Page 3 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 3

THE AUTHORITIES

“Is this absolutely fucking necessary?!” Nick snarled. He raised his voice above the din in the group around him, his vision tinted dark red. “Goddamn it, Lara! Answer me! What the fuck are you doing right now? What is this supposed to accomplish?”

She didn’t answer him.

He fought back his aggression as well as he could.

He bit it back forcibly, for Wynter as much as himself.

He knew the Archangel C.E.O. might kill him.

He knew it without ever really asking himself the question.

On some level, he’d always known that about her.

It was difficult to just sit there, and not do anything, though. Screams came from voices he knew, loud enough to make him grimace and wish he could close his ears. Those screams held so much emotion, his gut hurt. He felt sick, his skin prickled with electricity, his muscles and jaw tense, but he knew better than to act on his aggression.

He didn’t need to look.

He knew why they were screaming.

He understood their distress, but he couldn’t focus on it or he’d lose it for real. If he let his blood rise more, if he let himself grow truly irrational, then things would get ugly fast. Moreover, he strongly suspected that was part of their goal here. Maybe not for Lara, but definitely for these Leash pricks. They wanted him to lose his cool. They wanted him to lose it, period, so they could put him down like a rabid dog.

He couldn’t give them the excuse.

They could act with utter impunity here, given what he was.

They could then tell the press anything they fucking wanted.

He was a terrorist, and anti-human agitator.

He threatened humans. He consorted with seers and hybrids.

He was a dangerous animal.

He knew how the Human Racial Authority, or H.R.A., worked.

He knew how they thought.

He knew how their enforcement arm, The Leash, worked, in particular.

The Interracial Enforcement Bureau (a.k.a. “Intereb” or “The Leash”) was feared and loathed by vampires and hybrids alike. They were the terror that came in the night, that murdered their kind on the flimsiest of excuses, or sometimes for no reason at all. Worse, they could disappear any non-human without cause, without recourse, without even the pretense of a trial or due process. Once a non-human fell into the clutches of the Intereb like that, they’d likely never see daylight again. They’d be disappeared into a prison on another continent somewhere, usually under horrific conditions. They’d be experimented on, tortured, bled, fucked with, until they lost their minds. Vampires committed suicide rather than be taken by the Leash.

They turned to the White Death, if they had the connections.

Some fully became the terrorists they’d been accused of being.

Either way, Nick didn’t kid himself he had any rights here. Any vampire with half a brain knew the threat loomed over everything they did in the human world; it was why the White Death would never be short of new recruits.

Technically, the H.R.A. didn’t answer to international law, either.

Their jurisdiction spanned every human government, nation, and all protected areas.

While vampires generally saw the most of them, and the worst of them, seers and hybrids weren’t immune to their reach, either. The Leash always approached vampire-seer-human relations with a sadistic enthusiasm that made Nick, and likely a lot of other vampires, wonder exactly how they recruited and trained their agents.

They all really seemed like psychopaths.

Did they come in that way? Or did the Leash turn them into that?

Nick suspected it was a bit of both.

Unlike racist assholes like those two cops out on Long Island, “Rick and Rob,” agents who worked for the Leash generally weren’t stupid, either. They acted more like serial killer surgeons, like they’d spent decades learning how to inflict pain on vampires in creatively drawn out and impossible to anticipate ways.

Even their cruder tools were employed strategically.

They didn’t use cattle prods and organic binders only to hurt or restrain vamps.

They used them to elicit instinctive reactions that would give the Leash agents an excuse to do a lot worse, up to and including a full custodial claim. It also gave them an excuse for simply killing them outright, without bothering to bring them in for questioning. One wrong move from Nick right now, one wrong word, one wrong look, and one of the uniformed men St. Maarten had accompanied out here might decide to put a bullet in his brain.

Anything negotiated from that point forward would happen without his input. He’d either be decapitated on the spot, set on fire, or, possibly more likely in his case, wake up in a cell, naked, shackled to a metal table.

He’d definitely be unconscious until well past all of this was over.

They’d already killed two of their number tonight.

The only reason Nick figured they wanted him questioned or in a cell was because if they didn’t want him alive, they likely would have killed him already. They’d decapitated Walker’s girlfriend and that other poor vampire fuck right in front of them already. They hadn’t bothered with excuses. They didn’t even ask them any questions.

Walker himself still looked like he was in shock.

He was smart too, though, and didn’t say a fucking word.

Nick knew his only chance for getting out of this was St. Maarten. She didn’t seem particularly interested in helping him right now, though. Maybe she thought he’d outlived his usefulness. Even more likely, maybe she had less control over what the H.R.A. and The Leash did now that they were out here than she’d thought she did when she called them.

Either way, Nick realized appealing to her was a waste of time.

He shut his mouth and stopped shouting at her.

He knew how easy it would be for him to get Wynter and everyone else out here killed.

He knew how easy it would be to cross that invisible and constantly moving line.

And yes, he knew they might not even listen to Lara St. Maarten, despite who she was. He might know that better than she did, given what he was.

He continued to watch her surreptitiously, anyway.

There wasn’t a lot else he could do.

Nick was already on his knees, arms locked behind his back.

Organic binders shocked him whenever he moved more than a centimeter in any direction. The limits were jacked up to the highest pain settings… again, to get him to overreact, but also to impress upon him his utter powerlessness in the situation.

Nick knew that had been at least part of the message of killing those two vampires, too.

They’d removed the head of Forrest Keanu Walker’s girlfriend first.

Kit had screamed. So had Wynter.

Walker himself had cried out, his voice holding so much pain it shocked Nick.

They’d decapitated the second vampire, the one whose name Nick never got, while everyone was still screaming and staring at the first dead body.

All Nick had known about that other vampire was that she’d shown up with Walker in a helicopter a few hours earlier. She’d been one of the vampires to help when Nick’s doppelg?nger tried to drag Wynter and the two seer kids through the portal ahead of them. Like Wynter’s ex-husband, she’d risked her life to help them, and she hadn’t even known them.

The Leash agents removed her head while she stared in disbelief and shock at the dead body of Walker’s girlfriend. Her eyes had gone red, her fangs had just started to extend, probably more in grief than real aggression, but it hadn’t mattered.

The electronic blade hummed through the air a second time, and that was it.

Walker hadn’t even finished screaming in agonized disbelief that his girlfriend was gone, when he immediately lost someone else, someone who’d likely been a friend.

Now, both vampires’ rapidly-decaying corpses lay on the ground in front of Nick.

The message couldn’t be any fucking clearer.

Nick glared up at St. Maarten, knowing he was likely risking his life simply from his own dark red irises, and the razor-sharp fang tips he could feel nicking the edges of his lower lip. He tried to dial back both reactions, but some instincts were too deeply ingrained.

He could only remain physically still, try to keep his more dangerous reactions from sliding out of control.

He stared at the CEO of Archangel Enterprises, not down at the two dead bodies.

Not at Wynter.

Not at either of the young seers, Malek or Tai.

Not at his friend, Damon Jordan, a newborn vamp, who had significantly less control over his reactions than Nick. Not at James Vincent Morley, who wasn’t a young man, and who could easily be killed just for saying the wrong thing. Not at Kit or Charlie, two more humans Nick counted among his close friends.

Only one person in their group was bound even more tightly than Nick.

Nick saw in his peripheral vision as that Forrest Keanu Walker got heaved roughly to his feet by two large, heavily-muscled H.R.A. thugs, both of whom wore the distinctive, black and silver uniforms of The Leash.

Long, slightly-curved, electric swords were now locked to their backs as part of that uniform, the sword handles DNA-coded so that they could only be drawn by their official user. Every Leash agent additionally carried long, black, semi-organic charge sticks, which doubled as cattle-prods and long-distance shooting weapons. They emitted charges that could incapacitate a fully-grown vampire and kill a human dead with one pulse.

Their armbands displayed the skull and chain insignia of the H.R.A.’s enforcement arm.

They were fucking evil, as far as Nick was concerned.

Even their uniforms made him think of Nazis.

Nick felt his stomach drop as four more members of the notorious Leash joined the first two to drag Walker in the direction of an armored vehicle.

“Why are you taking him?” Nick asked coldly, still glaring at Lara St. Maarten.

“Be silent, Nick.”

“Why? Are you going to tell them to kill me, when they come back?”

She turned to stare at him, her eyes livid.

“He’s a terrorist.” She said it dispassionately, reasonably, as if she hadn’t had Forrest Keanu Walker inside her River of Gold penthouse apartment on more than one occasion, including for dinner.

“He’s a lawyer––” Nick began coldly.

“––He’s also been concealing his true race,” she said scathingly, her voice an open warning. “Now shut the fuck up, Nick. Before they decide you’re an accomplice, and start looking into who else the two of you might’ve been working with.”

She didn’t look at Wynter as she said it.

She didn’t look at Tai, or Tai’s brother, Malek.

She didn’t look at Morley, Kit, Charlie, or Jordan.

Even so, that message was crystal clear, too.

“Why did you bring them here?” Nick asked, quieter. His words weren’t meant for the human H.R.A. or I.S.F. agents’ ears, only for hers. “Would you really rather see us all dead? Is that the better outcome, as far as you’re concerned?”

St. Maarten pretended not to hear him. She gazed around the clearing, absently fingering part of her straight hair off her cheekbone.

“I’m afraid the H.R.A. was inflexible on their need to question Mr. Walker about his political activities,” she said, her voice indifferent, despite the warning Nick still heard. “Now that they know he’s the infamous agitator ‘Keori,’ they are unwilling to let him go without his being interrogated. Keori has long evaded their attempts to identify him.”

The middle-aged woman folded her arms, her eyes colder still as she drummed her fingers on a suit-clad bicep. She aimed her stare back at Nick.

“You’ll have to take it up with them, Detective,” she said mockingly. “I assume he’ll be processed, and then legal redress can be attempted, once specific charges have been filed.”

Nick swallowed his fury with an effort.

He knew she was behind this.

Of course she was.

She’d offered them Keori, probably in return for the H.R.A. and the Leash not looking too closely at Tai or Malek, and leaving them in her custody, instead. If that was the bargain she’d struck, she was a fool. The Leash might give her what she wanted in the short term, but they’d never forget it. Never.

Tai and Malek would be living on borrowed time.

So would Nick, now that he’d been associated with them.

Rich humans hiding hybrids was one thing.

Rich humans hiding dangerous, telekinetic and prescient seers was something else again.

That didn’t even get into the inter-racial consorting going on.

Vampires having intimate relations with seers, and hiding those relations by lying to the human authorities, was maybe the clearest death sentence for one of Nick’s kind that existed.

If they found out about him and Wynter, much less just how seer she really was, Nick wouldn’t even make it to the back of their armored vehicle.

He’d be rotting into blood and ash like Walker’s girlfriend and friend.

The next time The Leash came for Malek, Tai, Wynter, and him, they would find out, though. For one thing, St. Maarten would likely be arrested, and all of her assets stripped. Once Lara no longer stood in the way, it would only take them a few hours to determine what Wynter was, and what she and Nick had been doing.

It would be a death sentence for him, likely vivisection and/or life imprisonment in a government lab for her, and possibly something even worse for Tai and Malek.

But regardless of the sheer stupidity of the move, Nick knew he was right.

St. Maarten had done this.

She’d done it likely even knowing the risks.

It had probably been sheer desperation on her part.

Once she’d recovered from her own kidnapping by Nick’s doppelg?nger, once she’d cleared her head, and no longer had to fear death or torture from the other version of Nick and his venomed human and newborn army, it must have occurred to Lara that she was in danger of losing some of her most prized seer assets.

She’d likely realized she left them sitting in front of an inter-dimensional portal, and that Nick had recently found out he wasn’t actually from this version of Earth.

St. Maarten then likely realized Nick might just abscond with her favorite toys before she was done with them.

Definitely Wynter.

Definitely Tai and Mal.

Kit might have been a somewhat less-urgent consideration, as well. Organic machine whisperers at Kit’s level didn’t exactly grow on trees.

But Tai and Mal were irreplaceable.

Wynter herself was irreplaceable.

Nick’s mate was rare in her own right, as a hybrid with the potential sight rank of a gifted full-blooded seer. Tai and Malek, of course, were next-level rare. Not only were they full-blooded seers, they were rare even among full-blooded seers. They were once-in-a-generation seers, each one of them, much less the two of them together.

Moreover, Tai, at least, was deadly.

She was a living weapon.

She was practically a one-person army, even at her young age.

Nick had always known that, sooner or later, he would come face to face with St. Maarten’s real motives for helping Tai, Malek, Wynter, and even himself. He’d also known that, at some point or another, those reasons would be in direct conflict with his need to protect his family.

That eventuality felt inevitable to him.

It was always only a matter of time.

He’d warned Wynter of the same, more than once.

Each time, Wynter assured Nick it need never come to that, though Nick had never been entirely sure if Wynter believed that, either.

Lara St. Maarten ran the biggest defense tech company in the world.

While she might like “her” seers on a personal level––and might even be fond of some of them, Tai and Malek, especially––at base, Wynter, Tai, Malek, Kit, and Nick himself were little more than company assets.

They were an investment, not only for her, but for Archangel.

St. Maarten had taken them in. She’d helped them in various ways, given them resources, trained and taught them any way she could, protected them, kept them off the radar of the I.S.F. and the Human Racial Authority, and even the N.Y.P.D., but those things had always, from the very beginning, come with very definite yet unspoken strings attached.

She wouldn’t willingly give them up.

She wouldn’t simply allow them to leave, not for any reason… likely not ever.

Until she no longer saw them as directly useful to her organization’s goals, they would belong to Lara St. Maarten first, before they even belonged to themselves.

Nick was still lost in his thoughts, lost in his attempts to strategize, to determine any way he might reason with the Archangel CEO––

––when there was a loud, thunderclap-type sound directly behind him.

The sound rippled up his spine.

It raised the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck.

Like everyone else in the clearing, apart from the two dead vampires, Nick turned his head. He craned his neck around, and stared in the direction from which the sound had come.

He already knew, somehow, what he would find.

The sound had come from the dimensional rift.

Nick stared at it, along with everyone else.

He stared at the flickering, blue-green-gold light. He stared at the coiling smoke or mist, the glimpse of stars in the distance, the flashes of glittering light and color. He realized in shock, in a blind, terrified horror, that the rift was narrower than it had been the last time he’d looked at it. Instead of an opening of five or six feet, it looked to be under four feet now.

Another rumbled filled the clearing, and then it was three feet wide.

The dimensional portal was closing.

It was fucking closing, and there was nothing Nick could do to stop it.

All of them stared at that narrowing glimpse of space and time.

Not just Nick and his friends, but Lara St. Maarten, the I.S. Fucked officers, the members of The Leash and the higher-ups among the Human Racial Authority––all of them had frozen in place, stopped in the middle of whatever they’d been doing to watch as the door closed.

Some part of Nick wanted to make a run for it.

He wanted to grab Wynter, grab Malek and Tai, have each of them grab a hand of someone else who stood by them: Jordan, Morley, Kit, Charlie.

But Wynter was too far away, and Nick’s arms were bound.

His ankles were bound.

He could only kneel there, staring, as the rift’s opening eclipsed.

The only door he’d ever found that might take him back to his home world closed right in front of him, and there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do.

The two sides of the portal melded seamlessly together, and another rolling peal of thunder jolted Nick’s teeth, making them vibrate painfully.

The portal was gone.

Nick, Wynter, the bushes, the trees, the dirt, the circle where they all knelt, got thrown into a mind-numbing darkness. The mountain itself loomed over them, a featureless shadow against the night sky, silent and unmoving.

Then grass rustled in the wind.

The dome’s stars shone dully in the hollow bowl of an artificial sky, looking disappointingly fake and two-dimensional now that Nick had been reminded of the difference.

He wanted to scream.

He wanted to scream until they put him out of his misery for real.

He couldn’t, though.

There was still Wynter.

There were still the two kids, his human friends, Jordan.

He could only kneel there, every part of his body cold as ice.