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

by JC Andrijeski

  “I know.”

  He handed her the coat, holding it out to her.

  She didn’t take it at first.

  Seeing the frustration in her blue-green eyes, he couldn’t help himself. Caressing her face with the back of his fingers, he leaned closer, kissing her cheek.

  “I want you to come over. I want you there. Okay?” Pushing the coat into her hands, he added gruffly, “And take this. I’ll turn up the heater, too. Just looking at you is making me cold. Didn’t you bring a fucking coat?”

  She snorted, but didn’t bother to answer.

  She also took the coat.

  Wrapping herself in the long, black fabric, which resembled more of a blanket on her, she used it to cover her shoulders and nearly-bare arms, then snuggled into the cushioned seat of the robo-taxi. Through all of it, he still felt her eyes on him.

  He felt her lingering puzzlement.

  He didn’t bother to answer any of the questions he felt there… for either of them.

  Like she’d said, it was already too late.

  Chapter 8

  Who Is She?

  Nick didn’t have much of a memory of the drive up to Washington Heights.

  He remembered seeing holographic ads through the windows.

  He remembered keeping his hands off her, once more conscious of the I.S.F. surveillance that was required in the passenger section of all robo-taxis.

  He knew she was probably right about that, too.

  He knew it was too late for them… for a lot of reasons.

  It was also a difficult paranoia to break, for a lot of other, separate reasons.

  And yeah, okay, Wynter was registered legally as human, so biting her was legal, as far as the human authorities were concerned—at least under her current I.S.F. designation. But Wynter wasn’t human, and a nagging voice in the back of Nick’s head told him too many people knew that already.

  Even before tonight, too many people knew.

  Tonight, Wynter spent a chunk of her night sweating off the fake pheromones that hid her non-human smell, dancing in a fucking vampire club for hours—with her vampire date, who may have bitten her already, and who definitely knew what she was if he did bite her.

  Straven knew.

  Straven made a point of letting Nick know they knew.

  At the very least, the androgynous vampire seemed to know Wynter wasn’t fully human.

  Scowling at the thought, Nick fought back and forth in his head.

  He hadn’t fed on her… not yet… so technically, he hadn’t done anything illegal yet, even apart from her official race-cat.

  Nick knew that wouldn’t matter, though.

  Even if he never fed on her, it wouldn’t matter.

  No one would ever believe Nick didn’t know what she was. No one would ever believe he hadn’t fed on her, knowing what she was. Hybrid blood was like cocaine to vampires. Vamps fed while they fucked. Vamps fucked while they fed. If I.S.F. authorities had human witnesses putting him and Wynter together sexually or romantically—much less city surveillance doing the same—it wouldn’t matter what he said.

  No one would believe him.

  Which was another reason Wynter was right when she said it was too late.

  Wynter’s race was a ticking time bomb both of them were sitting on, and nothing Nick did now would fix any of it.

  That didn’t even get into what he’d said to her earlier.

  That didn’t even get into what he might actually do to her, if she got addicted to his venom… which was damned likely to happen if Nick started feeding on her regularly.

  Legally, Wynter was in better shape than he was. If they got caught by the authorities, it would be bad for her, sure. It might even be really bad, depending on the judge they got, but she’d still be better off than Nick, and frankly, those were the consequences that worried him less, at least when it came to Wynter herself.

  She would be fined. They might even take her house.

  She would likely do jail time.

  They’d definitely re-tat and re-implant her. They’d monitor her more closely from that point forward. She’d likely lose her job.

  What happened to her beyond that would depend largely on the political climate, the prosecutor, and the particular I.S.F. tribunal magistrate. If someone in the racial authority decided they wanted to make an example of her, she could end up in I.S.F. reprogramming for a few years. That would be in addition to any jail sentence she might incur.

  In the end, though, Wynter would rejoin society.

  In the end, Wynter would still be Wynter.

  Her freedom would be curtailed, in small and possibly larger ways, but she’d still be herself. She’d still be a citizen. She could still work, live independently, date non-vampires. She could build a new life.

  Nick wouldn’t get off so easy.

  In a vampire-hybrid situation, he would definitely be seen as the predator.

  Legally, he would be judged as primarily at fault.

  A vampire who couldn’t control their eating habits was more or less classified as a rabid dog. For that reason alone, not to mention a few hundred years’ worth of human fear of vampires, human legal precedent against vampires, human racism, myth and reality regarding vampires hypnotizing and ensnaring unwilling human women…

  For all of that and more, Nick would face a whole different dimension of shit.

  They might not technically kill him, but the kind of reprogramming they gave vampires more or less killed them, even if it left them technically “alive.”

  Originally, the mind-wipe drugs the I.S.F. employed against vamps were meant to turn them back into humans. Developed prior to the war, they were meant to deal with the “vampire problem” by rescuing turned humans from their vampire natures totally.

  The drugs didn’t do that—meaning, they didn’t convert a vampire back into a full-fledged human being. They could make a vampire behave like a human, temporarily at least, but eventually, the drugs stopped working, usually at around six or seven months.

  The vamp didn’t exactly go back to being a vamp after that, though.

  In all the cases Nick had ever heard of, I.S.F. anti-vamp drugs wiped a vampire’s mind out permanently. They also turned that vamp into a drooling, mentally-deficient, incompetent mess, one who could barely feed themselves.

  Even if the I.S.F. didn’t go that far, Nick’s life as he knew it would be over.

  Needless to say, he’d lose his Midnight status.

  More to the point, he’d likely lose his legal standing within the Protected Areas, at least within what had once been the United States. That meant permanent exile, even if they did let him go. That meant fleeing to Europe, or Asia… possibly even Africa.

  Or, more realistically, it meant throwing himself on the mercy of the White Death.

  It meant selling himself to the vampire mafia for protection.

  It also meant a life-debt to the White Death he could never repay.

  He’d be back in that way of being a vampire, back to that kind of work, back to that way of thinking and feeling. It meant looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life, changing his identity, never having a fixed residence, never interacting with anyone outside the syndicate ever again. They would turn him back into a murderer.

  Well. More of a murderer.

  He’d go back to being a full-time murderer.

  The taxi was slowing.

  Nick looked out the window and recognized his building.

  Immediately, that pain in his chest surged back.

  He knew he’d been distracting himself.

  He’d been distracting himself from Wynter. He’d been distracting himself from where they were going. He’d been distracting himself from what he would do when they got there, what she was thinking.

  He felt her eyes on him now as he looked up at the entrance to his apartment complex.

  He felt that pain in his chest worsen.

  He shouldn’t have brought her here.

&
nbsp; She shouldn’t fucking be here.

  At the same time, he knew Wynter was right.

  At this point, the race thing was mostly an excuse.

  He knew the truth. He knew Wynter did, too.

  He was afraid. He was a coward, and he was afraid. He was too much of a coward to even want to look very closely at why he was afraid, or even what he was afraid of… much less how much of it was for her sake and how much was pure, selfish, self-protection, not so much from the I.S.F. as from her, meaning from Wynter herself.

  He thought he’d dealt with that fear.

  He thought he’d dealt with it twice—first by being with her, then by leaving her.

  Neither thing really dealt with it.

  “Are we getting out?” she said.

  He had no idea what she was thinking. He knew there was a good chance she’d heard some or all of his thoughts, or at least glimmered the flavor of them. He had no idea why they would have shifted her reaction from anger to amusement, though.

  “Nick?”

  He gave her a bare glance, then reached for the door release.

  Hitting the panel with his palm, he watched the door slide open. Then he stepped out, removing himself immediately from the opening so she could follow. He watched her climb out of the taxi in his peripheral view, feeling that pain in his chest worsen when he felt her looking at him.

  She seemed to have given up on him returning her gaze.

  She seemed to have given up on him talking to her, too.

  Shoving her hands into the pocket of his coat, which she still wore, she walked towards the entrance of his complex, her high heels clicking lightly across the cement walkway.

  After the barest pause, he followed.

  He watched her walk up to the glass-doored entrance, then step aside for him, since she didn’t have the ability to let them in. He didn’t look at her as he bent down to key in the code to open the building’s main door, pausing only to press his thumb against the security pad.

  When the door clicked, then buzzed softly, he caught it in his hand and held it open for her.

  He watched her walk through, her arms wrapped around herself inside his coat.

  Remembering why he’d brought her here, what he’d been thinking about the whole drive here without really letting himself consciously think about it, he closed his eyes, clenching his jaw at the pain that sharpened in his chest.

  Her smell might have worried him, but it was early yet, for this building.

  Most working vampires wouldn’t be home yet. Most wouldn’t return until their shifts ended just before dawn, and even then, a lot of them trickled in after they’d eaten.

  Wynter glanced back at him when he remained frozen just outside the glass door, still holding that door in his hand. A faint puzzlement rose to her eyes, and for a few beats he was lost there, trying to decide what the look meant.

  Then the door buzzed louder at him, protesting how long he’d held it open, and he slipped inside, letting it swing shut behind him.

  He avoided looking at the guard working inside the glass booth.

  He recognized his smell, though he didn’t know his name.

  Like all guards who worked here, Nick knew the male was human, and an employee of the I.S.F., but not one with a high security clearance or with much interest in the goings-on of the residents. Like most security guards Nick remembered from the old world, he was underpaid, bored, and often napping when Nick glanced inside the booth—that, or glued to a show on one of the network stations.

  Nick walked Wynter to the second security door, and punched in that code as well.

  He held the door again as Wynter walked inside, but that time, he didn’t wait. He followed her straight to the elevators, where he again needed a code to get to his floor.

  “Wow,” she commented, as the security device scanned his fingerprint when he pressed down on the elevator summons. “You weren’t kidding with the security here.”

  Nick grunted, then moved out of the way as one of the doors opened in front of them.

  Wynter began to walk towards it, when a flurry of motion erupted from behind them.

  Nick turned, sharp—moving in instinct more than thought.

  He felt more than saw the chaotic, angry energy moving towards Wynter.

  He caught the source of it easily in his hands.

  A split-second later, he saw the projectile. Something hard, something that glinted in the overhead light, flew through the air. It had already left the attacker’s hands.

  Again, Nick moved more in instinct than thought.

  He lunged, leaping up and capturing it in one hand without fully letting go of the person who writhed in his grasp. He managed to catch the thing—which turned out to be a heavy bottle, what looked and felt like it was full of wine, maybe champagne—right before it would have slammed into the back of Wynter’s head.

  Wynter felt the air displacement though, and turned, even as Nick pulled the bottle back, snatching it out of the air. He watched her eyes widen in shock, saw her raise a hand to the back of her head protectively. She stared up at Nick, wide-eyed, when she saw him gripping the bottle in one hand, the hair and the back of the neck of a writhing human in his other hand.

  Before Nick could speak, before Wynter had even closed her mouth, the body writhing in Nick’s grip let out a furious burst of sound.

  “WHO IS THIS BITCH? Who is she?”

  Nick looked at Wynter a beat longer, then, reluctantly, turned his head.

  For the first time, he really looked at the person he’d caught in mid-lunge.

  He stared at her, recognizing her face vaguely.

  He fought to remember it past the lines of make-up running down her cheeks, and the fact that her hair was wet. Remembering that it had been raining earlier, he wondered if she’d walked here, all the way to his building, through a vamp neighborhood, in the rain.

  He had her now, though.

  He remembered her. He remembered how they’d met.

  He fought with names, trying to remember hers—then it hit him, he’d never actually gotten her name. He had no idea what to call her.

  “What are you doing here?” he growled after that too-long silence. “I cancelled live feeds weeks ago. Months ago, now.”

  He stared at her furious face, the trails of black make-up running down from those blue eyes, and found himself remembering her for real. Red hair. Decent lay. He’d fed off her not long before he cancelled the live feeds.

  The I.S.F. sent her to his door the day after the Kellerman case started.

  Then, his brain caught up with the rest of it.

  Realizing the I.S.F. program of sending him living humans to feed on couldn’t in any way explain what just happened, or what she was doing here, hiding in the elevator lobby of his building with a full bottle of champagne, even if there’d been some kind of bureaucratic mistake, his voice lowered to a harder growl.

  “…and why the fuck are you attacking my friends? How did you even get in here?”

  But the woman didn’t want to talk about that.

  She never tore her eyes off Wynter.

  She barely looked at him, even as she directed words at him.

  “Who the fuck is this, Naoko?” she hissed. “Are you going to tell me?”

  He stared at her, looking between her and Wynter in disbelief.

  “No,” he said. “Get the fuck out of here!”

  He released her as he spoke, shoving her backwards, even as he stepped deliberately between her and Wynter. He pointed at the security door to the lobby.

  “Get out!” he snapped. “Now! Or I’ll call the police!”

  “Who is she? Is she the reason you blocked my requests?” The redhead pointed at Wynter, who remained behind Nick. “That cunt! Who is she, Naoko? One of your new fight groupies? Some vampire whore you picked up on the street?”

  Nick stared at her, fighting between anger and bewilderment.

  At least some of his anger was now aimed at tha
t damned security guard, who clearly wasn’t bothering to so much as glance at any of the surveillance monitors. That, or he just didn’t give a damn enough to want to risk coming in here.

  How had this crazy human gotten inside the building in the first place?

  Had she talked another vamp into letting her in here?

  Behind him, Nick felt Wynter’s shock turning into a harder anger.

  Feeling that anger starting to affect him already, Nick pointed at the door, straightening to his full height. That time, he used a denser voice, one he normally used only to compel. He didn’t do it at full power, but did it enough to give her a mental shove. He’d had her blood before, so that should help, even if it had been a long time.

  “Get. Out,” he said through clenched teeth. “You’re not welcome here. You were not invited. You will never be invited here… and you just committed attempted assault against a human civilian. I’m letting you go out of pure charity… but I have your image,” he said, tapping his headset. “I plan to leave it with security, and with the building’s facial-rec. If I ever see you here again, for any reason, I’ll call I.S.F. and NYPD… and I’ll press full charges. I’ll also show them the recording of this night.”

  For the first time, the woman tore her eyes off Wynter, who must still be visible from behind Nick, based on the intensity of the redhead’s stare.

  She gazed up at Nick instead, her expression bewildered.

  “Why did you lie to me?” she said. “Why did you tell me we would be together—”

  “I never said that.” Nick’s voice came out cold.

  Still, some part of him was in disbelief.

  Tonight. Of all fucking nights.

  Tonight, she shows up here.

  “I’m sorry if you got the wrong idea,” he said, his voice more subdued. “But that was months ago. Why are you here now?”

  The woman blinked, her expression still stunned.

  Then the anger bled back over her expression.

  She pointed at Wynter again. “I saw you. I saw you, Nick… on the damned news channels! Kissing her. Kissing her in the middle of some fucking vamp club. Half the stations carried it. ‘Champion vampire fighter, White Wolf…’”