TO BLACK WITH LOVE: Quentin Black Mystery #10

by Andrijeski, JC

  That time, Brick could not suppress his smile.

  “You don’t say?” he queried innocently. “What… approaches… do you wish to try, my beloved friend?” Flashing his fangs briefly, he added, “My stipulation about not damaging him remains in place, Dorian. No torture. No chainsaws. No removing limbs, whether they grow back or not. No starvation, or mental manipulation––”

  The other vampire calmly raised a hand.

  “Nothing like that,” he said. “In fact, I now believe most typical forms of punishment will not be particularly effective with him.”

  Brick’s eyebrows rose.

  Leaning further back in his chair, he refolded his hands. “Really? And why is that?”

  “He is too intelligent,” Dorian said simply.

  At Brick’s silence, Dorian’s eyes flickered away.

  Staring into the fireplace, he went on in the same, neutral voice.

  “I now believe he significantly underplayed his intelligence as a human, as well as the extent of his skill sets. I do not know why, or for how long. I’ve recently done some research on his human records, however, including what I could uncover from the military, as well as his time on the police force, and working as a detective. Indications of a much higher than average intelligence reside in those records… as well as clear attempts by him to hide those conclusions.”

  Dorian paused, then made a flourishing shrug with one hand.

  “He is no longer doing that,” he said. “Not as a vampire.”

  Brick’s eyebrows remained higher on his forehead than normal. “An example, brother? If you would?”

  “Did Nairobi tell you how she found me?” Dorian said. “How he escaped?”

  Brick frowned.

  “She was not… specific,” he said carefully.

  Dorian nodded, his preternaturally handsome face as still as marble.

  “He laid a trap for me,” he said. “He cut himself free, maneuvering his body around the blade until he freed himself. Even after I told him that to do so would likely kill him.”

  Dorian’s eyes met Brick’s, his scarlet irises brighter.

  “He knew anatomy well enough to do it… to free himself of the notch I’d placed in his heart, and to maneuver the blade around the thickest bones, the ones the sword would not easily be able to saw through. It must have taken him some time, and some careful thought, but he freed himself, then set a trap for me, using materials from the room. A metal bar from the bed frame with enough flexibility to work as a pole in a snare… wire he pulled from the curtains and sharpened, presumably with more of the metal frame… a trigger he designed from a loose floorboard and carved with his teeth and a metal poker.”

  Dorian’s jaw firmed.

  “…He made sure none of it was easily discernible from the window, closing the drapes of the one window that would have given me or Nairobi a view of his snare from outside. He left the drapes of the other window open. Coincidentally, that view allowed anyone looking from outside to see him on the floor… but not the metal pole he’d rigged to trap me.”

  Again, that slight tightening of Dorian’s jaw.

  “Then our newborn maneuvered himself back onto the sword… again using the blade to cut through his own body, despite how painful that must have been. He followed the same track he’d followed to cut himself free. He covered the cut with his own blood so it wouldn’t be visible from the window. He then allowed his skin and flesh to heal back over the cut, so that he would appear to be exactly where I’d left him.”

  Dorian shrugged, his scarlet eyes flattening on Brick’s.

  “He waited there, on the floor, for me to come back. He didn’t jump out the window. He didn’t try to escape as he had the first time. He must have been hungry… especially after all of that blood loss. But he didn’t leave to feed, or to hunt. He waited.”

  Dorian smiled faintly, quirking his eyebrow as he made another of those graceful flourishes with one hand.

  “He learned, you see? He knew if he broke my neck, he’d have a real head start. He’d be able to get free of me for days, instead of hours… or possibly minutes, depending on whether I was inside the building or not, which he had no way of knowing without tipping one of us off that he was free of the sword.”

  Gripping the cushion of the settee with his long, white fingers, Dorian gazed thoughtfully into the fire.

  “I learned some things, in my recent study of his background… things I was lax not to discover before I attempted his training. Truthfully, I assumed I would have more time before I needed such in-depth information.”

  He returned his gaze to Brick, his scarlet eyes flashing with reflected fire.

  “As it happens, he is an expert in making and detecting traps of this kind. Explosives, too. I have made a much greater effort to study his profile once I discovered these things… so I now have a relatively thorough understanding of the full range of his skill sets from his time in the human military, and after.”

  There was a silence after Dorian finished speaking.

  Then Brick couldn’t help himself.

  He chuckled.

  “And?” he said, smiling as he rocked back on his leather chair. “How did you find him?”

  Dorian’s eyebrow rose in a silent question.

  “After he escaped,” Brick clarified. “How did you go about tracking our expert trap-layer and military operative, once he was loose on the streets of Paris?”

  The elegant eyebrow dropped back to its normal position.

  Dorian leaned deeper into his seat. His voice remained deadly serious.

  “It wasn’t easy,” he said.

  Brick burst out in a real laugh at that. “I’ll bet,” he grinned, still chuckling. “However did you manage it, my beloved friend?”

  Dorian quirked one dark eyebrow, pulling at the cut under the same eye.

  “He had gone some time without feeding by then… and without hunting.” Dorian focused back on the fire, his pale lips firming. “That should have made it easy to track him, but it did not. He was somehow able to control himself for the first few days.”

  Glancing back at Brick, Dorian added,

  “He used the sewers and catacombs to get around at night. He picked off a few utility workers, at least two homeless persons, and one priest that I eventually found. Clearly, it wasn’t enough to do much more than blunt the edges of his hunger. It wasn’t until the third day that he lost control entirely… when he got to that underground dance club. It was a lucky break for us. By then he was far from here, in the outskirts of the city.”

  Brick’s amusement remained.

  Even so, he scowled lightly at the other’s words.

  “I’m not sure I would call that ‘lucky,’ brother Dorian. It hit the Parisian news, and was picked up by international papers––”

  “I apologize for that,” Dorian intervened.

  Again, he held up a hand, his expression back to inscrutable.

  “Still,” he went on. “I would argue it is better that he lost control relatively early into his hunting spree. The damage could have been much worse, if he’d remained underground. Worse still, if he’d gotten out of the city entirely, which I suspect may have been his goal.”

  Brick nodded, conceding the other’s words, if somewhat reluctantly.

  “Even in the cage he has proven… difficult,” Dorian confessed.

  Brick’s eyebrow rose again. “Oh?”

  Dorian nodded, his expression flat.

  “In what way, brother, pray tell?”

  “I tried feeding off him,” Dorian explained. “I also tried having him feed off me, once he was sufficiently hungry. On both occasions, he spent the entire time reciting complex math equations and English sonnets to prevent me from pulling information from his mind. It is apparently a trick he learned from his interactions with seers––”

  Brick burst out in another delighted laugh, unable to help himself.

  Dorian only shrugged, continuing in the same voice
.

  “It is possibly a trick he learned from Black himself,” he admitted, his brow furrowing. “Unlike Black, however, Naoko is vampire now. He is less easy to pull into the thrall of venom. Less easy than a human… much less a seer.”

  Still grinning, Brick chuckled. “Undoubtedly.”

  There was another silence.

  Then Brick leaned forward on his chair, placing his arms on the oak desk. He studied Dorian’s face more carefully that time, some of the humor leaving him for the first time.

  “You are quite intrigued by this, aren’t you, brother?” Still studying Dorian’s face, Brick lifted one eyebrow. “I hear you forbade Lucia from going near him. Could that be angering him, too, my friend? That you deprived him of his playmate?”

  Dorian’s lips tightened.

  It was the first real show of annoyance on that porcelain, if marred face.

  “He was bored of her already,” Dorian said. “It was clear to me, if not yet to him. She reminded him of someone… someone she is nothing at all like, apart from a few passing physical similarities. To say she is too weak for him would be an understatement. He would have toyed with her a while longer, then found a new plaything.”

  Shaking his head in rebuke, Brick tut-tutted him mildly with his tongue.

  “Now, now, brother… respect lives in this family,” he said softly. “Respect for all of our brothers and sisters. Regardless of their talents and capacities. I insist upon it.”

  Dorian tilted his head in a bare shrug.

  “I will apologize, if you wish,” he said, his voice holding a faint puzzlement. “But it is not disrespect that causes me to say it. It is fact. She is not a suitable match for him. He knows this, even if he had not faced it yet. You know it, too. Moreover, he has not so much as mentioned her name since I ordered her out of his room that first night.”

  Brick nodded, again conceding the other’s words.

  “Is he remembering yet?” he said next, his voice more subdued. “His memories. Have they started coming back to him?”

  Dorian looked over, his expression thoughtful.

  He clearly knew exactly what Brick meant.

  “No.” Dorian pursed his lips, still thinking. “No. I do not think so. Not that I’ve observed. It is part of why it is still difficult to reach him, I think.”

  Brick nodded to that, as well.

  He had intuited the same.

  Even so, that faint suspicion remained in his own mind.

  “Have you had intercourse with him yet?” he said, blunt. “Naoko?”

  The silence felt heavy that time.

  “Dorian?”

  “No.”

  “No?” Brick gauged the other’s face. “And why is that?”

  The other’s expression did not move.

  Brick was not, however, willing to let a non-answer suffice, not in this instance.

  “Tell me why,” he said, his voice harder. “I insist.”

  When the silence stretched a few beats more, Dorian inclined his head politely, a near bow.

  “I assumed I would need permission for such a thing, my king,” he said.

  Brick felt that harder knot in his chest loosen slightly.

  “You do,” he said, his voice a touch colder. “Require permission.”

  Dorian merely sat there, his face and body unmoving.

  One hand rested lightly on his knee, the other flat on the satin cushion of the settee. If Brick’s words impacted him, there was no way to see how.

  “Is that what you are doing?” Brick said. “Asking permission? Is this the ‘alternate approach’ you have been leading up to with him?”

  Dorian was now looking at him.

  Nothing visible had changed in that face, in the blood-red eyes, in the full, perfectly-formed lips. Even so, Brick strongly got the sense he was being scrutinized by the other vampire, perhaps even assessed with caution.

  “It crossed my mind that such an approach might be more fruitful,” Dorian said, his scarlet eyes still fixed on Brick’s face. “So I suppose my answer would be yes.”

  His voice remained neutral, lacking in inflection.

  Again, however, Brick sensed the caution there.

  “…A more generous and affectionate approach in general, seemed like it might benefit him right now. We will not make him uncomfortable, or self-reflective, by declaring war on him. War is a state he knows, one in which he is wholly trained and comfortable.”

  “And your goal is to make him… uncomfortable?” Brick frowned.

  Again, that elegant shrug.

  “It strikes me that Naoko has quite a bit of emotional conflict around his new status, as much as he seems to be channeling that into outward pursuits. I thought if perhaps I could slow things down with him somewhat, he might delve deeper into those emotions, which are clearly more difficult for him to face head-on. I thought if we could understand him better, we might convince him to attempt to understand us better––”

  “I see.”

  Brick did see. It made a certain kind of sense.

  He, too, had sensed the volcano of anger living inside his newborn’s soul.

  Being a newborn didn’t explain all of it. That kind of anger didn’t develop merely from the blood of the source. It would be fed by it, yes, perhaps made impossible to ignore by it, but it would not arise from nowhere.

  It also made him dangerous.

  It made him a danger to the rest of the family, quite possibly––but, much more likely, it made him a danger to himself.

  Moreover, if Dorian was correct, Naoko had not even begun to experience the full range of vampire emotions. It was unlikely his memories had begun to come back to him yet, at least not in the full range of their emotions and understandings, as seen through the eyes of a vampire.

  Humans felt things on such a superficial level, really.

  “Has he slept with a male before?” Brick mused aloud. His eyes shifted back to Dorian, focusing on the other’s face. “That could complicate things. He is still new. Humans are different in such things.”

  Dorian nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “That occurred to me, yes.”

  Frowning faintly, a tiny and highly unusual crease appearing between his eyebrows, the blond vampire met Brick’s gaze.

  “I can perhaps give him proxies to play with.”

  “Human?” Brick prodded.

  Still nodding, seemingly to himself, Dorian glanced at him again.

  “Possibly. I do not think Lucia would be helpful at this stage.”

  “That is not jealousy talking?” Brick said, his voice warning.

  At the other’s flat look, Brick let out a snort.

  “You are clearly taken with him… our Naoko.”

  Again, Dorian did not speak, or change expression. He did nothing to try to refute Brick’s words, nor to acknowledge them.

  “You want him,” Brick said, harder. “Tell me that much, brother. Let us not have this silence between us on this point.”

  Dorian’s expression did not flicker.

  “Yes,” he said simply.

  Pausing another beat, he folded his arms over his broad chest.

  “I find him… intriguing. But I promised you I would train him, my king. I made a vow to you. One I have so far failed you in. That goal takes precedence over all else.”

  Studying Brick’s eyes, he inclined his head.

  “To that end, I would use any tool at my disposal. Including Lucia. I have thought well upon possibly including Lucia in this, but she is a toy to him. He will hide in her blood, and in her body. He will tell her nothing he does not wish me to know. He will put her between us, and will tell me nothing, for he will not lose control because of her.”

  Brick frowned, thinking about the other’s words.

  Again, he could not fault the other’s logic––nor his observations.

  Dorian had always displayed good instincts when it came to penetrating the psychology of his victims, whether human or vampire.

  Or
seer, for that matter.

  Naoko did seem to see Lucia as a playmate.

  He saw her as a sibling––a fellow “puppy,” as Dorian put it. Naoko had been using Lucia as a distraction, at least in part. If he could put her between himself and Dorian, he would do it. If he could lose himself in her blood, and avoid Dorian’s, he would do that, too.

  If Dorian used humans, Naoko wouldn’t be able to get away with that.

  The pull of human blood, of a human mind, would never be as strong.

  Still frowning, Brick drummed his fingers on the top of the oak desk, looking into the fire. He calculated around various other scenarios that might work as well as the one he could hear Dorian proposing. He considered involving himself in this more directly. He considered where this might go, what Dorian would do, once he’d pulled Naoko into a more open and accommodating space, once he’d reached him––

  But he already knew where it would go.

  Dorian had more or less spelled that out.

  He also knew Dorian awaited his decision.

  Dorian would not act in any way upon the newborn unless Brick allowed it.

  And yet… Brick hesitated.

  Staring into the fire, he drummed his fingers, silent.

  Equally silent, and now as still as stone, Dorian watched him, waiting.

  8

  Family

  I SWALLOWED, MY hands going cold as I stood on the porch of a house more familiar to me than my own childhood home.

  I just stood there.

  I honestly had no idea how long I’d been standing there, but I knew it was too long.

  I needed to press the door buzzer.

  I needed to do it, but I just stood there, staring at the blue-painted door without really seeing it, staring at the gold-painted buzzer with the mother of pearl button without really seeing that, either. They’d painted the door since two Christmases ago, which was the last time I could remember being here. I was pretty sure the door used to be red.

  That was the first time Black came over here for Christmas.

  Both of us had come for the whole thing that year––Christmas Eve, and Christmas day, too. Black brought bourbon for Nick’s dad. He brought a beautiful, authentic Japanese tapestry from Kyoto for Nick’s mom. He brought all kinds of obnoxious presents for the nieces and nephews, including drones and robotic dogs and cats and karaoke machines.