“Where is he?” I had to fight not to shout the words. “Where is the male seer you brought here with you? The one who told you where to find me?”
The seer stared at me, angry confusion back in his eyes.
I had an overwhelming desire to slap him, but I didn’t.
Some part of me wanted to scream at him, now that I realized what had been bothering me, what I’d been feeling in my light ever since the dragon-seer showed up in the skies above Los Angeles.
Charles was here.
I knew, even before I knew.
That same dragon-seer now sat in front of me in boxer shorts, his mouth curled in an angry frown.
“I already told you. I don’t remember anyone. I don’t remember anything at all… not before your asshole mate waved a gun in my face, ranting at me about breaking into his damned building and doing something to his friends. I definitely don’t remember meeting another seer.”
But any sympathy I might have had for the strange seer had vanished.
Now his attitude about his own blackouts just angered me.
They struck me as cavalier.
They struck me as irresponsible.
Some part of me wanted to hit him again.
I’d already made him show me the world he last remembered.
I recognized it.
I’d made a point of recognizing it, so I could find Charles again if I ever needed to.
The part the seer, Vaari, showed me wasn’t the same part where I’d left Charles, but every world, every dimension, had a kind of vibration, a signature my living light could recognize. I couldn’t put those signatures into words, but my aleimi could; those vibrations acted like a unique fingerprint in my light… like a street address I could identify and find again.
It was definitely the same world.
Worse, I should have known that.
I should have known it from the beginning.
The coincidence of a creature so much like Black showing up here, so soon after I left Charles on that world… it couldn’t really be a coincidence at all.
He must have felt you, Black muttered in my mind. He must have felt you from his dragon form, and the dragon part of him must have tracked your light to Charles. Now this asshole conveniently forgot all of it.
I scowled at Black, but his words felt right to me.
What are we going to do? I sent. If he really can’t remember, then how are we going to find him? We don’t even know if he brought Charles back here with him. But if he did, you know by now Charles is holed up somewhere, hiding behind some kind of military-grade construct in one of his hideaways in Russia… plotting around how to bust all of his buddies free so he can start his “conquer the humans and kill all the vamps” thing all over again.
Black grimaced.
I felt him thinking, even as the seer on the exam table in front of me cleared his throat.
I looked at him, and Black looked at him, and the seer scowled.
“I can hear you, you know,” Vaari growled. “I can hear every damned word.”
“With all seers?” I asked. “Or just us?”
Vaari grew silent briefly.
I wondered if the question had even occurred to him before I said it.
I decided it hadn’t.
“Just you,” he said, looking between us. His pale eyes grew wary once more. “I can only hear the two of you. Why is that?”
Black’s darker, deeper gold eyes hardened.
I found myself staring at those eyes I loved, the irises flecked with glints of bright yellow, gold-white, gold-blacks and greens.
Black’s eyes were gorgeous.
The longer I’d known him, the more I saw in them.
Vaari frowned at me, like he’d heard that, too.
The stare Black aimed at the strange dragon-seer turned cold.
“You should go,” he told him. “You should go back to wherever the fuck you came from, brother, before we’re forced to kill you. Can you do those… jumps… the interdimensional thing you do… in this form? Or do you have to turn back into the dragon, first?”
The seer swiveled his stare from my face to Black’s.
Again, I saw the hostility there.
Even in this form, Vaari seemed a little too nice to me, a little too not-nice to Black.
I understood why Black wanted him gone.
When Black didn’t react to his glare, Vaari exhaled in annoyance.
“I can do it in this form,” he said. “I can jump like this.”
“Then go,” Black growled. “Now. Before you change back into an even bigger asshole.”
There was a silence.
The dragon seer pushed off the padded medical table.
He landed on his bare feet, wincing a little as he shifted his weight on the cold tile.
Vaari looked at me for a few beats too long, then looked at Black, his lighter gold eyes shimmering with living light.
Without so much as a nod to either of us…
…he vanished.
The pale blue boxers and the white T-shirt fluttered to the floor.
Black and I just stood there for a few seconds, staring at the empty articles of clothing on the tile.
Then I turned to face Black.
“You know that probably won’t help,” I said, grimacing at the thought. “If he really is connected to Coreq…or to you… or to me… or to all three of us… he might have the same compulsion to return to us, as soon as he regains his dragon form. He could just jump right back here, the next time the dragon decides to take over his consciousness. He could show up here next time, Black. Right here, in this very room. We have no idea if he can remember things from the non-dragon side of himself, but we should assume he can.”
Thinking about my own words, I frowned.
“If his powers work anything like mine, he’ll remember how to get back. I don’t have the dragon thing you have, but the specific resonance with this dimension should remain imprinted on his light. He’ll know exactly where we are, Black… unless he somehow changes his aleimic body entirely, between the two states of consciousness.”
I felt my jaw harden briefly.
“Worst case scenario, which we can’t rule out… he remembers everything he knew in this form whenever he changes back to his dragon form. If that’s the case, he’ll likely come straight here… possibly in a matter of seconds, as soon as he flips back.”
“Yes,” Black said.
His long jaw hardened, but I strongly got the impression that same thing had already occurred to him.
“He’ll know where Charles is, too, doc,” he added, his voice hard.
There was a silence.
I couldn’t help thinking about that.
Black wasn’t wrong, but what he was proposing was dangerous as hell.
I could see Black thinking about it, too.
When he looked at me, however, eyes grim, he gave me a taut smile, the barest shadow of his killer grin.
“Well,” he said. “Maybe we’ll never see him again. Problem solved.”
I nodded, forcing a smile of my own.
“Problem solved,” I echoed.
I really wanted to believe that was a possible outcome of all this.
I wanted Black to believe it, too.
Sadly, it didn’t feel remotely likely to either one of us.
22
What She Took
Faustus walked up a set of narrow metal stairs, leading to a rusted-out metal door that appeared to be locked by a heavy padlock.
The whole area, in the far reaches of northwestern Poland, in a small island and town known as Swinoujscie, appeared to be abandoned, and not only because it was currently the off-season for the small resort town situated on the Baltic Sea.
“No one would destroy it, you know why?” his Polish cab driver said in English with an overpoweringly thick accent. “No one destroy it here, our beautiful island, for the same reason anything was spared by those monsters…”
The
taxi driver gave Charles a knowing, almost indulgent look as he let his pregnant pause fill the inside of the yellow taxi.
“Hitler liked it,” the cabbie whispered conspiratorially. “He wanted to keep it as a vacation spot for upper members of the Reich…”
Faustus frowned, but only on the inside.
Truthfully, he had his doubts that was the real story.
But World War II stories somehow remained alive and well in this part of the world, just as the war itself did. It was the strangest thing to Charles––the way awareness of the second world war seemed to scar their collective psyche and linger in the air like a foul stench.
If he were being honest, Faustus thought it was a colossal waste of time, analyzing and picking at that same war, seventy-five years after it had finished.
But the taxi driver wanted to talk.
Even after he pulled up to the back of a rusted-out looking warehouse, covered in splashes of graffiti, most of it made up of various obscenities in Polish and Russian, the man wanted to talk. Even when Charles stood there, holding a newspaper in his hand, making it clear he wanted to go, the man wanted to talk.
In the end, Faustus had to push him to get him to leave.
Raising a fist, the seer pounded on the metal panel.
He listened, but heard nothing.
Faustus tried pounding again.
Finally, he walked over to the small keypad hidden in the shadows to the right of the door. He flipped open the protective metal cover, and punched through a series of symbols. A swell of rage hit him when nothing happened.
They must have changed the goddamned codes here, as well.
This was the third such facility he’d checked.
He backed away from the door.
Staring down at the paper in his hand, he frowned at the date.
He still couldn’t believe so little time had passed here.
What had been months, more likely years on that shithole world where Miriam left him, had been only a few weeks on this version of Earth. He’d watched seasons change in that other place. He’d seen babies born. He’d gone through cold, heat, rain, mud, humidity, more rain, flowers, fruit, falling leaves.
Here, almost no time had passed at all.
He seemed to remember one of his infiltrators telling him that.
One of the people Charles had watching Black and Miri in San Francisco… what felt like a million years ago now… they’d mentioned “different passage of time” regarding the worlds Miri visited on her jumps.
Charles hadn’t thought about that, on that other world.
He hadn’t factored that in, coming back here.
Even if he had considered it, he suspected it wouldn’t have made much difference.
It would have been a shock to come back here regardless, only to find that so little had changed… even as absolutely everything had.
He was about to walk away, to try the back entrance, when the speaker crackled and whistled, letting out a hard tone of discordant static.
Faustus ducked in reflex, right before the speaker clicked on.
“Yes?” the voice said. “Who is there?”
Faustus fought between fury and relief.
“Let me in. Now.”
The speaker crackled.
Charles listened to the silence on the other end.
Then he felt them.
He felt their light. He felt the first darting probe to his aleimi… then a second… then a third. He felt their disbelief when they ID’d him for real.
There was a buzzing sound, and Charles caught hold of the metal door handle, yanking it towards him.
That time, the door gave.
The padlock had been a mere prop; it didn’t attach to anything. The door opened outward easily, taking the metal padlock with it.
Charles walked inside…
…and came to a dead stop.
The small chamber past the main door looked like a dead end: three walls of cement, covered with a film of black mold. Faded lines of paint remained visible on the other side of the mold, but as he looked around, he didn’t see any features on the cement walls, or any doors.
“What the hell is this…?” he muttered.
He was about to try and contact them through the Barrier space, when there was a grinding, mechanical sound, like giant teeth gnashing.
It came from his right.
Charles turned sharply, just in time to see an opening appear in what had looked like unbroken, moldy cement, cracked and worn away by water damage.
Now, he could see that it had been mostly a mirage.
The cement broke in a straight line on three sides.
The camouflaged door pulled open in thirds, showing a large shipping elevator.
Charles waited until the door had opened entirely.
He looked inside, fighting a sudden wave of paranoia.
The speakers inside the elevator crackled to life.
“Come in, sir,” a familiar voice said. “It’s all right, sir. The wall’s organic. It’s just a precaution… we’re all in the sub-basement level.”
Charles stared up at the speaker.
He knew the person on the other end.
He knew them.
Somehow, that realization hit at him only then, convincing him for the first time he was back––that he’d really made it back to his home, to his people.
A pain stabbed at his heart.
His hand rose to his chest.
Briefly, he couldn’t breathe, or really think.
Emotion overcame him.
He remembered the first morning he’d woken up in that other dimension, staring out over a river and a field, realizing she’d left him at the approximate location of the White House, on both of the Earths he’d embraced as his home.
He’d hated her for that. He’d hated her so much for that.
She’d left him at the location of his previous seat of power… only without the power.
Without his people.
Without anything.
Gritting his teeth at the memory, he shoved it aside, along with the maudlin emotions that wanted to rise with it.
Without another second of hesitation, Charles entered the square elevator.
He reentered his domain.
As soon as he’d crossed the threshold, the elevator doors closed soundlessly behind him.
“Brother.” The East-Asian seer choked on the word.
He wiped his eyes as they broke from their clenched embrace.
“Gaos. My brother, my heart… we thought you dead. We truly believed all of you had to be dead by now… or lost to us forever, in whatever hellhole she’d left you in. We had to be careful even looking for you from the Barrier. I was told to protect what resources remained by those fighting towards the end, in the event anyone might return. I confess, we’d about given up hope…”
He wiped his eyes.
A smile broke on his lips.
Charles saw the pain that lived within the male’s obvious joy.
He wanted to tell his brother how much longer it had been for him.
His chest clenched, however, making it difficult to force out words.
Meanwhile, Chu continued to beam at him.
“Gaos,” he said again. “You have no idea how much good it does my heart, seeing you here with us again. Just to see you alive and well, brother Faustus… it is like a miracle. It is like a true miracle to all of us. We have mourned you. We have mourned all of you… but most of all you, brother. Our Father. Our leader. Our one, true hope.”
Charles wiped his eyes, looking around at the space where they’d met him.
Unlike where the elevator doors lived on the ground floor, here they fed into a long metal and stone corridor, lined on either side by torch-like lights.
The tunnels shimmered with aleimic light, visible to him behind the Barrier. Even with his physical eyes, the sheer amount of living matter fused into the metal gave the walls a strange, otherworldly sheen that evoked the
organics that lived inside.
He cleared his throat, looking back at Chu.
“It is safe, then?” His voice came out gruff. “Your work, brother Chu. Black and my niece have not taken it all from you?”
Chu’s expression grew slightly more grim.
“I’m not going to lie, brother… we thought you were them. We’ve been more or less waiting for them to come for us, putting off that day and biding our time as long as we can hold out. We’ve done our best to hide, to stay one step ahead… to put off our capture to secure as much of your work for future generations as we can. Above all, we have prioritized keeping the organic technology safe… and out of enemy hands. We have attempted to take out the Usurper and his wife…”
He looked at Charles apologetically, as if afraid he might disapprove. “I know you had wanted them alive, before. But we took a vote and decided, with you and the others gone––”
“You did the right thing,” Charles said, his voice cold. “I no longer have any concern over keeping my niece or her husband alive. For any reason.”
There was a silence.
Charles felt Chu’s approval.
He felt it from others in the Barrier, too.
“You have not managed to kill them, I take it?” Charles prodded.
“No, sir. Not yet.” Gauging Charles’ eyes yet again, Chu seemed to relax more at whatever he saw. “We have been careful, as I said. We deploy our assets only from sites that cannot be traced back here. We have self-destruct protocols for much of the weaponized tech and organics… and we’ve sent out only a few at a time, with the exception of one full-blown attack, where we deployed several dozen. We had quite a few malfunctions in that first round, but we learned much from this, and have since been able to improve our models significantly. Despite our failure to eliminate either target, it proved a highly useful exercise for us––”
“Good.” Charles nodded. “Very good, brother. I am glad you have been thinking in the long term with this. I am so very very grateful that you have managed to keep our work safe, and have even built upon it, despite everything you faced.”
Chu gave him a hard look.
“I will tell you, brother… it was very difficult not to throw everything we had at them, the hell with the consequences. Many wanted revenge. Many of us, myself included, I confess, wanted it badly enough that we had to be talked down. But in the end, we all agreed. None of us could bear the thought of the Usurper and his wife, or any of their thugs getting ahold of our work here. The thought of them destroying it, or worse, giving it to the human scum to use against our own people…”
Black Of Wing: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery Romance (Quentin Black Mystery Book 14) Page 19