I hit the alarm, and notified building security.” His voice grew a touch sharper. “That was fifteen minutes ago.”

  Hearing the reproach there, the cop chose to ignore it.

  “All right,” he said. “Show me the surveillance you’ve got on—”

  Before he could finish, a loud, crashing BOOM erupted overhead.

  The cop dropped in reflex, bending his knees.

  He looked up in time to see an explosion burst out windows on the nearest side of the building, high up above the sidewalk. Fire plumed out the opening in a shocking burst, bright against the night sky.

  Despite the height of the flames, the force shook the ground under his feet.

  When the explosion continued, building as it went, he and the security guard dropped lower, staring up from where they crouched on the walkway.

  The way the other man moved, despite his age and relative lack of physical fitness, the cop couldn’t help thinking the guard had probably seen combat at one point, too, just like he had. The old man dropped fast, despite the weight he’d gained in the time since, and how bad his breathing sounded.

  When another big explosion ignited above, both of them moved again in pure reflex, knees bending as they covered their heads, the cop gripping his uniform’s headset and protective headgear as he looked up, staring in the direction of the sound.

  The security guard stared up with him.

  They watched the expanding mushroom cloud of fire light up the night sky.

  The explosion didn’t seem to want to stop.

  As the cop watched, it continued to erupt in smaller booms, blowing out windows all along the side of the building.

  The cop could only watch it happen, half-frozen in shock.

  Glass blew out in a third, then a fourth larger explosion, only that time, it also blew out bigger pieces of debris. Both rained down the side of the steel structure, coming seemingly from the very top floor of the ninety-story building.

  Then the cop realized where it was falling, the angle of the arc of glass.

  It was coming down, straight for them.

  His heart leapt to his throat.

  “MOVE!” he shouted, waving a hand towards the building as he raised his voice over the deafening sound. “GET OUT OF THE WAY!”

  He and the guard pulled themselves ungracefully to their feet.

  They ran for the eaves of the building.

  Glass rained down around them as they ran, nicking the cop’s face and the back of his neck, hitting his head, uniform, helmet, making him curse even as he flinched from louder booms going off overhead. The noise grew deafening as debris and office equipment rained down around them, smashing into the cement behind them and to either side.

  The cop couldn’t help noticing the other man moved a hell of a lot faster going towards the building than he had jogging out of it. They got under the protection of the building’s eaves as even more glass, metal and equipment rained down.

  By then the cop heard sirens, even behind the crash of falling debris.

  From nearer, he also heard the buzz of media and military drones.

  Crouching in an alcove of reinforced organic beams and transparent panes, he gaped up, seeing the reflection of the still-pluming fire in the windows of the adjacent tower. Despite being in relative shelter, he still gripped his uniform helmet in his hand as he stared up, flinching at smaller, subsequent explosions that followed the first.

  They were damned lucky to be alive.

  Both of them.

  The ground trembled under him, but he barely noticed now.

  The building trembled even more, behind his back and where his hands gripped the smooth beam between windows.

  He stared up, lost in disbelief as the whole floor seemed to be engulfed in flames.

  That sideways column of fire continued to pour out of the opening the explosion created in the wall, along with a massive cloud of black smoke.

  Chatter exploded in his headset, but for a long-feeling few seconds, the cop couldn’t make himself focus on it, or make sense of the words.

  He could only stare at that giant rosette of flames, watching them punch a hole in the night sky, illuminating everything in their path.

  It felt like being back in the war.

  It felt like someone had just declared war.

  Chapter 1

  It’s Starting, Isn’t It?

  “Can I talk to you?”

  Nick froze.

  Then, already reluctant, even before he recognized the face and outline of the person standing there, he looked up.

  Once he had, he frowned.

  He didn’t answer the other male’s question, not at first, but stood looking at him instead, maybe trying to convince himself he wasn’t real. Nick didn’t move while he stared, either, but remained paused from where he’d been drying himself off with a towel, fully naked outside the facility’s showers, and tired before even knowing what this was about.

  How the fuck had he even gotten in here?

  Generally speaking, no one got in here but Farlucci’s people, Farlucci’s fighters, and Farlucci himself.

  As Nick stared at the angular, pale face of the male standing there, though, of course he understood.

  He knew how he’d gotten in.

  No human security on the planet could keep this fucker out.

  Tossing the towel down on the bench, Nick reached for his bag, yanking it closer to him from the bench.

  “Do I have any choice?” he muttered, yanking his pile of street clothes out of the bag and tossing them down on the bench. Scowling at the inhumanly tall, gaunt form of the male seer, Nick saw him staring at his naked body and scowled deeper.

  “Do you mind?” he said, shoving first one, then another foot into pantlegs and pulling them up to his waist. Without looking up, he fastened the front, scowling in spite of himself.

  They were the same lightly-armored, deep-black pants he normally wore while working a shift for his other job, for the NYPD.

  “You just curious about vampire cock?” Nick grunted. “Or did you come down here for some other reason?”

  Still muttering under his breath, Nick sat on the bench, glaring up at the seer.

  “Does that hurt?” Malek said.

  Nick flinched, frowning. Then, realizing what the seer meant, he glanced down at himself. Taking in the darkening bruise on his upper chest, he shrugged, looking back up.

  “It’s not a kiss,” he observed, pulling on his first sock. “But vampires heal fast. It’ll be fine by tomorrow.”

  Pulling on his second sock, he reached for his boots. Catching hold of the semi-organic material, he lifted an eyebrow, giving the male seer a slightly harder look.

  “What do you want, Malek?”

  “How are you able to fight?” the seer asked, seemingly undaunted by Nick’s hostility. “I thought you killed a vampire. You know… with the bone.” The seer made an awkward stabbing motion with his lean arm. “Didn’t that disqualify you?”

  Nick exhaled, wondering what the fuck he’d done to deserve this shit.

  Maybe it was karma.

  Maybe this was Nick burning off karma, dealing with this crazy seer and the crazy seer’s sociopathic employer, the CEO of Archangel industries.

  “What do you want, Malek?” he repeated. “I’m assuming this isn’t a social call?”

  “It’s not.” The seer stared down at him, expressionless. “Aren’t you going to tell me? How you can fight, after murdering someone?”

  Nick’s jaw clenched.

  Then he shrugged, exhaling again.

  What the fuck. Maybe then he’d shut up about it.

  “Farlucci had them look into the legality of the fight,” Nick grunted, shoving his foot into his first boot.
“A judging panel for the circuit agreed with Farlucci that the whole thing had likely been set up as a hit… that the fighter had been paid to kill me. They blamed it on Tom, the guy who got killed by vampires outside the arena. In the end, I was declared innocent. Farlucci had my fight status reinstated.”

  “Ah.”

  From the tall seer’s tone, Nick might have just told him what he’d had for dinner.

  Annoyed by the stares and the silence, Nick glared up at the tall seer. “Don’t you watch the news? It was all over the sports networks for weeks. It came up again when I started fighting again.”

  Malek just stared at him.

  His long face remained utterly blank.

  Nick stomped his foot down more securely into the boot, hitting a pressure panel on the side and watching the material tighten around his foot, ankle and lower calf. Stomping down again to make sure the fit was right, he reached for his second boot and repeated the exercise.

  When the seer still hadn’t spoken, Nick felt his patience begin to ebb.

  “I’m going home after this,” he said. “I’m going to sit on the couch, eat a few blood bags. Watch a bunch of bad television.” He glanced up at Malek, his stare flat. “Whatever you want, you better spit it out, friend. Because it’s going to take a lot more than you leering at my pearly white vampire skin and asking me about my murders and my bruises to keep me from the exciting evening I have planned when I get out of here—”

  “I can’t tell you,” the seer blurted.

  Nick blinked.

  Then his expression soured.

  “You came all the way to Queens and down here, to the fight arena, just to tell me you can’t tell me something? That seems… inefficient.”

  “I just mean…” The seer hesitated. “I need to show you.”

  Nick frowned, stomping down the heel on his second boot.

  Glancing up at the seer, he tried to read something off his face.

  As usual, it was an exercise in futility.

  He could deduce it must be somewhat urgent, at least in Malek’s scrambled mind. If it wasn’t, the seer likely wouldn’t have hunted him down here, at Nick’s “second” job, for which he’d been contracted out by the government agency that oversaw vampires.

  His first job, his real job, was as a “Midnight,” a vampire who worked for the homicide division of the NYPD.

  Ironically, he originally got roped into this fighting gig as part of a case.

  The contract holder, David Farlucci, strangely hadn’t been all that interested in how the contract came about. The contract was signed.

  Farlucci expected Nick to honor it.

  Nick assumed he’d been off the hook when he killed his last opponent in the ring, but Farlucci handled that, too. He hired lawyers, called NYPD, medical techs, fight experts, and even other vamp fighters to the stand. With all their testimony, along with the blood tests and medical reports from the night of the fight, Farlucci’s lawyers managed to prove to the circuit judges that Nick had been the victim, not the aggressor.

  Farlucci convinced them the whole thing had been a set-up, an attempted hit, and that Nick shouldn’t be held responsible for a death that occurred essentially in self-defense.

  The judges agreed.

  It probably didn’t hurt that Nick killed another vampire—not a human. In any case, Nick’s record was expunged of wrongdoing, and his fight status reinstated.

  That meant Nick’s contract with Farlucci was still valid.

  Truthfully, Nick didn’t mind.

  These days, he could use the distraction.

  “What is it you have to show me?” he said, scowling as he glanced up at the seer again. “Are you painting again, Malek?”

  “Yes.” The seer nodded, emphatic. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”

  Nick’s scowl deepened.

  He’d been being sarcastic.

  Still, he should have realized that’s what this was about.

  Malek was a prescient.

  It was an exceedingly rare gift in a species that was exceedingly rare even apart from that. Seers used to share the world alongside humans and vampires. The three races fought a war that lasted almost a hundred years.

  They managed to fuck up a good portion of the planet in the process.

  Then the seers left.

  They just… left.

  Like everyone else, Nick thought they’d all left, as in every single seer, poof, vanished, gone forever. For decades, Nick believed only two races existed on the planet, human and vampire. He’d believed that for a little over a hundred years.

  Then he met Malek and his baby sister, Tai.

  Nick still hadn’t made up his mind how he felt about those meetings.

  He still hadn’t made up his mind what he felt about either seer, especially now.

  More often than not, he half-wished he’d stayed oblivious.

  “Where is this new masterpiece?” he grunted, pulling a T-shirt down over his head. Yanking it down over his damp back, he adjusted the fabric with a shake of his shoulders and reached for his coat. “…Can I look at it while I pick out what I’m going to watch on the network when I get home?”

  Malek didn’t smile.

  He didn’t even blink.

  He just looked Nick over as if to assure himself he was fully dressed. Then he turned around, aiming his feet for the door to the shower and changing area, clearly expecting Nick to follow him.

  After an annoyed exhale, one that was entirely unnecessary, since Nick didn’t have to breathe, Nick found himself doing exactly that.

  At the end of his train ride from Queens, plus an extra ten- or twelve-block walk, and a delay where Nick had to make his way through the compartmentalized lock and security system to enter the Devil’s Cauldron… around fifty minutes had passed.

  That, alone, already had Nick in a foul mood.

  He’d never been all that thrilled to visit the Cauldron.

  He generally found it depressing.

  He found it even more depressing now.

  The Devil’s Cauldron was a prison-like, segregated “security” zone inside Manhattan that mostly consisted of burnt-out buildings that never got fixed after the war, and poor people that the rest of the New York Protected Area would rather forget about.

  Amidst the bombed-out and half-falling-down buildings, the lack of electricity and inconsistently running water, not to mention scores of unexploded bombs and collapsed subway tunnels, lived a lot of refugees. Most were the poor and homeless, junkies and just regular ex-Americans who rushed the gates to get into New York Protected Area when the atmosphere grew too toxic to live outside the dome.

  Most of them would never leave.

  Malek came and went, but Nick never asked how that happened.

  Nick could come and go from the Cauldron too, of course… but he was a cop. He lived on the outside. He was registered through the I.S.F., and had a legitimate job in the human world. He wasn’t a denizen of the Cauldron, but one of its prison guards.

  Malek lived there.

  Part of the time, at least.

  Malek’s baby sister, Tai, used to live in the Cauldron with him, but the last Nick knew, Tai had gone back to Kellerman Prep School in the Northeastern Protected Area, where Nick had gotten her placed as a full-time student.

  But he couldn’t think about that.

  He couldn’t think about Tai.

  He couldn’t think about Kellerman Prep, or the Northeastern Protected Area… or anything remotely related to either of those things.

  “What am I looking at?” he grunted, shoving his hands in his coat pockets.

  Malek had brought him back to one of his favorite haunts.

  It was the same bombed-out church where Nick had first seen the prescient seer’s paintings inside the Cauldron, and made the connection to the paintings he’d been seeing on the outside. The Catholic church’s remaining brick walls seemed to be one of Malek’s favorite canvases, for reasons Nick didn’t even want to understand.


  The old wall that used to separate the church from Amsterdam Avenue still wore a giant mural of Malek’s sister, Tai.

  Malek hadn’t brought him to see that mural, though.

  This time, Malek brought him inside the church itself.

  Using a light from his headset, the seer illuminated a wall of what looked like the original structure.

  Nick glanced around before focusing where the seer wanted him, noting the remains of religious statues of the saints on the walls and floors down the middle of the cavernous room. On a higher floor, he glimpsed bent pipes and cracked, varnished wood that might have been the remains of an old pipe organ.

  Across from that, and below, he saw what must have been the main altar, perched on a slightly elevated section of floor.

  By now, of course, the altar itself was long gone, as was the tabernacle and most of the main cross, along with any tapestries and chairs. The stone steps were cracked and broken, with most of the dais covered in white powder and scorched chunks of stone, not to mention years of graffiti and what looked like a makeshift tent someone had abandoned.

  Everything looked and smelled moldy and wet, and Nick saw rats scuttle away under the seer’s headlamp. Kindling and larger pieces of wood covered much of the stone floor; Nick found himself thinking a lot of that might have been pews once.

  “Malek?” he prompted, when the seer didn’t speak. “What the fuck am I looking at?”

  The male seer was staring at him when Nick turned.

  Something about that stare annoyed Nick before the seer even spoke.

  “You should go see her,” Malek said.

  Nick felt every muscle in his body clench, seemingly in the same instant.

  He glared at the tall seer.

  “Tai doesn’t want to see me,” he said, deliberately misunderstanding him, even as he laced a harder warning into his words. “She made that perfectly clear.”

  “Tai does want to see you,” Malek said, his voice immovable. “She’s sad. She thinks she scared you. She misses you, Nick. She misses you a lot.”

  Malek paused, then said the thing that Nick had been warning him not to say.

  “…I didn’t mean Tai, though,” he added. “I meant your mate. I meant Ms. James.”