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

by JC Andrijeski

  That might be a problem.

  That might end up being a big fucking problem.

  “It’ll be okay,” Malek said.

  Nick turned sharply at that, staring up at the mismatched eyes, staring that long, angular-featured face. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it’ll be okay,” Malek said calmly. “You don’t need to worry about that, Nick.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Nick said, frowning. “If I’m not supposed to worry about that, what am I supposed to worry about?”

  When the other didn’t answer, Nick continued to think, his jaw hardening.

  “Is that why you’re here?” he said. “Is Archangel taking this over now? Are you going to disappear Straven into some hole under Phoenix Tower? Make him forget everything he ever knew about any of this?”

  Nick paused, waiting.

  Again, Malek didn’t answer.

  Nick’s frown deepened.

  “Were you the client?” Nick said, trying again. “Archangel? Is that who Straven tried to sell the device to?”

  Malek shook his head, once, seer-fashion.

  Apparently, the gesture didn’t mean “no,” however.

  “I don’t know,” Malek said simply.

  Nick’s lips pursed. He stared up at the tall seer, puzzled.

  “You don’t know?” he said. “Then what are you doing here?” Looking past the seer’s shadowed form a second time, scanning faces in the bar, Nick frowned. “Are you really here alone? Why? You come in for a drink?”

  Nick paused, waiting.

  Again, the seer didn’t answer him.

  He also didn’t smile.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Nick said, his voice a little sharper. “It’s not a good idea, Malek. The cops are coming. They shouldn’t see you hanging around.”

  When the seer didn’t move, didn’t speak, Nick added,

  “I showed them your painting, Mal. If they start seeing you in the same places where I am, they’re going to start putting two and two together. I told them you… meaning the unnamed you, the artist… came looking for me. I showed them the painting. Sooner or later, Jordan or Charlie will remember those old surveillance tapes from the Kellerman case. They’ll realize you look an awful lot like the artist from those tapes—”

  “It’s okay, Nick,” Malek said.

  His voice remained maddeningly calm.

  He patted Nick on the shoulder, his big hand heavy.

  “Don’t worry, brother. It’s going to be okay.”

  Nick stared up at him, frowning.

  Truthfully, he had no idea how to talk to the prescient seer.

  He still wasn’t sure the guy was playing with a full stack of pancakes.

  The “brother” shorthand threw Nick, too.

  Somehow, he got the impression the word was chosen deliberately.

  Glancing over his shoulder at Wynter, Nick bit his lip, fighting the impulse to call out to her, to tell her to walk to him, or at least to move away from Straven.

  “What will happen to them?” Nick muttered. “Straven?”

  He’d more been thinking aloud than speaking to the dark-haired seer hovering behind him. Malek answered him, anyway.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the seer said simply.

  Malek might have been talking about the weather.

  Or perhaps remarking on the décor inside the bar.

  Nick looked up at him, studying the angular face, his mouth hard.

  He thought about asking, probing what Malek meant.

  In the end, he decided he didn’t want to know.

  “I’d like to show you something,” Malek said next, offering the words in a near-friendly tone. “When you’ve finished here. When you’re done with everything you have to do… I’d like to show you something, Naoko. You and Ms. James… if she’d also like to see.”

  Nick stared up at him again.

  For a few seconds, he was tempted to tell the seer to fuck off.

  He was tempted to tell the seer he didn’t want to see any more paintings, that he’d gotten enough of a glimpse into the prescient seer’s mind, and into his horrible visions.

  He was tempted to tell him to stay the fuck away from Wynter, too.

  In the end, though, he didn’t.

  In the end, he couldn’t.

  …which is probably why Malek came to him.

  Exhaling, Nick nodded. Without thought, he reached out to clasp the tall seer’s arm, feeling a strange surge of sympathy for the stone-faced seer.

  It had to be a hard gig, seeing all of that.

  At least Nick had the option to tell the prescient to fuck off.

  “Okay,” he said, his voice as calm as the seer’s. “Okay, Malek. We’ll go after this. As soon as the cops get here. All right? Me and Wynter both.”

  The seer nodded.

  As he did, his broad shoulders relaxed, lowering as if in relief.

  Nick couldn’t help noticing that the faraway expression in the seer’s pale blue eye didn’t change; nor did the harder, more haunted expression of the nearly black one.

  Chapter 22

  Falling

  Morley got there quick.

  Quicker than Nick expected, honestly.

  Nick had Straven handcuffed by then, sitting on the faux-leather couch next to their two human lawyers, “Reg” and “Teddy.”

  Both humans were pale, and looked like they were in some state of shock.

  The rat-faced one still looked angry, though.

  Nick caught the older lawyer staring at him a few times, his eyes cold as metal. From his expression, the human held Nick personally responsible for every part of whatever this was, and was calculating how he could have him offed at the first opportunity.

  Teddy looked like someone had just told him his dog was dead.

  Wynter sat on a chair behind Nick near the door, her legs crossed easily in the moonstone dress as she sipped a glass of iced soda water Malek had gone to fetch for her at the bar.

  The tall, ghost-like seer stood behind Wynter even now.

  While that fact might have bothered Nick before—or even, let’s face it, threatened him—for some reason, Nick found Malek’s presence strangely comforting. While nothing about the seer indicated that he saw his role as anything other than spectator, Nick felt himself physically relax when he noticed where Malek had positioned himself, putting his long, leanly-muscular body directly between Wynter and the door.

  Malek didn’t move from that spot.

  He hovered over Wynter without speaking, without changing expression, watching everyone else in the room with a flat, empty expression on his face.

  Weirdly, though, Nick felt nothing but gratitude.

  He’d dismissed the rest of Straven’s entourage about ten minutes before, right after he fitted the cuffs around Straven’s wrists and read the androgynous vampire their rights.

  Therefore, when Morley walked in a few minutes later, six uniforms and Jordan trailing behind him, the whole thing felt strangely civilized.

  Morley read Straven their rights a second time.

  After he finished, the detective jerked his head towards Nick, catching hold of Straven’s left arm and yanking the famous vampire to their feet.

  Looking at Straven’s pale face, it hit Nick, suddenly, what an enormous loss this was.

  Whatever his drug addictions and borderline sociopathy… Straven truly was brilliant. They were the most famous artist of the post-war period for a reason. As much as Nick hated to admit it, their buildings were positively stunning, not to mention unique.

  “Take them out to the car, if you please,” Morley said to Nick, nodding towards the door.

  “What?” Nick frowned. “Why me?”

  “There’s press out there,” Morley said, unapologetic. “Leadership wants this to be your collar. Minimize any anti-vampire sentiment that might come of it.”

  At Nick’s scowl, the detective frowned back.

  “Go on, Tanaka. It’s
part of the job. A lot of people died in those last two bombings. You want there to be riots in Washington Heights? Yokels driving into your neighborhood from Queens, carrying baseball bats and artificial sunlight bombs to fuck with you and your kind, all because of one bad apple?”

  Nick’s scowled deepened.

  That time, it was in understanding, though.

  When the human detective handed off Straven to him a second time, Nick took the vampire’s arm. Glancing over the 18th Century style coat, he sighed.

  “All right, asshole,” he grumbled. “Come on.”

  “Be nice,” Morley called after him. His voice grew openly warning. “This thing only works if you’re the face of civilized, law-abiding vampire, Tanaka… not surly, telling reporters to go fuck themselves vampire. Got it?”

  Nick’s jaw involuntarily clenched.

  Without bothering to answer his boss, Nick turned on his heel, wincing when he forgot about his hurt leg and, worse, hadn’t noticed how much it stiffened while he’d been waiting in the private room. Stretching the muscle carefully and straightening out his gait, he began limping through the bar with Straven in tow, aiming his feet for the front door.

  The bar’s patrons watched them silently, shock on their faces.

  Nick avoided making eye contact with any of them, although he nodded to a few as he passed. He couldn’t help feeling the panicked shame vibrating the vampire at his side, since the two of them still shared the vestiges of a blood connection.

  Nick figured that would be the worst of it, though, going through the bar itself.

  He seriously underestimated how many people would be waiting for them outside.

  From Morley’s words, he’d expected a few reporters. Maybe a few humans from nearby news stations, maybe a handful of drones from networks that got the tip, but didn’t have time to get anyone down there in person… maybe a few hungry freelancers who listened in on police scanners and did the equivalent of ambulance-chasing.

  Instead, he opened the door to find a full-blown crowd.

  There were so many of them, they spilled out into the street, causing self-driving cars and robo-taxis to honk and drive around them, even as their passengers rubbernecked out back windows, trying to figure out what was going on.

  More uniforms had the bar’s entrance cordoned off, presumably to keep anyone else, reporters included, from coming inside.

  When Nick appeared at the bar’s entrance, however, Straven held out in front of him, a shout went up. Without warning, reporters rushed forward, pushing and shoving against the cops standing there, and against the barricades.

  Seemingly as one, they began shouting questions at the two of them.

  “What are the charges, Detective?” a reporter shouted, angling her body between two barricades. “What is Straven being arrested for?”

  “No comment—” Nick began, doing his best to make his voice as non-hostile as possible.

  “What did you do, Straven?” another human shouted, a male that time. “Were you responsible for what happened at the Anubis Building? The Sphinx? The Osiris?”

  “Did you do it for the insurance?” another human screamed, jumping to see them past the two enormous uniform cops standing in front of her. “Are you a traitor, Straven?”

  “Was the motive political?” another male yelled at Nick. “Give us something, Detective. The public has a right to know—”

  A light from a drone clicked on over Nick’s head, shocking him with a too-bright, nearly violently bright light. Nick threw up his free hand and arm in instinct.

  As he did—

  Someone slammed into him from his right side.

  Nick grunted in pain.

  Whoever ran into him, they knocked him into a uniformed cop and a barricade as they crashed into his side. Nick slammed his hurt leg into the metal barricade so hard it felt like he’d snapped the bone in two.

  Briefly, the pain nearly blacked him out.

  When his vision cleared, he found himself lying on the asphalt, groaning in pain, holding his bandaged leg in both hands.

  Next to him, Straven lay face-down on the sidewalk.

  Blood pooled out of the vampire’s head, which had a hole in it nearly the size of a baseball. Nick stared at the blood, at the motionless form of the famous artist, and for a long moment, he couldn’t think past either thing.

  The image burned itself into his brain, even as everything around him—the crowd, the shouting, the echoing report of the single gunshot—all grew weirdly silent.

  Then he heard her.

  “NICK! Nick!” Her voice rose, panicked beyond reason. “OH MY GOD! NICK!”

  He tried to speak, to tell her to go away—

  He couldn’t. He had no breath. He didn’t need breath, or to breathe, but he couldn’t seem to make his tongue work, or his vocal chords.

  “NICK!”

  By then, he’d heard the echo of the gunshot.

  He honestly didn’t know yet, if he himself had been shot, for the second time that day, but he’d heard the report.

  He knew someone out here had a gun.

  “Get out of here,” he managed, his words barely a whisper. “Wynter… go back inside… go back inside… please, baby…”

  She was already next to him.

  He tried to push her away with his hands, but she only maneuvered around them and between them, kneeling next to him on the sidewalk. He felt her fingers and palms feeling over his body and limbs, looking for new wounds, looking for blood.

  “Were you hit?” she said, her voice frantic. “Where, Nick? Where did they get you?”

  But Nick’s brain seemed to be moving again.

  He could see her.

  He could even think… sort of.

  “No.” He shook his head, gasping, but only in pain, not because he needed the air. “No. It’s just my leg, honey. I’m okay. I fell—”

  “You fell?” She stared at him in utter disbelief. “You fell?”

  “Fell… got pushed…”

  A shadow blocked out more of the light.

  Nick looked up, and saw the tall, black-haired seer standing over him, his mismatched eyes staring down at him curiously.

  From Malek’s expression, the seer found it mildly puzzling that Nick was still lying on the sidewalk.

  Looking up at that blank, weirdly cheerful face…

  Nick found he understood.

  That time, he really understood.

  He’d been standing behind Straven.

  He and Straven were roughly the same height.

  A head shot to Straven likely would have meant a head shot to Nick—from a bullet traveling fast, a bullet that had already expanded and exploded inside the other vampire’s skull.

  It likely would have killed him instantly.

  Nick wouldn’t have felt a thing.

  “I got pushed,” Nick repeated. He was still staring up at those bi-colored eyes. “And it’s a good thing, too. I’d be fucking dead if I wasn’t.”

  Wynter froze.

  For a long beat, she only stared down at Nick’s face.

  Then she turned her head slowly, looking up and seeing Malek.

  Kneeling there, in that moonstone-colored dress under the inhumanly tall seer, she looked almost like a little girl next to the dark-haired seer.

  Before Nick could think to explain any of it to her, she leapt up to her feet…

  …and threw her arms around Malek’s neck.

  Nick watched them hug.

  Really, he watched Wynter hug him.

  Seeing the confused, touched look on the seer’s face as Malek awkwardly patted Wynter’s back, Nick couldn’t help himself.

  He burst out in a laugh.

  Epilogue

  Miles To Go

  Nick stepped over the crumbling brick wall, wincing as he dragged his hurt leg over the edge of the raised opening.

  He only glanced behind him, looking for Wynter, once he was inside the church, and back on more or less level ground.
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  He definitely wasn’t complaining, but after being shoved to the ground by the prescient seer, Nick’s leg hurt like a son of a bitch.

  Even after the second handful of painkillers he’d gotten off the paramedics and swallowed in the wake of the shooting, when the ambulances showed up and insisted on giving him a once-over… Nick could barely think past the throbbing of the torn up muscle and flesh.

  He really wanted to go home.

  He really, really wanted to go home.

  Still, he wasn’t about to tell the seer that.

  Coming here was the absolute least he could fucking do, given everything.

  He’d done his best to catch Wynter up on everything on the taxi ride up here.

  He’d told her about everything he’d seen in Straven’s head, about the mind-control tech developed in some illegal Russian lab, about Straven and Abe Silverton gleefully using it to sexually assault the human volunteers they’d hired to test it, about Straven trying to sell that tech to the American military, about Straven hiring Janice and Tig Gorman to try and get the prototype back from Silverton to keep the Russians from murdering them both.

  Wynter didn’t say much while he told her all of it.

  When he finished talking though, she sighed, combing her fingers through her long, nearly-black hair with the green and turquoise streaks of color.

  “What a moron,” she said, blunt.

  Looking at her, Nick laughed.

  He took her hand, kissing her knuckles and wincing as he leaned back into the taxi’s seat.

  “Basically,” he agreed. “Yeah. A damned talented one, though.”

  “What a waste,” she murmured, annoyed.

  Nick nodded. “What a waste,” he agreed.

  Still frowning, she glanced up at him, then at Malek, then back at Nick.

  “What will happen now?” she said. “The Russians still have the device, right?”

  Nick nodded. “Presumably our humans have it now, too.”

  “Mutually assured destruction?” she muttered. “Because that’s worked so well before.”

  Nick frowned.

  Then, thinking about her words, he shrugged.

  “It’s not not worked,” he said, his voice apologetic. “At least not always. I mean, sometimes it’s worked better than the alternative… at least we were always told it did, back before the wars.”