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

by JC Andrijeski

  He watched the human thumb through the stacks, pulling them out and tossing pieces behind him on the desk to clear his view inside the safe.

  On the floor, in the nearer part of the virtual image, a slim, muscular woman knelt next to a man in a virtually-enhanced suit. The woman’s metallic silver dreads, tied back in a long ponytail, and her sharp, strangely feline features, definitely marked her as the woman from building surveillance.

  The human male lying on the floor unquestionably looked dead, as Morley had said.

  His suit flickered from the virtual patterns in the fabric, but his eyes stared up, unmoving.

  He didn’t look like he’d been dead for long, though.

  “Did you find it?” the woman on the screen said.

  Nick jumped a little.

  So did Jordan.

  He hadn’t realized there was audio.

  Moreover, it was loud, making him realize how quietly the two thieves were working as they moved over the body and emptied the safe. Now that he listened for it, he heard the rustle of papers and the movement of fabric from their clothes.

  Nick heard it before, of course, being a vampire, but he’d assumed the sound was ambient noise from the techs in the room.

  The woman on the screen never looked up from her intense focus on the dead body on the carpet, not even when she spoke to her husband.

  “Well?” she said. “What are you grinning about?”

  “The jackpot, honey—”

  Nick winced.

  He didn’t have time to think about why before she cut him off.

  “The client’s jackpot?” she said. “Because we need to start there, Tig.”

  “A jackpot for us,” he said, glancing over his shoulder to wink at her. “Can’t I multi-task?”

  “Sure,” she said sarcastically.

  Even in the sarcasm, Nick heard the affection there and winced again.

  “—Multi-task away,” she added. “But do the fucking job first, Tig. They won’t pay us the rest, if we don’t get what we came for. I’m doing my half. We need yours to get the full payout. Their contact made it pretty clear we wouldn’t get shit if we didn’t bring them both.”

  “Don’t worry, baby,” the husband said. He yanked a black box out through the safe’s opening, a grin on his scarred face. “It’s here. It has to be.”

  He brought the locked box over to the desk.

  Like the semi-organic suit fibers, Silverton’s desk flickered with internal life, sparking up and down its legs and around the edges of the flat monitor that made up the desk’s main working surface. That one piece of furniture had so much organic material in its makeup, it glowed a pale green in color, the color of new leaves, of baby grass.

  The husband examined the box with his hands and eyes, frowning.

  After a few seconds, he picked the whole thing up, bringing it over to his wife.

  “I think I need his fingerprints to open this thing,” he said. “See if any of them work on the pad…”

  Nick watched them go back and forth for a few minutes more, trying to decide which hand to use, which finger.

  He already had a pretty good idea how this was going to go.

  He glanced at Jordan, who was frowning, arms folded across his muscular chest as he stared at the moving images.

  From his expression, he more or less knew how this would end, too.

  Nick wondered if it bothered him as well.

  Just how, well… married the two of them were.

  For some reason, an image of Wynter’s face came to his mind, and Nick winced for real.

  Biting his tongue with the edge of a partially-extended fang, he grimaced.

  When he refocused on the three-dimensional images around him, the husband was positioning the dead man’s thumb over a silver indentation disc on the organic-metal box his wife held.

  “…Well,” he said, exhaling. “Here goes nothing.”

  He pressed Silverton’s thumb onto the organic pad.

  The box immediately snapped to life.

  Subtle lines and veins in the box’s design lit up.

  Those lights were a sharp, neon green and blue at first, as they scanned the dead man’s thumb.

  The husband grinned, looking at his wife.

  Nick plainly saw the affection in that look—no, the love that lived there—and winced again, averting his gaze from that broad, scarred face. When he glanced at Jordan that time, the other cop was looking at him, an eyebrow quirked in a silent question.

  Nick didn’t bother to respond, or react.

  “It’s working!” the human male in the virtual recording said gleefully. “They don’t do shit when you have the wrong finger—”

  “Wait!” his wife said, holding up one hand. “What’s it doing now?”

  The lights on the box were changing.

  The colors changed from cool to warm… then to hot. Nick watched them shift first from blue and green to yellow, then to orange.

  Then to red.

  “What the fuck?” the man said. “Could it know he’s dead?”

  The male human looked at his wife—

  There was a bare whisper of silence.

  —then the box exploded outwards in a hot, blinding-white flash.

  Sound filled the dark security room.

  The sound was so loud, it made Jordan wince and step back. It caused every tech in the room to glance over, even though they must have seen the footage before.

  The sound grew louder, more violent—

  Then abruptly cut off, leaving nothing but static.

  Then the static was gone, too.

  Silence fell over their corner of the security room.

  “Well,” Jordan said, still watching Nick with a barely-noticeable scrutiny. “I guess it was murder all right. Coupled with what you might call instant karma.”

  “Right,” Nick muttered. “In other words, does it matter?”

  Jordan gave him a wry smile, punching him lightly on the arm.

  “Of course it matters, brother. It means it’s our case.”

  Nick gave him a sideways look.

  “I find it creepy that you think that’s a good thing, Damon.”

  Jordan laughed. “I thought you wanted a good case to sink your fangs into, Tanaka. Weren’t you the one saying the other day that you needed a good distraction? Something juicy enough to actually occupy most of your brain for a change?”

  Nick scowled at him a little, but didn’t answer at first.

  Had he said that?

  He’d been pretty drunk the last time the two of them hung out.

  Well, at least until his vampire metabolism burned the alcohol off, only a few hours slower than he was able to drink it.

  He’d probably said a lot of stupid shit that night.

  Come to think of it, given his mood lately, he probably didn’t want to know what else might have come out of his mouth that night.

  Jordan, as if reading his facial expression, burst out in a laugh. “Now that is one guilty look, Tanaka. I’m guessing you don’t remember a word of what you said to me at Scully’s the other night? After your fight? Not one word… am I right?”

  Nick gave him a flat look. “Does it matter? I’m sure you’ll lord it over me, siphoning it out to me in drips and drabs to achieve maximum paranoia…”

  Jordan laughed again.

  That time, instead of punching his arm, he smacked him playfully on the chest with the back of his hand.

  Morley glanced over at the two of them, sipping off his Yankees mug and shaking his head as he rolled his eyes.

  “Children,” he muttered. “Case. Remember? Can I get at least one of you to co-verify the death with me for the write-up?”

  His words drew their eyes back to the flat monitor.

  Nick noticed only then that the tech had reverted the surveillance footage back to its two-dimensional format, displaying it on the dark screen below where they stood. He watched her begin scrolling back through the flatter images
rapidly, bringing the timeline to the point just before the Gorman husband-and-wife crime team first broke into Silverton’s office.

  Nick hesitated, looking between Jordan and Morley as they stared at the footage.

  He watched the slender woman walk in, gun in hand.

  A warning beep came off her headset when Silverton aimed his own weapon, and she swiveled, squeezing off a shot before he could.

  “I guess chivalry isn’t dead,” Jordan muttered, pointing at the screen. “Did you see his eyes? He wasn’t expecting a woman. He hesitated—”

  “She didn’t,” Nick said, shrugging. “A more positive spin. Sexism killed him.”

  Jordan grunted a half-laugh, but his eyes remained serious.

  “Or, could be neither,” the human detective murmured, low. “Maybe he was expecting someone else to come for him tonight. Someone specific.”

  Nick frowned, but didn’t disagree with Jordan’s words.

  “Verified?” Morley queried, after the surveillance showed the body of Silverton hit the carpeted floor. “Either of you jokers got an issue with the cause of death?”

  The Tig woman dropped him with one hard plasma bolt to the chest, using a wide-spread muzzle, the equivalent to a sawed-off shotgun from the olden days.

  The plasma bolts were twice as deadly, though.

  From what Nick could tell, that one shot more or less pulverized Silverton’s heart, most of one lung, and severed his spinal cord instantly, at least from the blood spray out the human’s back. It must have been tough for her to get accurate imaging of his internal organs.

  “Verified,” Jordan agreed.

  “Verified,” Nick seconded.

  Morley nodded to the young woman at the console. “Note the time signature, and send it to the precinct.”

  Nick watched the tech-punk key the command deftly into her console using the spider-like finger-extensions.

  By then, he’d more or less made up his mind.

  He had to show them.

  He’d promised himself he’d stop hiding things from Morley and Jordan, at least those things he didn’t absolutely have to hide.

  It was the least he could do, given how much he legitimately couldn’t tell them—about himself, about Archangel, about the seers, Malek and Tai… even about Kit.

  Clicking over in his headset, he switched to sub-vocals and linked with Morley and Jordan on a secure channel. After a bare hesitation, he encrypted the transmission as well, without even really being sure why, at least not specifically.

  “Look,” he said. “I might have something. It might be nothing. It might be pure bullshit, given the source, but I think I’m doing the right thing in showing it to you, anyway. Only… somewhere else. Outside, at least. Away from their surveillance, in case they can tap our headsets in here.”

  There was a brief delay.

  Nick knew that was the program sending, then de-encrypting what he’d sent.

  Morley glanced at him at the end of that delay, his dark eyes unreadable as he took a sip off his ugly Yankees mug. Nick couldn’t help but marvel at the other man’s poker face when he got a ping that he’d just received an encrypted message back from the senior detective.

  Nick had to wait a beat for it to de-encrypt on his end, as well.

  “You think someone in the building was in on this?” Morley said.

  Nick frowned.

  He hadn’t really thought that—not consciously.

  He just felt eyes on them in here.

  Unspecific eyes.

  Now that he was thinking about it, he had to admit that yes, a part of him must have wondered if it was an inside job, subconsciously or not.

  Maybe it was Jordan’s comment about Silverton waiting for someone specific.

  Whatever triggered Nick’s paranoia exactly, the possibility definitely wasn’t one his instincts had ruled out. Instead of answering Morley’s question outright, however, he glanced between the two of them, then motioned his head towards the door.

  Morley exhaled, a little impatiently.

  Then he turned to the tech.

  “We’re going on a coffee break,” he said. “How close are you to having a full chronology with all the tapes? Can we see the composite of the break-in when we get back? Everything they did to enter the building? Including the murder?”

  That time, two techs turned.

  The bald one, who’d showed them the sequence in Silverton’s office, turned first.

  Her partner in the adjacent seat turned as well, a twenty-something with white hair who Nick scarcely tracked until that precise instant.

  The second tech’s hair was shaved on the sides, gelled with rainbow AR-product that made it sparkle as if filled with tiny lights. She wore a jewel-like implant embedded in her forehead—embedded in a way that made Nick grimace, mostly because she had to have deliberately cut a chunk of her own skull out for the adornment.

  Both of them nodded, seemingly as one.

  Then, also seemingly as one, they turned back to the screens they had open.

  Nick watched the one with the jewel in her forehead return to scanning a separate surveillance feed on a secondary screen she’d opened while the three of them had been watching the replay of the explosion.

  Nick saw the Gormans walking across the lawn on her screen, dressed in a way that made them mostly inconspicuous to surveillance.

  They’d perfected the art of looking like they belonged there.

  When Jordan and Morley turned to leave, Nick watched the married couple on the screen a beat longer before following the two detectives to the door.

  Nick planned on talking as soon as they hit the business park.

  When he opened his mouth to speak, however, Morley gave him a warning look, glancing up at the surveillance poles lining either side of the lit path.

  Nick frowned, following the senior detective’s gaze.

  He glanced around to see additional poles scattered over the lawn, covering probably every inch of space between the street and the first building.

  There would be drones out here too, most likely.

  That meant audio surveillance.

  Morley brought Nick and Jordan to a curve in the business park’s driveway, walking them towards an armored, surveillance-proof NYPD van parked at the end of the path.

  The only person inside was one of the CSI squints.

  Morley asked her to go get Jordan another cup of coffee from the nearest kiosk, and give them the van for twenty minutes.

  Looking nervously at Nick’s eyes, the human nodded and climbed down through the double doors at the back.

  She was about to walk off entirely when Jordan tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Two sugars,” he said, swiping his barcode over the woman’s headset. “Some of those chocolate sprinkles on top.” Handing her the disc his cup had collapsed down into while they were inside the security station, he added, “…And have them deduct this from the cost. Be sure they do it, okay? They always fucking forget.”

  Still staring at Nick numbly, the squint tore her eyes off Nick’s face long enough to nod to Jordan. Still without saying a word, she took the disc from Jordan’s fingers and wandered off down the sidewalk towards the main street, where the coffee trucks lived.

  Nick wondered what the hell was up with her.

  As if he’d heard him, Morley snorted.

  “She’s a big fight fan, Tanaka,” the senior detective said, glancing sideways at Nick. “You should have heard her going on and on about what you did in the ring tonight. She bored the shit out of all of us, the whole way up here. I think you had her tongue-tied.”

  Rolling his eyes at Nick’s frown, Morley added,

  “Yeah, sure. I know. It’s tough being famous. Especially when you’re a reclusive, anti-social son of a bitch with deep-seated intimacy issues and a damned persecution complex.”

  Jordan burst out in a startled laugh.

  When Nick glared between both of them, Morley chuckled.

&nb
sp; “Lighten up, Midnight,” he said, taking another sip off the ugly Yankees mug. “You’ve lost your damned sense of humor lately. You used to be funny at least… when you weren’t being an overt pain in my ass. This past month, you’re like a black cloud every time you enter the room.”

  Smiling wryly, he lowered the mug, peering into Nick’s face.

  “What’s the matter? Immortality got you down? Or is it really all that unnecessary human contact you’re being forced to deal with, now that you’re a celebrity fighter?”

  “Girl troubles,” Jordan offered.

  Nick turned slowly towards Damon Jordan, giving his friend a death look, telling him to shut up with his eyes.

  Jordan only laughed.

  “Serious girl troubles,” he said, nudging Nick with a hand.

  Nick scowled.

  He was trying to decide if he should bother saying anything, or if it would only make the two of them worse. Before he could make up his mind, Jordan and Morley were already climbing into the back of the van, so Nick just shut his mouth and followed.

  Once they were inside with the doors closed, all of them sitting on stools bolted in front of computerized lab panels, Morley motioned at him.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s have it.”

  Nick frowned, wondering if he was making a mistake.

  He knew what Lara St. Maarten would say.

  Weirdly, he doubted Malek would care, but St Maarten would blow a gasket if she knew what Nick was about to tell his two NYPD colleagues.

  Then again, why he should start giving a fuck about anything that woman thought was beyond him.

  She might think she owned him, but she didn’t.

  Not yet.

  “I got another painting,” he said, exhaling. “From our artist. You know. Same guy we ran into during the Kellerman case.”

  “What?” Jordan stared at him. “How the fuck did that happen?”

  Nick turned, looking at him.

  “It happened tonight. After my fight. He sent me a location to go look for the painting, at a church inside the Cauldron. I got the message after I got out of the showers. It was waiting for me on my headset, when I turned it back on.”