Faustus stood there, paralyzed.
Then, slowly, as the being’s words sank in…
He smiled.
1
The Bigger Dragon
My love, my brother, my God…
It is time to come home.
We whisper together.
Love together.
Always one, always bound…
I drown with you in the ether.
Leathery wings beat clouds in night skies.
Stars rotate in the darkness.
Into the blackest night…
Our love will never die.
My dreams had been waking me for weeks… two, three, four, five in the morning.
The voice.
That heartbreaking, love-filled voice.
There didn’t seem to be any pattern, any rhyme or reason to when it came.
It started seemingly that first morning back on this version of Earth, back in our bed at the building on California Street, inside the penthouse that finally felt like home again, even after all the horrible things that happened there.
Black and I hadn’t really talked about Nick yet.
To be fair, we hadn’t really had time, and other things took precedence.
After Black gave that press conference, after his announcement about vampires being real… that yes, he could transform into an enormous dragon… and yes, he’d been fighting the United States military at the border wall with Mexico… and yes, he’d been involved in the disappearance of dozens of people who’d worked inside the U.S. government… and yes, he’d been behind that crazy thing in Hawaii… and yes, he was one of those so-called “seers” from another dimension… oh, and he’d been fighting with other, anti-human seers who’d been in the process of overthrowing the human governments across the globe…
After all that, we’d been a little busy.
A lot of decisions had to be made, and damned fast.
Some of those decisions, Black and I already discussed, even before he gave that crazy speech to the press. We’d discussed a lot of the “what next” while on that other version of Earth, in that other-dimensional version of Hawaii.
A lot of things we’d discussed sounded crazy now.
Things that struck us as clear and self-evident in that other place––that place without humans, or vampires, or messy governments, or hundreds possibly thousands of traumatized, angry seers who hated human beings––now sounded a little naïve and a lot nuts.
At best, they sounded pretty damned reckless.
At worst, they sounded like the “I have this cool idea” phase that occurs right before an apocalypse where millions of people die.
Of course, that hadn’t stopped us from starting to implement some of those ideas.
Like me going to London.
Like Black approaching the military leaders here in the United States.
Like me trying to find us a potential Plan B via another dimension, in the event we needed to move all seers off this version of Earth, to somewhere we wouldn’t be risking a massive race-war, whether with humans or vampires or both.
Like us talking about forming some kind of non-human bureau that dealt with seer and vampire affairs.
Most of it, maybe all of it, sounded a bit nuts to us now.
Not only because Brick the Vampire King was a malignant narcissist.
Not only because Brick seemed to thrive in chaos.
Not even because Brick remained completely untrustworthy, open to massive corruption if we gave him any kind of real power, and fundamentally wired to hunt, eat, and mentally enslave seers and human beings.
Even apart from all the vampire complications, the idea that these institutions and “world rules” could be created or implemented cleanly, that they wouldn’t evolve in directions Black already experienced on the human and seer world he’d left behind… a world that didn’t have the added complication of vampires, or vampire venom, or the problems both things presented for humans and seers…
Well. It all just struck us as a pipe dream.
We were building a new world.
It was impossible not to fear we might be putting the building blocks in place for a new world order that resulted in suffering on a scale I couldn’t really imagine.
So maybe that’s all the dreams were.
Maybe it was all of that rolling around in my head.
Maybe the pressure was getting to me.
Maybe those thoughts, those worries, those impossibilities are what brought them on, creating vague anxieties that overcame my mental space.
That’s what I told myself.
That’s what I told Black, when I inadvertently woke him up.
I didn’t tell Black about the dreams themselves.
I told myself he didn’t need to know the content of my stress-induced anxiety dreams, much less the details of how my mind translated my worries into images.
I didn’t really believe it, though.
I didn’t really believe any of it.
Truthfully, I wasn’t entirely sure those places and beings I saw were “dreams” at all, or even that they originated from something inside my own mind.
I heard them calling for me through the ether.
I heard them calling for both of us.
I even recognized a few of them.
I remembered them from trips I’d taken, back in the early days of my other-dimensional traveling. I remembered seeing them in those worlds… feeling their resonance with Black… knowing what they were, even before I’d admitted to myself that Black was the same.
Massive, leathery wings beat hard against solar winds.
They were free now, untethered from their worlds.
Not just one, but many came to me.
Many, but they morphed into one at the end of every dream.
That, or the largest of them––the most powerful, the most demanding––pushed its way to the forefront, past the rest, looming in the darkness of my mind.
It stared at me with brightly-colored, fire-filled eyes.
Pale, gold eyes, like a burning sunset.
Like a burning world.
There is always a bigger dragon, my mind whispered.
As big as Black was, as seemingly invincible in that form…
…he wasn’t alone in that interconnected labyrinth of threads connecting all of our worlds.
He wasn’t alone, and I could feel them now, vibrating those strings that tied them to us, resonating at a frequency that shocked my heart, making it beat painfully hard inside my chest. That solid, stone-filled heartbeat vibrated my body at a molecular level, turning my bones to liquid, my skin to air, my limbs to fire.
It burned me alive, from the inside out.
The changes woke me up.
The changes terrified me, right before they reached their culmination.
I never got to see how things came out.
I could feel them coming though.
I felt it coming.
The bigger dragon.
I was certain he was out there. I was certain he’d been waiting.
Now, that time was slowly ticking down to its end.
Because, as my mind whispered.
…There is always a bigger dragon.
2
Real Talk
I frowned, coming back from wherever my mind had gone.
Luckily, my mental wandering had been short.
A silence fell after I finished speaking.
Somehow, I managed to bring my mind back before it ended.
The one guy at the table I hadn’t yet been able to identify, at least not to my satisfaction, gave me serious side-eye through most of my longest speech yet.
I felt his cold stare, the entire time I was talking, but I didn’t react.
Well… I mostly didn’t react.
Hopefully, I didn’t react where the humans could see it.
I was exhausted though, and still not sleeping well, so I couldn’t be sure.
Even in my ha
lf-delirious state, I had theories about who the mystery guy was, sitting at the table full of world leaders, giving me a forty-year-old’s version of stink eye.
I strongly suspected he came from the same world I had, back before I knew what I was. I strongly suspected he was military intelligence. Possibly military intelligence with a strong psychology background, from the little bit I’d picked up off his heavily-shielded mind.
Given where we were, I assumed he worked for the United Kingdom.
That meant probably Mi6.
Well… it meant that for now, anyway.
Black already warned me it was a damned good bet the human governments would band together and quickly start to build branches of government––not to mention courts, law enforcement, military and intelligence services––solely dedicated to dealing with races other than the human one.
In that sense, Mi6 constituted more of a temporary relic of a past world… a world that still mostly existed a few months ago, until Black blew it up.
For now, however, the humans were stuck with the institutions they had.
I knew the UK’s Prime Minister wanted him here, and the other leaders must have okay’d it, as well. We’d already positively ID’d at least one member of the French security services. That one sat at the table even now, masquerading as an advisor to the German Chancellor, likely to throw us off.
I suspected we hadn’t found even half of them yet.
Most probably didn’t sit at the table for meetings like this, but I had zero doubt other intelligence agents worked here in the building, likely at least one from every world power.
To say the humans were nervous was a laughable understatement at this point.
I knew behind the scenes they had to be losing their collective minds.
We’re only in the early stages of this, I reminded myself. Breathe, Miri. Don’t freak out. Don’t give up on them when we’ve barely started. Don’t let Black and Charles psyche you out. Most of all, don’t let their paranoia about humans from Old Earth get to you… or influence how cynical you let yourself become…
I knew it wasn’t all Black and Charles.
Every single one of the seers I’d met from that version of Earth maintained a deep paranoia and suspicion around human beings.
Understandable really, since seers had been slaves there.
But that was then.
This was now.
Circumstances were so different in that other world, in terms of how First Contact occurred, the two worlds were unable to be compared at this point. As Black told me, time and again, this current generation of seers, the generation that came to this world, weren’t a bunch of monks singing kumbaya in the mountains, the way their forebears had been.
Most were vets of multiple wars, and had a significantly less mystical view of their role in the multiverse, particularly vis a vis the human race.
Still, things were tense.
Things were tense on both sides right now.
For the same reason, we’d only pulled in a relatively small group for this.
We weren’t ready to start giving speeches in front of the United Nations.
We weren’t even close to that.
These early discussions were supposed to lay the groundwork for something more official, but even at this stage, we had leaders refuse our invitation.
China wouldn’t respond to our attempts to contact them.
The Russian president gave us a hard no at first, then attempted to negotiate a private meeting that all the seers vetoed on our end.
The United States refused as well, and denounced the meetings aggressively, claimed we were terrorists, and blah-blah-blah… which made sense, whether or not we’d managed to root all of the seers out of the current administration. Of course, after it came out that the U.K., Canada, Mexico, India, Japan, and the European Union were sending people, President Bradford “Buck” Regent changed his mind and wanted to come after all.
We told him no.
It was a LONG discussion, but in the end, we all agreed. From his speeches and rhetoric, it was pretty clear Regent only wanted to go so he could derail the talks.
In some ways, I wished we’d just told him yes.
I mean, I knew we needed him.
We needed the United States.
We talked about letting him come and maybe pushing him… psychically, that is… to keep him from blowing up the talks.
We decided against that, too.
For one thing, it would have been a hell of a way to start negotiations. For another, there was a chance other countries would have noticed. It definitely would’ve raised eyebrows if Regent suddenly started acting calm and reasonable.
Or remotely intelligent.
Sadly, Uncle Charles, despite being wrong about humans in so many respects, was a thousand percent right about our country’s current Commander in Chief.
Regent was an absolute moron.
Unlike the leaders of the E.U. and the United Kingdom, he also didn’t seem to have even a basic understanding of what was currently at stake.
I knew a handful of the human governments already had preliminary cooperation agreements in place, specifically to deal with the threat of “intelligent non-human species,” which is how they termed seers and vampires in most of their official documents. Those same human governments had already begun the process of joining forces to deal with the non-human threat.
I mean, come on.
They were still in full-blown panic mode.
They were sitting here, looking grim and serious and official, but I knew they were mostly shitting their pants.
Which is why I got paranoid whenever I saw new faces at the table.
We’re working on it, Mika murmured in my mind. That guy, doc. We’re working on identifying who he is. Don’t sweat the small stuff, okay? We’re on it. Whoever he is, there’s nothing there you need to worry about. We need that big doc brain of yours focused on the bigwigs, okay? On the geo-political threat. We need you to figure out how to reassure them we aren’t about to enslave them all with our psychic powers… or eat them…
Quirking an eyebrow over her faint smile, Mika added more seriously,
Let us handle security, doc. We won’t let anyone fuck with you. Promise.
I knew she was right.
I knew she was right that I was distracting myself.
I also knew what she was telling me about that man at the table.
She was telling me he wasn’t a seer.
He wasn’t one of Charles’ plants.
Still, there was something there.
He might not be a seer, but his living light didn’t feel quite right.
His mind was too silent.
We don’t think he’s a vampire, either, doc, Mika sent, sighing a little at me. Really, you don’t need to worry about this. We’re going over his living light with a fine-toothed––
Is he wearing something? I sent. Some kind of blocking mechanism?
There was a slight pause.
It was small, but I heard it.
Then Mika sighed, at least on the inside.
Yes, the infiltrator said, clearly reluctant to answer me, but likely thinking it would be faster if she did. We think a number of people in here are using various forms of sight-blocking tech. Apparently Charles had a few things at the prototype stage. We’re not pushing back on those devices too hard just yet, in part because we want to see if we can get around them on our own. They aren’t overly sophisticated at this point…
She must have felt me about to say something.
She quickly cut me off.
…I’ve already sent a number of things back to the labs, doc. Implants, a few organic wristbands that emit fields, even a type of human “collar” meant to block seer sight. But we need to trace them back to the source. That’s the bigger issue right now. We need to figure out who’s creating all of these things…
I nodded to myself, thinking about this, even as I refocused on the Prime M
inister sitting in front of me. Next to him, the side-eye guy from Mi6 watched me a little too closely, a faint frown hardening his mouth.
He was handsome.
Maybe forty-five years old.
Brown hair, green eyes, a ruggedly handsome face, one that looked like its wearer had spent a lot of time outdoors, in pretty heavy sun.
The Middle East? Somewhere in Asia?
Doc… Mika warned.
Refocusing on the actual words the Prime Minister was saying, I found myself shaking my head, interrupting him without thought.
“No,” I said. “We can’t do that. Not yet.”
Pausing at his silence, I glanced around the table a second time, modifying my voice to make it more polite, if not exactly full-blown friendly.
“I’m sorry,” I said, letting my eyes return to Prime Minister Garrity. “But we’re going to have to insist on being treated more or less as a sovereign nation. Or at the very least… as a private company with proprietary information we are legally entitled to protect. That includes what relates to whatever security measures we might have in place… to maintain safety and privacy for ourselves and our employees.”
There was a silence.
I let my eyes flicker around the long table, taking in faces.
“Black Securities and Investigations is the primary employer of most of the seers we have pulled into our orbit,” I added. “Through that organization, we have strong contractual alliances with the largest organized segment of the vampire population as well.”
I gestured vaguely with a hand, not fully realizing it was a seer gesture until I’d done it.
“…But really it’s Black Industries as a whole that’s providing the organizational focal point for the seer race at this time. Even in terms of housing, which we are currently supplying out of our own resources.”
Prime Minister Garrity frowned.
“But that’s only the seers who’ve joined your side, correct?” he said, his voice sharper. “It doesn’t include the other side… the ones you claim pose the far greater risk to humans.”
Black Of Wing: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery Romance (Quentin Black Mystery Book 14) Page 2