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

CHAPTER 8

DEAD BODIES

The murder was depressingly routine.

On a night where Nick might have welcomed something a bit more freakish and out of the ordinary, he got a normal, completely uninteresting street death in a poverty-stricken neighborhood near the Cauldron.

Probably drug related, which was somehow even more depressing.

Not like Nick wanted something bloodier, or with more dead bodies, or even something ritualistic or serial killer-y. Nick wasn’t pining for “doppelg?nger kills family of six, including small children,” type of excitement in his life.

He’d just hoped for something that might make him feel like his being here, in this particular dimension and time, was making a shit’s worth of difference to someone.

Instead, he and Morley found themselves a few blocks above the Cauldron, where it looked like some kind of black market transaction had gone wrong, ending with two tattoo-covered humans dead. Both bodies were left in a small park just north of the Cauldron’s high, razor-wire covered walls. Both had their heads pulped, their faces made unrecognizable from high-range plasma shots fired at close range.

Whoever killed them hadn’t wanted an easy ID on the vics.

Nick found himself staring at the tattoos both of them wore.

Both had Dimitry Yi’s marks on their thick, muscular arms.

Yi himself had been taken out of this dimension months ago, of course. Not long enough to stamp out his fanatical cultists, or any of the crazy ideas he’d spread, but long enough that it was strange for Nick to remember all of that was still going on.

Dimitry Yi had been feeding ideological poison into the veins of the humans of this world for a lot longer than Nick had been aware of him. He’d lurked in the dark corners of the feeds for years, if not decades, before he finally exploded out into the mainstream of political thought, some five years earlier.

His disappearance hadn’t ended any of that, unfortunately.

In some ways, it ramped things up more, making him more of a martyr than he had been, and convincing his followers that the very structures of the human governments were corrupted, filled race-traitors and seeded with murderous non-humans who were passing as human.

A million conspiracy theories existed around Yi’s disappearance alone.

Some believed a shadow vampire government had killed him.

Some believed the White Death had turned him into a vampire.

Some believed seers and their hybrid slaves had imprisoned him.

Some thought he was working inside the human underworld, killing vampires and seers and working to re-launch the final war between the races, single-handedly.

It wasn’t even just basement dwelling, feed-addicted weirdos who believed this shit, either, unfortunately. Some of the most powerful citizens in the human protected areas believed some of that shit. Morley told him that whole sections of the H.R.A. believed it, and that some of them openly talked about the coming race wars.

They didn’t talk about that in front of Nick, of course.

Nick himself still mostly encountered it in places like this.

Sadly, a lot of Yi’s most rabid adherents could be found among the poorer denizens of the New York Protected Areas, who likely needed more reasons to explain why their lives were such shit. Many of them couldn’t comprehend how things had gone so badly for them, despite the fact that humans were widely touted as having “won” the race wars.

Yi told them that rich humans had betrayed them.

He told them traitors among their own kind had allowed half-breeds and vampires to infiltrate every level of the human governments, corrupting them from the inside out, and turning the human elite into venom addicts and groveling, spineless tools of their natural enemies. Ironically, Yi’s ideas had infected the culture of much of those same elite institutions, who went on internal witch hunts and purges to remove the imagined spies.

Those beliefs also formed the core ideology of a number of black market gangs, including those that had burned Nick’s building to the ground.

The fact that Yi himself turned out to be an extremely powerful seer was an irony not lost on Nick. He knew none of Yi’s true believers would ever believe that, but it made a strange sort of sense once Nick understood Yi’s long-term goals.

Yi wanted this version of Earth to be owned completely by seers.

He barely tolerated hybrids, even though he obviously found them useful as foot soldiers in his movement. Ultimately, Yi wanted humans and vampires to destroy themselves so he could take over the world and rebuild it for his own people.

Why he’d chosen this version of Earth, in this particular dimension, was anyone’s guess. Nick had to assume there were many, much better dimensions where the inhabitants hadn’t destroyed most of the oceans, contaminated the fresh water and air, irradiated the land, and killed most of the animals, trees, plants, birds, insects, and people.

But Yi had his gaze set on this one, and he was adamant that seers were the only rightful owners of what remained.

His ideology was a grand experiment in destroying the foundations of a harmonious culture. Yi feigned hatred of non-humans because he believed it would destroy human culture from the inside. He believed inflaming their “natural violence and irrationality” towards anything they didn’t understand, anything that frightened them, would pit them against one another and eventually incite them into suicidal wars.

For the same reason, Yi’s supposed hatred of half-humans was partly true and partly smokescreen. He definitely saw half-seer hybrids as inferior to himself, and as second-class citizens in his coming paradise. He seemed to see Wynter as more than that, but most hybrids seemed to arouse nothing but contempt in him.

His hatred of vampires hadn’t been faked in the slightest.

Mostly, though, Yi had wanted to destabilize the human world. He wanted them pitted against one another, and against the vampires. He wanted to ignite an irrational, bloody, terror-filled war, with the sole intent of murdering as many human beings as possible.

The crazy thing was, his plot had been working.

Yi’s father had come to collect him before he could get all the way there, but Yi had already begun destabilizing the delicate peace that had been wrought in the post-war period. He’d re-ignited fear and hatred of vampires, in particular.

But he’d also succeeded in pitting humans against one another.

Nick didn’t know what Yi’s next step would have been to take over the planet, but he had zero doubt there was one. Yi had been devious as fuck.

He’d also been patient.

He’d had a brilliant mind, so really, it was a waste.

Nick looked down at the two dead humans lying in a dirt clearing surrounded by grass, and frowned, glancing over only when Morley finished talking to the regular officers and came back to where Nick stood. Nick had been eavesdropping, of course.

He’d heard the uniforms telling Morley they had a few witnesses, humans.

He wondered if Morley would want him involved on that side of things. Nick generally only handled interrogations when he was working alone, or when they wanted him to bite someone and force them to tell the truth.

Nick glanced around at the dark buildings, and guessed Morley would ask him.

No one around here would cooperate willingly.

People were unwilling to cooperate with cops even on a good day, but up here, this close to the Cauldron and the hollowed-out Vampire District, it was significantly less likely. Only full-blooded humans could give legal testimony in criminal cases without severe restrictions, and special dispensation by the police or the courts, usually both.

While the local human residents likely had no personal interest in covering up crimes for whoever had been involved in a shootout on their street, they wouldn’t put themselves and their families at risk. They wouldn’t intentionally cross the wrong person or persons.

Up here, “the wrong people” often had somewhat different connotations.

It was too close to the vampire ghetto.

It was too close to the Cauldron.

“Gertrude’s eyes got two witnesses,” Morley said, referring to the A.I. that ran most of the administrative side of the N.Y.P.D. Her “eyes” referred to drones used by the N.Y.P.D. to get a look at crime scenes, sometimes before the cops could arrive themselves.

“Human,” Morley added, taking a sip of coffee from his ugly, blinking, obnoxious Yankees mug. “Watching from the windows of a nearby complex, apparently. Gertrude thinks at least two people in those windows saw the whole thing go down.”

Nick nodded, and glanced up and around at the high, concrete buildings, doing a rough inventory of the different styles. There weren’t a lot of windows in most of them, but there were definitely some, and maybe more than were visible to him, despite his vampire vision.

Morley jerked his jaw towards the nearest structure, a tall residential with direct line-of-sight to where the dead bodies lay.

“That one,” he said, grimly.

Nick followed his eyes.

Not a single lit window could be seen along the entire blank surface of wall, despite the fifty-plus stories. Yet Nick had zero doubt that many, many pairs of eyes likely watched them from those same windows, and could see the dead bodies. That darkness was a tell in its own right. The first instinct in a place like this would be to make oneself invisible.

Tons of residents likely watched him and Morley look their way that very minute.

Morley took another sip from the horrible Yankees mug.

“N.Y.P.D. sent drones when the security perimeter got tripped,” Morley explained. “They think the original trigger was plasma rifle fire, so audio, but the perps shot down the flyer they sent down pretty quick, so they lost a lot of the data. The assassins might’ve worn heat-signature-disguising clothing as well. Masks, cloaks, and head coverings, so Gertrude didn’t get clear images of faces or bodies. They had their ident tats and implants covered with scramblers.”

Morley gave Nick a dour look.

“So far, officers are coming back with fuck-all from knocking doors, despite the several hundred windows facing this way,” the older human grunted, not hiding his annoyance. “No one’s willing to say dick. I doubt that will change, but they might send up some Midnights once they figure out which windows had the best vantage on the scene, see if they can venom them into telling us something. It won’t be admissible on its own, of course, but we could use it to find the perps, gather our own evidence along the way.”

Nick nodded expressionlessly, but he could read between the lines.

“You think this was vampires.” Nick didn’t say it like a question.

Morley shrugged. “I think they might’ve been vampires, yeah.” He motioned with the hand holding the gaudy, fading-neon mug. “They might’ve gone with the excessive head shots to cover up bites. Of course, there are a lot of other reasons they might not want their vics to be recognized, but given the focus on the necks, it’s a consideration.”

Nick nodded, his expression still.

He’d already wondered the same, truthfully.

There was no reason to use such a big weapon in such close quarters, and a lot of reasons not to, unless the victims were already dead and you were trying to obscure the race of the killers. It would only buy them time, of course.

“The squints will be able to verify all of that, of course,” Morley affirmed, as if Nick had spoken a portion of his thoughts aloud. “Until then, they want you and me to start knocking doors, too. At least until we can get a few more Midnights up here.”

Nick felt a little sick, but he only nodded.

Wynter wouldn’t like that, either.

She absolutely hated it when he bit anyone else, even for work.

Not for the first time, or the last, given he was now back in this world for real, and this was his life again, Nick wished he had some fucking control over how the case got run. If he was in charge of the case, he wouldn’t bother going after human eye witnesses at all.

He’d find someone in the Cauldron who worked this kind of black market shit for Yi or even for vampires, and see what he could find out from them.

Mostly likely, the lowliest bottom feeder in the Cauldron could tell them more than some low-level desk jockey schmuck who lived in one of these apartment buildings at might have glimpsed a guy getting shot in the face from a hundred feet away.

But Nick knew why the bosses would want to go this route.

They’d want humans to say they saw vampires feeding on these guys.

If they did, then they were going to make political hay on these deaths.

Nick found that pretty gross, personally. Not only would it not help them find the actual killers, it would likely inspire copycats and retaliation that would confuse the case even more. Anyway, these fucks and their racist Yi and Eifrah tattoos practically screamed come fucking kill me when they wandered this close to the old Vamp District.

A lot of Nick’s brethren were still pretty pissed off at the bombings and widespread arson that targeted their ghetto.

It had thrown a lot of them onto the streets, and worse.

While most of the vampires who’d lived in the area had been the responsible, hard-working type of vampire, with registered work-designations and categories, who earned their regular H.R.A. live feeds and paid their taxes and dutifully picked up their synth blood bags every Tuesday from the dispensary, and allowed the government to violate them regularly in the name of being “one of the good ones,” there would definitely be some among them who didn’t fall into that camp, and who might take things into their own hands.

There’d be some who maybe started out as “good” vampires, only to change their mind about that when humans came after them and their families.

That shit was fucking personal.

These jackasses, whoever they were, had been really fucking dumb, doing a deal this close to the Vampire District, with all of their bullshit Nazi tattoos visible and uncovered on their arms, and likely on their faces and necks, too, when they still had anything significant left of either.

Maybe they thought everyone had gone from this area, but they hadn’t.

More likely, they’d done it out of arrogance, trollishness, and an attempt to be intimidating, or even funny, and they’d run into a group of vampires with no patience for any of those things. Nick guessed, whoever did this, they had even less of a sense of humor for brazen members of Yi’s flock, given their entire neighborhood had recently been razed to the ground by those fucks.

So yeah, it wasn’t all that surprising that the humans who lived up here wouldn’t be anxious to talk about anything they might or might not have seen.

Nick didn’t blame them.

A full-blooded human didn’t tend to live up here at all unless they’d come to a certain cautious understanding about vampires. That didn’t mean some of them weren’t racists. Nick had zero doubt that some of them absolutely were. But most of them would have a more reality-based wariness when it came to posturing with the undead right to their faces.

There wouldn’t be a lot of cowboys among this bunch.

They might have even watched Yi’s people get taken down a notch with some element of satisfaction. Only outsiders would be this dumb, they would think to themselves. Only a fucking moron would do this now, with the vampire herds so angry and hot for blood.

Nick understood the apparent contradictions.

It was familiar, even from back when he’d been human himself.

The people huddled here, in this divided neighborhood on the edges of the Cauldron and the coven ghettos, might hate vampires themselves, but those damned vamps were their vampires to hate… not anyone else’s.