Page 33 of Almost Midnight

Nick would have to wait, too.

“Send me the location,” he said, not hiding the thread of tiredness in his voice. “I’m already on my way.”

CHAPTER8

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 “doppelgänger 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 believethat,but it made a strange sort of sense once Nick understood Yi’s long-term goals.

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