“I did tell you about that,” a woman’s voice half-yelled from the area of the cameras.
The audience laughed.
Grant Steele bantered back and forth with her for a few beats more, and Angel realized this was a bit, one he and Black likely planned in advance.
When they were done and the audience was still laughing, Steele turned to Black.
He kept smiling, but his eyes turned shrewd as he studied Black’s face.
“…but come on, man… you have to know…weddings are great, but that’s not what people really want to hear about. Not right now. Not after what you announced the other day. I mean, you had to know that would grab a few headlines, my friend…”
Black gave him an equally subtle, significantly more wicked grin.
“Whatever could you mean, Grant?”
Something about the way he said it brought another explosion of laughter through the crowd on the bleachers.
Steele shook his head, still with that sideways smile.
“You’re going to make me work for it, Quentin.”
“Not at all, Grant,” Black said, winking at the audience. “Don’t be coy. You know how I just love coy on you, brother, but if you’ve got a question for me… ask it.”
Angel could almost feel the mood in the crowd shift.
It was as if every person in the stadium seats behind her leaned forward, holding their collective breaths as they waited for Steele to speak.
“Do I really need to?” the host said, winking at the crowd himself. “Ask it?”
“You know you want to.”
Again, laughter from the stadium, but it came through as considerably tenser that time.
“All right, then.”
Grant Steele paused, leaning forward over his thighs and lacing his fingers together. He looked Black right in the eye, his expression serious.
That time, funnily enough, Angel suspected it was at least ninety percent theater, despite the seriousness of the crowd behind her.
“Is it true?” Steele’s words carried, his voice sounding louder in the utter silence of everyone else. “What you said that day, in the lobby of your building… is it true?”
Black’s smile lingered at his lips.
He stared at Steele, his oddly flecked, gold eyes looking maybe more animal than Angel had ever seen them.
He leaned back in his chair, and Angel realized only then that he’d leaned forward, mirroring part of Grant’s pose.
Black cleared his throat then, smiling wider.
“You mean the dragon thing?” he said loudly. “Is that what all this fuss is about?”
The two of them might have timed it out as another bit.
That whole back and forth might have been planned.
Either way, it worked.
Either way, his words somehow fell into place like puzzle pieces on a board.
The crowd behind Angel erupted.
Not in screams, not in hysteria, or even shock.
They laughed.
She knew a good chunk of that laugher was likely still nerves, but somehow, Black managed to work with Steele to make the revelation more exciting than scary… more superhero than aliens from some other world, about to destroy this version of Earth.
It went from being about dangerous outsiders conquering humanity, to the elevation of one of their own, a man who’d had an insane fan following for almost as long as Angel had known him. It had become about Black suddenly becoming an angelic protector of the human race, and of this country, the United States, in particular.
Realizing again the utter brilliance behind Black’s seeming chaos, Angel didn’t know if she should roll her eyes, sigh in relief, or throw something at him where he sat.
She honestly didn’t know if this would help things with human beings in the long run, or simply make them worse when they decided they couldn’t trust him, or he did something too out-there, or it hit them that, in order for humans to retain supremacy, seers were too powerful to be allowed to exist without some kind of insanely restrictive “protections” put into place.
She didn’t know.
That was always the nightmare with Black.
Everything about him evoked a metaphorical wandering in the wilderness, starting fires at random even as it put out others.
Now, listening to the audience laugh and clap and stomp their feet behind her, Angel glanced across the way at Cowboy and lifted an eyebrow.
He returned her pointed look with a wry smile of his own.
He opened his mouth, like he was about to say something––
––when a sound jerked her head back towards the street running through the middle of the studio backlot.
Unfortunately, it was a sound she’d grown disturbingly familiar with over the past few years.
Automatic gunfire.
6
Eclipse
All of them looked towards the sound, including the camera people, every person on those metal bleachers, not to mention Grant Steele and Black himself.
Black rose to his feet.
His voice rose in Angel’s ear, and Cowboy’s… and every other seer and human ear hooked into the main channel.
“Who’s shooting?” he asked. “Ours?”
Dex’s voice rose, sounding grim.
“No, boss,” he said. “Not yet.”
“Is it more of those Purity Movement assholes?”
Angel felt her jaw clench.
Most of Charles’ creepy cult was still walking around, since the majority of them were human. Getting rid of the construct hadn’t solved that particular problem. The only way to solve that would be to create a construct of their own, which posed all kinds of logistical issues… not to mention ethical ones, given that it was tantamount to brainwashing large numbers of humans to change their ideology artificially.
Black wasn’t in favor of that.
Miri was adamantly opposed.
Truthfully? Angel wasn’t so sure it was right to dismiss that option wholesale.
These Purity types weren’t exactly stable.
They’d also been recruiting heavily since Black came out. Now, instead of obsessing solely on vampires and immoral humans, they were obsessing on seers, as well.
Black, in particular.
Most of them ranted non-stop about fire and brimstone and the need for “blood purity” even before Black outed himself as a damned dragon.
They’d already left a handful of creepy and ominous messages on the street in front of Black’s flagship building in San Francisco, using poured gasoline to spell out things like “DEMONS BEWARE” and “HUMANITY FIRST” and “THE BLOOD WILL TELL.” Angel saw one written on the windows across the street in viscous, stringy liquid that turned out to be actual blood.
That one said, “GOD IS WATCHING.”
Angel about puked when she found out it had been dog and cat blood.
It turned out the guy broke into an animal shelter and slaughtered a bunch of the animals being held there.
Jax and some of the other seers managed to hunt that guy down, sharing the information they dug up with the F.B.I., but he was part of a whole pod of these Purity assholes, so getting rid of one didn’t exactly solve the problem.
Now, similar movements had sprung up all over the globe.
They were starting to organize across countries.
Some increasingly had government support.
Angel focused on Dex and Black, realizing she’d missed a few things, standing there, worrying about human fanatics.
“Are they inside?” Black was saying. “Did they make it past the gates?”
“They’re still outside,” Dex assured him. “At least the lot out here is. We’ve got some reason to think this is a distraction, though. Zairei’s got a lock on others coming around the other side of the studio lot. I sent him and a handful of our people over there to check it out… and Yarli’s backing him up from the Raptor’s Nest.”
Angel saw Black frown.
&nb
sp; From his expression, she wondered if he was using his seer abilities to look at whatever Zairei and the other seers had seen.
That, or he was talking to them, seer-to-seer.
Angel noticed the seers doing more of that in the field lately, now that Charles and his people were less of a direct threat.
She briefly had a flashback to the desert where they’d been pinned down by Charles’ seers. They’d been stuck there for weeks: low on water and food, dirty, some of them injured before they’d been trapped underground with a few hundred vampires, everyone claustrophobic and verging on anxiety attacks.
Frowning at the thought, she watched as security guards from the studio ran up to Black. The guy in front, a Latino weight-lifter-looking type guy who struck Angel as an ex-cop, or possibly ex-military, began talking in Black’s ear, his expressions tense.
The guy was maybe six feet tall, and looked like he spent serious time in the gym.
He still looked weirdly small next to Black.
The guard was motioning towards the audience then, speaking louder, and Black was frowning.
Black turned to Grant when the guard finished, saying something to him, but Angel didn’t catch any of it.
Eerily loud, the sound of gunfire echoed down the backlot streets, drowning out their words. Angel knew it was at least partly acoustics, but it unnerved her how close it sounded.
She clicked her headset to speak.
“We need to get them out of here,” she said to Black. “The audience.”
“I know.” Black gave her a bare glance. “We’re talking about that now. Grant wants to try moving the interview back into the studio, if we can get the go-ahead from the security team here… but we might have to postpone.”
“Ya think?” Angel said, faintly outraged.
Black gave her another sideways look, lifting an eyebrow, but didn’t respond.
The screaming outside the gates grew louder, and now the sounds of the crowd echoed down the fake streets of the backlot, making Angel distinctly nervous.
“I’d prefer we get you out of here, brother,” Cowboy said, putting in his vote. “Do this another day… maybe start it off indoors… or on one of your properties, where we can control the environment more. I’m not so sure we’ve got this place as secured as I’d like…” he added, watching a few studio types roll by in a golf-cart, staring at all of them.
Angel knew what he meant.
So many people came and went in here, it was difficult to know if they might have missed someone at the gates.
Black still hadn’t answered when a new voice rose in their headsets.
“Zairei here,” the seer said, his voice hard. “We’ve got eyes on the second group, on the north side of the studio. They went through the cemetery…”
He sounded out of breath, like he’d been running.
“You need to get out of there, boss. We have reason to believe they might have one of those robot things.”
Angel heard Black rattle off a string of words in the seer language.
A lot of it sounded like cursing.
Most of it sounded like cursing.
Glaring briefly in the direction of the audience, he motioned towards the security guards, who were waiting by the aisles.
“Bring them in!” he shouted over the echoing sound of the crowd surging outside the gate. “Inside! We need to move them! Now!”
Angel felt her jaw harden.
She knew Black was right, but that also likely meant this area would be another damned war zone.
Not a lot of things took those robots out easily.
A rocket launcher could do it, with a direct hit.
The only other effective method they’d found for killing the damned things was dragon.
Meaning Black.
Black, in dragon form, dealt with them handily.
He also made an unbelievable mess.
The robot-cyborg things first showed up in Hawaii, more or less ruining Miri and Black’s wedding plans, not to mention their semi-vacation at a ritzy resort on Oahu. Black managed to destroy all of the ones that showed up there, but whoever sent that first batch had sent more in the time since, starting just a few weeks ago.
Two showed up in San Francisco, wading out of the Bay to attack the building on California Street.
Two more showed up at a Black property in London.
Now they’d apparently followed Black here.
They always seemed to come in pairs.
At each new wave of attacks, the models seemed to work better, too.
Other new toys had been showing up recently, as well: strange, disturbing drones with animal-like components. Odd viruses in their computer systems. At least one cybernetic animal, a half-robot dog that behaved almost like the cybernetic humans.
One of the seers came across something that looked like a rat but that also had cybernetic components. It showed up in one of the computer labs inside the Raptor’s Nest. Manny and the others “killed” it, and Luric immediately dissected it inside his California Street lab, trying to determine exactly what it was. Angel never got the full scoop on that, but Cowboy said Luric struck him as “unsettled” by what he’d found when he cut the thing open.
Because of oddities like that, everyone at the Raptor’s Nest more or less assumed they were being surveilled… likely by things they hadn’t found yet.
They didn’t even know who was behind it, exactly.
Charles was gone.
Every member of Charles’ leadership team was either dead or in custody.
Black put out a priority order to find (and hopefully destroy) the facility designing and building the damned things, but so far, they hadn’t had any luck tracing them back to the source.
Angel was still turning all of that over in her when it happened.
BOOM.
A deafening sound exploded over the sky, like a sonic charge.
Windows shattered, car alarms went off, the ground trembled.
Angel ducked in reflex, panting.
It wasn’t gunfire.
It wasn’t even a bomb.
It sounded more like a volcanic eruption, like the chunks of lava might start raining down, setting the city on fire.
Every pair of eyes turned up towards the sky.
The sound continued to expand, rolling outwards like a descending boom of thunder. Even that softer sound managed to vibrate the brick and asphalt.
A blinding light flashed.
Then all hell broke loose for real.
7
The Bad Sound
“You can’t seriously expect us to trust you, under these circumstances…”
The French translator spoke clipped English, even as the President of France stared at me, as if trying to transmit the emotion behind his words with his eyes alone.
He went on speaking in rapid French, his eyes hard, his hands moving in a series of chopping-like gestures.
“…Garrity is being too polite,” the translator informed me, looking across the table and quirking his own dark eyebrow as he folded his hands primly. “Or he is playing some game, buying time by telling you what he thinks you need to hear… perhaps out of fear, or perhaps until he can get the rest of us alone. But I know the futility of this…”
The French President glared at her.
“…You are mind-readers, are you not?” the translator continued, keeping up with the other’s rapid French. “You know what we are thinking? What we believe? So there is no point in being anything but honest with you. We cannot possibly trust you. The power imbalance is too great. The danger is too great for us… how is this not obvious to you…”
I waited through the pauses and weirdly distracting hand-gestures.
When he finished a few seconds later, I leaned back in my chair, my expression unmoving.
“We do know that, Mr. President, sir,” I assured him then, pausing to let his translator repeat the phrase in French.
Down the table, I heard a few other langua
ges being murmured as well.
“…We’re extremely aware of the difficulty of what we’re asking,” I went on carefully. “But both sides will need to compromise on this point. I’ve been extremely clear on our willingness to meet you halfway, to provide you with various safeguards, to do whatever we can to even the playing field…”
My voice grew warning.
“I’ve made it equally clear we are entirely unwilling to enslave ourselves to reassure your people that you are in control of the situation. I understand the impulse… I do. But that’s not on the table.” I gave him a more explicitly warning look. “There will be no compromise in regard to our bodily or mental autonomy. Not a single seer will give up their basic rights simply to reassure humans that we are harmless. There will be no rules around assembly, around how and when we are able to use our abilities, or around some kind of ‘racial registry’…”
I glared at the Belgian Prime Minister, who’d already raised that as a suggestion.
“Not a single seer will agree to that,” I said, my voice flat as I hammered the words. “If any of you try to enforce something like that on your seer populations, even at a local level, not a single seer will comply. The fastest way to provoke a war with my people is to attempt to institute a system that renders them second-class citizens or attempts to constrain them in ways no human would ever agree to for themselves.”
I spoke louder, hoping like hell they were hearing me on this.
“Please understand me,” I said. “To even attempt to walk that road is dangerous with some of my kind. They have long lives… and even longer memories. You will trigger a reaction in some of them akin to what you saw in Charles Vasiliev and his followers. Potentially a much worse reaction. After all, Charles and his people were reacting to the mere fear of such a thing.”
I leaned over the table, folding my hands.
“If you give them concrete reason to believe that is the desired outcome of most humans in a position of power… much less if you make a concerted effort to put such a system in place… it will be extremely difficult for our races to live together peacefully.”
Black Of Wing: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery Romance (Quentin Black Mystery Book 14) Page 6