Page 53 of Midnight Coven

After the barest hesitation, he answered.

“Not exactly,” he said. “I mean… no. Not in the way you mean.”

He hesitated a second time. For the barest second, he considered telling Morley about falling asleep in Wynter’s bed even when Wynter wasn’t there. About not waking up when she left. About falling asleep a second time, right in front of the kid, after hallucinating a vampire in Wynter’s living room. About not hearing a fucking thing when police were pounding on his door, or yelling at him through the security entrance from barely ten feet away.

He considered telling Morley about the man in his dreams.

He considered describing that deeply disturbing fuck with the hat and bandages and twisted mental monologues who murdered human adults and children in front of him.

Who appeared in dreams that didn’t exactly feel like dreams.

Dreams that might actually be happening in real time.

In the end, Nick decided that was probably a bad idea.

Telling Morley that is. Telling anyone.

At the very least, it could wait.

Nick needed to know more first. He needed to see the crime scene for himself. He needed to know more about who this asshole was. Anyway, none of those conversations could take place while they were still under constant and molecular H.R.A. and I.S.F. surveillance.

Which they definitely were right now.

It was going to be damned hard to sidestep that level of racial authority surveillance for a while. They’d have access to every word Nick said, likely for the next few months. They’d be listening via his headset, through any police vehicle he rode in, his residence, any precinct property, his gun. They would have placed surveillance all over wherever he got approved as a temporary residence to house him here in New York.

Really, he had no where safe that belonged to him.

His old housing up in the vampire districts of the Upper West Side had burned down. As far as Nick knew, no replacements had yet been built, although proposals were in the works. Nick hadn’t paid much attention since Wynter wanted him to move in with her.

But now that was out of the question, too.

No way in hell could Nick go back to Wynter’s, not given what she was. They’d probably covered that place in every kind of surveillance already.

Eventually Archangel would be able to deal with that, but not right away.

It was unlikely Kit could reroute all of those cameras and microphones and motion detectors without calling attention to herself.

Maybe once they solved the case, but not now.

Hell, they were probably listening to him via his vampire tat and implant at this point, not to mention whatever drones and other listening devices they had nearby.

Nick frowned at the thought. He glanced up with his vampire eyes, picking out a few flickers that could have been police drones.

Then again, they might have belonged to just about anyone. That was the problem.

So much of that shit filled the skies now, Nick had no way to tell the difference. Surveillance covered just about every aspect of human, vampire, and hybrid life these days. A lot of it just collected data for private companies and advertisers, but a lot of it got put to more nefarious uses. If they got a warrant to surveil Nick around the clock, he likely couldn’t go anywhere without eyes on him, even when he showered or slept.

That would be true until they lifted the warrant.

He really needed to solve this fucking case.

They needed to catch him in the act.

“I need to find a place to sleep tomorrow,” Nick muttered. “Well. Shower, anyway. I don’t need to sleep, obviously.”

When he glanced at Morley, the human raised an eyebrow.

Maybe he was remembering what Nick said before, about being asleep at Wynter’s.

---