He looked like Magnum-fucking-P.I.
The mustache version. From the 1980s.
Hearing him, Wynter laughed louder in his mind.
More Hawaii Five-O, she sent, still grinning at him in the spaces behind his eyes. More like you should have a surfboard under your arm. It struck me as appropriate.
How the hell do you even know that is? he sent, bewildered.
I watch the classics, she informed him. In fact, I might watch some Hawaii Five-O and masturbate, thinking about you in that shirt until you get back here…
Eat first, he sent in a growl. Eat, and you can masturbate all over my apartment if you want. Feeling his fangs extending, he added in a denser voice, Although, I really wish you wouldn’t. I’m having enough trouble… concentrating.
She laughed.
What? he thought at her. What now?
Jordan, she sent, still fighting to control giggles. Jordan. His face when he sees you in that outfit. I would seriously pay you to record that—
Ha, ha, he grumbled.
He was about to go on when the driver spoke up from the front of the car.
“Sir?” she said politely. “My employer asks that you stay for dinner, since you’ve made him wait. He insists.” Pausing, she added, “He wants to know if you have a preference. In terms of blood type.”
Nick shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”
“He will provide live feeds, of course. All totally legal. And very willing—”
“I’m not hungry,” Nick said, his voice a harder growl.
Damned straight you’re not, Wynter growled in his mind. You touch someone while you’re there, Naoko—
The thought made him feel sick, though.
Actually, physically sick.
He grimaced, his hand on his stomach.
Wynter, he sent, hearing actual hurt in his mental voice. Shut up.
She went quiet.
Then, he felt heat in his heart and chest, an almost debilitating warmth.
Realizing she was sending that to him, he bit his tongue, stifling the sound that wanted to come out of his throat.
Don’t, he sent. Please, honey. Not while I’m here. They’re going to lock me up. They’re seriously going to lock me up if I don’t calm the fuck down…
She sent him more warmth, but it was lighter that time, more affection than heat.
Okay, she sent, her mental voice sending more of that heat into his limbs and chest. Just so we’re on the same page. With the you not biting other people thing—
We are one hundred percent on the same page, Wynter, he sent back, softer. Come on. Be a good girl. Get out of the bathtub. Put on clothes… anything… even another one of my ugly shirts. Just answer the door and eat at least some of what I ordered, okay?
She sent him more warmth, and he closed his eyes.
Okay? he sent, clenching his jaw. Wynter?
Okay.
I’ll come back as soon as I can—
The limousine was slowing.
Feeling that it was different this time, that it wasn’t a stoplight or traffic in front of them, Nick refocused out the tinted windows.
The sun was starting to go down.
He really was late.
He was like… hours late.
His stomach twisted when he remembered he still hadn’t called Kit back yet, either.
He should have stayed at the apartment. He should have just told them he was sick. But vampires didn’t get sick really, not like humans.
He wondered if Jordan would even still be there.
Looking at the collection of messages still blinking in his headset, he considered listening to them, then decided they would just stress him out more.
The car pulled up to the front of a building that looked vaguely familiar to him. He requested info on the address from the NYPD artificial intelligence, even as the limousine rolled to a stop right in front of the old-fashioned, revolving glass doors.
Gertrude, the NYPD A.I., rose in his headset.
“Built by celebrity architect, Straven, the Anubis Building, as it is commonly called, is located a block away from Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and features a hotel and residential apartments that take up most of the building, with the lower floors housing businesses, including the famed arthouse, gallery, and coffee shop, Rogue 7, which takes up most of the southeastern corner of the ground floor…”
Nick continued to listen with part of his mind as the driver got out in front of him, walking around to the rear door by where he sat and opening it for him with a bow.
He glanced up at her with a faint scowl, wishing again he’d come up with some excuse as to why he couldn’t be here.
He really hadn’t thought this through.
“Where are they?” he said, gruff, as he climbed out of the back of the long car, moving too fast, fast enough that a number of nearby humans turned and stared.
They were in the shade of the building’s striped red and white awning over the street, but given how weak the sun was at that point, and the fact that none of it was direct, given the tall buildings surrounding them, it may not have mattered.
“The fortieth floor,” the driver said politely. Motioning towards the glass revolving doors, she added, “Someone is waiting for you in the lobby to take you up.”
Nick’s jaw clenched involuntarily, but he only nodded, conscious again of his clothes, and the fact that he hadn’t thought to grab a coat, either.
Did the food come yet? he thought in Wynter’s general direction, as he walked towards the glass doors.
She didn’t answer at first.
As he entered the lobby, and found himself staring up at a massive, four-story stone statue of the Egyptian god, Anubis, with its black dog’s head and gold robes, her voice rose in his mind, along with a pulse of her warmth.
Yes, she sent, laughing. I’m just sitting here, staring at all of it. Do you have any idea what you ordered? Or just how much you ordered, Nick?
Don’t stare at it, he grumbled at her. Eat it. Some of it, at least.
I will, I just need to… absorb it all first. There’s so much—
I have to go, Nick cut in, seeing a man in a dark suit walking towards him.
The man had been standing outside the elevator doors.
He must have watched Nick walk in. The human was still staring at him as he approached, an elaborate headset wrapped around the back of his head, and another morphing gadget around his wrist. The augmented-reality dark suit he wore shimmered and changed color as he walked.
Nick had never seen the human before, but the man pretty obviously recognized him, whether from an image he had in his headset or from memory.
“Mr. Tanaka?” he said, holding out a hand when he was close enough.
His voice boomed across the high-ceilinged lobby, causing Nick to flinch, causing others to turn and stare at the two of them curiously.
The man smiling at Nick didn’t seem to notice.
“…So good to have you here. I apologize for the heavy-handedness, but my employer wanted to make sure you found your way easily, so he sent me down to wait.”
“It’s fine,” Nick muttered, glancing around, conscious suddenly that he probably looked like an ex-con the way he was scanning the room.
The paranoia he felt bordered on weird, given who he was and why he was here; he was acting like he expected something to jump out of the walls at him.
If the human noticed, he was too polite to comment.
“Are you ready to go up, sir?” he said.
Nick nodded, still gazing around the lobby at the hanging chandeliers, the gold and red Persian-style carpets, the stone fountain under that massive Anubis statue, the palm trees that dotted most of the lobby.
“Lead the way,” he said, still taking in the room as he motioned vaguely towards the elevators. “Fortieth floor. Right?”
“That is correct, sir.”
Nick followed him to the elevators, which were each decorated with a giant Ey
e of Horus. When Nick glanced up the marble-looking walls, he saw more palm trees on the floors above, not to mention the high skylight, at least forty stories above where they stood, at the very top of the building.
Nick was beginning to think those high skylights constituted a trademark of the Straven style. That, and maybe his plant and water fetish. He could hear water running somewhere even now—something apart from the pyramid fountain below the frighteningly large Anubis—but his eyes hadn’t yet detected the source.
He followed the human into the elevator and immediately retreated into the corner of the car. The doors closed with a soft snick, and the car began moving smoothly upward.
“Are the others still here?” Nick said. “The police, I mean?”
He was trying to wrap his head around the case again, around why he was here.
“Yes,” the human said. “Two of them left. Two are still here.”
Nick frowned faintly.
He wanted to ask which two, but didn’t.
He fought to remember the scene of the bombing, what he remembered of Straven’s first interview. He also found himself wishing he’d listened to his messages. It was possible there was information in those messages that would help him now.
He pulled up the queue, noting that five of the messages were from Kit, four were from Jordan, one was from Morley… and a new one from St. Maarten blinked there. There was also one from an unmarked address, which was more than a little unusual.
He was trying to decide if he should hit that one first—
The car jerked hard to the side.
It came to a dead stop.
Then it jerked again, even more violently, causing him and the man in the dark suit to fall into defensive crouches, holding out their arms.
“Whoa!” the man next to him said.
His voice was shaky.
Then Nick heard it.
A loud, explosion coming from somewhere below where they stood.
He stared at their feet, feeling a thick wave of trepidation.
“Hold on,” he said, growling the words at the other man.
“What?”
Nick gave him a grim look. “Hold the fuck on.”
The human paled.
Nick gripped the brass balance bar at the back of the elevator car. Copying him, Straven’s human employee did the same, staring around at the elevator car, breathing hard as he stopped to focus on Nick’s face, as if trying to read the danger through him.
He was still staring at Nick, fighting to speak—
—when the blast hit.
Chapter 12
The Second One
Nick knew it was coming.
It still managed to come out of nowhere.
The first explosion is when he heard something metallic snap.
An echoing, sonic kind of vibration, almost a twanging vibrated the elevator car—right before something hot slammed it violently from side to side. Nick felt the heat rise around the outside of the metal as it happened, raising the temperature more slowly on the inside where he and the human crouched.
Closing his eyes, he envisioned smoke, air, fire from the blast… some combination of all three.
He lost his balance in those first few seconds.
He lost it badly enough, he nearly fell.
He was forced to grab the bar with his second hand as he fought to stay on his feet.
The man next to him hit the floor, hard, then slammed against the wall to the right. He let out a shriek, a half-yell, a half-scream, slamming into the opposite end of the car before Nick reached out and grabbed hold of his arm, yanking him closer to where he crouched. When the shaking paused for a few seconds, he gripped the man’s shoulder, holding him down.
“Is it over?” the man said, shouting, panting, his voice rising.
“No—” Nick began.
The elevator car slammed sideways again, bouncing and jumping, then throwing them up in a hard snap. The violence of the jerk pulled the human halfway up to the ceiling of the car.
He yelled out in terror, flailing his arms and hands.
He reached for Nick, for the brass-plated walls.
When he collapsed onto the floor, Nick grabbed him a second time, right before the car started jumping again. The human would have hit his head on the brass bar, but Nick managed to hold him down that time, gripping him tight enough on the shoulder to keep him from flying up and braining himself on the car walls.
He could hear the explosions dying down.
They were still loud.
They were still really damned loud, especially to his vampire ears.
The diminishing rumbles trembled the elevator car, the cable swinging the car into the walls on either side, lurching it sickeningly back and forth… but Nick could hear the violence of the explosions receding.
The alarm on the elevator grew in his awareness at the same time, loud in his vampire-ears as he stared up at the flickering lights on the ceiling of the car.
“What’s down there?” Nick said, half-shouting. “What’s down on the lower floors? Anything besides the building lobby?”
The man blinking, panting.
He stared up at the flickering lights, his expression blank, his mouth ajar as he looked up past Nick, his eyes glassy.
“Hey!” Nick shook him, sharpening his words. “What’s on the lower floors? What are they targeting?”
“Nothing.” The man shook his head. His expression cleared marginally as Nick forced him to think, to try and answer him.
Since that had been at least part of Nick’s goal in asking, he felt his shoulders relax. He couldn’t afford to have the guy go into full-blown shock, not if he could help it.
“The ground floor doesn’t have much,” the human said. He held up a hand, counting off his fingers, as if reciting. “Rogue 7. The coffee shop and arthouse… the one that used to be in that bombed-out church during the war. The lobby business center. A hair salon. Some clothing boutiques. Another small art gallery. There’s an antique store. A deli—”
“A bank? What about safety deposit boxes? A safe for the owners?”
The man shook his head, but not exactly in a no.
“No bank,” he said. “I’m not sure about the residential offices. They have some boxes, I think. In the back room—”
Nick’s headset suddenly lit up.
The voice on it drowned out whatever else the man was about to say.
“Nick? TANAKA! Are you there? Can you hear me?”
“I’m here. Calm down, Damon… you’re screaming in my fucking ear…”
“Where are you?” the human said, still shouting. “They said you just entered the building. We have it that they hit the lobby level—”
“I’m in the elevator,” Nick said, looking up. “And yeah. They hit the lobby. Hard, from what I can tell.”
The car was still swaying back and forth.
They were hitting the sides of the walls.
That wasn’t normal.
One of the cables must have gotten cut in the blast. That must have been the twanging sound he’d heard, right after the first big explosion. He didn’t know a lot about elevators, but he knew they weren’t supposed to rock back and forth, banging into the shaft walls like they were hanging from a frayed piece of twine.
“I might need to get us out of here,” he muttered, staring up at the top hatch without turning off his channel to Jordan. “Is the security system still up?”
“Most of their team is cut off from us,” Jordan said, his voice losing some of its volume, but not much. “Straven says they lost a lot of them in the blast,” he admitted a beat later. “He’s on the phone with the company right now. Morley is calling in I.S.F. and Home-Sec, along with more NYPD and emergency responders—”
“Got it.”
“Nick,” Jordan said, switching to sub-vocals. “We just got word this wasn’t the only building hit. The Osiris Building, on the Eastside in Manhattan, is also reporting an explosion. That will split
the response—”
“Understood.”
Nick straightened slowly, unnerved when he felt the elevator car sway dramatically from the shift in his weight, banging into one of the walls with a dull thunk.
He motioned for the human to remain where he was, down by the floor, to not move, as he stared up at the security hatch.
The man ignored him, climbing up clumsily next to him.
Grasping for Nick’s arm, he let out a shocked, terrified gasp mixed with a whimper when the car lurched violently from his rise.
“Yeah,” Nick said grimly, looking around at the car as he swayed to keep his balance. “I gotta deal with this situation right now.”
“Deal with what?” Jordan said in his ear. “Nick? Don’t do anything stupid. I know what I said, but we still have resources. We’re sending people down to find you now. Straven’s got them trying to find your elevator—”
Realizing he still had the channel open to Jordan, Nick focused on the other cop.
“I’ll update you when I know more,” he said, blunt.
“Tanaka—” Jordan began, exasperated.
Nick clicked off.
He glanced first at the human male standing next to him, knowing the guy was more of a liability to him than not, but unable to help feeling sorry for him anyway.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s your name?”
The man looked at him, his face blank, his eyes unnaturally wide.
“C-Case,” he said. “Casey. But everyone calls me—”
“Case,” Nick said. “Got it. Okay, Case. Just take a breath, all right? I need you to stand here, and just focus on your breathing for a few seconds. Just close your eyes, and breathe. Okay? Can you do that for me.”
The man stared at him, his face showing utter incomprehension.
“Close your eyes, Case,” Nick said, putting more intention into his voice, making it a touch hard, almost stern. “Do as I say. Or I’m going to have to bite you… all right? You don’t need me to do that, though, do you, Case? You can do this. I know you can. And I’m going to get us out of here.”
The man’s face changed, the longer Nick spoke.
When Nick paused, Case nodded, swallowing.
Instead of scaring him more, Nick’s words, possibly the ones he said after the threat, not the threat itself, seemed to calm the worst of the panic Nick saw in those dark brown eyes.
The Prescient: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 3) Page 18