Page 21 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 21

THE ENTRANCE

“Okay, I think I’ve got it… I think I got in,” Kit’s voice whispered in Nick’s ear, soft as a breath.

“How sure?” Nick sub-vocaled back on the comms. “No weirdly convenient backdoors into the security system, I hope?”

“No,” she snorted softly. “The old fashioned way. Wynter grabbed an employee we profiled, and used her seer stuff to make him give up his passcode and user name.”

Nick grunted. “How much access do you have?”

There was a pregnant feeling pause.

Then a slightly more triumphant lilt to Kit’s voice.

“I’ve got enough,” she said smugly. “More than we’ll ever need.”

“Don’t jinx us, kid,” Nick scolded.

He nodded though, glancing at Brick, who acknowledged his nod with a slight one of his own. Nick looked to Malek next, who stood closest to him. All of them wore black, and every one of them but Nick had their faces hidden behind masks for the building’s surveillance. Only their eyes peered out from slits, and the masks came equipped with morphing signals that would make it impossible for the system to get locks on any of their exact features.

Nick’s face remained bare, if bandaged and cut, but he made sure his back remained to every surveillance camera they’d mapped with Kit’s help.

He also wore a clip on his collar that should obscure his features to the security system as well, or at least majorly slow down a positive ID. The bandages and the cuts on Nick’s face wouldn’t hurt with that, either, Kit told him, which was yet another reason Nick had been assigned this part. It wasn’t the only reason, though.

“All right,” Nick sub-vocaled to Kit. “You ready? I need to move.”

They couldn’t stay where they were for long.

Tai was around back, along with the remaining six of Brick’s vampires. They were masked like Brick, Malek, and the others, and were waiting for Nick’s signal from the shadow-darkened walls on either side of the sanatorium’s shipping dock.

There was no more reason to wait.

“Kit?” he pressed.

“You’re good,” she said that time. “I’ve got the whole front lobby.”

Nick nodded, mostly to himself that time.

He steeled himself then, and set his headset to the open channel, which networked only to the sixteen of them. He glanced at Brick, and the elder vampire made one of his flourishing gestures, somewhere between a bow and a wave.

Nick rolled his eyes.

Then he walked out of the hedges and the shadows along the side of the sanitarium, shoved his hands in his pockets, and walked straight for the front door.

* * *

Neither of the two women noticed him at first.

Nick supposed that wasn’t particularly surprising; who would have possibly expected him to walk right through the front door of the high-security building, and right up to the young human nurses who worked the front desk?

When the first of them looked up, Nick smiled his most winning smile with her, and shyly, she smiled back at him, her eyes slightly dazzled as she met his gaze.

“What happened to you?” she blurted.

“Car accident,” Nick said at once. He smiled wider. “My fault.”

Both women giggled.

Nick didn’t wear contacts, but he’d already immersed himself in a kind of humming thrall as he walked towards the front door, something he could do when he wanted to encase his entire presence in mystery and romantic illusion. The effect might be something like a mythical witches’ glamour. It made Nick into whatever the two women were most drawn to.

If he’d done it right, neither of the nurses would notice his eyes, or realize the meaning of them, even if they did.

It seemed to work.

The first nurse blushed deeply as she continued to stare at him, her eyes slightly glazed, a faint but visible lust in her expression as she looked at him. She stared at Nick like Nick was her favorite movie star back home, like she was both desperate and terrified to speak with him, like she couldn’t stand the thought that she might not at least say something before he turned and walked out of her life.

Nick aimed his smile at the woman sitting beside her next.

Like the first woman, she stared at Nick in utter disbelief, her blue eyes wide, her pupils completely blown. The second woman was older than the first, and looked mildly embarrassed at her own reaction to him, but it wasn’t enough to tear her eyes off Nick.

“I wonder if you could help me, beautiful ladies,” Nick said warmly, putting a much stronger dose of thrall in his voice. “I’m positively desperate, and would be oh-so grateful?”

The two women looked at one another, and giggled.

The older one giggled louder, and clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Six minutes, Nick,” a voice murmured in his ear. “Not a second more.”

It was Kit.

She was monitoring how long it would take the front desk camera feeds to get to someone who actually mattered back at Archangel. She’d told him she’d do her best to slow down that occurrence, but if she tried to stop it altogether, it would trigger the general alarm, and then the other sites would immediately know there’d been a breach.

It was a part of the system she’d warned them about, back in the Cauldron.

There was no way around it.

“I’m supposed to visit a friend of mine here,” Nick continued in that lulling, pulling voice. “Could you tell me, do you have a Damon Jordon on the premises? He’s a police officer, like me. Only he was racially injured in the line of duty…”

The euphemism might have made Nick snort on a different day.

“Racially injured,” the older woman said, her cheeks now bright red.

Her eyes flinched as a scrap of relevant information seemed to reach her mind.

“Right!” she said, responding to Nick’s gentle nudge via the thrall. “Right! Mr. Jordan… I remember. But I think he was moved from his original room. They have him in the lower levels now for security reasons…”

“Can he still get visitors?” Nick pushed a little more coercion into the question.

“He’s not supposed to,” the younger woman blurted, apologetic.

Nick’s eyes swiveled to hers, and he saw her thinking, trying to find some way to help him, to give Nick what he was asking for.

“Could you make an exception, love?” he asked sweetly.

“I… I’m sure we can. I don’t… I mean, I really want to… for such a kind, thoughtful friend.” She blushed even darker. “I just don’t know how.”

“Oh, brother,” Wynter muttered into the comm.

He’d nearly forgotten she could see all of this, too.

The four of them, Wynter, Morley, Forrest, and Kit, had parked the van by an access hole in the ground, where the fiber-optic cables ran underground to reach the main building. The three of them were likely all crouched down in that tunnel in the dark, Kit with her terminal open while Morley and Wynter watched from two other terminals nearby.

He fought back his reaction to Wynter watching him do this.

“Maybe you could come back tomorrow?” the blue-eyed nurse said hopefully. “I’m working a double, so I’ll be here in the morning, too… and so will our manager. She could call the Archangel people, maybe? See if they would grant you special permission to go down there to see your friend?”

Nick smiled wider.

“You can’t just sneak me down there tonight?” he coaxed. “I really only need a few minutes. I need to see for myself that he’s all right.”

The two nurses exchanged looks again. The younger of the two, with the thick braid of black hair, shook her head, dismay in her eyes.

“We don’t have clearance to go down there,” she said sadly.

“Which floor is it?” Nick asked pleasantly.

“Sub-basement four,” the blue-eyed one said, her voice also sad. “But the elevators will lock down if you don’t have the right access card, and you’d have to wait until the security team gets sent over, and those are the H.R.A. guys…”

The women exchanged looks again, and the blue-eyed one shuddered.

“They’re not… very nice,” the woman said, hesitant, as if afraid to say that much. “They really hate the vamps, too. I think they’re the ones who moved him down there.”

She sounded almost like she felt sorry for that.

Nick didn’t let himself think about that too much.

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” he asked the women pleasantly. “Anything that would help me get in to see my friend?”

“The stairs!” the darker one blurted, the one with the braid and the younger face. “The stairs are hidden, and the doors lock, but they’re less likely to kill you…”

“And where are the stairs?” Nick asked pleasantly.

“We have a map… on the screens…” the woman explained.

“Great!” Kit enthused in Nick’s ear. “Have her show you those! I can’t easily get access to the whole building plans, but I can see parts of it, if I know exactly where to look. I can probably use the guy’s access code to get in, if you give me a view of that screen.”

“Can I see?” Nick asked the nurses politely. “Just a little peek?”

His smile on the two women never wavered.

Both of them nodded enthusiastically, and Nick walked around the counter so that he was standing behind the two women.

“Four minutes,” Kit murmured.

Nick kept his ears open for any sound of approaching footsteps, any hint that someone might be coming to the front desk to check on the two women from another part of the building. So far he hadn’t heard or noticed anything. He hadn’t smelled another living being.

He leaned over their two chairs once he was behind the desk, and breathed more thrall on both of them.

“Show me,” he coaxed.

They brought up the plans, and Nick stared into the screens, knowing his headset would be picking up every detail for Kit, Wynter, and the others to see.

“Have them show you the emergency protocols around exits,” Kit instructed him.

Nick passed that on to the two nurses.

A different set of blueprints filled the long monitor.

“And the lock schematics for Jordan’s room,” Kit said next, after they’d brought up the exits. “And any special access shit in the corridors down there.”

Nick passed that on next.

He got the nurses to show him a few more screens after that.

“Okay, thirty-four seconds, Nick,” Kit said. “Do you think you can get to those stairs?”

Nick smirked, but only a little.

“Of course I can,” he assured her.

He didn’t fully realize he’d spoken aloud until the two women looked up, blinking at him in amiable confusion.

“You’re going to need to hide under the desk now, loves,” he told them gently. “Go on. All the way under…” He was already pulling the plasma grenade out of his vest.

He ignited the end, then motioned for the blue-eyed nurse to jam herself under the massive piece of furniture even more.

Once she had, he walked out from behind the curved monitor.

He lobbed the grenade gently in the direction of the organic glass doors, and the rotating entrance in the middle that had scanned the fake implant Nick held up to it.

“Go signal incoming,” Nick said, as he began to jog backwards. “Four seconds.”

“Got it. B Team’s been informed.”

Nick broke into a full run.

* * *

The explosion shook the walls and floors of the corridor so violently, Nick accidentally knocked into the wall on his injured side. He didn’t fall––he was a vampire, after all––but it was enough that he grimaced and stopped, and enough that he worried that maybe those two nurses wouldn’t be as protected by the heavy front desk as he’d hoped.

It was too late to do anything about that now.

It was too late to dwell on it, either.

Like it or not, Brick was right about what he’d said.

Something had changed.

This might not be war yet, but Archangel and the H.R.A. and whoever pulled the organization’s strings, certainly seemed to be steering things that way. There would be collateral damage now. There would be innocent people who got hurt.

It was fucking horrible but it was also inevitable.

Nick didn’t jog back in the direction of the clouds of black smoke, not even to look for Malek. He knew the young seer would be safe. Brick and the vampires would look out for him, and they wouldn’t come inside in a way that put any of them at risk.

For the same reason, he made his way straight to the staircase door, instead.

He pinged Mal and Brick’s lines to let them know exactly where he was.

Kit assured them she’d encrypted the headsets so intensely that there was no way any sensors inside the building would be able to crack the signal in time. They weren’t networked to anyone or anything but one another, which made it a closed, iron-clad, impenetrable system, she told him.

Nick had no reason not to take her at her word.

He heard gunfire behind him, the discharge of both hand-helds and plasma rifles, and realized the security team must have already been on their way.

“Your timer was off,” he informed Kit. “We’ve got company.”

“Noted,” Kit said, seemingly unperturbed. “Tai’s on her way. She says she already handled the guards who came from their end.”

“She got through the door?” Nick asked.

“As soon as they heard the signal,” Kit affirmed.

“Send them all images of the plans,” Nick said. “Tell them we’re meeting at the stairs.”

It had been Nick’s idea that they go at it head-on, and have one of the vampires thrall someone into giving them the information before the broader security alarm could get triggered. He figured it would be faster than Kit having to figure out the whole system on the fly.

Kit had enthusiastically agreed.

The job of walking through the front door to do the actual thralling had fallen to Nick, who Brick proudly claimed, “was always the best mind-fucker I ever had.”

Nick didn’t particularly like the title, but he didn’t argue.

He hung a right as he followed the map he’d gotten from the nurses, then a left after he’d passed another four doors. He found himself in a wide corridor with a dozen doors lining each side. He used the map to zero in on the hidden wall panel at the very end.

He immediately showed the corridor and the blank wall to Kit.

“That’s it, right?” he prompted.

“Why are you asking me?” the young woman retorted. “You saw the map, same as I did. I need to work on the security protocols so you don’t get decapitated in there.”

Nick couldn’t really find fault with her logic.

He switched to Brick’s comm.

“How far out are you?”

“Right behind you, brother.”

“You still in a firefight?”

“Not currently.”

Nick rolled his eyes. “Does that mean you got all of them? Are more coming? Have they sent for reinforcements yet?”

“I feel certain they have,” Brick affirmed in his maddeningly smooth voice. “But no more are making their presence felt as of yet, my excitable offspring.” The vampire paused. “Incidentally, your handsome hybrid pet is quite good with a gun,” Brick mused. “He took out half of them on his own. He is quite useful.”

“I told you what they said about him,” Nick said, impatient.

“Does he not remind you of anyone, brother?”

Nick frowned. “Are you fucking serious right now? We’re in the middle of an op, Brick.”

“Yes, yes.” Brick went back to sounding bored. “I was merely expressing admiration. We’ll pick up any stragglers we find, but expect us in under a minute.”

Nick didn’t bother to answer.

He slowed his steps when he reached the section of blank wall where the map showed an access panel to a hidden staircase.

Nick still couldn’t see it, or hear it, not even with his vampire senses, but something about the metal there hummed differently to his skin, anyway.

He never would have noticed if he hadn’t gotten so near it, and probably wouldn’t have thought anything about the wall at all, if he hadn’t already known the door was there. But his eyes searched all over the panel now, looking for seams, for any kind of way in.

Maybe he’d been too cocky with Kit about his confidence they could break through.

Whatever this wall was, Nick was willing to bet it was made of solid organics.

Even a vampire couldn’t break through that, not with nothing but his bare hands.

He ignited his comms to Brick and Tai both that time.

“Someone grab an Archangel prick, if you can,” he said, gruff. “Someone high up, if you can manage it. Maybe more than one, if it’s not too much trouble. We’re going to need someone with authorization to get us through this door, I think.”

“Alive?” Tai asked.

Her young-sounding voice made the question more jarring.

Nick wanted to say yes, but something made him tell the truth.

“It shouldn’t matter,” he admitted. “We’ll likely need their implant. Possibly bio-metrics, too, but if it’s a fresh corpse, it should still work.”

He was definitely going to hell.

Then again, he didn’t want to think about how many people the kid had killed for Archangel and Lara St. Maarten already.

“Got it,” Tai affirmed. “We’ll bring you the highest rank we can find.”

“Or someone in a lab coat,” Nick offered, when the idea popped into his head. “I’d be willing to bet they let the doctors down there. The ones who do research, anyway.”

“Copy,” Tai said.

Right then, quiet footsteps ran around the corner.

Nick looked over sharply, feeling a pang of relief when he saw Brick’s unmistakeable eyes from behind his black mask. Malek was right behind him, and Zoe right behind Malek. Both of them looked tense from the set of their shoulders, as did the other vampire who trailed after Zoe, a monster of a vamp with a bright green mohawk, named Thorn.

Thorn’s mohawk wasn’t visible now, of course.

He wore a wraparound mask like the rest of them.

“You see Tai yet?” Nick asked, as soon as they were close enough. “Hear any gunshots from any other part of the building?”

Malek gave him a tense look, but only shook his head.

So did Zoe, and the massive seer gripping a plasma rifle behind her.

“She’s bringing us someone to help us open the door––” Nick began.

Just then, he heard a low sucking noise.

Nick turned sharply…

…Right as the door opened silently behind him.