“I need Black here,” Manny said, his voice reflecting his annoyance. “Both of them. I need Black and Miriam here, Lucky.”
I turned to find him glaring at Charles, squinting up at him in the noonday sun.
“I hired him, damn it,” the old man snapped. “He’s here on my request… and I have work for him here.” Pausing, he motioned towards Red. “My son’s got trackers who can take you to that bluff. Same damned people who were up there yesterday. They know the land. They know it like their own children. Black can’t help you with that. If Vietnam is any indication, Black gets lost inside a paper bag.”
“That was one time,” Black muttered. “One damned time. And I was drunk.”
“So you say.” Manny shot him a look. “Shut up, anyway. Why’re you arguing with me?”
I snorted a laugh. I couldn’t help it.
When I glanced at Charles, he wasn’t laughing though.
He was staring at Manny like Black’s friend was a child who’d spoken out of turn.
He clearly didn’t appreciate a human butting into the conversation. Then again, I’m not sure the anger he leveled at Manny was much different than his anger with me and Black not going along with his demands, so maybe race didn’t have much to do with it.
It still reminded me how I’d heard Charles speak about humans in the past.
I motioned at Manny, my voice and expression deadpan.
“There you have it,” I said. “Problem solved. Detective Natani and his people can take you up there. Along with the rest of the B.I.A. and Navajo police. You don’t need us.”
My uncle continued to stare at me.
He didn’t look at Black at all that time.
I felt him measuring me on some level, maybe trying to decide what my defiance meant. For the faintest breath, I felt him blaming Black for that, too.
In the end, he seemed to concede defeat––for now.
Exhaling in obvious irritation, he took something from around his ear, a smooth coil of dark green material that glinted like metal. I hadn’t even noticed it until he removed it.
Stepping forward, he handed it to Black, who took it from him with a frown.
“Keep the channel open, if you would,” Charles said, his voice stiff. “Channel 6.2. We might need your counsel once we get up there.” He gave me a harder look. “Remotely, as Miriam said. Since clearly she’s the one making the decisions at the moment.”
If that was meant to be a crack, Black didn’t react.
He just nodded, once.
Charles gave me a last look before he walked away, motioning a series of hand-signals to the seers clustered in rows just outside the range of the helicopters. I watched as they all walked towards him, and then up the path, closer to Manny’s house and the entrance to his driveway.
Red gave me, Manny and Black grim looks, then turned to follow them, presumably to help arrange for transport to the bluffs and to Ship Rock, and provide them with trackers. The middle-aged woman I’d pegged as Manny’s daughter went with him.
Briefly, I caught her aim a stare at me, as if noticing me in a real way for the first time, and trying to get a sense of who I was. The scrutiny was there and gone, but for the briefest instant, it felt almost like she was scanning me, like a seer would.
I scanned her in return, almost in reflex.
I didn’t feel anything specific about me when I did, apart from mild puzzlement, but I did pick up that she liked Charles even less than her husband did––or her father. In fact, the brief whisper of hatred I felt off her light made me wince, in surprise as much as anything.
Manny left more or less when they did, but he peeled off from the group and passed them once he got to the path leading back towards his house.
Only when they were all out of earshot did Black turn to me.
“You want me along for those interviews today, doc?” he said.
Looking at him, I realized he was more asking if he could come than asking if I wanted him there. I smiled, wrapping my arm around his waist.
“Yes,” I said.
I felt a hard pulse of heat rise briefly in his light.
He brought it immediately under control, but when my light flared in reaction I couldn’t help frowning at how hair-trigger both of us were. As condescending as he was about it, my uncle wasn’t exactly wrong about me and Black. The Barrier storm might have worsened that off-balance feeling, but it still felt like most of it had to do with the separation.
I knew some of that was time; it had only been a few hours.
I still found myself looking at him a lot––reconciling myself to him in some way. I don’t know how to explain that exactly, other to say that, in some ways, he felt like a stranger to me again. Or maybe I just remembered how little I knew him in some ways still. I could feel him looking at me with new eyes, too, so that may have been part of it.
I was still looking at him when he leaned closer.
Lowering his mouth, he kissed me, tugging me deeper against him.
His light opened when I kissed him back, and both of us lost ourselves there, for what felt like a few long minutes––minutes where everything else vanished.
Then the ground moved under my feet.
I let out a gasp, pulling away from Black.
The ground continued jerking, moving in rippled waves as I stared down at the red soil.
Black gripped me tighter, keeping both of us on our feet. Frowning, he looked around at the red earth and rock as the jerking, rolling motion slowly began to fade.
Manny appeared at the back porch of his house.
“Earthquake?” he called out, drawing me and Black’s eyes.
Black nodded, shouting back. “Felt like one.”
“I’ll check the news,” Manny said, waving back.
Black nodded. He still hadn’t let go of me, or even loosened his grip.
“That’s weird,” I muttered.
Black caressed my face, then my hair, nodding.
He didn’t say anything, but I could feel him thinking about that now, too.
I watched as his eyes shifted to my uncle and the seers he’d brought with him. They obviously felt the earthquake too, and were looking out over the red rock desert. I saw my uncle frowning, gazing over at the paddock where Manny’s three horses were standing in a corner, neighing and stomping their feet.
“You think it has something to do with the storm?” Charles raised his voice, looking over at me and Black. “The door?”
Black shrugged, calling back, “No idea. Did it feel that way to you?”
Charles didn’t answer, but I saw him frown.
A seer stood next to him who looked vaguely familiar to me. Like the others, he wore full combat armor and carried an assault rifle. He was also frowning, gazing out over the land after the earthquake, motioning out towards the desert with one hand. I could see him talking to Charles in a low voice.
I found myself looking at the seer’s gun for some reason.
It was one I didn’t recognize, so maybe that was part of it––some kind of bullpup, meaning its action and magazine were located behind the trigger group.
“It’s a BR18,” Black said from next to me, still holding me against him, still watching Charles and his seers. “ST Kinetics makes them, out of Singapore.” His sculpted lips tilted in a frown. “Those they’re carrying look like they’ve been heavily modified, though.”
He glanced at me, his jaw hard.
“We need to have a talk about that too, Miri. About organics. Your uncle is building them. It’s not just one or two ‘experimental’ collars anymore… he’s mass-producing the shit, and expanding the applications. That has to be how Brick and his vampires got access to that tech. They either stole it from Charles, or Charles gave it to them.”
His voice hardened. “…Or, more likely, he sold it to them.”
“Organics?”
Black turned, looking at me, that frown still on his lips.
“Organic machines,”
he said. “Machines with an organic, living component. They were technically illegal for commercial use on Old Earth, which means the black market made a killing off them… and off the organic parts needed to make them.”
His expression turned into an open scowl he aimed back at Charles.
“There are significantly worrisome fucking reasons to be concerned he might be manufacturing them here,” Black added. “And not only because of how they might be harvesting the organic material. That’s not the kind of tech you want to see big companies getting a hold of here, Miri––although I suppose it was inevitable they’d make their way here in some form.”
I frowned, following his eyes back to Charles.
I stared at the bullpup, at the glint of mirrored, dark-green metal covering the stock and a good percentage of the barrel.
I could see it now, what Black was talking about.
I could see the faint glow of living light, especially around the trigger mechanism and the gun’s sight. The more I used my seer’s vision on it, the brighter that glow grew.
I thought about the collar locked around Black’s neck in that Louisiana prison, the one that blinded his psychic sight, rendering him more or less helpless since the guards could use pain sensors in the collar to knock him out cold. I’d taken that collar off him myself, in the limousine after we picked him up, using my fingerprint and a retinal scanner.
Black said something about organic machines then, too.
“Yes,” he said, without elaborating.
“So Uncle Charles might have given them that,” I said. “He might have given that collar to the vampires. To Brick. Or sold it to them.”
Black gave me a grim look.
Studying his eyes, I realized he’d more or less known that all along.
I also realized Uncle Charles would have known Black knew––which might be part of the reason Charles saw him as a threat.
Then again, Black had shown himself to be not on board with most of Uncle Charles’ goals, pretty much since they first encountered one another in Vietnam. In his own way, Black had been conducting a one-man mission to try and thwart as many of Uncle Charles’ goals as he possibly could. The only reason he stopped that was because of me.
I’d known that.
I’d known the truce between the two of them would likely never be anything other than uneasy, ever since I’d learned “Lucky Lucifer’s” true identity.
Even so, they’d seemed to come together of late, mostly due to their aligned goals around the vampire threat, and their mutual interest in minimizing that threat in any way possible. I knew Black, like Charles, now saw vampires as the greater danger.
Maybe that hadn’t been an accident, either.
Maybe Charles brought Black into that mess with Brick and the vampires on purpose.
Charles likely knew Black well enough by now to know exactly how Black would react to his experiences in that Louisiana prison. Maybe it was all just one big recruitment operation, with Charles using the vampires to recruit Black––or at least to make Black less hostile to his goals.
The thought made me faintly ill.
If Black felt any of my thoughts around that, he didn’t say anything.
I watched his eyes as they scanned the cluster of desert camouflage and armor-wearing seers. I thought about the fact that Charles came here personally to deal with this door. I thought about the fact that Manny said the Colonel approved Charles coming in lieu of any formal military presence by the U.S. military.
All of these connections and relationships were starting to make me nervous.
I couldn’t pull a coherent picture out of it all yet, but I was increasingly worried for Black, and worried about the grander vision behind all this. I could almost feel the target forming on Black’s chest… I just wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, or who was painting it there.
The thought made me grip him tighter.
Black’s deep voice pulled me out of my thoughts.
“What do you think he really wants?” he said.
He spoke under his breath, his voice low.
“…from me,” he clarified, glancing over, his gold eyes catching the sunlight as he met my gaze. “I know what he wants from you.”
I returned his look.
Exhaling as I looked at Charles, I felt my worry harden in my gut, even as my voice turned borderline annoyed. “How could you possibly know what he wants from me? Even I don’t know that, Black.”
Black only shrugged, gazing back towards the group of seers and humans.
Watching him take some other inventory of their group, I frowned.
“Black?” I said. “What does he want from me?”
Clicking softly, Black tightened his hold on my waist, pulling me deeper into his side without looking away from my uncle’s team.
“He wants to convert you, Miri,” he said simply. “He wants you at his side, as a kind of lieutenant, or second in command. He wants to groom you to help him carry out what he sees as his sacred work.”
His words turned faintly bitter at the end.
Turning, he aimed a hard smile at me.
“He wants you to have children, to continue the family line. He wants to be directly involved in their upbringing. If he could, he’d probably try to raise them himself… or at least have a lot of say in their education. He wants to raise them the way he wished he could have raised you and your sister.”
I continued to frown at him. “How do you know all this? Did he tell you that?”
Black shrugged, noncommittal.
Making one of those graceful gestures of his, he inclined his head sideways.
“He’s always wanted these things for you,” he said. “He was just biding his time on approaching you until he’d developed a stronger link, both personal and ideological.”
His voice turned bitter when he added,
“…I’m pretty sure he sent Ian to you for that reason. I’ve long thought he didn’t tell you the whole truth on that. Ian wasn’t just some faceless bodyguard he sent to keep you safe. He was assigned to you. I believe he was also assigned to court and marry you. Your uncle likely oversaw the procedures to make Ian appear to be human… not exactly a non-specialized type of surgery. Ian was there to begin the process of indoctrination. Once you and he were married, I suspect Uncle Charles would have shown up. Maybe even at the wedding itself.”
His mouth forming a harder line, Black studied my eyes.
“In his view, I fucked all that up. Even the children part. Maybe especially the children part. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to control the upbringing of any children you and I might have. Not with me in the picture.”
At my disbelieving stare, he shrugged.
“But I can’t imagine he’d risk killing me, Miri, given that you and I are bonded. He knows damned well that killing me might also kill you. Even shoving me through that door under Ship Rock could very well kill you. It’s more likely he’s trying to recruit me… like you were just thinking with Brick and that prison in Louisiana.”
He gave me a grim look.
“Or,” he added. “He already knows things work differently on this version of Earth, and he’s just waiting for an opportunity to present itself where he can eliminate me without alienating you. Or without you finding out he was behind it.”
My frown deepened.
I could feel Black was telling me only a fraction of what he was thinking, even now. I could feel the wheels turning there, the change in his light and mind now that he was evaluating my uncle from this other, more cynical perspective.
“So what do we do?” I said, still watching his gold eyes.
Black clicked under his breath, his voice wry.
“That’s a damned good question,” he said, giving me a half-smile. “If he already knows that bonded mates don’t die when their mates die, not on this version of Earth, that means he’s likely already conducted tests to that effect… experiments, if you will… to make sure it’s safe to kill
me before he pulls the trigger. That makes him a cold fucking bastard on a whole other level. One I haven’t encountered, frankly, not since I left Old Earth.”
Cocking his eyebrow, he gave me another flat look.
“Life-bonded mates weren’t exactly common on Old Earth either, Miri. They were considered pretty sacrosanct, maybe partly because it was rare. To kill one of a pair like that… it was considered one of the cruelest things you could do to another seer. There were strict laws against it. Laws that went back thousands of years.”
Black gazed back at Charles.
“Of course, this is all speculation. Maybe he doesn’t want me dead. Maybe he’s more respectful of the bond than we’re both thinking. Or maybe he’s working both of us in different ways, waiting to see which course makes the most sense in the end.”
I stared at him.
Then I turned, gazing out over the dirt road to where Uncle Charles and his people were beginning to make their way up to Manny’s driveway. In the distance, I saw a line of Navajo Nation police SUVs heading our way, kicking up dust along the paved road that started where Manny’s driveway ended.
They turned left at the sky blue mailbox, just like I had the night before, heading down the slope towards Manny’s house.
Red’s cavalry had arrived.
I wondered why Red and his wife was cooperating so much with Charles and the Colonel, when they clearly didn’t like them, or want them on rez land. I hoped like hell Charles wasn’t pushing them. I hoped it was because they genuinely wanted Charles’ help to deal with Wolf, and not because Charles was manipulating their minds.
Grunting, Black gave me a wry look.
Then the two of us just stood there, watching as they made their way towards the house and the approaching line of SUVs.
17
GHOSTS
I SAT IN a small wooden desk, in the classroom of an old-fashioned-feeling school with dingy stucco walls and a blackboard covered in pink and blue chalk.
A boy sat in an identical wooden desk, directly in front of me.
Black To Dust: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery (Quentin Black Mystery Book 7) Page 25