Black Of Wing: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery Romance (Quentin Black Mystery Book 14)

by JC Andrijeski

  Fuck.

  It looked like dinner was probably out.

  Black’s words exploded out of him.

  I leapt back in pure reflex, totally broadsided when my husband’s voice rose to a near shout. I was still panting, fighting back the panic that brought us here.

  I was still fighting against that feeling of having been punched, wincing as I rubbed my chest, fighting to slow my heart rate. It took me another second to take in a terrified-looking Lizbeth staring at the four of us. It took me a few more to look at Black, to see the direction of his furious stare, to follow that stare back to where Dalejem sat at one of the bullpen desks, an open laptop on the etched glass in front of him.

  Then Black was moving away from me.

  He moved so fast, I let go of his wrist in reflex, remembering only then I still held it.

  Cowboy and Angel let go of my arm in the same instant.

  “Was that him?” Black shouted the words a second time. “Really, Jem? That’s the first damned thing I have to see? Right now? What the fuck are you doing here, anyway?”

  Aleimic light infused his voice.

  The sheer power behind it made the glass walls tremble; it felt strong enough I wondered fleetingly if he’d caused a mild earthquake.

  Black’s voice boomed out again.

  “SPEAK!” he bellowed. “What are you doing here, Jem? Why are you here?”

  His words caused another semi-instinctive fear reaction in the rest of us.

  I winced, putting my hands over my ears as Cowboy and Angel took a step back, retreating towards where Lizbeth huddled by the cabinet behind reception.

  The glass walls seemed to shake again when Black stalked directly up to where Jem rose gracefully to his feet.

  “Calm down,” Dalejem said.

  He held up a hand, as though calming a horse.

  “FUCK YOU.”

  “Di'lanlente a' guete… Black. You are clearly in shock.” Dalejem’s voice came out more accented than usual. Clearly, the seer was upset, but he also sounded frustrated. “This is not the time to discuss––”

  “Then maybe don’t talk to him on MY FUCKING EQUIPMENT,” Black snarled.

  “Black!” Something about Jem’s words snapped me out of my own slack-jawed staring. “Black, he’s right! For fuck’s sake… why are you screaming at him? You know damned well why he’s here, and now isn’t the time to hash out your issues around Nick. All of us are WAY too wound up to have that conversation…”

  Black didn’t even look at me.

  I might as well not have spoken.

  By the time I finished, Black had reached Jem.

  He stood in front of him, stark naked, his black hair still strangely perfect-looking. I knew they’d coiffed it and sprayed it and hell, maybe shellacked it, for his interview with Grant Steele, but it looked totally bizarre to me now, especially with the rest of us panting, and me with my twisted ankle, windblown hair, and sweaty neck, chest, back, and face.

  Everything else Black had worn at the studio was gone, of course.

  His semi-organic head set, expensive work shirt, armored pants, his favorite leather jacket… his wallet, keys, hotel key-card, boots…

  All of it was gone.

  Dalejem––who was maybe the only seer in the place who had some height on Black, even if it was only an inch or so––straightened to that full height. He stood in front of my naked husband, staring down at him from that added inch, and folded his arms, maybe to force some space between the two of them.

  I bit my lip, watching them look at one another.

  The air between them vibrated.

  Even without using my seer’s sight, I could almost see it with my eyes.

  It hit me… really hit me… that Black hadn’t seen Jem since Jem and Nick got back to the United States. Black had thought Jem was dead for months.

  Like the rest of us, he’d assumed Nick killed him.

  Or that Solonik killed both of them.

  Whatever exact story he told himself about the how of it, Black one hundred percent believed Jem to be dead.

  I knew that, because he tried to convince me of the same. He told me there was no way Jem wouldn’t have contacted them in all of that time, not unless he was dead. Black said Jem would have called… at least once… if only to let them know he was okay.

  Jem hadn’t called.

  Ergo, Jem was dead.

  Black told me I had to accept that Nick most likely killed him.

  Now, looking at my husband’s face, I realized he was dealing with the shock of seeing Dalejem alive at all, even apart from everything that happened that day.

  Now Black stood in front of his friend, chest heaving, staring at him like he was a ghost.

  I looked at Jem, and saw emotion in his face, as well.

  Jem’s emotion was maybe more honest… or possibly more self-aware. Dalejem looked at Black like he was genuinely happy to see him. His eyes brightened as I watched, and I realized he was crying when I saw him wipe his face with the side of one hand.

  “Brother––” Dalejem began, his voice thick.

  But just then, Black moved.

  He moved so fast, I couldn’t even yell at him not to do it.

  He wound up his right arm and punched Jem right in the face.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I scowled up at Black, dabbing the swollen part of Jem’s cheek with a cold rag.

  Angel had walked out the agency’s front door to find us clothes.

  Cowboy went with her to help, muttering about getting ice to keep Dalejem’s face from swelling out a few more inches.

  I suspect both of them left mostly just to get away from the three of us.

  At the very least, they did it to get away from me and Black.

  Black hit Dalejem pretty much at full strength.

  “Seriously.” My scowl deepened. I fought between rage and a kind of semi-amused disbelief. “Do you have no self-control at all? I swear, emotionally I think you’re about twelve years old sometimes, Quentin…”

  Dalejem erupted in a low laugh.

  The laugh didn’t contain a lot of humor. Instead the sound came out in a short burst, like he couldn’t help himself.

  He was still staring warily at Black, like he half-expected Black to hit him again.

  Thinking about all of it, remembering seeing Black punch Jem in the face, knowing it was coming by then but being powerless to stop it, I glared back over my shoulder at my husband’s handsome face.

  “I mean it. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Black frowned, his arms folded.

  He didn’t really look at either of us.

  I could feel on him that he was embarrassed at what he’d done, but he clearly wasn’t ready to admit that, much less to apologize.

  Instead, he addressed his words to Jem.

  “Are you still working on it?” he growled. “Or are you too pissed at me?”

  Jem gave him a look. “I am working on it, brother.”

  “Are you making progress?”

  Again, that cold stare. “Yes.”

  Black touched his ear, barking into his headset as he turned away.

  He didn’t quite pace the floor of the bullpen, but he walked away a few steps, still naked apart from the headset, which Lizbeth handed over to him, all while covering her eyes with a hand and scolding him for nearly giving her a heart attack.

  “Well?” Black growled into the headset. “Sister? How does it look? Can he track us here? Should we be thinking about leaving? Because I need to make some calls. Normal, business, human calls. That thing in L.A. is blowing up, and we have to tell the media something. I can’t do that until I know if we’re going to have to leave here in a hurry first…”

  He trailed, obviously listening to whatever Yarli was saying.

  I hadn’t bothered to find a headset for myself yet.

  More than anything, I wanted a shower.

  “Yeah,” Jem said, his voice quiet as he looked at my
hair with a frown. “What happened to you? You look like you were fighting sixteen angry cats in a wind tunnel…”

  I laughed at that for real, earning a cold glare from Black.

  He was still walking the row of desks, naked, growling at Yarli over the headset.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he was saying now. “I’ll put Farraday on that. If you want to help on that front, get someone to look in on Mika, Jax, Kiko. Find out what they’re doing to stabilize the situation over there.”

  Hearing his words, I was forced to think about them.

  My jaw gradually clenched as I did.

  Black was right. This was going to be a damned mess.

  We needed to deal with this dragon asshole, and fast.

  If we didn’t, literally everything we’d been trying to do to calm down the humans and set up some basis for species-to-species harmony and compromise would get flushed down the toilet in a hurry.

  We couldn’t just hide out behind a construct indefinitely.

  This had to be a serious regrouping time, but a brief one.

  Then we needed to go out and deal with that jackass, whoever he was.

  When I looked up that time, Black was staring at me.

  I saw agreement in his eyes, and for the first time, what might have been an apology.

  “Ah,” Jem retorted. “I see. Your wife gets an apology. I didn’t realize how you punching me in the face necessitated an apology to your wife, or implied that in some way she is the true victim here.”

  He winked at me, even as he aimed his scowl at Black.

  “Clearly, it is your wife who was harmed in this exchange… from sheer embarrassment at her spouse’s inability to behave like a civilized, adult person, one presumes…”

  I grunted a laugh of my own, earning another glare from Black.

  I heard the tension in my laugh, though, nerves mixed with genuine humor.

  I couldn’t help but be grateful Jem was being such a good sport.

  “Only because he doesn’t want me to kill his boyfriend…” Black muttered darkly, glaring at the two of us again. “And could you not hang over him like that?” he growled in more of a regular voice. “I know you two are friends, and he prefers bloodsucking rapists in his bed, but you’re starting to try my tolerance, wife.”

  Dalejem rolled his eyes, folding his arms, even as I straightened.

  “You’re a child,” Jem informed him.

  “Yeah? You think so?” Black glowered at him. “Maybe when she does that to Nick, stark naked, and you just look on with that condescending smile on your goddamned face… then you can tell me what a child I am, brother.”

  Jem’s eyes flashed with genuine coldness at that.

  Black grunted a laugh that contained zero humor.

  “My point exactly.”

  Dalejem opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Cowboy pushed through the front doors by reception, gripping a heavy-looking duffle bag by the handles.

  Behind him, Angel carried what looked like bathrobes, along with about a pound of ice in a Ziploc bag.

  Cowboy nodded at Lizbeth as he passed, now that he was wearing clothes, and brought the duffle over to plunk down on a nearby desk.

  I heard metal hit the glass tabletop, and realized they hadn’t brought clothes.

  Cowboy gave me a look.

  “Ayuh,” he said, shrugging a little, apologetic. “We brought guns, not a lot of clothes. Ange’s got some robes for you and the boss… none of my clothes’re gonna fit ‘em, anyway. Ange thought you might want a shower or something, anyway.”

  Angel handed Jem the bag of ice, which he promptly put to his face.

  She handed me a robe next.

  I shouldered it on, chuckling a little as I saw her hold out a second robe to Black, her face turned deliberately away.

  She shook it when he didn’t notice at first.

  “Quentin? Are you going to cover that thing of yours? Or not?”

  Black grunted, but walked back to take the robe, quirking an eyebrow at me as he stuck his arm into the first sleeve, then the second, tying it in front.

  Like Cowboy, Angel also came back clothed, wearing a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt.

  Her braids were also wet, I realized; she looked like she’d taken a shower.

  “Just a quick rinse-off with soap,” she informed me, obviously seeing me looking at her hair. “Cowboy and me both. I couldn’t bear to put clean clothes on without rinsing off.”

  “I get it,” I said, holding up my hands. “Not judging, believe me.”

  She motioned towards the back-end of the offices, where there were men’s and women’s locker rooms and showers for Black’s employees.

  “You should do the same, doc.”

  I followed her pointing fingers with my eyes.

  Thinking about her words, I realized she was right.

  I did want a shower.

  But it made a lot more sense to just go to the penthouse.

  Jem, who clearly hadn’t finished with Black, looked up past the bag of ice to the now robed dragon-seer.

  “You know, I was supposed to go to a dinner tonight,” he grumbled in accented English. “Now I suppose I’ll be going with a black eye.”

  “…Black eye suddenly striking me as a sort of ironical term,” Cowboy muttered, even as he unzipped the duffle bag, pulling out a holster and his two, pearl-handled guns.

  I looked at Cowboy, blinked.

  Then I looked at Angel.

  Both of us burst out in uncontrolled laughter.

  14

  A Shower And Pie

  “You didn’t tell Dex.” I frowned at him, my hands on my hips. “How the hell did you not tell Dex? Isn’t he one of your best friends? What were you thinking, leaving that so long?”

  He glared up at me, his gold irises flashing from the overhead lights.

  “Did you tell Kiko?” he growled.

  I opened my mouth.

  Then I closed it.

  Frowning at him, I sat down heavily on the white leather couch of our living room, combing a hand through my wet hair, which had already created a huge wet spot on the back and shoulders of the light-blue T-shirt I’d thrown on, over a lace bra and dark-blue jean leggings.

  Between the shower and the clothes, I felt almost like myself again.

  I also couldn’t help but feel an enormous relief at being home.

  “I told Jax,” I mumbled.

  “You what?”

  “You heard me,” I said, folding my arms and blowing my bangs out of my face. “I told Jax. Well… Jax heard me thinking, and then I told him.”

  “So you’re letting Jax tell Kiko?” Black frowned. “Really, doc? I thought you were supposed to be trained in this shit?”

  “I was planning to tell her. Tonight, if you must know. We were going to go out for dinner and drinks at a place she likes in London, just the two of us.”

  Realizing he was right, that I’d chickened out as much as he had, I sighed again, frowning as I stared out through the enormous bay windows.

  “God, I’m starving.” I exhaled in a sigh. “I could really use a beer, too.”

  There was a silence.

  Then Black sighed with me.

  He’d showered and dressed right after I did, and wore more or less what he’d worn in Los Angeles, but somehow looked a lot more “normal” wearing it here, inside his own home.

  Maybe it was the fact of us both being back in San Francisco, or both being together… or just the fact that he’d washed all of the product out of his hair and looked less “on” than he had in Hollywood… but he looked more like quintessential Black to me again.

  Which meant I really wanted to order a ton of food, lock the penthouse door, and more or less curl up on his lap.

  When I glanced up at him next, his expression had softened.

  “Should we try to tell them en route?” he said, gruff. “Kiko and Dex. We shouldn’t broadside them… and we can’t keep it from them for long onc
e they get back here.”

  I nodded, not so much in a yes, but more because I was thinking about his words.

  He was right.

  We couldn’t keep it from them any longer.

  If we waited until they got here, we risked a number of bigger problems.

  I hated the idea of doing it over a video call, though.

  “We’re okay now,” Black said, before I’d finished thinking it through. “There’re still mapping the cords between me and you and that asshole in Los Angeles… but he doesn’t seem able to locate us here behind the construct.”

  He paused, as if waiting for my reaction.

  When I said nothing, he added,

  “They lost him. He flew off, over the ocean… then disappeared, if you can believe that. They don’t know if he went into the water, like I did, or transformed back into a regular seer, got on a boat… or flew to Guam under the radar… or left this dimension altogether.”

  “What about the robot?” I said, still staring out the window. “There was a robot. Right? Wasn’t Zairei tracking that?”

  “There was,” he affirmed. “And he was.”

  “What happened to it? Are we still following it?”

  “It disappeared.” Pausing, maybe waiting for a reaction from me, he went on when I didn’t give him one. “We have to assume whoever is controlling those things has a way to shut them down so we can’t track their signals. I’ve got people looking on the docks, where it was last spotted, in case they just shut it down and hid it somewhere.”

  I thought about that, frowning.

  Then I turned, still frowning, to study his gold eyes.

  “Why send it after you at all? If they’re afraid of dragons, I mean. Why not just send it after me? Or hell, send it here… have it take out our home base?”

  Black studied my eyes.

  I saw his gaze flicker over the rest of me, right before he cleared his throat.

  “I don’t know,” he said frankly.

  He shrugged, seer-fashion, gesturing fluidly with one hand.

  “Maybe to provoke me into turning into a dragon? Or maybe in the hopes I wouldn’t turn, not while surrounded by media and a studio audience. Maybe it was always meant to be a distraction… to be pulled back as soon as we noticed it there. Dunno.”