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  VAMPIRE DETECTIVE MIDNIGHT

  A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel

  JC Andrijeski

  Books in the Vampire Detective Midnight Series

  (Recommended Reading Order)

  VAMPIRE DETECTIVE MIDNIGHT (Book #1)

  EYES OF ICE (Book #2)

  THE PRESCIENT (Book #3)

  Books in the Quentin Black Mystery Series

  (Recommended Reading Order)

  BLACK IN WHITE (Book #1)

  Kirev’s Door (Book #0.5)

  BLACK AS NIGHT (Book #2)

  Black Christmas (Book #2.5)

  BLACK ON BLACK (Book #3)

  Black Supper (Book #3.5)

  BLACK IS BACK (Book #4)

  BLACK AND BLUE (Book #5)

  Black Blood (Book #5.5)

  BLACK OF MOOD (Book #6)

  BLACK TO DUST (Book #7)

  IN BLACK WE TRUST (Book #8)

  BLACK THE SUN (Book #9)

  TO BLACK WITH LOVE (Book #10)

  Black Dreams (Book #10.5)

  Books in the Bridge & Sword Series

  (Recommended Reading Order)

  New York (Bridge & Sword Prequel Novel #0.5)

  ROOK (Bridge & Sword #1)

  SHIELD (Bridge & Sword #2)

  SWORD (Bridge & Sword #3)

  Revik (Bridge & Sword Prequel Novel #0.1)

  SHADOW (Bridge & Sword #4)

  KNIGHT (Bridge & Sword #5)

  WAR (Bridge & Sword #6)

  BRIDGE (Bridge & Sword #7)

  Trickster (Bridge & Sword Prequel Novel #0.2)

  The Defector (Bridge & Sword Prequel Novel #0.3)

  PROPHET (Bridge & Sword #8)

  A Glint of Light (Bridge & Sword #8.5)

  DRAGON (Bridge & Sword #9)

  The Guardian (Bridge & Sword #0.4)

  SUN (Bridge & Sword #10)

  Other books by JC AndriJeski

  Alien Apocalypse

  The Culling (Part I)

  The Royals (Part II)

  The New Order (Part III)

  The Rebellion (Part IV)

  The Morph

  The Morph

  Crash Morph

  Standalones

  Shadow Wings

  Red Magic

  Copyright © 2019 by JC Andrijeski

  Published by White Sun Press

  Cover Art & Design by Damonza.com (2019)

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an official vendor for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Dedicated to my dear friends at Fuel in the Blank, R.E.A.D. Cafe, and Thee Cafe, not to mention the lovely ladies who tolerate my typing during foot massages, even as they cluck their tongues at me and tell me I work too much.

  You will all be dearly missed.

  Contents

  Synopsis

  1. Smells Too Good

  2. The First Sign

  3. Midnight

  4. Weird Hobby For A Vampire

  5. Devil’s Cauldron

  6. Feeding

  7. Never Sleep

  8. Red Cube

  9. Stowaway

  10. I Like You

  11. Following Leads

  12. Phoenix

  13. Stonewall

  14. Dismissed

  15. Field Trip

  16. Truce

  17. Principal’s Office

  18. Wynter

  19. Racist

  20. Going All Vampire

  21. A Work Question

  22. Vampire Of The Hour

  23. Somebody’s Listening

  24. Going Rogue

  25. The Dark Castle

  26. Alliance

  27. Opening

  Epilogue

  What to read next

  Sample Pages

  Prologue / Demons

  1 / Two Days Earlier

  2 / Tech Punk

  Series Summaries

  List of Book Titles

  About the Author

  Synopsis

  Vampire with a past and homicide detective, Naoko “Nick” Tanaka just got transferred to the NYPD, where he works as a “Midnight,” or vampire in the employ of the human police.

  Like all state-registered vamps, he gets his food delivered to his door, lives in government housing, and basically can’t sneeze without the U.S. government knowing about it.

  More than anything, he just wants to be left alone, to finish out his immortality in peace… but he’s barely there two weeks when things go sideways.

  It starts with a weird case that somehow mixes dead hybrids, a rich woman living in a gold tower, graffiti that tells the future, and a kid who shouldn’t exist at all.

  Between his case, the mystery artist, a conspiracy involving the richest families in New York, and a school principal who has an unsettling effect on him, Nick finds he can’t get personally uninvolved with any of it.

  Instead, he gets sucked in even deeper, until he’s pretty sure he’ll end up forcibly reprogrammed by his human owners—assuming they don’t just rip his heart out of his chest and be done with it.

  VAMPIRE DETECTIVE MIDNIGHT is book #1 of a gritty, romantic new series set in a futuristic, dystopian New York populated by vampires, humans and psychics trying to rebuild their world after a devastating race war nearly obliterates the previous one.

  A spinoff of the Quentin Black Mystery series, it features vampire with a past and homicide detective, Naoko “Nick” Tanaka, who gets transferred to the NYPD after a bad incident in Los Angeles forces him to start a new life.

  Nick works as a “Midnight,” or vampire in the employ of the human police department, but when he arrives in New York, he really just wants to be left alone to work, surf, and deal with his immortality in peace.

  Life, and the residents of New York, clearly have other ideas.

  Chapter 1

  Smells Too Good

  He smelled the blood, even before he turned the corner into the alley.

  He heard them talking about him only a few steps after that.

  That was the problem with working with humans.

  One problem, anyway.

  They had shitty hearing, so they assumed everyone else did, too.

  “Where’s Midnight?” he heard the lead detective say.

  Nick heard the man’s clothing move as he looked around, maybe making sure a random vampire wasn’t lurking next to him already, or that he didn’t see Nick himself walking towards him in the dark.

  “I thought he was coming to this?” the detective muttered, taking a sip of something—something hot from the quick, cut-off way he sipped it, likely artificial coffee given that Nick could make out the faint, bitter-tinged odor of that, too.

  Of course, no one called it “artificial coffee” anymore.

  They just called it coffee.

  But Nick remembered real coffee, well enough to know the bilge they drank now wasn’t it.

  It was an insult to coffee.

  The lead detective glanced around where he stood a second time. He checked his watch again.

  “Where the hell is he?” he muttered. “We could use a blood-sniffer right now. Christ. Look at this mess.”

  The man standing next to him grunted. “Fucking bloodsuckers. He’s probably paying a blood whore to jerk him off while he drains her dry in a dark alley somewhere…”

  The man trailed, mid-thought,
flushing as Nick rounded the corner of the building.

  Nick stepped deliberately into the light, right as he entered the narrow alley where they were all crouched, standing over something he could smell but not yet see.

  He’d been right about the artificial coffee.

  The detective standing closest to the scene, closest to the female tech leaning over the nearest body, collecting samples and photographing it from all angles, took another sip of the watered-down crap, gripping one of those semi-organic, morphing cups in his left hand.

  Damn, Nick missed real coffee.

  He knew it wouldn’t taste right to him anymore, not as a vampire, but he missed it anyway.

  Only the truly rich could afford real coffee these days. The few plants still in existence were tended meticulously in greenhouses run by boutique farmers who catered exclusively to the super-rich—the same handful of people who basically ran everything.

  “You’re late,” the lead detective, a tall, scarecrow-thin black man with gray hair named Morley, declared neutrally.

  Nick ignored the dig, looking around the scene.

  Six. He smelled six.

  He only saw five bodies, three female and two male, but he smelled six different types of blood, six different DNA imprints. The sixth, another female, could be one of the killers, but it didn’t smell like it.

  She smelled dead.

  “Check the dumpster,” he said.

  He motioned towards the bin shoved against the wall to the left and a few meters behind where the techs and detectives were focused.

  “You’ve got six bodies,” Nick added, hands still in his pockets.

  He continued to walk the scene, his nose wrinkling as he got closer.

  As he did, he was even more sure of the sixth body.

  He was still looking around, smelling the air, when he felt his fangs start to extend.

  In reflex, he clenched his jaw, repressing it. Even as he did, he glanced around surreptitiously, checking faces, although the likelihood one of the humans might have noticed was pretty much nil.

  Fuck, had he come here hungry?

  Why was his stomach getting weird on him all of a sudden?

  Shoving the thought from his mind before it started to affect his eye color, or his overall demeanor, he focused his attention back on the scene.

  From what he could tell, apart from the woman they’d thrown in the dumpster, the killers didn’t get near enough to touch any of the other five bodies. They didn’t leave much in the way of trace imprints as a result. They definitely hadn’t gotten into any kind of physical fight with the victims, not enough to leave blood, or anything with DNA.

  At best, the techs might find some fibers or a few stray hairs in the mix.

  Nick had his doubts they would.

  Whoever these assholes were, apart from the anomaly with the woman in the dumpster, they seemed to know what they were doing. Anyway, if there was hair here, he likely would have smelled that, too, despite the overpowering smell of blood.

  Sniffing the air again, he frowned.

  The blood in the alley was really damned pungent, even for how much of it there was. It struck him as somehow more pungent than usual.

  It bothered him, how pungent it was.

  Shoving the thought from his mind, he focused back on whoever had done this.

  He smelled four of them.

  He smelled someone else, as well.

  Someone more recent.

  “The scene’s been contaminated,” he commented sourly.

  Without waiting for an answer, he walked past the other detectives, aiming his feet for the dumpster he’d motioned towards earlier. He wasn’t thrilled with rooting around a dumpster that smelled like dead blood, or even being this close to a bunch of dead bodies, but the sooner he got his part of the job out of the way, the sooner he could get the hell out of there.

  Like most vampires, he hated being around dead things.

  The irony didn’t escape him, which is why he didn’t bother to mention that fact to most humans.

  Most of them would look at him like he was nuts.

  Well, that, and, generally speaking, explaining to a human how differently their blood smelled to him alive, versus how their blood smelled to him dead, tended to make most humans more than a little uncomfortable.

  Donning latex gloves of his own, he lifted the lid of the dumpster gingerly once he got close enough, and stared down at the contents.

  A clump of black hair greeted him, long and tangled over a back wearing a faux-leather jacket with a brightly colored, virtual reality (VR)-enhanced cartoon dog on the back.

  Someone had thrown her into the dumpster, face-down.

  The cartoon dog bounced around her back in the dim light, oblivious to its owner’s death. When Nick lifted the lid higher, it triggered the VR sensors a second time, and the cartoon dog started barking at him, wagging its butt and tail playfully.

  It didn’t make any sound.

  Something about that silent, dancing cartoon dog and the crumpled corpse smelling too-pungently of blood and death made Nick grimace.

  Holding his breath, he lifted the lid higher.

  Definitely a woman, from the curve of her hip in the form-fitting, shiny pants she wore, and the high-heeled, VR-enhanced pink and purple boots.

  She smelled relatively young.

  Twenties. Possibly early thirties.

  He sniffed again and frowned.

  It wasn’t fake leather. It was the real thing.

  He glanced down the rest of her clothes, taking a second look at her metallic-sheen pants. They fit her perfectly. The pants also had a more subtle virtual enhancement, one that sent shimmers of sparkles down her long, toned-looking legs and curve of well-exercised butt.

  Her knee-high boots looked expensive, and shimmered with virtual cartoon dogs that matched the one on her real-leather jacket. The boots might be real leather, too, under the VR panels. Her hair, where it wasn’t matted with blood, was silky and expensively cut.

  Whoever she was, she had money.

  He glanced around the rest of the dim space of the dumpster.

  It was empty.

  No purse. No headset, or armband.

  The only thing in there was the woman.

  So why had they bothered trying to hide the body?

  He squinted down at her, tilting his head to see her from the side, to try and get a better look at her profile.

  “They destroyed her face,” he announced after another minute. “Her teeth, too, it looks like. They might have even removed them. I don’t see an ident-tat.”

  Frowning, he leaned closer, squinting down at one of her leather-clad arms. He stared down at the hand at the end of that arm.

  “…They took her fingers, too,” he added.

  “Fantastic,” Morley muttered from behind him.

  Nick carefully lowered the lid to the dumpster, stepping back.

  “Better photograph it,” he said. “Whoever she was, she had money. Someone’s probably looking for her.”

  Three police techs in white, semi-transparent decontamination suits were standing at a safe distance behind him, presumably waiting for him to move away before they started photographing and taking samples.

  One of them cleared their throat, speaking up.

  “Those too,” she said, blanching when Nick turned.

  She motioned towards the bodies on the floor of the alley.

  “…They have money, too,” she clarified. “Expensive clothes. Manicures. Some plastic surgery treatments. At least one pair of diamond earrings—”

  “They left all that?” the younger detective said, puzzled. “Why?”

  The tech looked at him, then back to Nick.

  She didn’t answer.

  Realizing he stood between the techs and the woman in the dumpster even now, Nick backed off to give them room. From the looks on their faces, they weren’t about to approach with him standing there, no matter how fuzzy and cute he tried to make
himself.

  Frowning up and down the alley, he looked for signs of tampering with the scene.

  Who was the contaminant? Did a beat cop walk through here?

  It didn’t smell like a cop. He couldn’t quite explain that to himself, not in so many words, but cops had a particular imprint, and he didn’t get it off this person.

  He didn’t like the anomaly of the woman.

  “It’s likely she was the primary target,” he muttered, mostly to himself as he continued to scan the scene. “The others may have been incidental.”

  “Cause of death?” Morley said, his voice pointed. “They all die by plasma rifle? Or did the one in the dumpster die by something else?”

  Nick glanced at him, then frowned.

  “Plasmas, yes. The woman in the dumpster, too. They hit her in the face.” He motioned towards his own face in rote. “That doesn’t strike me as an accident. They tried to use the rifle to hide it, but the superficial damage to hide her ID all looked post-mortem to me.”

  Still thinking, he added,

  “At least one of the killers carried an old-school projectile. He shot the one in the dumpster at least once, possibly twice. At least once in the head. That shot didn’t go all the way through.”

  At Morley’s puzzled look, Nick jerked his chin towards the metal container.