Black opened his mouth, a faint puzzlement on his lips.
Before he could quite think his way out of that one, Steele burst out in a laugh.
“Damn. How did THAT just whoosh on by over my head?”
Steele made a corresponding hand gesture over his near-pompadour of blond hair.
Answering his own question, he added,
“I admit, I was pretty blown away by that press conference you gave… and the fact that we were still on for this interview, given that…”
Black gave him an indulgent smile, clicking his fingers for Cowboy.
Angel watched, a faint frown on her lips as her boyfriend––
Fiancé, her mind whispered.
––walked up to the lit area in front of the cameras, lowering his head and ear to Black’s lips while the seer spoke to him.
Black spoke in a lower-than-usual voice, too low for Grant Steele to hear. The seer’s hand wrapped over the top of his chest microphone anyway, cutting the sound more.
Angel saw an odd look come to Cowboy’s face as Black spoke.
When Black gave him a warning look, the lean Louisianan nodded, once, his expression clearing as he straightened. He gave Angel a fleeting sideways look, right before he backed away from the staging area and the two comfortable chairs where Black and Steele sat across from one another on a paved, decorative walkway between sections of lawn.
Walking back down to the other side of the cameras, Cowboy touched his ear, clicking on the microphone on his headset.
“Darlin’?” he said, speaking through the sub-vocals.
“What was that about?” Angel murmured back. “Do I even want to know?”
“He says he’s thinking about turning into dragon… or part of a dragon… at some point in the interview. He wants us to keep the studio people from, like… lighting him on fire… or something.”
Angel didn’t answer at first.
Honestly, she was kind of waiting on the punchline.
“What?” she said, forgetting the sub-vocals and speaking out loud.
A production assistant and a camera man looked over at her.
Angel switched to sub-vocals.
“What?” she repeated.
Cowboy let out a long, audible sigh.
“You heard me correct, darlin’. Apparently Miri tried to talk him out of it, but he thinks it might be a good idea still.”
Before Angel could answer, a third voice joined their conversation.
“You two remember I’m a seer, right?” Black rumbled in their ears. “You know I can hear you… right? Even when I have my headset turned off?”
Angel turned towards the makeshift stage, only to see Black had pulled his headset out, presumably from one of his pockets, and now held it to his ear.
Angel let him see her roll her eyes.
“You’re not turning into a dragon, Quentin,” she informed him.
“Why… in the dragon levels of hell… am I not?”
“Are you ever going to learn to listen to your wife?” Angel said, not hiding her exasperation as she folded her arms. “And why is that wedding taking so damned long to happen, anyway? How long does it take you to fix up a venue that you own for what amount to twenty-four hours of drunken debauchery and a bunch of fingerfoods?”
“Don’t talk to me about weddings,” Black grumbled. “I would have had it weeks ago. WEEKS AGO. If it were only up to me, Miri and I would be basking in the Tahitian sun right now. As I recall, I’m arranging this for everyone… and paying for everyone, too.”
“Only because you’ve insisted about a million times,” Cowboy butted in, annoyed. “Even when I’ve spent half the night arguing with you about it. Even when I gave up arguing and just put money in your damned bank. You still took it out and put it back in mine… which goes to show what a penny-pinching dragon you are in the first place, by the way, that you’d even notice that little amount from me in all your pile of gold…”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Angel muttered.
“And you don’t care about the money anyway,” Yarli added over the line, clearly listening in. “You just like needling your friends. I swear I’ve never met anyone who likes to hold things people’s heads that he couldn’t give two shits about…”
Angel laughed again. “You tell ‘em, Yarli!”
“Hush, sister Yarli… this doesn’t concern you,” Black growled. “Anyway, money or not, I don’t have all the weird, alligator-wrestling relatives flying in from Louisiana. We’re mostly waiting for humans to make the arduous, unbelievably scary trip to New Mexico… a whopping five states away, or whatever. Their tiny human brains have to schedule everything like six months in advance or they overheat and explode…”
Angel burst into an involuntary laugh, hiding it behind a hand when the production assistant and the cameraman stared at her again.
She waved them off, smiling.
“Now you’re just desperate,” Cowboy informed him. “That’s just a sad, desperate act to blame my old Aunt Nelly and her kids and my cousin Georgie. Not to mention Angel’s working nephews and nieces. You’re a snob, Quentin. A classist.”
“No shit,” Black said. “Is this news?”
Angel laughed again.
“Well, just button that nonsense down,” Cowboy said. “You’re an ex-felon. And the last thing you need is another reason for the common man to be wary of you. Should be enough they all think you might eat them… or light them on fire…”
Black let out a half-annoyed laugh.
Then his voice grew more serious.
“Look. I really think the dragon thing… here, I mean… today… is a good idea. Miri could use it. As leverage. I know she’s afraid of blowback, and she’s stuck trying to calm all of them down… but I honestly think a little reminder that they can’t take us in a straight fight wouldn’t go amiss right now, either. Frightened people tend to do aggressive things. If we push back on that aggression from the get-go––”
“You’ll just make them more frightened,” Angel cut in, exhaling another excess of frustration. “Do you actually listen to yourself speak, Quentin?”
“If you’d let me finish––” he began.
“You said it yourself,” Angel said, motioning with a hand, forgetting she wasn’t supposed to make it obvious they were arguing. “Miri’s trying to calm them down. To make them NOT afraid of us. Or at least LESS afraid––”
“And I’m saying that’s never going to happen,” Black growled, throwing a touch of heat into his voice. “She’s never going to calm them down, Ang. She’s NEVER going to make them not afraid of us. You have to stop thinking of these people as rational… as able to deal with what I’ve thrown at them. They aren’t rational. They can’t deal with it. You think just because you and Cowboy, Alice and Frank, Dog and Easton, Dex, Kiko, Ace, and whoever else can deal with this, that you-all can face reality, and accept it as real, everyone can?”
Black paused, waiting for Angel to think about this.
“…Because I’m here to tell you they can’t,” he went on, his voice a heavier growl. “They can’t deal with it, Angel. They can’t. They’ll deny reality, and they’ll tell themselves they can take us, they can outsmart us, or out-weapon us, or outnumber us. They’ll cause all kinds of problems attacking us… and in the end, we’ll have to use violence to keep them from hurting us, anyway, because that’ll be the only thing to stop them from destroying the whole damned planet, Ang. Including themselves.”
Angel frowned.
Thinking about his words, she felt her jaw slowly clench.
She hated that he was right.
She hated it.
But his words felt true.
“So?” She motioned sharply with a hand yet again. “So why did you tell them at all, then? If you knew they wouldn’t be able to handle it––”
“I told them because Miri was right,” Black said, his voice now verging on a warning. “They were going to find out… no matter what we did. I
t was just a matter of time. A fair-few in the government already knew. And we had to stop Charles. We needed to bring as many reasonable humans over as we possibly could… not to mention the scientific community… and the only way to do that was to control how they learned about us. We needed to be the ones to tell them. And now, we have to do what we can to make it real to them. The rational, reasonable humans will see that, and they’ll realize they need to compromise.”
His voice grew a touch deeper, more rough.
“The less-rational ones will be more like kids touching a hot stove. They’ll hate us. They’ll be afraid. They’ll blame us for every problem. They’ll want us all dead…”
Feeling Angel about to interrupt, he raised his voice, still using the sub-vocals.
“…but they’ll respect our raw strength enough to back down. The more frightened ones can only be controlled through strength. Unfortunately, there’s no ‘peaceful’ way to win them over. The rational ones, sure… we can work with them. But we need them to acknowledge what we are, and what we’re capable of.”
There was a silence on the line.
Angel glanced to the side, watching security guards lead a crowd of tourist-civilian types through the studio lot towards the bleachers they’d set up behind her while Black had still been in the make-up and trailer area.
Looking back at Black, Angel grunted, shaking her head.
“You’re sounding pretty Old Testament, Black,” she muttered. “What if you’re wrong? What if you’re just alienating anyone who might have been our allies? What if fear is what makes them desperate enough to drop a nuclear bomb on the building on California Street?”
Black didn’t answer at first.
Then he exhaled, sounding suddenly tired, even through the headset.
“Ang… I can pretty much guarantee some of them will want to do that anyway.”
Giving her a level stare across the space between them, over the camera operators’ heads and to where she still stood to the left of the bleachers, he added dourly,
“…Anyway, non-humans caused this problem, not humans. If Charles could’ve just gone to a damned psychiatrist for his trauma, dealt with his issues, and lived here quietly, at peace with human beings like a normal fucking person, they never would have needed to know about us at all. And if vampires could have just left seers the hell alone… and vice-versa… we probably could have dealt with our issues with them without involving humans, either.”
“Well, that’s the damned truth,” Manny muttered over the line.
Before Angel could finish thinking about any of this, the crowd reached the end of the studio backlot street.
She watched their faces as they went from talking and laughing to hushing one another as they rounded the edge of the bleachers and saw Black sitting in the interview chair across from Grant Steele. They stared at him, mouths ajar in cartoonish surprise, their expressions openly incredulous when they saw him sitting at one of the two gold comfy chairs set up on the walkway between the lawns.
Angel found herself thinking they hadn’t known.
They really hadn’t known Black was the guest.
They’d probably been told they could come participate in a special live broadcast of the Grant Steel show and that had been enough of a draw to get them back here.
Looking at the utter shock bleeding over those painfully normal-looking human faces… shock that was rapidly turning into full-blown fear on some of them… Angel felt a shiver of misgiving, like someone just walked over her grave.
Black might be right about everything he’d said.
But this was still a huge mistake.
It made the time Black went on camera to goad a psychopathic, murderous, vampire king on live television seem like a harmless prank.
She glanced at Cowboy, who frowned, his gray eyes flickering up to watch the staring, gaping, and unnervingly quiet humans fill the bleachers behind the line of cameras.
Some of their faces were white as chalk now.
They watched Black like he was a unicorn, or a leprechaun, or a full-blown demon… stumbling on the stairs as they found their seats when they couldn’t tear their eyes off him long enough to pay attention to where they were walking.
Remembering most of them… realistically, all of them… had seen footage of Black-as-dragon ripping through the United States military on the border of Mexico, and possibly at the Pentagon, Angel felt her misgivings exponentially worsen.
“This is going to be bad,” she muttered into her headset, barely conscious she’d spoken out loud. “This is going to be real bad.”
That time, it wasn’t Black who answered.
“Ayuh,” Cowboy said grimly, gazing up at the now-filling bleachers. “I’m afraid you’re probably right about that, sweetheart.”
Black, uncharacteristically, remained silent.
5
Interview
“Sooo…” Grant beamed at Black, looking him over with a look verging on lust in his eyes. “…How’s your summer been so far, Quentin? Anything interesting going on?”
The outdoor audience laughed.
They’d all found seats on the tiered bleachers by then, and seemed to perch on the edge of their metal seats, staring unblinkingly down at Black.
Some of the faces Angel saw still looked tense, but the laughter came out surprisingly natural-sounding now––mostly because Steele spent roughly nine or ten minutes warming up the crowd and calming them down. He even drew Black into a few minutes of back and forth banter, obviously attempting to take some of the supernatural stench off him, and remind the audience who Black had been to them before all this.
Black rose to the occasion surprisingly well.
He slipped into his “charming asshole” persona, which the media had always adored. The same persona earned him a rabid fanbase back when he’d just been an eccentric billionaire, and not a shape-shifting alien from another dimensional version of Earth.
Of course, none of this felt remotely normal.
Then again, the interviews of Black before––meaning prior to Black’s press conference confirming the existence of seers and vampires––never felt all that normal either. Back then, the big worry and preoccupation for Black’s staff generally concerned Black doing or saying something that would out him as not-human.
Now, obviously, that was less of a concern.
Now they were all more afraid he’d do something to scare the shit out of any human beings who might be watching this.
The fact that they were outside also made the interview a bit strange.
The laughter sounded different outside, under a big elm tree in a studio back-lot, versus being shot inside a sound studio… but Angel, who stood to the right of the metal bleachers, found herself thinking it was a smart move on Steele’s part, to have a live audience.
Now that they’d relaxed a bit more, the laughter normalized things.
It normalized things in a way she wouldn’t have thought possible, frankly.
It struck her that the interview, and Black himself, would have felt much more distant and alien without any audience at all.
It didn’t hurt that Grant Steele still gushed over Black like he was a movie star. If anything, Steele had gotten even weirder about being in Black’s immediate presence.
The way he stared at Black’s face and his flecked, gold irises, the way he looked Black over in the matching gold chair… including staring a beat too long at Black’s crotch… all of it made Angel wonder if the guy was bisexual, or, at the very least, if he had a huge, platonic man-crush on the seer.
Steele was married to a woman, wasn’t he?
Angel honestly couldn’t remember.
If she wasn’t working right then, she might have been tempted to look it up on her phone.
“Could you think about something else?” Black muttered through her earpiece. “Or at least think it less loudly? It’s damned distracting. Because I’m a seer…” the seer added tersely. “Like you’ve onl
y known for a few years now, Ange. Like I’ve only reminded you a few hundred times since we met, whenever you’re thinking so loudly I can’t block you out…”
Without missing a beat, he aimed one of his killer smiles at Grant Steele.
“Well, I’ve got a wedding coming,” he smiled, folding his muscular arms and leaning back in the velvet-upholstered chair. “You should definitely try to make that, by the way, now that you’re living out here in the Golden State. I sent you an invite…”
Steele’s eyes widened.
“A wedding?” he said. “I thought you were already––”
“We are.” Black shrugged with a sideways smile. “But I deprived her of a good party… or, really, I deprived myself of one… not to mention the ceremony itself. She got stuck with the equivalent of a gas station Elvis chapel in Vegas, I’m afraid. I didn’t want to torture her with all that crap back then, and risk her divorcing me before we even got our honeymoon.”
Steele broke out in a delighted laugh. “A gas station? Really?”
“There might have been a few ruffled shirts,” Black said, deadpan. “And some ‘Love Me Tender’ playing in the background…”
He propped his ankle on the opposite knee.
For the first time, Angel really noticed his clothes.
Unlike the last time he’d been interviewed by Steele, Black ditched the power suit, and went more Hollywood-casual.
Despite the warm morning sun, which had heated up even more in the last two or so hours since they’d arrived, he wore a black, gold, red, and white ribbed motorcycle jacket over a black T-shirt, black armored pants, and black motorcycle boots.
So… more or less what he wore every day when he wasn’t conducting a live interview with the most popular host on late-night t.v.
“A wedding’s great,” Steele grinned, leaning back in his own chair and resting his arms on the chair’s arms. Slapping his hands easily on those same chair arms, he let his smile grow more shrewd. “And you know I’ll be there, even if it means a scuba suit and clog dancing. I’ll have to yell at my assistant for not telling me about that.”
Black Of Wing: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery Romance (Quentin Black Mystery Book 14) Page 5