Page 34 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 34

THE EXPECTED

Nick came to a dead stop when the tunnel abruptly opened up.

He found himself standing at the entrance of a strangely round room, with a ceiling so high, he couldn’t see where it ended, even with his vampire eyes. He looked for the highest point anyway, for a few fractions of a second, at least, then lowered his chin to gaze into every corner of the room itself.

It was filled with machinery.

That explained the hum, at least.

Nick didn’t see any people in there at first, only rows and rows of green-metal terminals, blinking and humming with activity where they sat in a sharper, green-tinted light. It struck Nick that the machines themselves might be what emitted that light. His eyes searched all the way around that oddly symmetrical space. He searched for movement and sound apart from the machines and their blinking lights.

His gaze stopped when he saw another glass-like wall on the far side of the room.

Beyond that glass, he could see it.

A light-filled fissure writhed and sparked in front of the rock.

Just seeing it made Nick’s heart jackknife in his chest.

Memory again slanted out his vision of the surrounding room. Him and Dalejem sprawled on the rock floor, their only illumination coming from that same blue-green-gold fissure, which writhed in the space in front of them. He remembered Jem’s distinct smell, his heavy breaths as they stared into that misty, mesmerizing portal.

Neither of them moved or spoke for what must have been a few minutes.

None of it felt real.

It didn’t feel like they’d been gone long enough to be anywhere truly different.

But Nick remembered seeing and feeling the instant Brick had been torn away from him, and suddenly it felt like they’d traveled a lot further––

“Nick.” Wynter’s fingers wound into his. “Come back,” she whispered, softly.

He shook his head to clear it, and glanced at her.

He squeezed her fingers reassuringly.

“I’m here,” he promised.

“There are people down there,” Morley said, breaking the silence. “Behind that glass wall. They’ve definitely seen us.”

Nick’s eyes jerked back to that transparent partition.

That time, instead of looking at the portal itself, he looked at the people clustered around the thick pane of glass. He didn’t recognize any of their faces, but he recognized some of the clothing, especially the uniforms.

A number of them wore dark-green lab coats.

A second group wore actual uniforms, with insignias Nick had been intimately familiar with for the past hundred years.

They were H.R.A. uniforms.

Specifically, they belonged to members of the Leash.

Seemingly the instant Nick determined that much, a voice erupted from overhead, coming out of speakers that ringed the edges of the room.

“There’s nowhere left for you to go, Midnight.” A hard, male-sounding voice came from a harder-looking, square-jawed face. “Cooperate, and we won’t kill the beings who have been helping you. We’ll let them live.”

Nick glanced at Wynter.

She looked up at him.

Then she took his hand, and gripped it tightly in hers.

She didn’t speak, but then, she didn’t need to.

The man was right.

There was no where else for them to go.

He just didn’t seem to understand that his words cut more than one way.

* * *

Nick released Wynter’s hand and began to walk.

His body and legs cut a straight line down the center aisle between computer terminals, taking him steadily but unhurriedly towards the organic glass wall and the crowd of people he could now see half-filling the glass-enclosed space.

He didn’t look back, but he knew the others were following him.

He only stopped when he reached within a few feet of the organic barrier.

He stood there, taking in the faces that were now all staring at them.

The man in front had to be their leader.

He was the same one who’d spoken to Nick before.

He smirked at Nick now, his thick lips stretching into a smug half-smile. He was bald, with mechanically-enhanced eyes, that square jaw, and a wraparound headset that had the look of one of Archangel’s prototypes. An armband around his forearm and wrist also looked like next-gen tech, and his black uniform was pristine.

“We knew you would come,” the man said, just as smugly.

Nick couldn’t help wondering what he was so satisfied about.

What did the H.R.A. believe he wanted with the portal, anyway?

While Nick might have kept his own counsel about something like that in the past, when he had every reason to keep as much personal information from the authorities as possible, now it felt like he no longer had anything to lose.

“Why?” he asked, genuine curiosity in his voice. “Why would you think I’d come?”

The man scoffed. He spat onto the floor on the other side of the glass.

Nick’s lip curled.

“Because of course you’d come,” the man said derisively. “You’re a human-hating subversive, and a traitor. To win your pathetic attempt to make war with us, of course you would need to summon more of your kind here. The only way you could do that is via one of these inter-dimensional wormholes.”

Nick turned over the other man’s words.

Then he had to fight not to laugh.

The man was staring at him with so much triumph on his face.

Nick suspected that confidence would lead the human to talk, and he didn’t want to discourage that in any way, so he controlled his amusement.

“So that’s why you’re here?” Nick clarified. “To meet the vampires and seers you’re absolutely positive want to be here… on this world… so badly they’re frantically waiting on the other side of this portal for someone to come fetch them?”

Nick’s voice turned a touch mocking by the end, in spite of himself.

“And you plan to stop them all by yourself?” he asked with faux-politeness.

“We won’t need to stop them if we have their leader captive, will we?” the man sneered.

“Then it wasn’t me you were waiting for,” Nick countered. “I’m not the leader of anyone. The only people who might follow me are the ones you see with me now. So were you just waiting for any random non-human to show up? Someone you could use as leverage to shake-down any encroaching aliens?”

The man glared at him, his expression cold.

Nick wondered suddenly, just how long they’d been down here.

The same thought clearly wasn’t only on Nick’s mind.

“How long have you been waiting for them?” Malek asked the human.

His voice, like Nick’s had in the beginning, sounded more curious than hostile.

“Since maybe a hundred years since the last war,” Tai said, speaking for the man with the square jaw. “They haven’t left here in ages. They came down here to protect the portal. To make sure no more hostile beings came through.”

When they all turned to stare at her, the young seer blinked, then seemed to realize how her words sounded.

“Well, not him, obviously,” Tai explained, pointing at the man with the square jaw. She glanced back at the faces on the other side of the glass. “But they’ve had someone on the portals since they first began to discover them. For every single door they find, they build one of these stations and stand guard.”

Her brow scrunched as she looked at the red-faced human.

“They found them sort of gradually and haphazardly, I think,” she added. “They saw vampires and seers coming from the same few regions of the world, so they went looking for the source, and found the portals Dimitry Yi and his people had been using to bring seers to this version of Earth.”

She met gazes with the human in the H.R.A. uniform.

“I’m guessing they still gas or shoot whoever comes through.” Tai’s lips pursed as she stared at the human, who Nick now had no doubt whatsoever was having his mind thoroughly read by the young seer. “They experiment on some of them,” she clarified.

She continued to frown lightly as she read the man.

“They believe a lot of crazy stuff,” she said next. “They think the non-human races have embedded agents here, already living on this world, and their only job is to bring in more of their own kind. For conquest. Full-blown extermination of the human population. Rape of human women. Dilution of the human race. Etcetera.”

The male human’s jaw pushed out more as he clenched it.

Tai only stared back at him.

“That is why you’re here,” the uniformed human declared.

None of them bothered to answer him.

It absolutely wasn’t why they were there, of course, but Nick wasn’t sure which thing he should say, from the strategic point of view. He didn’t know if that was why the others didn’t speak, either, but he guessed it was.

Nick’s eyes roamed instead over the glass wall. It rose all the way up to the rock ceiling above. Nick could feel from the vibrations coming off the glass that it would likely shock him badly if he touched it, and that there was a good chance it would kill the mortals.

“Don’t touch the wall, anyone,” he said mildly. “It’s electrified. Deadly.”

His eyes returned to the H.R.A. guard.

“So what’s the plan here?” He held out his hands in a question, then let them fall to his sides. “We all just hang out here in a holding pattern until more of our friends show up? Is that it?”

“It won’t be long now,” the man retorted. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Still seems like it would make more sense if we were the ones on that side of the wall. Not you,” Nick pointed out.

“So you can pass through the portal and signal more of your vamp and glow-eye friends?” the man sneered. “I don’t think so, corpse boy.”

Nick almost smiled.

“Corpse boy” was similar to what Jordan called him a few times when they were first forced to work together on the N.Y.P.D.

Jordan only got openly racist with Nick a handful of times, and generally only when Nick did something to really piss the human off. He’d almost forgotten that particular insult, or how anti-vampire Damon had been when they first crossed paths. It had been a long time since anyone had spoken those words to his face.

He glanced at Tai.

The girl looked unconcerned.

It took Nick a few seconds to remember why.

Then his eyebrow rose.

“Think you can handle this, small fry?” he asked.

She pretended to think for a half-second, then rolled her eyes.

She might as well have scoffed.

“Duh,” she said mockingly, all of her perfectly-calibrated, outrageously-arrogant, pre-teen scorn fully in effect. “Why ask questions you know the answer to, Nick?”

She sniffed, then faced the glass.

Nick felt the change in the air before he could have labeled what it was.

It took him another few fractions of a second before he saw the effects on the other side of the glass. Then the men standing there started to change. They didn’t scream and yell or even look especially afraid of what was happening to them; it was almost like they didn’t have time to feel any of those things.

Then the man in front raised his hands to either side of his thick head.

He gripped his own skull in muscular fingers as his face went slack. His mouth fell open in a silent scream as he seemed to be trying to hold his mind physically still from whatever was happening inside his skull. The scientists and other uniformed officers didn’t even raise their hands. They stood there, mouths agape, eyes completely out of focus.

Nick saw the blood first.

He saw it before any of them fell.

Blood began streaming out of their eyes and noses and mouths, dripping down their chins and necks, darkening the clothing they wore and the tops of their chests. They stood there, all frozen in place, jaws and mouths locked in those eerie, silent screams. It seemed to go on for minutes, but Nick honestly had no idea how long it went on.

He jumped when the first of them fell.

It was one of the green-coated scientists who dropped first.

He didn’t go down to his knees, but toppled forward, face-first, still without uttering a single sound. He didn’t try to break his own fall with his hands or even his knees, but fell straight down like a tree that’s been chopped through at the base of its trunk.

After the first one fell, the others were quick to follow.

Nick didn’t move, didn’t blink, even after the big one with the square jaw fell, and slammed his head into the glass on the way down. Nick was pretty sure the guy was already dead by then, but it was still unnerving to see his face break on the organic pane, and the unnatural angle of his neck as he slid down the glass before landing in a heap at its base.

Eventually, after all of them had fallen, the vibration in the air began to still.

Apart from the hum of the machines behind them, and the heaving breaths of the seers, hybrids, and humans, it grew eerily silent.

Then Jordan, of all people, broke that cathedral-quiet.

“Holy fucking horse-balls!” he said.

It was morbid, Nick knew, but he couldn’t help it.

He laughed.

* * *

They swarmed the entire length of the glass wall now, not touching but looking, trying to figure out how to open the door.

Kit already had her armband computer unwrapped so that she could get at all of the controls, and was using that and her headset to try and hack her way through the encrypted locks. Nick had a moment of regret where he wondered if he should have tried his thrall first. He maybe could’ve convinced one of the humans to open the door that way.

He dismissed it a few seconds later, realizing that was wishful thinking at best.

If they were that easy to get to, they wouldn’t have left so few of them here.

“Oh, they’re not alone,” Malek said to him calmly.

Nick turned, staring at the other male. “What?”

“There are soldiers coming,” Malek said, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. “One of the scientists in there hit the alarm as soon as we showed up.”

All of them stared at one another, then at Malek.

“And you only thought to mention this now?” Morley snapped.

The tall seer shrugged. “How would it have helped, James?” Malek asked reasonably. “Everyone here is doing everything they can as quickly as possible already.”

Malek’s voice grew a touch more grim.

“We should get inside there as soon as possible, though,” he added.

“No shit,” Jordan muttered, rolling his eyes. “Jesus, how did you spooky freaks manage to stay alive this long, anyway?”

“It’s a good question,” Charlie muttered.

“Just get the fucking door open, someone,” Nick grumbled, annoyed with all of them. “I’d rather not get shot, or thrown out into that radioactive goop again, not now that we’ve gotten this far.”

Kit was back to staring at invisible numbers and lines as she tapped into the virtual interface. Morley was looking at an instrument panel to the right of the door. He frowned as he started hitting through keys, and Nick figured he was just taking stabs in the dark, trying any random combination he could think of.

Nick glanced at Malek and Tai again, only to find them obviously engaged in some kind of silent conversation with one another. He remembered those types of odd, silent, staring contests between seers, back and forths via telepathy that often got interspersed with even odder facial expressions and hand gestures.

It was the eyes that usually gave them away, especially if the conversation got emotional.

Tai and Malek didn’t have anything so obvious as that going on.

They both looked intensely concentrated.

Then Tai nodded, once, and gave a kind of half-shrug, as if to say, “It’s worth a try.”

She focused back on the glass.

Nick fought back a feeling of disbelief when he saw one of the scientists stirring. Nick’s jaw fell open for real when the man crawled stiffly up to his knees, then began kneel-walking towards a freestanding terminal of some kind, not far from the organic wall.

He wasn’t breathing.

Blood covered his cheeks, jaw, and neck in long streaks, and his eyes were filled with it. They were openly, but entirely unseeing. Nick watched incredulously as the scientist reached up, then fumbled his hand around on the top of the square panel.

Suddenly he understood.

Tai hadn’t brought him back to life.

She was manipulating the man’s corpse.

Nick was about to say something, maybe even to make a joke in extremely poor taste, when the wall suddenly began to hum.

Kit stepped back, as did Morley and Wynter.

Then the thick, transparent door slowly began to open.