That time, she let out a real laugh.
It still carried a hard enough edge that he flinched.
“Jesus Christ, you’re full of shit,” she said. “To call me up like this, when I specifically told you not to call me, and lay this guilt trip on me about your friend and his family, knowing full well I’m going to feel like crap if I don’t help now. Especially if there’s any chance in hell he, his children or grandchildren are more likely to be hurt if I don’t help. You want me to feel responsible for more deaths of children on the rez… my people… gods.”
“That’s not what I––”
But she barely seemed to hear him.
“This is really fucking low, Black. This is a whole new category of low––”
“They didn’t tell me,” Black growled. “I’m telling you, they didn’t fucking tell me, Miri. Call Nick, for fuck’s sake! Ask him! He’s the one who sent me out here. He said it was some kind of serial killer problem they were having––”
“Oh, that makes it so much better––”
He cut her off, speaking fast, before she could remind him of the last serial killer case they’d worked on together.
“Miriam! Gaos… just come. I need you. I’m serious about that. Please. Come to Santa Fe. I won’t fucking go near you if you don’t want me to. You can work with me through Red. You can coordinate with the Santa Fe branch of the F.B.I.. You can talk to Manny and Red and Red’s wife, and not come near me at all. If we get ahold of another of these things, we’ll bring it to you to interview. In Santa Fe, all right? Safely,” he added. “I swear to the gods, Miri, I’ll make sure the fucking thing is restrained properly next time.”
“Next time,” she grunted.
“I don’t know what you want me to say––”
“Are you going to let them bite you this time, Black?” she said, her voice colder. “You know, to gather intel? To question it more effectively? After all, maybe that’ll be the only thing that lets you get a read on what’s so ‘different’ about these vampires. Maybe that’s the real reason you can’t just walk away, or let my uncle handle it.”
Her voice grew colder still.
“It’s been a while,” she said. “You must be jonesing for that high about now. Maybe the vampires there on the rez will like you as much as the ones in New York did, Black. I’m sure if you think real hard, you can come up with a reason to let them. Can’t you?”
Black’s jaw hardened enough to hurt.
The screen door opened with a screech behind him and he turned.
Seeing Manny standing there, he fought to control his light, or at least his facial expression. The old man held out a beer to him, and Black took it, giving him a nod in thanks. Manny had already popped the cap off it, so Black tilted his head back, taking a long drink.
Manny disappeared back into the house, shutting the screen door behind him.
“I’m sorry, Black.”
Her voice was quieter that time.
He shook his head, taking another long drink of the beer.
“I deserve it,” he said.
“You do deserve it.” Emotion reached her voice that time, enough that it brought a sharp ribbon of pain to his light, cutting his breath. “I wish I could believe a damned word you say. I wish I didn’t have to feel you through this damned phone, trying to convince me you really, really mean it this time. I wish I didn’t want to believe you.”
He felt her hold herself back from saying more, biting her lip as she tried to control her light, just like he had, seconds before. Just feeling that much off her was enough to worsen his separation pain to unbearable.
“Please come, Miri,” he said, low. “I’ll leave you alone.”
She laughed. “No. You won’t.”
“So you won’t come?”
“I didn’t fucking say that! I didn’t say that, Black… did I?”
He didn’t answer, but took another long drink off the beer. He was more than halfway done with the bottle already.
“I’m in Hawaii, you know,” she said.
Then, before he could answer, she let out a humorless laugh.
“…of course you know. You’ve probably got satellites tracking me this very minute. I’m sure you’ve had your goons following me all this time, to make sure I don’t, I don’t know, spontaneously explode or something.”
“There are a lot of vampires out there still,” he said, cautious. “Word will have spread about who I am, who you are. You can’t expect me to let you go off without––”
“God forbid you ask me, Black. Or even inform me.”
He started to answer that, too, then thought better of it. He took another drink instead, clenching his jaw as he looked out over the desert.
His pain was bad enough now that his eyes stung.
He wrapped an arm around his gut, trying to breathe through it.
“I wanted to come here with you,” she said, her voice openly angry now. “I wanted you and me to come here, after all that bullshit in New York. I wanted to get away from all this… all this shit, Black. I wanted you to get away from it. Once you put that psychopath away.”
His pain worsened more, but he still wasn’t sure if she wanted him to speak, so he didn’t.
“What a fool I am,” she said. “What a fucking idiot you married, Black.”
He bit his lip, shaking his head.
If she felt it, there was no indication in her voice.
“Gods above, I’m stupid. I made it so easy for you, didn’t I? I saw the fucking bites on you. I saw them, and I didn’t do anything. There you were, feeding me bullshit stories about sword fighting injuries and late night planning sessions with Cowboy and you were off doing… whatever… to that son of a bitch while he fed off you.”
Disgust reached her voice, but also pain.
He felt the pain a lot more than the disgust, but both made him wince.
He could tell she was crying now, and that pain in his chest grew unbearable.
“Miri––”
“Don’t,” she snapped. “Just… don’t, Black.”
There was another long silence.
He felt her emotions roil as she stared out at whatever view she looked at from where she was. He had to remind himself it was probably still daytime where she was, or maybe it was just early evening, either right before or right after the sun had gone down. She might see a few stars over the private beach at his property by now, or maybe she’d gone to town.
Maybe she was sitting at one of the resort beaches right now, near a tiki torch bar and restaurant on the sand, to eat dinner or just have a drink around other islanders and tourists.
He could definitely feel her outside, not inside.
He pictured her in a dress––white maybe, or light blue––her long brown legs splayed under a barstool or on a beach chair overlooking the ocean, her bare toes squishing in the sand. He pictured her looking at the last vestiges of a gorgeous sunset over the ocean, fuming at him.
Every human in the fucking place was probably looking at her.
“Can I come there?” he said finally. “Now, I mean. Can I come to you, Miri?”
“No.”
He felt her emotions spike higher, even as confusion swam through her light.
“…No, Black. Absolutely not.”
For a moment, he felt her confusion worsen, along with her frustration, her indecision. He held his breath as he felt her go back and forth, between emotions, between decisions, between things she wanted to say.
In the end, she exhaled, her voice angry.
“I’ll be on a flight in the morning,” she said.
Pain hit at his chest, along with a relief so intense, it had to be organic in part, since it slammed into his light before his mind had fully wrapped around what she’d said.
“Gaos. Thank you, Miri. Thank you, I––”
But the phone was already dead.
She’d finally hung up.
5
WOLF
&n
bsp; “SHE COMING, THEN?” Manny said, raising his still-full beer to his lips.
He watched Black shrewdly, his eyes holding a scrutiny on the surface. His dark eyes followed Black as he walked his empty beer bottle into Manny’s small, old-fashioned kitchen, casting around until he found a trash bin behind a cloth curtain under the sink.
He emerged from the kitchen seconds later, a new bottle of beer he’d plucked from the fridge clutched in one hand.
Manny frowned, watching his face.
“You look ill, brother. You all right?” He paused. “That thing didn’t bite you, did it?”
Black returned to the same reclining chair by the adobe fireplace where he’d sat before. Collapsing into the chair, he winced at the pain still coiling through his light, trying not to notice Manny watching him. Still struggling to get the pain and his light under control, he glanced at his arms, which were bruised from the vampire gripping them.
“No bites,” he said finally. “I never did get that shower, though.”
“No problem. I’ve got clothes that might fit you, too. Might,” he added with a smile. “I notice you’ve kept your weight up over the years.” He held up his own skinnier arms. “Unlike some of us,” he added ruefully.
Black shrugged, taking a shorter drink than what he’d been doing on the porch, his eyes returning to the fire. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so tired. He was rubbing his eyes when Manny spoke up again.
“You should talk about it, Black,” he advised. “That’s what old men are good for.”
Black glanced at his friend, grunting in spite of himself.
“Oldest story in the world, Mañuelito,” he said, resettling into the recliner and taking another pull off the beer bottle. He closed his eyes briefly, then went back to staring at the fire with a frown. “I’m a shitty husband.”
“You cheat on her?”
There was a silence.
Then Black turned, giving Manny a hard stare. “Excuse me?”
Manny held his gaze unflinchingly, his eyes once more aiming that denser scrutiny at him. “No offense meant, brother. As I recall, you were fairly indiscriminate in your appetites, back in our rough and tumble days––”
“I wasn’t fucking married then,” Black cut in, staring at the other male. His voice verged on hostile, even as he once more fought the pain in his light. “You’ve never known me in a relationship, Manny… any kind of relationship. Don’t assume you know anything about how I am in this.”
Manny grunted, leaning back in his own seat.
“True,” he conceded. “But do you know how you are in a relationship, Black?”
When Black turned, giving him an annoyed, incredulous look, Manny smiled, even if that harder edge never left his dark eyes. Leaning forward so that his elbows rested on his thighs, he continued to study Black’s face openly.
“How many relationships you been in, Black? Before this one?”
Black frowned. “Before this one? Why?”
“How many?”
Black exhaled, leaning back deeper in the cowhide chair. Frowning up at the ceiling, he slowly shook his head.
“Why are you asking me questions you already know the answer to, brother?”
“You reading me, brother?”
“Not intentionally.” Black lowered his gaze to scowl at the other man. “But yes.”
“So this is your first relationship? The very first?”
Black aimed another angry look in his direction. “Jesus Christ, Manny. Give it a rest, will you? What is this obsession you have with my marriage?”
“Is it? Your first relationship, Black?”
“Define relationship. Then I’ll tell you.” When the other man chuckled openly, Black swallowed another mouthful of beer, adding sourly,
“On second thought, don’t fucking define it. And no… I won’t tell you, because it’s none of your business, Mañuelito. Oh, and incidentally? Fuck off.”
When the other man only laughed harder, Black fought to keep his sense of humor and mostly failed. It didn’t help that the pain in his light seemed to be worsening since he got off the phone with Miri. He rubbed his chest unconsciously, still staring at the fire with a grimace.
“Really,” Manny frowned. “What’s wrong with you? You don’t look right. You seemed fine at the station. You seemed fine until you talked to your wife.”
Black gave him a hard look. “Can we talk about something else?”
Manny just returned his gaze, his expression unmoving until Black looked away. Then the old man sighed, leaning back on the couch and throwing an arm over the back of it.
“Fine,” he said. “Vampires. Can we talk about that?” He paused, then said, “You clearly have some kind of issue with them. Something that mightily displeases your wife.”
Black grunted, looking over from the fire.
“You are a piece of work, Mañuel,” he said, clicking under his breath. Glancing at the old man, he frowned. “Were you always this much of a dick? My memory must be going. I recalled you being the nice one in our unit. Well, you and Lawless.”
Undaunted by real annoyance in Black’s death stare, Manny observed, “There’s something about our vampires here that bothers you. You think they’re different.”
Black didn’t answer that for a moment, either.
Then, shaking his head as another flood of annoyance hit his light, he let out a grunt, lifting the bottle to take a slightly longer drink of beer.
“I already said that,” he said, lowering the bottle down to his thigh. “At the station.”
“You didn’t say all of it,” Manny said. “Is it really about the clothes it was wearing? Or was it different in some other way? From other vampires you’ve encountered, that is.”
Black opened his mouth, about to answer––
When a series of howls erupted outside of the house.
Long, mournful, wolf-like howls, they surrounded the one story dwelling, causing him and Manny to freeze, looking at one another across the floor rug with frowns on their faces. The howling grew louder as they sat there, growing into a chorus. Black’s ears and mind picked out at least two dozen separate voices in whatever pack was circling Manny’s home.
“Those aren’t wolves,” Manny said, rising abruptly to his feet.
Black was already stretching out his light.
He felt nothing outside the house.
Nothing.
A blank, lifeless void lived there, devoid of any hint of living light, what seers called aleimic light. Not only did he not feel wolves, he didn’t feel insects, birds, bats, even the old, twisted piñon tree he’d seen planted in the red dirt on the side of Manny’s house.
He followed Manny, rising so quickly he gave himself a brief head rush.
“Don’t open the door,” he warned.
He spoke quietly, placing his beer on the low table before he walked fast to catch up with his friend. Black stepped in front of him, putting himself between the old man and the front door, standing in the small linoleum foyer.
He held out a hand, cautioning Manny to stay back.
“Is anyone else in the house?”
“No. Red and Elsie took Mai home after they dropped us off here.”
Obeying Black’s hand signals, Manny was hanging back now, watching Black warily as he approached the front window to the right of the door. Black was careful to stay behind the wall, to not walk in front of the frame, despite the heavy curtains covering the glass.
“What about Red?” Black said. “Elsie? They stay at home when they took Mai home?”
“They were going back to the station––”
“Call them. Now. Tell them not to go outside.”
Manny immediately pulled out a smart phone, swiping the glass front with a finger and going into his contacts before hitting a number. He had the phone to his ear as he moved behind Black, a few yards further from the door than the seer.
“You feel anything?” he said.
B
lack gave him a grim look. “Not a damned thing.”
Without bothering to elaborate, he took two more steps, bringing himself to the very edge of the window. Reaching up carefully, he pushed aside the heavy curtain with his fingers, just enough to see through to the front porch.
Once he had, he frowned.
A man stood there.
That man looked human to Black, not vampire.
For one thing, his eyes were all wrong for a vampire. Black knew that because he could see him reasonably well, now that the moon had risen.
That wasn’t really the weird part, though.
The man stood smack in the middle of six actual, living gray wolves, all of them a healthy size. Behind him and the wolves stood a number of other, human-like forms, all of them wearing heavy black clothes. Those clothes were foreign-looking, off-looking, wrong-looking. They all wore round-brimmed, bolero-like hats and leather gloves.
“What the actual fuck…?” Black muttered.
His eyes returned to the human standing in the center with his wolves.
The human wore a hat too, similar to the ones the vampires wore, but more local-looking somehow, and less out of place. It was a lighter color––brown instead of black––and sat high on his head over a dark red headscarf that tied to one side of his head.
Below that, he wore a dark red shirt with no collar that looked to be made of thick cotton. An elaborate turquoise necklace hung to about his sternum, and an equally elaborate silver belt with sunburst-type designs rested easily on slim hips over dusty blue jeans.
Two side-thigh holsters held impressively large guns that were probably antiques.
The man’s thick hair hung straight and black to just above his shoulders, and he had a decidedly Native American-looking face.
To Black, he looked like he was maybe in his early thirties.
The clothes looked like traditional garb, despite their simplicity. Despite a few superficial similarities, like the hat, he looked nothing like the vampires in their weirdly Victorian clothing and their black gloves and coats.
Black frowned, then glanced over his shoulder at Manny.
After a bare hesitation, he motioned with his head for his friend to join him.
Black To Dust: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery (Quentin Black Mystery Book 7) Page 8