Forcing his eyes off the volcanic rock formation, he looked back towards the Jeep, looking for Manny and Red. He didn’t realize until then that he wasn’t vertical any more.
He was on the ground, on his hands and knees.
He looked down at the red rock under him, and saw something, a red stain.
Touching his forehead, he winced, pulling his fingers down to his eyes.
They were stained with blood, just like the rock.
Hands grabbed his arms, and he fought to work his legs, to bring himself back up to vertical. After what felt like a long period of silence and breathing, his light entwined with that of two presences he knew.
He felt them wanting him back on his feet, but that struck Black as irrelevant.
“We have to find out what it is!” he said, feeling like he was shouting down a tunnel. “How do we get under this thing?”
He turned, and found himself facing Red, who held his arm on one side.
The other man’s lips were moving, but Black squinted, unable to hear anything.
“Louder!” he said. “Talk louder!”
Red’s mouth opened wider, his chest straining as he shouted back.
From a long way away, Black heard his words.
“Under what? What thing?”
Black frowned, pointing at the Rock.
“Under that!” he shouted. “We have to get under that!”
Red stared at him, his dark eyes slightly wider. Looking past him, at the man crouched on the other side of Black, he returned his gaze to Black’s an instant later.
“Is that where it is?” Red shouted.
Black could barely hear him, but he nodded. “Yes.”
“Where? Do you know where the entrance is? How do we get down there?”
Again, his voice sounded far away, like it was coming through a wind tunnel.
Thinking about his question, Black tried to answer it. Frowning, he stared up at the sky, at the hole in the vortex, rotating over them like a cosmic storm. He glimpsed blue sky through the opening in the gold, red and orange clouds.
“There’s a door,” he managed. “A metal door. It’s old. North of here.”
When he glanced at Red, he saw a sharpness in his eyes, a focused attention.
“Can you tell me anything else?” Red shouted. “How far north?”
Black frowned. Once again, his vision slanted out.
When he could see again, he shook his his head.
“Black rock,” he said. “Lava flow. I don’t know what that means.”
When he looked at Red, however, he saw triumph in the other man’s eyes. Red nodded, still gripping Black’s bicep in his hand.
“It’s okay,” Red shouted. “I understand.”
Black found he didn’t like the expression on the other man’s face as he said it.
He didn’t like it at all.
He shouted, “Can you take me there? Red? Take me there now.”
Red stared at him, visibly startled.
He shook his head then, adamant.
“Why not?” Black said.
Again, that faint, distant shout, through a pane of warped glass.
“…Not possible!” Black heard from a distance. “We have to get you out of here!”
Black shook his head. He fought to crawl forward, dragging the other two with him. He considered twisting free, then realized he would never make it on his own. He would only end up on the ground again, his head bleeding more.
Then he realized that was exactly where he needed to go.
He needed to go into the ground.
Making a snap decision, he partitioned his light a fourth time, plunging that part of himself into the ground, towards the origination point of that vortex.
He just wanted to look at it, he told himself.
He just wanted to see it.
For a long moment, he swam through light. That light grew brighter, the deeper that part of him descended into the volcanic rock. Buffeted by high winds, by clouds of red, gold, a dark orange… sunset colors, his mind told him… he fought to see what lay beyond it.
He found the center.
He found the center of the storm.
An opening stood there…
Washed out with light, a jagged fissure pulsed with the heat from a thousand suns. It shimmered with so much light, it hurt to look at it.
Black knew what it was.
He knew what it was…
He stared at it, even as he felt some part of himself start to disappear.
He stared at it, lost in that light, lost in the familiarity.
Fear came––maybe more fear than he’d ever felt in his life. More fear than he could think past, than he could structure rational thought around. He felt himself losing control of his light as he stared into that chasm. He felt more of himself being pulled down into that… that…
Door.
He was being pulled into that fucking door.
Another goddamned door.
The fear in him worsened, turning into a harder, more terrified panic.
He thought of Miri.
He could see her then. He saw her face, her gorgeous eyes behind his.
Miri, gaos. Miri… please. Please forgive me, Miri… please… forgive me…
The pull in that light strengthened, uncoupling him from his body. Feeling himself lose the last whispers of his control, his panic turned into full-blown terror.
MIRI! MIRI! HELP ME! I DON’T WANT TO GO! MIRI!
He reached for her in sheer desperation, trying to find her in all of that light.
He screamed her name, couldn’t stop screaming it. He called for her with every ounce of his being, screaming her name into that light, into the endless night he could feel beyond it.
He screamed for her.
She never answered.
She never fucking answered him, even now.
Then everything flashed white…
…and he was gone.
12
NOT ENOUGH
I HELD THE phone to my ear, trembling, biting my lip.
I tasted blood. I knew I was biting my lip too hard but I barely noticed, staring sightlessly out the window of the conference room where I’d gone to make the call.
I paced by that same window, fighting to control my mind, fighting to breathe.
No one picked up.
I stared down at the piece of paper where Detective Rodriguez had scrawled a list of numbers for me.
I knew they thought I’d lost my mind, babbling about how I needed to get in touch with Natani and his people right away, that I needed the number to any sat-phones the Navajo Nation or B.I.A. might be using, any numbers they might have with working cellphone towers.
I’d called Lizbeth after I’d tried all of those numbers and failed.
I called Nick.
I’d gotten every number Nick had for Red, for Manny, for anyone who might be with Black. From Lizbeth I’d gotten the number to pretty much every cell and sat-phone Black had used in the past five years. I was still tempted to call her back, to ask for phone numbers going back even further. I’d called Dex and Kiko, asking them to look up his RIFD chip’s location.
They told me what I already knew.
He was in the New Mexico desert. He was close to Ship Rock, close to where I could see that Barrier maelstrom rotating over a dot on a map I strongly suspected was Ship Rock itself.
They couldn’t reach him either.
They couldn’t tell me anything I wanted to know either.
I asked them to aim the satellites at his location, and I think they thought I’d lost my mind for real. They explained they didn’t have any satellites in the right location and I hung up on them. I called my uncle next, but even he couldn’t help me.
He saw the same thing I saw over the New Mexico desert.
He told me other spots like that had gone active all over the world, just in the last handful of days, but that the one in New Mexico was flaring at about ten, maybe twe
nty times the intensity of any of the others.
The only real, concrete answers I’d gotten were from Natani’s scouts.
They were the same group Black told me had peeled off from him, Red and Manny to attempt to track Wolf across a cluster of bluffs southwest of Ship Rock. They had no way to get in touch with Red, apart from the numbers I already had. They told me their cell phones should work out there, though. They said a tower lived near enough for the phones to work, that they must have left them in the Jeep while they were out looking over the site.
They told me to keep trying to call.
The man I talked to had a deep, calming voice.
He sounded older. He definitely seemed to pick up on my panic.
He talked to me the way one might talk to a wild animal that needed calming down. He tried to soothe me with his words, with his tone of voice, even with his light, although I don’t know how conscious that last part was. He told me to wait an hour, then try again.
He said if I still got nothing, wait another hour, and try again.
He said there was nothing to worry about, not unless it started getting dark. If I still couldn’t reach anyone in Black and Manny’s crew and it was getting dark, then I should call the tracker back and they’d go get them.
He reminded me they weren’t far from the highway out there, by Ship Rock.
He assured me Red knew that, and Manny knew that.
He told me they weren’t trapped. He said they wouldn’t have to drive across the desert, where Wolf and his people might ambush them.
I fought to hear his words.
I fought to make myself believe them.
I kicked myself for not telling Black what I’d seen in the Barrier. I kicked myself for not warning him, for not saying a damned thing to him. I’d been so flustered even talking to him. Anyway, he always saw so much more than I did, and I hadn’t wanted to hear him lie to me. I hadn’t wanted him to tell me it was nothing, that I was overreacting.
I hung up on what had to be my tenth attempt to reach the phone Lizbeth said she had registered for Black on this trip. Holding the phone to my chest, I stared at the list of names on the table, reading each of them until the numbers and names blurred.
I’d called each one of them at least five times now.
I tried to decide which one to try next.
I was still staring, seeing nothing, when the phone rang against my chest.
I swiped the screen, snatching the phone up to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Miriam?” a familiar voice said. “Mrs. Black? Is that you?”
“Yes!” I practically shouted at him. “Manny? Where are you? Where’s Black?”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Black. It’s okay. He’s fine… he’s with us. We’ve got him here with us and he seems to be totally fine now.”
“Now?” I bit my lip harder, closing my eyes against the hole that hadn’t yet closed in my chest. “He’s totally fine now?” I fought to control my voice and failed. “Where the fuck are you? Where is he? What do you mean, he’s fine ‘now’? What happened to him? Why weren’t you answering your phones?”
There was a silence.
I could almost see Manny’s startled look at Red, maybe at Black himself.
“Mrs. Black…”
“Don’t Mrs. Black me! What the fuck happened?”
Manny hesitated, but I felt him resolve himself, even as he flinched back from the light and intensity behind my voice.
“He passed out,” Manny said, blunt. “He warned us he might, that we should just put him in the Jeep and drive him away from the Rock if it happened… so that’s what we did.”
“Is he awake now?” I said, still fighting not to snap at him.
“More or less. Maybe more less than more on the awake front… but he’s better.”
“Better? What does that mean? Can I talk to him?”
“He’s groggy,” Manny admitted. “I wouldn’t think you could talk to him just yet, but we’ll have him call you when we get closer to the settlement.”
At my silence, he sighed, and I could hear wind and dust through the phone’s receiver, enough that they must be driving relatively fast and not on the highway.
“He’s not fully conscious, Mrs. Black,” he said then, still seeming to be struggling with both reassuring me and not sugarcoating the truth. “But he’s clearly here with us again, enough that he’s responding to light and sound.”
I noticed for the first time his voice was shaking slightly.
“We were worried by Ship Rock,” he added. “I don’t mind telling you now, he scared the hell out of me. He went down like a stone. We couldn’t get him to respond at all. His pupils are responding to light now, and he seems to be recovering the further we get from the site. We’ll get some water and food in him as soon as we can.”
I nodded, back to biting my lip.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, that will help.”
“Do you know what happened to him, Miriam?” Manny said next. “He said something about psychic energy, some kind of ‘storm’ of light. Red could feel it a bit, too, and it made me dizzy, but I couldn’t see anything like either of them––”
“A storm of light.” I nodded, gazing out the window again. “Yes. That’s right. That’s what it is. A storm of light.”
I felt Manny nod, without really understanding it still.
“He said something else,” he volunteered. “Right before he went down the last time, he said something. Red and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it that time––”
“What did he say?”
Manny exhaled into the phone, which was still being buffeted by wind.
“He said, ‘Another damned door.’” He paused. “Do you know what that means?”
I bit my lip hard enough that I winced.
Pressing my clenched fist against my chest, I gazed out at the view of the desert through the conference room window. I could see dark gray storm clouds on the horizon now, heavy with rain.
“I don’t want him going out there again,” I said, still staring at the clouds. “I mean it, Manny. If you and Red need to go, then go––but don’t you dare take him with you. I don’t want him going anywhere near that fucking place, not while this storm is happening. I don’t give a damn what he says. Tell him if he tries it, I’m having him forcibly removed from New Mexico.” I clenched my jaw. “Tell him it’s not an idle threat. He’ll know what I mean.”
There was a silence after I spoke.
Then Manny surprised me, letting out a low chuckle.
It got lost somewhat in the sound of the wind, but I distinctly heard it.
“Understood, ma’am,” the old man said then, his voice warm. “I really hope to meet you in person one day, Mrs. Black.”
Still pressing my fist against my chest, I made up my mind.
“How about tomorrow?” I said, my voice short. “How about I drive myself up there tomorrow? That way you don’t need the school bus. You don’t need to send the kids to Santa Fe. I’ll go and talk to them there.”
Manny fell silent.
I could feel he was struggling with something again. It occurred to me he was reacting to something Black told him.
I found I understood that, too.
Black told him he didn’t want me coming there. He’d told Manny he didn’t want me doing the exact thing I was telling Manny I wanted to do.
I was about to reiterate my intention, when Manny spoke up again.
“Come anytime, Mrs. Black.” His voice was firm, decisive. “I’ll text you the address and the easiest way to get out here by four-wheel-drive when I hang up. I’ll leave your name with the Nation police, so just bring your ID. Spare key’s under the fossil stone to the right of the front door. Come anytime. You are family here.”
Hearing the deeper meaning behind his words, I nodded to myself.
Forcing a sigh, I nodded again.
“I’ll see you in the morning, Mr. Azure.”
I MADE
IT back to the hotel by three, Angel’s deadline––barely.
Honestly, I’d nearly forgotten everything that happened that morning, or the night before.
By the time I got off the phone with Manny, I felt like I’d been wrung out.
Hearing Black screaming in my mind, not being able to reach him for almost an hour, Manny’s description of Black going down, his muttered words before he hit the packed dirt at the base of Ship Rock, his description of a “light storm” and “another damned door,” my uncle’s warnings to stay away from the eye of that storm until his people could look into it more––all of it left me spent, exhausted, unable to think.
I left the police station in a kind of a trance.
It didn’t help that I still felt too much light around me, even now.
It tugged at my aleimic body, trying to draw it out of my physical one. It confused me, flooding my mind’s eye with light, with presences I knew and didn’t know, with more information than my mind could consciously process.
I called Charles back after I spoke to Manny.
He said he had a few of his people monitoring the storms around the globe full-time now. He also said the light phenomenon seemed to be surging then lessening, then surging again, like a kind of pulsing, beating heart, and that the symptoms would come and go accordingly.
When I asked him how long it would last, he said he had no idea.
When I asked him when it started exactly, he couldn’t really answer that, either.
Pushing my conversation with Charles from my mind, too, I climbed into the SUV and started the engine, leaving the parking lot and retracing my steps back towards Old Town and the hotel. I pulled up to the front, where a valet waited to take the key fob from me, at just about two forty-five.
By the time I got back to the suite, Angel looked both relieved and anxious.
I didn’t have to read her to know she’d been talking to Nick.
From the way her light felt, she’d also been wondering if she and Cowboy should go looking for me.
So mostly, I felt her relief when I first walked back into the suite.
A few seconds later, I also felt her worry when she saw how I looked.
I felt a flicker of her irritation too, but that felt mostly wound into the worry and relief and whatever else, like a come-down off a decent amount of pacing and adrenaline and worrying and trying to decide what to do about me.
Black To Dust: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery (Quentin Black Mystery Book 7) Page 17