Looking down, I saw my hand gripping the back of a leather chair, white-knuckled. It was the same chair where I’d been sitting. I glanced around the room, taking in human faces. They still stared up at the monitor––all but Weston Banks, who now studied my expression with wariness mixed with caution, mixed with a denser understanding, like he knew exactly who I was talking to, and exactly what I was doing.
I can’t do this in here, I told Black.
Thinking about his question then, I added,
I didn’t see it. I didn’t see the beginning of this. How did it start? They haven’t shown us, not that I’ve seen. The footage has all been live. We probably need to change the channel––
Don’t worry about that, Black cut in, his thoughts soothing. It’s not important right now. Don’t worry about any of that, Miri.
He sounded worried, though.
He felt worried, I should say––and not about the new dragon.
He felt worried about me.
Miri, honey. His thoughts grew soft, even as I thought it. I think you should get out of there. Make some excuse. Tell them we’ll reschedule the talks. Tell them this complicates things too much. You said none of the human leaders seemed to come all that prepared. Tell them we’ll give them a few weeks to think through everything you said… maybe even come back with some concrete policy proposals, now that they know more about where we stand…
He sounded like he was soothing a wild animal.
He sounded like he was trying to keep me from freaking out.
Maybe he was even right to sound like that.
I felt lost, like I’d been shaken roughly, or even punched in the face.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so unmoored.
You want me to come there? I heard that confusion reach my voice. To Los Angeles? Right now? Even with all of this––
No. Black cut me off, unambiguous. Absolutely not, Miriam. I want you to go to the Raptor’s Nest. Now. I’ll come up there to be with you, as soon as I can.
He trailed.
Feeling his seer’s light, reading it through our connection, I frowned.
I could feel how distracted he was.
Moreover, I could feel something else.
Someone else was there.
Something was happening.
What? I sent, alarmed. What is it, Black? What’s wrong?
I have to go.
Black’s mind came through hard, crisp.
I knew that part of him, too.
It was his military mind. It was his strategy-war-fight mind.
He must have felt my alarm.
I felt him make an effort to hide his state of mind from me. I felt him do his best to subdue his thoughts, to infuse some warmth, something other than that cold-as-ice calculation.
Please, honey, he sent. Go back to the Raptor’s Nest. Tell Mika, Jax and the others to get on a plane and follow you. But I have to go. I have to go right now, doc. Please do as I ask… I’ll tell you everything as soon as I can.
Black––
I was too late.
My mind met nothing.
Black had disappeared.
9
Light Bond
“Where the hell did it go?”
Angel half-shouted the words. She stood just inside the main door to a sound studio, the door gripped in one hand. Her eyes never left the sky, not even to look at Cowboy, who stood slightly in front of her, gazing up and down the main road through this part of the studio backlot.
The dragon had disappeared.
She shouted anyway.
Gunfire still echoed down the fake city streets.
Angel thought she’d heard the softer whump of grenade launchers too, probably from gas cannisters being lobbed at the protesters who were still outside the gates.
Those idiot Purity assholes were still coming after Black, trying to break into the studio even with everything else going on.
On the plus side, Zairei told them the robot-cyborg things left.
Maybe it was the sight of a dragon in the sky, given they hadn’t the best track record with dragons in the past, or maybe it was something else, but Zairei said they’d tracked them going in the opposite direction, pretty much the instant the dragon appeared.
They were still tracking them.
Zairei’s team had traced them to a boat so far, and would continue to track their movements as long as they could. Even with everything else, with all of this going on, Black wanted the team to use the retreating units to find out who’d sent them.
The sound studio where the rest of them had ended up––the same one where studio security brought Grant Steele and his audience––stood only about a hundred yards from the gate.
When Angel leaned out far enough, she could see the real street.
“Where’s Black?” she muttered.
It hadn’t been a question she expected an answer to.
Cowboy gave her one anyway.
“Over there,” he said easily.
When she glanced at him, Cowboy used his chin and jaw to motion to his left, down the opposite row of storefronts.
Angel tore her eyes off him, then off the side security gate, then off the sky when she glanced up nervously in reflex, like a rabbit under a circling hawk…
…and aimed her stare down the fake city street in the opposite direction.
It took her a second to realize what she was seeing.
“Christ,” she muttered. “Now what?”
Cowboy didn’t answer.
Probably because he didn’t have an answer for her.
Both of them stared out over the street.
They had a vantage point where they were, being a good half-story off the ground, since the door to the sound studio was built at the top of a short flight of stairs. It gave them an unusually good view of what was happening about fifty yards to their left.
Black stood there.
So did an entirely naked man.
A naked man whose entire body steamed in the Los Angeles sun.
He looked like he’d just climbed out of a jacuzzi on a snowy, wintery morning in the Swiss Alps, or maybe in the wilds of Canada.
It wasn’t snowing here, though.
It had to be at least seventy-six, seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit.
Angel watched the man walk, barefoot, buck-naked, emitting wisps and curls of steam, down the center of the street towards Black. She took her eyes off the naked guy’s muscular back and arms, away from his lean, muscled legs, long enough to look at Black’s face. She gauged the stillness of the Black’s expression, and couldn’t read a damned thing.
Just looking at him, she had absolutely no idea how he was reacting to this, much less what he was thinking.
“That has to be him,” she whispered.
She wasn’t even sure why she was whispering.
They were too far away for anyone to hear them, even without the automatic weapon fire she could hear, or the concussive sounds of the smoke grenade launchers.
“That has to be him,” she whispered to Cowboy. “Right?”
“Ayuh,” Cowboy said only.
The two of them watched, silent, as the steaming, naked man with the raw-red skin came to a stop, his legs slightly apart as he stared at Black.
Angel half-expected a tumbleweed to roll down the street between them.
But this wasn’t an Old West area of the backlot. Instead, it served as an approximation of a modern financial district, a downtown area of New York, San Francisco, Chicago, maybe even Sydney, London, Cincinnati.
Angel figured Black would talk first.
Black could be a talker.
Of course, a lot of time, that was misdirection.
Black had a tendency to snow people with a lot of bullshit in tense situations.
He didn’t do that now, though.
He looked the naked man over unapologetically, his gold eyes flashing where they caught the sun, his perfectly-shaped mouth frozen in a hard, if subtle frown.
In the end, it was the naked man who spoke.
When he did, Angel jumped.
That may have been partly because the naked, possibly-dragon man spoke perfect English, if with an odd impossible-to-identify accent. That accent caused him to clip his words strangely, even as he trilled a bit on the “r” sound.
He only said three words.
“Where is she?” the dragon hissed, staring at Black.
Black blinked.
The man’s words seemed to surprise him, too.
Then he scowled.
That time, the hostility on his face wasn’t remotely subtle.
“Who?” he growled.
Angel had a feeling Black knew exactly who the new guy meant.
From the look on his face, and the aggression seething off him, she had a feeling she knew exactly what name popped into Black’s head.
“You know who,” the other said. “She is the mate. The other half.”
Again, his voice remained eerily calm.
Angel really looked at his face, realizing she hadn’t before now.
Not just his face––she looked at all of him.
She looked at his face, hair, arms, height, eyes… and the expression she saw in all of it, including in his exact stance as he faced Black. For the first time, she looked at him as a person, not simply an unknown, freakishly-steaming collection of skin, bones, and machine-like muscles.
He was tall… definitely over six feet.
In fact, watching them face off, she realized he stood just under Black’s six-five or six-six, or whatever he was these days.
Black’s height was still a moving target, according to Miri, in that Black was apparently still gaining in that area. Angel had no idea how, but something to do with seer physiology had him growing still… at whatever age Black was, since that was yet another enigma when it came to seer versus human biology.
The new guy being so tall definitely hinted at his race.
Then again, if he’d just been a freaking dragon a few seconds ago, the whole seer versus human question was pretty much moot.
Angel noticed a tattoo along his arm.
It wasn’t the colorful, peacock green and blue winged dragon tattoo Black wore on his back, or the new one he’d just gotten on his arm. The new guy’s tat was obsidian black with white and purple highlights, a winding snake that coiled up his forearm and around his elbow to thicken around his bicep.
It could have been a king cobra, but Angel wasn’t ready to label it that.
She wasn’t ready to label anything about this guy yet.
His brown hair contained streaks of silvery-white.
It didn’t look gray, or like anything to do with ageing.
His eyes were a pale gold, or white and gold-ish, depending on how you looked at it, so roughly in the same rough color category as Black’s.
Unlike Black’s irises, the new guy’s didn’t contain the same depth, or the same flecks of light and dark. The pale, white-gold eyes of the new seer-dragon-whoever-whatever appeared to be basically empty. His eyes glowed faintly, as if lit from within, but Angel got nothing off him, no sense of personality or even emotion.
His eyes shone blindly from a tanned face, contrasting his brown and silver hair.
He seemed to be waiting as he stared at Black.
Was he really going to stand there, naked, and wait for Miri to show up?
Even as Angel thought it, the new male spoke again.
“Where is she?” he said again.
Black folded his arms.
He answered the guy’s question with a death stare.
Uncharacteristically, he was also doing it silently.
“Where is she?” the male asked again.
Angel was beginning to wonder if it was another robot, like what they encountered on Hawaii. Of course, that left a HELL of a lot of unanswered questions. Like, for example, how a robot could turn into a dragon, then back into a robot––
“Not a robot, Ang.” The voice was soft, and obviously sub-vocals. “Nice theory, though… positively genius.”
Angel frowned, but didn’t answer.
Black didn’t sound particularly welcoming of her speculations, or overly impressed with the non-insights her brain had come up with so far.
“Anyone looking into this?” Black growled next. “Or are you all going to just stand there, holding your dicks? Wait and see if this fucking thing kills me or not?”
Angel felt her face grow hot.
That’s more or less exactly what she’d been doing.
Well… minus the dick part.
Cowboy spoke up before she could.
“Yarli’s on it, boss. She’s called in some help.” Cowboy paused, his voice edging on apologetic. “She figured this was an all-hands-on-deck type situation, boss.”
Angel flinched a tiny bit.
Even before her boyfriend said that last part, she’d had a pretty good idea who Cowboy meant, when he’d talked about “calling for help.”
There were really only two options.
Black clearly got the not-so-subtle message there, too.
His scowl deepened.
He refocused on the male in front of him.
The mystery male chose that moment to try again.
“Bring her to me,” he said.
As before, his voice came through flat, unemotional.
It also contained not so much as the tiniest hint of a request.
He spoke the words as an order, like he was unused to being questioned, second-guessed, or disobeyed by anyone, in any way.
Black didn’t answer him.
The male, undaunted, tried again.
“You must bring her to me––” he began.
“Never going to happen,” Black growled.
There was a silence.
Again, the other male didn’t appear angry, or frustrated. He looked just as immobile, unfazed, and totally single-minded as he had since he appeared.
The two of them stared at one another, and now Angel really did feel nervous. What if Black wasn’t just being melodramatic? What if this thing really could kill him? What if he knew something she and Cowboy didn’t, and he really did think this… guy… might be able to overpower him in a fight?
“You mean besides the fact that his dragon form weighed probably fifteen tons more than mine?” Black murmured in her ear.
“Yeah,” Angel sent back through the sub-vocals. “Besides that.”
The silence was brief.
That time, Angel practically felt him thinking through it.
When he next spoke, his voice was dry.
“Let’s just say, it doesn’t strike me as outside the realm of possibility,” Black remarked. “Speaking of which, it would be really damned nice if someone would get back to me with something I can actually fucking use. Today, if possible––”
“Sir.”
A deep voice broke through Black’s sub-vocal growl, coming through clearly on the line.
Crystal-clear. Melodic.
Cultured to the point of sounding scholarly.
That male voice contained a vibrating kind of charge Angel had learned to associate with certain seers, especially those trained to a high level, and especially those who might have been older, or maybe just more steeped in “seer-ness” from that other version of Earth.
It was almost a spiritual quality, like something you’d see on someone who’d been meditating in caves for a few dozen years.
Or maybe a few hundred, in the case of seers.
Unlike the voice belonging to the naked male on the street below where she stood, Angel knew the voice on the headset immediately.
She knew every inflection in that strangely-accented English.
“Sir,” the male seer repeated. “We’re working on an ID. All we can tell you so far is what you’ve likely guessed… he contains the same tell-tale light markers for the ‘dragon’ entity you had us map in your own living light. There are nuances of difference, b
ut in terms of composition of the primary, high-functioning structures––”
“Jem!” Not Black that time––Zairei, who must have been listening on the line. Joy infused his voice, a kind of disbelief mixed with pure happiness. “Brother! I did not know you were back! Gaos d’lalente, I did not know you were even alive, brother––”
“None of us knew he was alive,” Dex growled, his voice openly hostile. “Well, except Black, apparently. And Cowboy, apparently. And Yarli, apparently. And presumably the doc. And presumably Angel. And presumably Manny… and all the seers still at the Raptor’s Nest. Which is suddenly sounding like a hell of a lot of people who aren’t me, despite me supposedly being one-half in charge of ops––”
Black was having none of it.
“Clear the line,” Black growled. “All of you. You can have your fucking reunion and bitch at me for not knowing things later.”
Angel exchanged looks with Cowboy.
Then her fiancé shrugged. He went back to looking at the naked man standing in the middle of the studio street.
Steam still coiled off the male’s dense arms and muscular thighs.
“Yeah,” Cowboy muttered. “This ain’t the time, brother Dexter… as shitty as that is, and regardless of the fairness and truth of your words.”
Angel felt a stab of guilt.
It hadn’t been her place to tell Dex about Jem and Nick, but she still felt guilty. Hell, they’d been living at her house.
She knew Cowboy felt guilty, too.
Part of the reason they’d split up the team the way they had was to break it to different members of Black’s inner circle that Nick and Dalejem were still alive, and back in town.
Clearly, Black hadn’t done his side of things yet.
He hadn’t yet told his half of the team that Nick was alive, that Dalejem was alive, and that the two of them were back in San Francisco.
Angel hadn’t been privy to the real-time conversation between Black and Miri on that whole plan, to divide the team up the way they did, but she had to assume it was Black’s job to tell this portion of the team, meaning the half he’d brought with him to Los Angeles.
That should have included the seers Kiessa and Zairei, the human Black Securities and Investigations employees, Luce, A.J., and Miguel, along with Dog and Easton, and the other ex-cons Black had working out of New Mexico...
Black Of Wing: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery Romance (Quentin Black Mystery Book 14) Page 8