I wondered how many of them had truly belonged to Wolf, the way Red had.
I knew Charles’ and Black’s people––maybe even the Colonel’s––would have to do evaluations of each and every one of them. They’d have to do it to identify and then try and deprogram the ones who’d fully bought into Wolf’s crazy.
They’d also do it to debrief them on what happened and to make sure no more vampires were lurking in these hills. They’d want assurances that no more disciples of Wolf’s might be hanging around, waiting to kill more rock-climbing tourists, or maybe take revenge on Manny or anyone in Joseph’s family, or in Frank’s or Easton’s or Dog’s.
In the end, I knew Charles would also want them erased. He’d at least want those erased who knew he wasn’t human.
Black might want that, too.
At this point, I wasn’t sure I disagreed.
Hell, it might even be a kindness to erase them after this.
Grimacing as I saw Manny standing over his daughter and granddaughter, holding a gun on both of them, I realized the town would never recover, even if most of them were erased.
They might do better to just let the desert take it back.
I knew it was more likely they’d reclaim it in some other way, though.
Manny was stubborn. He might not want to leave his house. He might stay there with his horses, hoping others moved back, once they got their heads on straight and remembered who they were again.
Looking away from Manny and his family, my eyes found the newcomer seers.
I’d forgotten about them all over again, as the door closed.
It struck me, in the same instant, that they were stuck here now, just like we were.
I gripped Black tighter at the thought, feeling a rush of gratitude so intense, it brought tears to my eyes.
I was still clutching him when he turned, taking in the span of the room with his gold eyes.
No one had really spoken aloud yet, although I saw people murmuring to one another in different corners of the room, mostly to reassure one another it was over. I saw Easton clap the girl with the bow on the shoulder with one muscular hand. He smiled at her warmly when she turned, kissing her on the top of her head.
I saw Cowboy pull out his swords long enough to wipe them off with part of his shirt before he re-sheathed them.
Then I saw him wrap his arms around Angel, holding her tightly against his chest.
Looking at the two of them together, I couldn’t help but smile.
I could feel someone else’s eyes on me, though.
Not Black’s. Not Angel’s.
Not Cowboy’s or Manny’s, either.
Turning slowly, I faced the newcomers.
It was that male again, the one I’d pegged as their leader.
I found myself staring at his eyes. I could see their color a little better without the bright yellows and oranges coming off the fissure in the rock. They were still tinted somewhat orange from the fire coming off the lit torches, but more of the natives had their flashlights on again, so the brighter white of those lights illuminated his irises from the sides and from the front.
They were green––a light, stunning green, more of a translucent jade than the more opaque, leaf-green color of my uncle’s irises.
That wasn’t what made me stare, though.
A violet ring stood out in those green irises, contrasting the jade green yet also complementing it somehow, making both colors stand out even more.
He was handsome.
Truthfully, he was maybe the most handsome man I’d ever seen in real life.
Frowning down at me, Black turned, following my eyes.
He stared at the same male seer I’d been staring at.
I realized in the same set of seconds that the seer was staring at Black, too.
In fact, he was staring at him with a look of utter incredulity on his face.
Black was still holding me, watching the other male warily, when the seer walked directly up to us, still staring at Black like he knew him.
Why is he looking at you like that? I murmured in Black’s mind.
I have no fucking idea.
Are you sure? I frowned, staring at the green and violet-eyed seer. He’s looking at you like he knows you, Black.
He doesn’t.
Are you sure?
Jesus, Miriam. I’m sure. How many times do I have to tell you? Seers have photographic memories. If I knew this asshole… I would know.
The seer had reached us though.
I watched him glance down, grimacing as he looked at the bodies of more dead seers piled up in front of the now-dormant door.
His jaw hard with anger, he looked back at Black.
“Did you do this?” he demanded.
He spoke English, which startled me.
He had an accent––a strong accent, and one I’d definitely never heard before––but he definitely spoke English.
“Did you kill these brothers and sisters of ours?” he said, flicking his fingers at the bodies, the same way I’d seen Black do while he’d been talking to Wolf.
“No,” Black said. A faint incredulousness touched his voice. “Gaos. Why the fuck would I do that? Why would I kill seers? Can’t you see I’m seer, too?”
The male seer frowned, but didn’t take his eyes off Black’s face.
“Who did do it?” he demanded.
Black frowned.
I could feel his annoyed reluctance to answer the other male’s question, primarily because of the way he’d asked it.
Then his eyes shifted, finding what remained of Wolf on the floor of the cave. For the first time, I really looked at Wolf’s corpse. He’d been stabbed through the heart with his own knife. His vacant eyes stared up at the ceiling, sightless, blood covering half of his face and neck. Seeing him in the dark like that, I felt another rush of anger.
I think that time it was from the waste of all this, the stupidity. Wolf’s passion could have been useful. Instead he lost his fucking mind, turning on his own people.
“Him?” the green-eyed seer said. “He did it?”
“Yes.”
“Who killed him? Who killed this fucking murderer?”
“I did,” Black growled.
The male seer turned, staring at him, his sculpted lips tilting into a frown.
“Who the fuck are you, brother?” he said then.
Black glanced at me.
Annoyance left his light in a cloud. He scowled at the other male, gripping me tighter in his hands, tight enough that the male seer glanced down at me, as if remembering I existed.
His interest in me didn’t last long, however.
His stare returned to Black’s face, his green eyes sharp, almost wary.
“You are seer? You are from this world?”
Black hesitated, then slowly shook his head. “There are no seers from this world.” Renewing his grip on my arms, he added, “Not full-blooded ones, anyway.”
Again, those green eyes flickered over me. I saw him contemplate asking what Black meant, then decide that his questions about me could wait. His gaze flickered back to Black, and for the first time, I realized the two of them were almost the same height.
“Who the hell are you?” Frustration leaked into the male’s voice that time. “You are from my world?” He paused. “What is your name?”
“Black,” Black said. “Quentin Black.”
The male’s frown deepened. He shook his head, scowling.
“I mean, what is your real name? Your seer name? Your clan.”
Black hesitated. I saw his jaw clench. I felt his reluctance to answer to this seer, to answer his questions, to tell him anything. More than that, I felt his reluctance to claim the name of the family that had abandoned him.
When the silence stretched, the male scowled.
“What is your name?” he said. “That world is gone. What does it matter now?”
“What does it matter to you?” Black retorted. “If the world is
gone, then the clans are dead. What possible difference could it––”
“Dehgoies,” Charles gasped, speaking from the wall. “His clan is Dehgoies. His name on our home world was Kirev. Dehgoies Kirev.”
There was a silence.
I frowned, looking between faces as the silence stretched. I didn’t understand any of what I felt in the seers now clustered around us, apart from Black’s annoyance with my uncle for knowing his name. Feeling reactions crackling in the psychic space around where Black and I stood, I looked back at the green-eyed seer.
He was staring at Black as if he really were a ghost.
“Dehgoies,” he said, his voice holding disbelief. “Your family name is Dehgoies?”
Black scowled. “So? What of it? You said that world is dead, right?”
He looked past the green-eyed seer, and I followed his gaze.
All of the seers who’d walked through the door were staring at him now. They were staring at both of us, but mostly at him.
Now that I was paying attention to them for real, I realized there were six of them––three females and three males, including the green-eyed one in front of us.
Black and I were just standing there, bewildered, when one of the females, a tall seer with straight black hair and the brightest, bluest eyes I’d ever seen in my life, burst out in a laugh.
When she did, the four other seers standing with her did the same.
Black and I could only look at one another.
I’d never in my life so completely not gotten the joke.
From the bewildered look on his face, Black didn’t get it, either.
Moreover, he looked distinctly un-amused.
He gripped me tighter in his arms, gritting his teeth as he glanced around at the rest of our group––not the seers that time, but Joseph and his family, Easton, Frank, Dog, Manny, Cowboy, Angel, Devin. I felt him thinking he wanted to get us the fuck out of there, that he wanted to get all of out of there, but especially me.
He wanted to take me to a hospital… preferably one in Santa Fe.
Then he wanted to take me to the suite where he’d left his bags at the resort, and sleep in the bed he still hadn’t slept in, again with me.
We were just standing there, staring at the new seers, listening to them laugh at a joke none of us got, when I happened to glance back at the green-eyed one, the one who stood nearest to us, and the only one who wasn’t laughing.
Unlike his friends, he didn’t even smile.
He was staring at Black in a kind of furious disbelief.
It only occurred to me later, maybe hours later, when we’d made our way out of those caves and into the cool desert night air, that he’d looked at Black almost like he wanted to hit him.
He’d looked at Black like he wanted to punch him square in the face.
*
WANT TO READ A NOVEL SET IN BLACK’S HOME WORLD?
Try the BRIDGE & SWORD WORLD, starting with:
ROOK (Bridge & Sword Series #1)
Yanked out of her life by the mysterious Revik, Allie discovers that her blood may not be as “human” as she always thought. When Revik tells her she’s the Bridge, a mystical being meant to usher in the evolution of humanity––or possibly its extinction––Allie must choose between the race that raised her and the one where she might truly belong. A psychic, science fiction romance set in a modern, gritty version of Earth.
See below for sample pages!
1
ALLIE
I KNOW WHO I am.
Somehow, deep down inside, I’ve always known.
I don’t know how to explain that statement precisely. It’s not in the “I am Alyson May Taylor” sense of knowing myself. It’s more like this presence I carry within me, this solid sense of “me-ness” that feels untouchable in some way. It shocked me as a kid, when I realized a lot of people didn’t have that.
For a lot of people, that rock-solid, “here I am” thing was more elusive. A lot of them spent their whole lives searching for it.
Funnily enough, with me, it turned out who I was didn’t end up being all that important.
What I was mattered a whole lot more.
On that front, I knew a lot less than I thought I did. I might have had that essence thing down, but I was missing a hell of a lot of pretty significant details.
“HE’S BAAAACK.” MY best friend, Cass, grinned at me from where she leaned over the fifties-style lunch counter, her butt aimed at the dining area of the diner where we both worked. Given that our uniforms consisted of short black skirts and form-fitting, low-cut white blouses, she was giving at least a few of our customers an eye-full.
Seemingly oblivious to that fact, and to the men sitting at the counter to her left and my right, pretending not to stare at her ass as she stuck it in the air, she grinned at me, her full lips looking even more dramatic than usual with their blood-red lipstick.
“Did you see, Allie?”
I pursed my lips, rolling my eyes.
“What’s the pool up to now?” she said. “Seventy bucks? Eighty?”
“Eighty-five.” I used the metal stopper to compress finely-ground espresso beans into the metal filter I held in my other hand, managing to spill a small pile of grounds on the linoleum counter in the process. “Sasquatch threw in twenty yesterday.” Remembering, I let out a snort-laugh. “He walked right up to the guy’s table. Asked him his name, point-blank.”
Cass’s black-eyeliner decorated eyes widened. “What happened?”
I smiled, shaking my head without looking up. “Same thing that always happens.”
Cass laughed, kicking up her high heels, which were red-vinyl platforms, more seventies than fifties, not like it mattered. Again, I saw the men nearby sipping their coffees while they surreptitiously stared at her legs.
Cass had been on a red kick lately. Her long, straight, raven-black, Asian hair had dark red flames coming up from the tips, the color matching her lipstick, eyeshadow, fingernail polish, and the five inch heels.
Two months ago, everything had been teal.
She could get away with just about any style she wanted, though. Her ethnicity, an odd mish-mash of Thai sprinkled with European and Ethiopian, somehow mixed inside her to make her one of the most physically beautiful women I’d ever seen.
I hated her a little for it, sometimes.
Other times, I pitied her for it. Truthfully, I hadn’t seen that it had done her a lot of favors over her life, and Cass and I had known each other since we were kids.
Looking up from where I was doing battle with the diner’s antiquated espresso maker, a machine I was convinced had it in for me, personally, I blew my much less dramatic dark brown bangs out of my face, glancing at the man in the corner booth in spite of myself.
I’d seen him walk in.
Truthfully, I’d felt him walk in.
It was unnerving as hell, the effect he had on me, simply from entering a building I happened to occupy.
This was in spite of him never saying a damned thing to me, apart from whatever single-item purchase he made off the diner’s crappy menu. He paid in cash. He never came in with anyone else. He flat-out ignored any attempts at small talk, even polite questions. He rarely made eye-contact, although I always felt his eyes on me. When I looked over, however, he was usually staring out the window, or down at his own hands on the table.
Mr. Monochrome wasn’t a talker.
He wasn’t a people person in any sense of the word. He took ignoring other sentient beings to the level of an art form. The extremes he went to in avoiding conversation didn’t just verge on rude; they were rude. Mr. Monochrome didn’t care.
Mr. Monochrome wasn’t interested in our opinions of him.
Mr. Monochrome wouldn’t even tell us his name.
That last part was the pool Cass referred to.
Given that most people paid bills with their headsets these days, the fact that he paid in cash made him frustratingly impervious to our curiosity about h
im. He was a blank canvas. My mind superimposed that canvas with various stories, of course, as did my co-workers––undercover cop, international fugitive from justice, spy, private detective, writer doing research, terrorist for the seer underground. Serial killer.
I knew the reality was likely a lot less interesting.
Jon, my brother, referred to him as my “current stalker,” but Jon was paranoid about that kind of thing, given the number of problems I’d had in that area back when I was a kid. Apart from the fact that Mr. Monochrome insisted on sitting in my section every day––even when we moved around which tables were mine––he didn’t seem all that interested in me, either.
He certainly hadn’t made any overtures in my direction, not even oblique ones.
He was probably just a guy who lived somewhere on the autism spectrum, and I’d fallen into his daily routine.
At most, he might be cultivating a deep-seated paranoia around being tracked by the government, one that made him reluctant to use his headset. If he did have some kind of socially-dysfunctional crush on me, he didn’t seem the type to do much about it. He likely worked at one of the tech companies nearby and came to the Lucky Cat because we still accepted cash; more and more places in San Francisco didn’t.
So yeah, a tinfoil hat weirdo, maybe… but a harmless one.
At the thought, I glanced up at the monitor on the wall.
Cass or one of the other waitstaff had turned the volume down, but the news feeds were still playing up there, showing the reaction to the latest terrorist attack in Europe. I watched the President of the United States as he gave a speech from behind a podium, his mouth moving silently. Blooming trees waved gently in a breeze behind him, framing the view of a sprawling lawn and flower gardens. His blond wife stood beside him, hands clasped, a small smile etched on her face, her expression rapt, if bland.
I knew she didn’t really look like that, of course.
Neither did he.
According to Human Protection Act rules, both were required to wear avatars to avoid being targeted by seers owned by enemy governments. Even the landscape around them was digitally altered, to prevent seers from tracking them or reading their minds.
Black To Dust: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery (Quentin Black Mystery Book 7) Page 34