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

by JC Andrijeski

  Nick felt his chest clench.

  Looking into his sire’s eyes, it hit him, just how much of a mistake he’d made in mentioning Wynter.

  Of course, Brick may have already known about her.

  If he had people watching Nick, he would have known soon, if he didn’t already.

  Even so, Nick could see the spark of interest there, of curiosity.

  Worse than either thing… he saw the jealousy there, too.

  “I have to go,” Nick said, blunt.

  There was a silence.

  Then Brick’s eyes flickered away.

  Turning, the dark-haired vampire set his glass down deliberately, with more force than necessary, balancing it on the brass table to the right of his chair.

  “Of course you do,” the vampire murmured.

  “I apologize…” Nick added. “But I was clear, was I not, that my time was short—”

  “You were,” Brick acknowledged with a nod. Using his fingers, he waved Nick away, his mouth still pursed in that faint frown. “Fly away, little Naoko… fly away. Until you need me again, I suppose. Or until I decide to come calling on you.”

  Nick hesitated at that.

  He heard the threat there; he heard it clearly.

  He considered offering to come back.

  He considered offering to make a social call, offering to pay his respects in a real way, anything to keep the vampire from making good on his threat to come see Nick, to insert himself into any part of Nick’s life, or his world outside these walls.

  Then reason reared its head, somewhere in Nick’s confused mind.

  He remembered what a terrible idea that was.

  He remembered how that would only make all of this worse.

  “Thank you,” he said instead.

  He rose smoothly to his feet, hiding the shock of pain that ran through his body when he put his weight back on his hurt leg.

  Backing away from his sire, Nick didn’t turn his back on the other vampire until he’d left the rug-covered area around Brick’s decidedly throne-like chair.

  As soon as he did turn his back, however, Brick’s voice rose, echoing through the high-ceilinged room.

  “You will come back, Naoko,” the vampire drawled. “I insist.”

  Nick froze.

  Turning, he stared at the older vampire, at where he remained draped over the velvet-upholstered chair, his leg swinging lazily over the floor.

  “…You will bring your mate, and we will have a meal together. I will not take no for an answer, my son.”

  Nick stared at him.

  Again, his mind slid through all the different ways Brick might mean those words.

  He glanced at his timepiece.

  Fifty-six minutes.

  He didn’t have time to puzzle it out now.

  Instead, he bowed, keeping his expression perfectly blank, his voice and words noncommittal.

  “Thank you again so much for your time, father,” he said politely. “I appreciate your aid in this matter more than I can say—”

  “Soon, Naoko,” the vampire warned, clearly unwilling to let his words go unanswered. “This will happen soon. And you and I, we will be friends again… not strangers. Not estranged father and son.” Pausing meaningfully, he added, “I insist, Naoko.”

  Again, Nick opted not to answer.

  Bowing a second time, he simply removed himself from the room.

  Chapter 18

  Just A Feeling

  He walked into the hotel, glancing around with some trepidation, in spite of himself.

  Another Straven property.

  Another Ancient Egypt fetish in building form.

  More to the point, why were they meeting here?

  Was the androgynous vampire fucking with him? Or was he trying to prove something, jumping from one of his ostentatious properties to the other, even as they were being systematically taken out with explosives?

  Glancing at the row of elevators, Nick grimaced.

  Fuck.

  Was he really going to go through this again?

  He decided the answer to that question was no.

  He clicked on his headset. “I’m here,” he said, without bothering with a greeting. “Are you really on the sixty-fourth floor?”

  He’d already called her once, on the way to the building.

  He’d contacted her as soon as he left Brick’s, if only to keep her from making good on her threat to come looking for him… or really, even trying to contact him while he was inside a property owned by the White Death.

  “Yes,” she said at once. “Are you inside the building, or—”

  “Yes. In the lobby.”

  He hesitated, glancing around the cavernous space.

  The tile floor in here was white alternating with electric blue, the latter being an approximation of lapis lazuli. Despite that dramatic hue, the effect with all the white made it look like a giant chessboard.

  Nick actually thought this was the prettiest of the Straven buildings he’d been inside so far. The white marble theme extended into the art filling the lobby space, most of which consisted of statues of women, but also figures of graceful animals.

  Even more than the Anubis building, the ground floor was covered in living trees and plants, most of them full-sized palm trees. A white marble fountain, made in the shape of a pyramid, took up an enormous dais in the middle of the main part of the lobby floor. The building’s overall architecture mirrored the shape of the fountain; high above the blue and white tile floor, Nick saw a pyramid-shaped glass structure directly above the largest open area of the lobby, lit with white and blue lights that somehow didn’t dim the view of the stars.

  Marveling a little at the number of people walking to and fro in front of the massive, white-and-pale gold image of the goddess, Isis, Nick scowled.

  He couldn’t help hoping at least some of these people were plainclothes NYPD.

  Hell, he would have settled for I.S.F.

  He would have settled for Home-Sec, private-sec… or even Intereb, the international non-human enforcement bureau, what most vampires referred to as “The Leash.”

  The nickname was far from a compliment.

  “Yeah,” Nick said, letting his eyes flicker up the towering statue of Isis. “I’m not going up there. Tell Straven getting shot at and dangled from an elevator shaft once today was enough for me. If they want me to hang with them, I’ll be waiting in the lobby.”

  Wynter broke out in a surprised laugh.

  When Nick didn’t laugh with her, she cut it off.

  He felt her surprise through the line.

  “You’re serious.”

  “I’m dead fucking serious. I’ll be waiting down here. Tell Straven I’m happy to humor them with their need to act the rich degenerate around me… and to flirt with you in front of me… but I’m not getting in another one of their fucking elevators. Not today. If they want to try and kill me again, at least inside one of their buildings, they’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

  That time, Wynter didn’t laugh.

  Nick glanced over his shoulder, out the glass doors behind him.

  “…Come to think of it,” he said, clenching his jaw. “I’ll be in the bar across the street. The one with the AR cat over it. Le Chat Noir.”

  At her continued silence, Nick’s voice grew harder.

  “If Straven won’t come, I’ll wait for you there, Wynter. However long it takes. Unless you really want me to go up there. If so, I’ll do it, but I’m taking the stairs. With my hurt leg, it’ll probably take me a good thirty minutes, so I wouldn’t wait on ordering, if you’re hungry—”

  “No.” Her voice held a tinge of amusement, but he heard the edge there, too. “Absolutely not. If Straven says no, I’ll come straight down. Okay?”

  Nick opened his mouth, hesitating.

  Rethinking what he’d been about to say, he closed it reluctantly.

  She must have felt something, though.

  “You were about to tel
l me not to take the elevator,” she said. “Weren’t you?”

  Nick exhaled, half in embarrassment, half in defiance.

  “Yes,” he said, on the tail end of the exhale. “I still want to tell you not to do it. I know it’s irrational, but—”

  “It’s fine, Nick,” she said. “I’ll take the stairs if Straven won’t agree to come down with me. But honestly, I strongly suspect I’ll be riding down with the rest of them. I don’t see Straven either letting me leave without them, or letting you off the hook for spending most of your evening with them and their entourage—”

  “I wish they would,” Nick confessed. “I really just want to go home.”

  “I know you do,” she said.

  He heard the caginess there.

  Realizing she thought they should stay, he sighed again.

  “Is he talking?” he said. “Them, I mean. They. Straven.”

  “No,” she said at once. “Not yet.”

  Hesitating, Wynter added,

  “But in all honesty, I think they’re waiting for you, Nick. Straven seems like they want to talk. They’re way too jittery about you showing up for it to be all about flirting with me, or flirting with you, or even screwing with the NYPD. They seem afraid to me. I could be dead wrong, of course, but I think they really do want to talk to you—”

  “No,” Nick said, frowning. “I doubt you’re wrong. Let’s do this. Hopefully the bullet hole in my leg, mixed with my general crankiness and desire to be alone with my girlfriend will be disarming enough, Straven will drop their guard…”

  He felt her flinch.

  Hesitating at her reaction, he rolled back what he’d just said, turning his words over in his mind.

  “Girlfriend?” he ventured, cautious.

  When she didn’t answer, he frowned, thinking about that, about his choice of words.

  “I guess that was kind of presumptuous,” he said after a beat. “I should have asked. Sorry. It just came out—”

  He could already feel her shaking her head.

  “No,” she said. “No, Nick. That’s not it.”

  Hesitating, obviously thinking, she amended,

  “Well, yes. I mean, that’s the word I reacted to, but I have no problem with the concept. It’s just…”

  She trailed, hesitating.

  He felt her thinking, or maybe trying to decide what to say.

  “It just sounds weird, Nick,” she confessed after a beat. “The word itself. ‘Girlfriend.’ After last night, it just struck me as bizarre. I know that doesn’t make sense.”

  He felt a whisper of embarrassment off her when she added,

  “It doesn’t feel too heavy, though, Nick. It feels too light. Like… just not the right word. It doesn’t really line up with how I’ve used that word before. Or how I’ve had people use it in relation to me.”

  He felt a flicker of jealousy in his lower belly at her words.

  It didn’t stop him from turning over the meaning behind what she’d said, however.

  Frowning into the space behind his eyes, Nick found he knew what she meant.

  “Girlfriend” really didn’t feel like the right word.

  Whatever she was to him, that wasn’t it.

  He refused to call her “mate,” though. He refused to refer to her like he was some kind of animal that had dragged her back to his den with his teeth.

  She must have seen part of that image in her head, because she laughed.

  “We’ll come up with a better word later,” she suggested.

  “Promise?” he said, gruff.

  “We’ll try, anyway. How’s that?”

  He acknowledged that grudgingly, even as he backed towards the revolving glass doors.

  “I’ll sit at the bar, if I can,” he said. “Don’t be long, girlfriend.”

  He heard her smile.

  “I won’t.”

  After she disconnected, he stood there, hesitating, second-guessing whether he should wait for her after all. He felt more than a little strange, leaving her behind in this building, given why he wasn’t comfortable standing in it himself.

  Still, he was reasonably sure she was right.

  Whoever was doing this didn’t seem to want Straven dead.

  Wynter should be safe, as long as she remained with the androgynous vampire.

  Well—safe from everyone but Straven himself, at least.

  “BROTHER!”

  The vampire’s voice boomed, making people turn all the way down the length of the bar. That was despite how crowded it was, despite how loud it was already from drunken voices.

  Nick jerked violently and winced, looking up from where he half-leaned, half-sat on a barstool in the corner facing the door. He was still strung out and jumpy as hell, even apart from having high vampires yell at him from across crowded rooms.

  He knew that wasn’t all the painkillers, or even being injured.

  It wasn’t even delayed shock from the bomb.

  Truthfully, he hadn’t managed to get his equilibrium back since he woke up with Wynter in his bed, late that afternoon. He also hadn’t really had much time to stop and think since then—or really since before his fight the previous day.

  Or had that been two days ago now?

  Remembering the prescient seer coming to see him after his fight, dragging him out to that crumbling brick wall inside the bombed-out church near the minefield in the Cauldron, Nick frowned.

  He’d nearly forgotten about all that.

  That’s what started this, really.

  Not the first bomb, at Sphinx tower. Not salsa night at the dance club with Straven.

  No, it was the seer’s painting that happened first.

  Nick watched the tall vampire with the spiked, augmented-reality hairstyle make their way towards him through the crowd filling the area between him and the door.

  Despite the name out in front of the bar, and the Art Deco style of some of the wall art, the bar’s design was mainly hyper-modern, with a shimmering, virtually-augmented bar that morphed along with the designs on the walls, rippling between disturbingly real-looking virtual scenes that altered without a second’s notice.

  When Nick first walked in, he found himself inside space, lurching sickeningly between birthing stars, nebulae, spinning around the rim of a black hole.

  He’d barely made it to the bar without biting anyone.

  Now, the virtual projectors and speakers had turned the entire bar into a three-dimensional experience of being on a ship at sea… during a thunderstorm.

  At night.

  Truthfully, it was making Nick vaguely nauseous.

  Now that the painkillers were wearing off, he was having to work harder to keep his mind off the hole in his leg.

  He sipped a glass of soda, trying to settle his stomach, when Straven’s voice boomed a second time, making Nick jump nearly a foot. That time, he half-stood up, knocking his hurt leg into the barstool hard enough to grit his teeth.

  If Straven noticed, the androgynous vampire didn’t let on.

  They walked directly up to Nick, slinging an arm around his shoulder and back.

  “I am so glad you are here,” they said, grinning into Nick’s face. “Have you eaten yet, my brother? How are you feeling? Better, I hope?”

  The vampire’s breath smelled like hard alcohol, mook, and human blood.

  Thankfully, that blood smelled nothing like Wynter’s.

  If it had, Nick might have snapped the vampire’s neck by now.

  Nick glanced past the famous designer’s waving, spiked silver and pink hair, watching Wynter make her way towards them from the bar’s front door.

  Like Straven, she got a lot of looks as she passed, and not only from vampires.

  She wasn’t wearing the salsa dress from last night.

  Nick remembered, then—Straven had their people out at some fancy boutique, clothes shopping for her, picking out things for Wynter to wear while she showered at his place. This must be what they came up with, unless Wynt
er found this outfit herself, maybe inside one of the Isis building shops after they picked her up.

  In either case, Nick had definitely never seen the clothes Wynter had on now, nor had she gotten them out of his closet, nor from any of the stores Nick knew of in Washington Heights. He was no fashion-guy, but the dress she wore looked expensive, as did the cut-stone necklace around her neck, the matching earrings, and the matching, high-heeled shoes strapped around her feet, all of which shimmered with varying degrees of augmented effect.

  The shimmery white dress pulled his eyes first.

  It hugged her body, showing off her curves and rippling around her upper thighs like it was alive, even as it conformed to every muscle in Wynter’s legs as she walked. He blinked, staring at the fabric as it coiled sensually around her waist and ass, realizing that had to be another augmented-reality effect, if a disconcertingly real-looking one.

  He looked up at her face to find her eyes on him.

  She was assessing him with a faint frown on her lips, staring at his hurt leg.

  Her blue-green eyes flickered up, and he felt his chest clench.

  It hadn’t occurred to him that he hadn’t seen her since he’d left her in his bedroom, naked in his bed. She’d been laughing at him, sprawled out on his mattress.

  Remembering that now, his cock was instantly hard.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, staring at her.

  Somehow, he’d managed to forget everything that happened the night before—before Damon and Morley and this fucker, Straven, dragged him out of his apartment.

  Now, it was all he could think about.

  Forcing his eyes off hers, he looked down at the rest of the dress, frowning faintly when he saw the plunging neckline, and the gauzy, moonstone-colored gathering of fabric around her shoulders and bust, which also writhed around her as if made of feathers, or fur, or some other living material that was more like skin and body than clothing.

  The overall effect kept drawing the eyes to her bare shoulders, then to her neck, and upper breasts.

  That dress was pure vampire-bait.

  It was a vampire’s wet dream dress.

  That couldn’t be an accident.

  Nick glanced at Straven, lifting one eyebrow.

  “Your idea?” he said. “The dress?”