Black To Dust: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery (Quentin Black Mystery Book 7)

by JC Andrijeski

  Black winced again, but didn’t speak.

  “You should call her, Black.”

  Grimacing harder that time, he shook his head. “No,” he said. “She knows I’m all right. You talked to her, right? You called her back?”

  “She knows.” Manny aimed a look at him, stirring the cocoa into the milk. “You should call her anyway. You scared her, Black. She’s your wife. You owe her a damned phone call.”

  Black let out a humorless sound, shaking his head.

  “Trust me,” he said, low. “Talking to me wouldn’t make Miri feel better.”

  There was a silence, broken only by the sound of Manny stirring the cocoa.

  In that silence, Manny managed to exude pure disapproval.

  “So?” he said, after another few beats, still somehow conveying with his tone that he disagreed with every single thing Black had just said. “Are you going to tell me what that was out there? What happened? Or not?”

  Black frowned, shaking his head slightly, but not really in a no.

  “I honestly don’t know if there’s any way to explain it,” he said, exhaling. “Not in a way that would make any sense to you.”

  “You called it a door,” Manny said, giving him a sharper, sideways look, the metal of his spoon lightly scraping the bottom of the pan as he stirred. “Right before you went down, you said, ‘another damned door.’” He paused. “That meant something to your wife.”

  Black grimaced. “You told Miri that?”

  “I did.” Again, that sideways, disapproving look, laced with more than a small amount of wariness. “She freaked, Black. Forbade me or Red or anyone else from taking you up there again. She flat-out said she didn’t want you anywhere near the Rock. Said to tell you she’d take you out of here forcibly if you tried to go back on your own… and that you’d know she meant it, and how she’d do it.”

  Black grunted, grimacing. “Yeah. I do.”

  “What’s the door, Black?”

  Exhaling, Black rested his arms on the linoleum table, again feeling the weight of his exhaustion.

  He knew Manny. Manny wasn’t going to let this go.

  And really, why should he? This affected him. It wasn’t something Black could still pretend had nothing to do with Manny or his family, or why they’d called him up here in the first place. It had everything to do with them, especially now.

  Exhaling a second time, Black nodded, realizing he was just tired enough to tell his friend the truth. Maybe some part of him even greeted it as a relief to tell him.

  He looked back at the old man standing by the gas stove, stirring chili powder into a saucerful of hot chocolate.

  “You know I’m not human, right Manny?” he said.

  Manny looked over, sharp that time. “What?”

  “I’m not human,” Black said, holding up his hands. “I let the Colonel think I was, that I had some genetic anomalies… that I was some kind of mutation or aberration. But I’m not. I’m actually a separate species.”

  Manny didn’t answer at first. He continued to watch Black warily as he pulled two cups out of the cabinet over the stove, setting them on the counter.

  “A lot of what I told the Colonel is bullshit,” Black admitted. “It’s just a story I made up so I wouldn’t end up in a lab somewhere, being vivisected while I’m still alive. I’m not even from this world, Manny. Not this version of this world. I come from a different version of Earth altogether… one where people like me were everywhere.”

  Manny stared at him, his dark eyes holding a kind of guarded wariness that definitely wasn’t disbelief, much less an assumption Black had lost his marbles. Black could tell his friend was still listening to him, and guardedly accepting what he was saying.

  Moreover, that he was thinking about what he was saying.

  “Go on,” Manny said, back to stirring the chocolate.

  “People like me were enslaved there,” Black explained, sighing. “We were owned by humans for the most part… it’s complicated, and seers did a lot to manipulate the world of humans, too… but humans had ways of controlling us there. Collars. Drugs. They had a lot of cultural advantages at first. And of course, superior numbers.”

  He looked up at his friend, frowning.

  “My people had taken strict vows of nonviolence and non-coercion when humans first came upon us, during the early 1900s on that other Earth. That nonviolence was wrapped up in ancient religious beliefs, and something we called the ‘Seer Codes,’ which were a set of rules around how we could use our abilities, based on a broader philosophy of noninterference with other beings. It took a generation for that more benevolent philosophy to wear off… a generation where a hell of a lot of us were killed, enslaved, experimented on, collared, bought and sold. By the time the next generation grew up, and wised up, humans had already more or less wiped us out as an autonomous cultural and political power. We were completely dominated by them.”

  Manny winced, but didn’t nod.

  He just stood there, stirring and listening.

  “I came here in the fifties,” Black said. “It’s complicated. I can’t fully explain how I got here, or why. I can’t really explain why me, or why then. But there was a kind of… door.” Black frowned. “I always called it a door. It opened in that other world, and I ended up here.”

  Manny frowned, turning off the gas stove.

  Lifting the saucepan with its small spout, he poured the contents into first one mug, then the other. Setting the empty saucepan in the sink, he ran water over it, then shut the water off, picked up the two mugs, and walked over to Black.

  Setting one of the mugs down in front of him, Manny placed the other one on his side of the table and sat down in the chair behind it.

  “What were you doing, when you fell through that door?” Manny said. “Was it like here? A light storm, or whatever you called it?”

  Black shook his head, frowning.

  “No,” he said. “Truthfully? I was a terrorist. I was young… not much more than a teenager in seer years. I’d been recruited by an anti-human paramilitary group and we were trying to blow up Livermore Labs… the version of them that existed in my world, anyway.”

  “You had a Livermore Labs there, too?” Manny said, frowning.

  Black nodded. “There were differences, but yes.” Pausing, he shrugged, clasping the hot mug between his two hands. “There was a machine there. An experimental machine of some kind… with living components.” His voice grew harder. “…Seer components. The door opened when I went inside the machine.”

  Thinking about the voice he’d heard as he passed through that door, Black frowned.

  He shook it off a second later, meeting his friend’s gaze.

  “Look, I might be wrong about this being something like what brought me here,” Black said. “But there was a similar feeling there… something I remember from that.”

  Remembering what Miri told him about the lab results for the vampire’s clothes, he grimaced again, shaking his head as he lifted the mug of chocolate.

  “There’s something else, Mañuel,” he added grimly.

  Without mincing words, he told him everything Miri said to him from the Barrier while they’d been driving north to Ship Rock.

  Manny absorbed all of that, too.

  By the time Black finished speaking, his friend was frowning.

  “But you say there weren’t any vampires in that other world you came from?” the old man said. “You say you never came across vampires until you got here?”

  Black shook his head slowly. “There was definitely no significant population of vampires in that world. I’d bet a lot of money there wasn’t… any more than you have a secret race of seers here, at least not in any numbers. If there were vampires hiding out in that other version of Earth, they must have fallen through doors and stayed hidden, like I did.”

  “So Lucky Lucifer? He’s like you? From that same world?”

  Black nodded.

  “Yes. He got here before
me. By about twenty or thirty years, I think he said. He didn’t come through alone, though. Also, he has at least a few seers on his crew who got here even earlier than he did… so doors have opened here and there for at least the last one hundred years or so.” Black frowned sipping the chocolate. “As far as I know, he was the first to try and organize my kind down here, though.”

  Thinking about Miri’s uncle, Black grunted.

  “I didn’t know it then, but Charles mostly did that because of vampires. I figured he wasn’t crazy about the idea of humans doing to us here what happened back in that other world, and was trying to get the jump on all of that. I suspect that thought wasn’t totally absent from his mind, given my race’s history, but vampires were the real game-changer for him. He said he first came across them during the Vietnam war. I didn’t find out about them until about a year ago.”

  “Did you know him?” Manny said. “Charles. Lucky. Did you know him in that other place? Before you got here?”

  Black shook his head, glancing at his friend.

  “No.” He sighed. “No, I was young, as I said.”

  Frowning, he was still thinking when he added,

  “I suspect we might have had friends in common, though. Acquaintances at least. He was part of an anti-human group on Old Earth too. Maybe not the same one as I was… I’m not sure. That whole thing he has, with the dragon images, the triskeles, the other weird symbols… that’s all from Old Earth. I don’t remember the group I was in using that exact symbolism. They were religious too, but it had a different feel.”

  Manny nodded, his mouth pursed as he thought about Black’s words.

  “What about Miri? Your wife?”

  Black shook his head slowly, his mouth pursed.

  He glanced at his friend, trying to decide if he should tell him more about Miri, about what she was.

  “Miri’s different,” he said finally. “Miri was born here.”

  “Here? On this Earth? By two seers?”

  Black hesitated. Then, still watching his friend’s face, he inclined his head.

  “No,” he said. “One seer, one human.”

  Manny frowned. “But I thought you said before that your kind couldn’t reproduce with humans?”

  “We couldn’t on Old Earth.” Shrugging, Black held his friend’s gaze. “Apparently the humans are different here. There are other differences, too.”

  Manny’s frown deepened. “What kinds of differences?”

  Black sighed, blowing on the chocolate and taking another few sips.

  Damn, it was really good. Manny had a gift.

  Like the meals he’d been making for him the past few days, it really was almost like a seer drink, in terms of the subtle flavors and light frequencies woven into the taste.

  “It would take a while to get into all of it,” Black said. “But I’ve noticed things, even apart from what my lab guys tell me. More of you are psychic, for one thing… like Red. That was really rare on Old Earth. Almost unheard-of rare. Your light is different, which might explain how you can have children with seers. And it’s different for us here, too,” Black added, taking another sip of the chili and dark chocolate.

  “Our sight works differently here,” he said. “The Barrier, that space where we operate a lot of our seer abilities… it’s different. Lately I’ve wondered if some of that is because of the vampires living here, but truthfully, I think it’s more complicated than that.”

  Still thinking, Black shrugged, staring out the window at the dark.

  “As for Miri and her parents, it’s possible it was a fluke. I kind of doubt it, but it’s possible. Either way, you can probably see why I don’t want the Colonel knowing anything about my wife, or anything about her parentage.”

  “So she is native then?” Manny said, still frowning.

  “Half,” Black said. “Half seer, half Native American. Her mother was human.”

  Taking a sip of the chocolate, swallowing more of the warm, rich liquid and its sharp tang of spice, he swallowed, closing his eyes briefly in appreciation.

  “Like I said,” he continued. “There were no hybrids at all on Old Earth. Those flat-out didn’t exist where I’m from. It’s why those vampires were interested in her, too.” His mouth curled into a frown. “Motherfuckers wanted to see if they could turn her. They’d already tried with seers and killed all the ones they’d experimented on.”

  Manny grew silent.

  Lifting his mug, which was still steaming between his hands, he sipped the dark chocolate, staring out the window into the darkness, maybe unconsciously copying Black.

  “So these vampires,” Manny said after a beat. “The ones here, I mean. Wolf’s vampires.” His eyes returned to Black, but his furrowed brow and pursed lips showed him to be thinking still, still processing all of this. “You think the vampires out here are from some other world, is that right? Not the one you came from, but a different one altogether?”

  Black exhaled, then nodded, combing his fingers through his hair.

  “Yes,” he said simply, leaning back in the metal chair. “I do.”

  “Because of their clothes?”

  “Because of their clothes.” Black nodded, making a more or less gesture with one hand. “Because of where Wolf found them. Because of what that girl Birdy told Miri, about more of them showing up here all the time. Because the vampire in that jail cell spoke a language I’ve never heard before in my life… in either of our worlds… and part of being a seer is having a near-perfect memory. Because there was something different about them physically. Their teeth were different. Longer, more vein-y. There was something strange about their skin. They seem to be more sensitive to light––”

  Holding up a hand, Manny nodded, his brow still furrowed.

  “I get it,” he said, grim. “They’re different like the humans here are different.”

  Black nodded, once. “Yes.”

  “That means that door is already open,” Manny said.

  Leaning back in his own metal chair, he took another sip of the chocolate, surveying Black’s expression with a somber look.

  Black flinched a little at the question, then drank more of his chocolate, closing his eyes briefly as the semi-sweet and spicy liquid again warmed his throat.

  Turning over Manny’s words, he could only nod.

  “It means the door is already open,” he agreed, his voice grim.

  14

  INEVITABLE

  I GUESS I knew I intended to drive out there that night.

  I knew before I hung up with Black’s friend, Manny.

  I even told myself Manny told me to come.

  Some subconscious part of my mind was convinced that’s what his last words to me really meant––that his mention of where he kept the key to his front door meant that, along with him saying I was welcome any time.

  I told myself it was all a way of telling me that I needed to come that night, not wait for the morning.

  I didn’t tell Cowboy or Angel.

  I said I planned to get up early, to try and reach the Reservation as early as I could. I told them I’d take the SUV, so they might need one of Black’s other cars tomorrow.

  Technically, none of that was not true.

  When they went into the resort’s main restaurant, however, to get us a table on the patio, I visited the concierge desk and asked them to make sure the SUV would be ready for me that night, and that it had a full tank of gas.

  Over dinner, the three of us talked about the lab results, and what happened to Black and Manny out at Ship Rock. I told them just about everything Manny told me, almost word for word. I told them what Black said about it being a door.

  I wasn’t sure if I should tell them how Black first came to be on our Earth, or anything about Black’s past, really. Angel already knew he wasn’t from here, that he’d grown up on a different version of our world, in a different version of our history. She knew he’d been a slave in that other place, because we’d talked about that, and
how it affected Black’s personality and worldview even now.

  I wasn’t sure if he’d ever told her how he got here though, or if she’d ever had any thoughts about that. I knew the door comment was probably pretty meaningless to her without that, but in the end, I decided it wasn’t my story to tell.

  I had no idea what Cowboy knew and didn’t know about Black’s past.

  I knew he was aware Black was psychic.

  I knew Black told him that openly, unlike most of the humans he employed, even Dex and Kiko, who still might not know much about Black’s abilities in concrete terms.

  I was pretty sure Cowboy knew I was psychic, and similar to Black in that way.

  Cowboy definitely knew my uncle and most of his employees were psychic.

  He referred to my uncle and his people collectively as “the psychics” and seemed to know their differences extended further than merely their ability to read minds––and that Black, at least, was like them. Whatever theories he might have on the subject of seers and their relative differences with humans overall, however, he didn’t share with me.

  I knew he and Black were pretty tight––tighter than Black was with most of the humans he employed, maybe in part because of their shared experience in that prison. Because of that, I knew there was a good chance Black had confided a decent amount to him.

  Cowboy was pretty close-mouthed in general, though; he didn’t contribute anything specific to our conversation over dinner apart from questions.

  As we sat eating chimichangas, fish and beef tacos, chili relleno, and guacamole in that outdoor garden overlooking the second and larger of the resort’s two swimming pools, he asked me about the lab results, about the team that specifically went after Wolf in the cliffs southwest of Ship Rock, and what the cops knew about Wolf.

  I was able to answer most of his questions.

  After dinner, we all dropped the work-speak and returned to the room. Curling up on different parts of the massive sectional sofa, we watched an action movie.

  Angel and Cowboy fell asleep about three fourths of the way through.