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

by JC Andrijeski

  Chu bit his lip, as if forcing himself not to finish that sentence.

  He shook his head, grimacing.

  “This thought keeps me up at night still,” he confessed. “So does my anger, brother. That they would do this to you, most of all, after all you have done for our people… that keeps me up at night. Thankfully, it has also hardened my resolve.”

  Charles fought against another tightening in his throat.

  As he looked at the other male, he felt an intense swell of affection.

  Not only affection.

  Love.

  A fierce, uncompromising love… a love of war and blood.

  He would die for his brothers and sisters here, those who remained loyal to the cause.

  Yet, so much of his emotion remained grief.

  All the work he had done.

  All of it… all of it… years and years… decades of planning and positioning his people, of waiting, of stage-setting…

  It had all been destroyed in a matter of days.

  And not by one of them.

  Humans had not done this.

  Vampires had not done it, either.

  No, Charles’ work had been destroyed by members of his own race.

  It had been destroyed by one of his own blood.

  “You were not wrong to assume me dead,” he said thickly. He still gripped the arms of the other male, and now he met his gaze. “Perhaps my physical death was not accomplished… at least not yet… but I thought myself dead to you, my dearest of brothers. I truly believed I would never be here again, on this world.”

  “Where were you?” Simon’s pale blue eyes shone iridescent under the flickering lights. “Did you see any of the others where you were?”

  Charles again felt his throat close.

  He’d been so shocked when he landed in the world where Miri left him.

  He’d never felt anything so desolate in his life.

  For years, he had felt not a single seer on that world, apart from himself.

  Then, coming back here, he’d been shocked all over again.

  The construct he and his people spent years perfecting… gone.

  Most of the seers he spoke to every day… also outside of his reach.

  He could feel none of his inner circle, none of his friends.

  His people all over Washington D.C. had vanished.

  His people in Moscow, in London, in Switzerland…

  It was like Miriam took an eraser and just rubbed out Charles’ entire existence.

  Where had she taken them? Where had they gone?

  Had she killed them all?

  Had he been spared to suffer alone in eternity?

  Miri had to have done it on purpose. There was no possible way she had done any of it on accident. Yet he still could not comprehend why. Why had she done it?

  Did she really hate him so much?

  Did she hate her own kind?

  The thought truly shocked him.

  Charles never recovered from that shock, in all those years on that other world.

  That his own niece could have dumped him, dumped him, who loved and protected her all those years, alone on a world with none of his kind… it hurt him deeper than he’d thought himself capable of being hurt. After decades of fighting vampires, he’d thought those bloodsucking parasites were the most sadistic creatures any god had ever imagined.

  Yet no vampire had hurt him like Miri had.

  That she deliberately could have left him without the comfort of living light, permanently separated from his brothers and sisters… it was inconceivable.

  But now it seemed she had done it to every seer fighting for their kind.

  That assumed she hadn’t just killed the rest of them outright.

  It was beyond betrayal, beyond injustice. It evoked something in him beyond anger, revenge, beyond even grief.

  It made him sick.

  “No,” he said, after that too-long pause. He refocused on Chu. “No. I saw no one, my brother. Not until a solitary, dimension-jumping being found me there… the one who brought me back. The other Dragon.”

  Simon’s eyes widened.

  “A dragon? Did you say a dragon brought you here?” Simon’s eyes widened a touch more. “Were you the one who set him on Black? In Hollywood?”

  Charles released his arms.

  He stepped back.

  He gauged what he saw in Chu’s face.

  “You have seen him.” He didn’t voice it as a question. “Where? Has the creature really attacked Black? I arrived back in this dimension only a few days ago…”

  Chu nodded vigorously, seer-fashion.

  A smile broke his round face. He looked oddly excited, like he’d just been given an amazing Christmas present.

  He waved Charles deeper into the dim corridor, past the rows of flickering, greenish lights set in dark-green, clearly-organic wall fixtures. Once Charles began to follow, Chu began walking more rapidly, backwards at first, then in a straight line, once Charles sped his pace enough to pull up alongside him.

  Chu led him towards a much brighter light, one that lived past a curve in the corridor maybe a hundred feet ahead.

  The technician began speaking in an excited voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “Honestly, we were afraid to view this as a positive development, at least without knowing more. It only just happened today… during an interview in a movie studio in Hollywood, of all things. Black’s wife appears to have rescued him in the end, jumping him out before he could be harmed… but they definitely did not kill the second Dragon. We managed to get image capture on the new being, both before and after the initial conflict. We have been working hard to identify him, both via Barrier imprints and scans on what we could feel of him in the time since… so obviously anything you could tell us that might help with that would be most welcome…”

  Charles nodded, gazing around as they approached the curve in the tunnel.

  Chu went on in a voice that now sounded more like an official report, like something he would have given Charles before he’d been taken.

  The sheer familiarity of the seer’s speech cadence, of his tone as he fell back into their normal dynamic, straightened Charles’ spine, squaring his shoulders, bringing back the seer he had been before Miri left him to die on that world.

  “…As you know, we initially had the organics programmed to take out vampires. We even had specific vamps ID’d to eliminate first. Miri’s friend Nick Tanaka, their vampire ‘king,’ Brick… a number of high-ranked fighters in Brick’s inner circle… his main henchman, the vampire known only as ‘Dorian,’ and so forth…”

  Exhaling, Chu went on in the same voice.

  “…We added most of Black’s inner circle to the program later. We’ve also recently refined a scaled, multi-scenario prioritization of that list, to aid the assets in choosing targets. That was the mistake we made on Hawaii. We gave them a list of primary targets without prioritizing. It confused their systems when confronted with multiple targets on the list at the same time. We believe we’ve fixed that glitch––”

  “Are there still vampires programmed for elimination?” Charles said.

  “Yes, sir. Absolutely. They are factored in as part of the prioritization, just like the seers. Black seems to have continued his alliance with the bloodsuckers, even after they crushed our leadership.”

  Charles winced, but Chu didn’t appear to notice.

  “…We don’t know if that is because of Nick Tanaka, with whom they seem to have reconciled… or if it has something to do with your other niece, the one the vampires turned not long after your brother was killed.”

  Chu gave him a faintly cautious look before adding,

  “We try to stay as up to date on those developments as we can, but our intelligence apparatus is much diminished, as you can probably imagine. We work with what we can get, and tweak the kill lists accordingly, where it seems relevant.”

  “Do we still have someone on the inside?”

&
nbsp; Chu nodded. “Yes. So far, neither of our primary infiltrators appear to have been ID’d.”

  Charles got distracted briefly as they entered that light at the end of the dim corridor, and he found himself in a high-ceilinged, cave-like room. He looked up at the rock walls, realizing the elevator had taken him down further than he’d realized.

  He gazed around at rows of machines, lab stations, watery containers filled with animals and parts of living beings, including heads, limbs and torsos of humans, seers, vampires…

  Applause broke out.

  Charles, flinched, looked down.

  Then he saw them.

  Every face he saw smiled at him, some beaming grins from across the room where they clapped their hands enthusiastically in his direction. The clapping grew louder, the longer he stood there. Charles saw tears in most of the eyes he met, and his own vision grew blurry again as he was moved to see and feel the real emotion there.

  And light… living light.

  It surrounded him again, the light of his people.

  A few let out whoops, and that spread too, until the rock walls echoed back what sounded like an enormous crowd, rather than the twenty or so scientists who’d somehow evaded capture from Miri and Black and their fucking vampires.

  For the first time in weeks… months… Charles felt hope.

  He felt hope, and with that came resolve.

  He wasn’t out of the game yet.

  The war wasn’t yet called.

  He could fix this.

  Thinking about the dragon being finding him, and bringing him back… thinking about the odds of that happening, in all the worlds and beings the dragon seer could have traveled to… a smile teased at his perfectly-formed lips.

  He would fix it.

  He would make this right again, if it was the last thing he did.

  He had, after all, always been Lucky.

  23

  The Morning Of

  “Are we really going forward with this?” I muttered the words under my breath, more to myself than to anyone I sat beside on the private plane. “We have to be insane… all of us…”

  Angel, who sat next to me, snorted.

  “Probably,” she said cheerfully.

  I was about to say more, when Panther, my dog, sat up.

  He’d been curled up on the seat on my other side. It was an aisle seat, so maybe not the best place for a dog, much less a long-limbed, gangly, half-grown, Irish wolfhound pup, but I figured he’d be okay there, since he’d made it his spot immediately, dragging up a blanket and then flopping down on top of it.

  Now he jerked out of his doze, clearly smelling something in the plane’s recycled air.

  Staring down the center aisle of the plane, ears perked, he let out a joyous, happy bark.

  He immediately began wagging his tail.

  From that bark alone, I knew who it was.

  I knew exactly who I’d see entering the plane, even before I turned my head, even though some part of me couldn’t quite believe it. He ghostly white face appeared from between the two blue curtains separating us from the flight attendant area and the cockpit.

  Several seers and humans on the plane audibly gasped.

  I watched Nick walk warily down the aisle, his eyes darting around like those of a stalking cat. I couldn’t help feeling nervous for him.

  I also couldn’t quite believe he was here.

  My eyes shifted to his seer boyfriend––who still sported a black eye from my husband’s over-zealous fist.

  I waited until they’d both reached our cluster of seats.

  “Are you suicidal?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Maybe,” Nick grunted.

  I watched him throw himself into a leather seat across from Angel’s, just like he would have done back when he was human. The difference was, thanks to his concrete-slab of a vampire body, the airplane seat groaned in pain, reacting poorly to the added pounds and general unwieldiness of his new physique.

  “You’re crashing my wedding?” I folded my arms, pretending to scowl at him.

  He lifted an eyebrow, unfazed.

  “Crashing?” He grunted. “I was invited.”

  “Seriously?” I folded my arms. “What idiot did that?”

  “That would be you,” Dalejem said from the aisle, quirking an eyebrow.

  “Oh,” I said, exhaling. “Right.” Looking back at Nick, I frowned. “Seriously though… I meant it about wanting you there, but I never thought you’d come in a million years, Nick. You said no way, as I recall. You laughed in my face.”

  Nick scowled, but didn’t really answer. Reaching for the sun shade on the oval window, he yanked it down, even though it was dark outside.

  I couldn’t help but be happy to see him, even if it was sheer madness for him to come.

  Maybe it had been a mistake for me to invite him.

  “It wasn’t just you,” Dalejem said, hearing me. “He knew you’d want him there.”

  That time, Jem didn’t mean Nick.

  Black. Black somehow talked Nick into coming.

  Black was behind this.

  Because of course he was.

  Looking out one of the oval windows at the darkness, I frowned back at Nick. I still couldn’t make up my mind how I felt about him risking his life just to see me get married. Particularly since the spectacle of this was primarily to get human media attention.

  “How will you even watch the wedding, given it’s happening in broad daylight?” I said, refolding my arms. “Doesn’t the sun equal vampire barbecue? Aren’t you supposed to burst into flames whenever it touches your delicate vampire skin?”

  I saw Nick wince.

  Thinking about my choice of words, I grimaced.

  I’d forgotten the fire in Thailand that led to Nick being turned into a vampire in the first place. The fire we left him in.

  Black and I.

  After the wince, Nick gazed at me levelly, his face expressionless.

  “You think I’d miss your ridiculously over-the-top fucking celebrity dream wedding in the New Mexican desert?” He looked at Angel. “Or Angel’s, for that matter?” He grunted as if that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “Dream on, Dr. Fox.”

  He still managed to look genuinely defensive.

  I saw him look around surreptitiously, scoping out the length of the cabin, noting all the eyes on us. His arms remained folded, his broad shoulders tense. From his expression, he had his doubts he’d even make it to the wedding.

  As I thought it, Nick looked back at me.

  After a bare pause, he leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees.

  “Honestly, I agree with you,” he said in a low voice. “This is probably suicide.”

  He glanced at Dalejem, who’d just finished stowing away their carry-on bags, and now set his backpack down on the cabin floor, right before he sank into the middle seat next to Nick. I saw Nick focus on Jem’s black eye, and scowl, like just seeing it there still angered him.

  He looked back at me, that frown still on his lips.

  “Black said we had to come,” he added, gruff. “He fucking insisted. He was kind of a dick about it, if you want the truth. He paid for Yumi and Hiroto to come, too.”

  Angel burst out in a laugh, but I saw her smiling at Nick fondly, shaking her head.

  Nick gave her a bare glance.

  I couldn’t help noticing his crystal-colored vampire eyes relaxed when he looked at Angel. They grew more guarded again when he looked at me.

  “He said you’d never forgive him if I didn’t show,” Nick added. “He said, ‘even if she won’t fucking admit it, she’ll hold that crap over my head forever’… and that he wasn’t ‘shouldering that shit,’ as he put it, during his damned honeymoon.”

  Angel chuckled again.

  Nick paused, as if waiting for me to refute or agree.

  “He really insisted you would want me there,” Nick said, clearly not satisfied with my non-response. “He insisted, Miri. I tried
to make excuses, but he wasn’t having it. I told him we’d never get there in time, that we’d have to drive since I couldn’t fly commercial… so he said we had to come this way… on his private plane with you and Angel… or he’d send his people to come ‘get’ me.”

  Dalejem grunted a laugh.

  Angel chuckled, too.

  Nick gave both of them faintly irritated looks, but his eyes never really left mine.

  When I didn’t answer him that time, either, he frowned, leaning back in his seat.

  He moved his hands out of the way a few seconds later, when my dog, Panther, jumped off the aisle seat next to me and ran over to him. The rapidly-growing puppy leapt into his lap and promptly began licking his face.

  I fought not to smile, keeping my expression stern.

  Nick ruffled Panther’s ears, scratching and rubbing his back and chest, all without looking away from me.

  I could almost see the question in his eyes.

  Thinking about that question, I shook my head.

  “I didn’t tell him to do that.”

  Nick looked somewhere between hurt and relieved. “Do you want me to leave? We should probably get off the plane now, if––”

  I let out a laugh. “Nice try, Tanaka. But no. You’re coming.”

  Nick looked at Angel, who was even more vehement than me.

  “You are definitely coming,” she informed him. “Don’t even think about trying to get off this plane, Nicky. You’ll wake up in a bathtub filled with garlic and holy water…”

  Dalejem laughed louder at that.

  Around the plane, heads turned, staring at us.

  They looked away a second later.

  Nick continued to scan seats as he stroked and scratched and petted Panther. His crystal eyes looked worried now, and more than a little nervous.

  It hit me suddenly who he was looking for.

  “Jax and Kiko are taking the other plane,” I informed him, my voice low. “Dex is already in New Mexico. He flew commercial, straight from Los Angeles.”