Eyes of Ice Read online

  EYES OF ICE

  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

  The ones who try to hide from the world,

  Who the world finds anyway

  Contents

  Synopsis

  Prologue

  1. Two Days Earlier

  2. Tech Punk

  3. A Night Out

  4. Dead Vampires

  5. Strange Feelings

  6. Grant

  7. Fight

  8. That’s… Not How We Thought It Would Go

  9. Invitation

  10. Purity

  11. Fresh Blood

  12. Cold

  13. Sanctuary

  14. Hangover

  15. Girlfriend

  16. You’re Like Seers, Then?

  17. The Blackest Night

  18. Instrument

  19. Three Of Them

  20. Powerless

  21. White Wolf

  22. A Soft Voice

  23. She Played You

  24. Technically

  25. Partners

  26. My Mistake

  27. A Familiar Face

  28. Three Brothers

  29. Just A Girl

  30. Coward

  What to read next

  Sample Pages

  Prologue / The Box

  1 / It’s Starting, Isn’t it?

  2 / Sorry, Straven

  Series Summaries

  List of Book Titles

  About the Author

  Synopsis

  “Hey… you.” The man looked him over again. “You fight? Right?” His lips thinned, his eyes on Nick’s chest and arms. “…You look like you do. Frankly, you’re the first vampire I’ve seen in here who’s worth the cost of admission.”

  At Nick’s blank stare, the man shrugged.

  “A hundred thousand to fight. Twice that, if you win.”

  Nick gets pulled into the world of underground boxing, first to support a friend, and then to help one of the homicide detectives in his precinct solve a case.

  Things get personal, fast, when Nick gets drawn into the game himself, and into the sights of the killers, who appear to be targeting vampires, first draining them for blood and venom before extracting their hearts and tossing them outside the dome.

  Nick is technically still suspended, but that doesn’t keep him out of the crosshairs with some of the biggest names in the criminal underground that runs New York Protected Area.

  Nor does it reassure his new girlfriend, who by now is convinced he has a death wish, or at the very least will do just about anything to avoid talking to her about what’s going on between the two of them.

  VAMPIRE DETECTIVE MIDNIGHT is a new romantic, science fiction and fantasy 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.

  Prologue

  Demons

  He stood over the body, smelling the blood.

  It filled his nostrils, nearly making him dizzy, somehow sweeter than the coppery smell of his own blood.

  “Candy blood,” he muttered.

  He said it soft, under his breath, but the woman standing next to him let out a low laugh.

  Her pupils were dilated.

  She’d been dipping into the stock again.

  He frowned at her, fighting to hide the disgust that rose in him at the spaced-out, sloppy grin on her face. He had nothing but contempt for product suppliers who grew dependent on their own product. Not only was it stupid, it was dangerous, and not just to her.

  If he didn’t need her right now, he would have cut her out totally.

  Patience, a voice whispered in his mind.

  Michael inhaled a heavy breath.

  Patience, Michael, the voice murmured. Patience. All is going as it should.

  The voice calmed him.

  It always calmed him.

  Family.

  Family was what mattered.

  Family was the only thing that mattered.

  This woman wasn’t family; she was an employee. He wasn’t tied to her. They could get rid of her any time he chose. The family could simply dispose of her when they no longer required her services. There was nothing to worry about in that. There was nothing to be distressed in any of it. He had control over the situation.

  Michael exhaled tension he hadn’t known he held.

  The muscles in his shoulders, arms and neck softened, allowing him to
breathe easier with the next breath… and the next.

  There you go, brother… everything is good…

  Michael focused back on the job at hand.

  He stared down at the increasingly pale face of the vampire locked down on the stainless-steel table.

  He wondered what would happen if they just kept draining it.

  What would the corpse look like, if they took all the blood… all the venom? If they just kept going? Would the whole thing just collapse into itself, like the fantastical vampires from old horror movies, leaving a desiccated pile of bone dust? Perhaps covered in a loose pile of skin? Or perhaps all of it, skin and all, nothing more than a chalky powder?

  After all, it wasn’t alive.

  Vampires looked alive, but they weren’t.

  Feeling a slight pain in his temple, he closed his eyes, rotating his head and neck sideways in a circle. Blinking down at the vampire on the table, he focused on the task at hand.

  “How many more?” he said.

  No answer.

  He turned, looking at the woman, who was staring down adoringly at the vampire’s face.

  “Melissa,” he said, sharper. “How many?” He checked his watch. “We have to be out of here in five hours. We’re not even halfway to quota. Not to mention, anything we don’t drain, we still have to carry out of here… only it weighs about three times as much.”

  She stared at him blankly.

  “Melissa!” he snapped. “How many?”

  She blinked, thinking.

  “Six,” she said, doubtful. “…I think.”

  “Well, get in there,” he said, once more keeping the distaste from his voice with an effort. “Go prep the next one. This one is almost done.”

  Tearing her gaze off the vampire’s face, she looked up at him, eyes wide.

  “No!” she protested. “You promised! You promised I could do this one!”

  Michael followed her eyes to the long, black metal pole on the table adjacent to the one where the vampire lay. A long-toothed claw adorned one side of the device, with razor-sharp, silver teeth with ragged edges.

  They called it an “alligator.”

  Michael had no idea where the name originated.

  It could just as easily have been called a “shark,” or a “T-Rex.”

  It was designed for one purpose.

  Looking at the alligator, he frowned, then glanced back at Melissa.

  This definitely wasn’t a battle worth fighting.

  Realizing that, he exhaled in annoyance.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll go. You finish this one. Do it fast, and get him in the incinerator. We need to be working faster than this.” He checked his watch, scowling. “We should have already had the next one prepped and ready to go before we got to this point. That’s the whole point of having two tables. Prep, drain, dispose. Got it?”

  “We only had one rig tonight,” she mumbled, her voice still spacey, and maddeningly distracted. She played with a long, stringy strand of blond hair, swinging her hips slightly from side to side under the baby-doll shirt that looked two sizes too big. She even moved like a child, as though she were rocking herself for comfort.

  “The tube-thingy on the other one broke,” she complained, pointing to the stainless-steel rig on the table next to the alligator. She still clutched her hair in one hand, swaying her hips. “It’s missing a part. We need a new one.”

  Michael scowled.

  He wanted to yell at her.

  He wanted to ask her why she hadn’t fixed the damned thing before they’d started the harvesting. Like, say, at some point in the twelve hours before they showed up in this part of Queens.

  He knew there was no point at yelling at her though.

  It would only make her more useless.

  She’d go crying to Felix, to his brother––

  “Fine,” he said. “First thing tomorrow.” His voice shifted to a growl. “And you can be the one to tell the boss why we didn’t hit our quota.”

  She looked at him, eyes widening, her full lip jutting in a pout.

  The expression was probably meant to be coy, even flirtatious, but it just made Michael want to punch her in the face.

  Turning away, he walked to the entrance of the walk-in cold storage unit.

  Yanking on the door release, he leaned into it, pulling open the heavy metal door with an effort. Steam plumed out of the opening as he swung it open. Michael was forced to wait for it to clear slightly before he could make out the shapes inside with sufficient detail.

  Once it had, he called out to the woman behind him.

  “Seven,” he corrected. “You have seven in here, Melissa. You forgot about the cop. That Midnight from the club––”

  “Oh.” Her voice remained indifferent. “Yeah. Seven.”

  Michael bit his lip, refraining from calling her an idiot outright.

  Junkies, his mind muttered. Goddamned junkies. All the same.

  His eyes never left the inventory.

  In the end, he grabbed the closest one to the door.

  Gripping the shoulders of the Asian-looking cop, who also looked the heaviest of the bunch, he yanked on the leather jacket the vampire wore with a grunt, dragging him out of the freezer unit, muscles straining. He could barely move the animal at first, even with how Michael had trained his body for this very work.

  It got easier when he got some momentum on the slick floor.

  “Is Felix still outside?” Michael grunted, out of breath. Sweat popped on his forehead, even in the cold, dampening his hair at the back of his neck. He let the muscular vampire drop to the floor once he got him clear of the door.

  Swinging the metal panel shut, he shoved it until the latch clicked, frowning when she still hadn’t answered him.

  “Melissa!” he snapped. “Felix. Is he still out there? I don’t think the two of us are going to be able to get this one up on the table by ourselves. Remember, it’s only us three tonight.”

  Melissa blinked, turning.

  Then she walked over to where Michael stood.

  “Ooh,” she said, smiling. “This one’s cute.”

  “You said that about the last six,” Michael muttered.

  “But this one’s really cute,” she said, undaunted. “What’s his name?”

  Michael fought not to roll his eyes.

  “What difference does it make? He’s a walking corpse. Like the rest of them.”

  “Is he wearing I.D.? He’s a cop, right? Don’t they have badges?”

  Giving in to her, he exhaled, crouching down to go through the pockets of the cop’s heavy coat. Finding a flat, old-school style leather wallet in one pocket, he frowned.

  “Still uses cash,” he muttered. “I guess that’s what happens when you’re undead a few hundred years.”

  He rifled through the wallet until he found a shimmering, gold and green, I.S.F.-issued ident card. He frowned down at it, reading the front of it.

  “Naoko,” he read in a mutter. “What the hell kind of name is that?”

  He glanced up at the woman, but she shrugged, holding up her hands.

  “Is that all it says?” she pressed.

  “Pretty much.” Michael frowned, staring at the ident-card, still squatting down by the unconscious vampire. “Naoko Tanaka Midnight. I.S.F.-cleared. Security level four. Says he’s in homicide.”

  “Homicide?” She frowned, leaning down to take the card from Michael’s fingers, swiping it right out of his hand and making him scowl. “Not vice? What was he doing down here?”

  Michael grunted, glancing down at the unconscious vampire’s face.

  “What do you think, Melissa?” he said flatly. “He was probably feeding.” Frowning slightly, he added, “That, or he was looking for us.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean? Looking for us? Why?”

  He gave her an even flatter look.

  At her blank stare, he glanced at the mostly-drained vampire on the stainless-steel table above, then returned his gaze
to her.

  “Why do you think?” he said drily. “You notice any vampires leaving here, when we’re done with them? Did you think no one would ever notice, Melissa?”

  She blinked, confusion on her face.

  Her eyes darted to the alligator on the second table, and she frowned.

  “You can’t kill a vampire,” she said, speaking as though the very idea was abhorrent. “They’re not alive.”

  Michael shrugged, agreeing with her for maybe the first time that night.

  “No argument here,” he said. “But the law says different, honey.”

  She continued to frown, as if offended by the whole idea.

  Again, he didn’t really disagree with her.

  A beeper went off overhead, signaling that the vampire on the table was finished. Both of them turned, staring at it.

  Then Michael rose smoothly to his feet, motioning at the alligator.

  “Well?” he prompted, snapping his fingers and motioning at it a second time when she didn’t move. “You said you wanted to be the one to do it.”

  She blinked, looking at him, then at the alligator.

  Understanding reached those watery blue eyes; she broke out in a grin.

  The smile was so childlike, it would have been infectious if it wasn’t on the face of a thirty-something woman who happened to be addicted to raw vampire venom.