Hearing me through his light, Jem checked his gun, his face twisted in a scowl.
“We can’t afford to have a single one of these fuckers knowing even one more thing about us,” he muttered. “They know way too fucking much already.”
I nodded, agreeing with him.
I focused my light. Concentrating on the structures I used to shield, I began closing my aleimi down systematically, hiding it from view, checking for gaps at each stage of the process to make sure I wasn’t missing any part of my mind or light.
Within seconds, the world felt further away.
It also felt strangely clearer, as did my mind.
Keep a line open to me, doc, Black murmured in my mind. At all times.
I sent him a pulse of acknowledgment, feeling the structure he highlighted over each of our heads, the one that connected the two of us.
Once I’d double and triple-checked to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, I glanced at Jem.
“Better?” I said.
The older seer frowned, looking at me. I saw his light green irises shift faintly out of focus, his gaze narrowing as he methodically scanned my light. I didn’t feel a damned thing, but from what I knew of Jem, I could count on him being thorough.
His eyes slid back into focus a few seconds later.
Surprise flickered subtly across his expression.
“Yes,” he said, giving me one of those delicate seer frowns. “A lot better than I would have expected, sister, if I am to be honest. And not only because you were raised on a planet with almost no other seers.” He frowned in Black’s direction. “Did he teach you that?”
“No,” Black said, glancing over his shoulder at Jem. “I didn’t.”
I gave Black a semi-humorous look, but he’d already gone back to where he was speaking in a low voice to Yarli and Dex, seemingly without missing a beat.
Jem grunted at his back, glancing at me.
“Is that true?” he said.
I shrugged. “Half true, so no… not really. He definitely taught me to do it more consciously. And how to be more systematic about it. And how to check to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. But I suppose he’s at least partly right.”
Glancing at Black’s back, I looked back at Jem, lowering my voice. “My father taught me. He started when I was a kid.”
Jem’s eyebrows rose at that.
He didn’t comment on it, though.
Hearing the light squeal of breaks from the street outside the building, I looked out the one-way glass walls. A row of armored SUVs was pulling up to the curb, all of them with blacked-out windows.
I didn’t have to see the gunmetal gray eagle insignia on the doors to know they were there for us.
Watching each of them come to a stop, engines running, I gave Jem a grim look.
“Here we go,” I said.
* * *
BRICK AGREED TO meet us not at the California Street building, as he’d originally proposed, but at one of Black’s other properties instead, which Black more or less demanded.
Black didn’t want him anywhere near our headquarters, or our home.
I could hardly blame him.
At the same time, I’m not sure why Brick agreed to Black’s demands.
I don’t know why the vampire would agree to meet at one of Black’s properties at all, much less let Black pick the place. It’s not like Black made much of an effort to hide his state of mind over the phone.
The whole thing struck me as an enormous risk for Brick, no matter what leverage he believed he had. I could only think Brick must’ve been so damned determined to convince us he was operating in good faith, he was willing to risk Black setting up an ambush and just massacring his people wholesale.
That, or he planned to do the same to us.
Whatever his reasons, Brick agreed to meet us at one of Black’s storage facilities inside the city, an older one located in the Mission District.
Black bought it back in the 1980s, when the Mission had been run down, the area was more or less ignored by developers, and the properties went for ridiculously cheap, particularly by current-day standards in San Francisco. What now had to be an eight-figure property may have cost Black as little as five-figures back in those years.
The neighborhood had since been gentrified.
That was putting it mildly.
Now the large, brick, heritage building that took up a full block of real estate, with its blacked-out and barred windows and thick steel doors, stood on a series of city blocks dotted with high-end bars and restaurants, not to mention nightclubs, art galleries, expensive and trendy loft apartments, boutique hotels, specialty and designer shops for wine, as well as imported food, local clothing and jewelry designers, cigars and antiques.
For the same reason, it was strange to watch the row of armored SUVs pull up to the massive, sliding metal door smack in the middle of the busiest part of Valencia Street. It was even stranger to watch those SUVs empty out, dumping what looked like a small army out onto the sidewalk across from a row of trendy restaurants and bars.
We got a lot of stares initially, but within seconds, most of those eyes had turned away. Glancing around at the armed seers now surrounding me and Black, I realized the infiltrators were already engaging in crowd control.
I knew that for certain when I glimpsed the faces of nearby humans as they slid from surprised to utterly blank in a matter of seconds. Those who clearly recognized Black blanked out even faster, their expressions turning as empty as manikins before they came to a dead stop, going motionless and unblinking on the sidewalk.
All of those who’d been approaching our position either quickly walked through if they were already close to the steel doors, or they stopped before they got within twenty yards of the warehouse opening. Many of those latter just stood there, like the ones who’d noticed Black, as if waiting for a light to change. Others turned around entirely and began wandering aimlessly in the opposite direction.
I felt whispers of fear on most of them.
Black told me once that humans on this version of Earth knew on some level, when they were being pushed. He said it made them subconsciously fear him––it made them fear any seer who tampered with their minds.
Even without that, even without the fear I picked up from the crowd that stood out of our way, the power behind the group of infiltrators unnerved me.
Shaking off my misgivings, I glanced towards Black’s warehouse.
The path between the SUVs and the steel doors was entirely clear now.
The brick and iron building was taller than I remembered, at least ten stories, and more forbidding-looking. I remembered Black telling me it used to be an armory for the United States military, which is part of how he got it for so cheap.
Overall, it struck me as oddly appropriate for the meeting we were about to have.
It was the kind of place I could picture vampires living in already.
I knew one reason Black picked it was that a heavy, military-grade construct, as Jem put it, already protected the structure. I suspected that had more to do with Charles than Brick, however, since constructs were pretty useless against vampires.
Black definitely wouldn’t want Charles to think he and Brick were negotiating.
At the very least, he wouldn’t want Charles listening in on what was said.
I suspected there were other reasons, as well––reasons having to do with the functionality of the construct for the seers operating in it, and advantages that might give us, even over vampires, who were relatively immune to most seer abilities––but I could only really guess at those, since the whole infiltrator thing was still pretty new to me.
Black nudged me with his light.
“We need to get off the street,” he said, gruff.
I nodded, glancing his way. “I’m ready.”
“Stay near me, doc. At all times.” He gave me a grim look. “We have drones over us, and inside the building, but unless I order Javier to blow the wh
ole damned structure, they’re liable to be too slow. That leaves those of us with swords on the front lines. Mostly seers.”
I nodded a second time, showing I understood.
Holding my gaze another beat, Black motioned for Javier and Dex to open the sliding doors into the warehouse.
Once they did, Black and I made our way to the gaping opening.
Seers and humans jogged around us, keeping us more or less surrounded the instant we left the shelter of the SUVs.
I think we were only on the street for a few seconds total, but I felt Black’s light gearing up and charging in that unnerving way I remembered from Koh Mangaan. I wondered if the other seers around us noticed, or if those structures on Black were still relatively invisible to them.
Black seemed to think they were––invisible, that is.
He claimed it was one advantage of having a lot of advanced structures below his feet, rather than above his head, which is where most seers were trained to look for them. Apparently, you needed some awareness and training in your own lower structures to see subterranean structures on other seers.
Or something like that.
Truthfully, I needed a lot more training in whatever the hell Black was talking about, too.
The bottom line was, according to Black, most seers didn’t have the ability to even see what he had in his light, nor the training on how to look for it.
Glancing at Jem as we entered the warehouse, I wondered if that was true of all seers.
Pushing all of that from my mind, I focused back on why we were here. Even with those stray thoughts, I could feel the part of me that was laser-focused.
Once this meeting became real, once it sank in that I’d be in the same room as Brick and his vampire henchmen, that I’d be in the same room as the vampire who attacked Kiko, that Brick would have Nick’s body with him, all of my more volatile emotions faded back.
I fell into a state I recognized, but one I hadn’t lived in for a long time.
It didn’t really hit me until we were inside the warehouse, walking down a black-painted passageway to the high-ceilinged room where the actual meeting would take place, that it was a mental state I’d cultivated in a war zone.
The last time I remembered feeling like this was Afghanistan.
It was a mental state Nick helped me learn, both through his advice, when I was green and he was a lot less so, and just from watching him operate.
Hyper-practical, completely focused on the job, Sargent Nick Tanaka maintained a peripheral awareness without letting anything pull his attention from the task at hand. I learned that from him, consciously emulated that in him. Something told me, even when I first met him, that adopting Nick’s approach to the front lines might be the only thing to keep me alive.
That state of mind had changed in me somewhat from those years, now that I understood my living light. I knew how to shield myself differently, as well as how to focus my mind, to gear into the more aggressive parts of my seer abilities, to aim that power outward––but the fundamental mental state still came from Nick.
Thinking about Nick now wasn’t going to help me, though.
I followed Black and Yarli down a second narrow corridor between another set of black-painted walls.
Behind me, I felt Jem pacing us, even though I still couldn’t hear him.
I’d foregone the assault rifle most of the seers and humans around me carried.
Instead, my hands rested on the grips of two SVI Tiki’s I wore at my hips.
Black handed those specific guns to me personally, and told me to wear them as my primary guns, since he’d noted during training exercises I was the most accurate with those. He also muttered about needing to buy me some “real guns,” presumably meaning some that belonged to me personally, versus those coming out of his general armory.
Two more guns rested in shoulder holsters inside my coat.
Those I’d already been carrying when Black handed me the Tiki’s with holsters. Both were Desert Eagles, and matched the Baby Eagle I wore at my ankle.
I didn’t carry swords like Black or Jem, although I had a long knife in a scabbard on the small of my back under the coat. I figured in this, I should play to my strengths. I’d logged a lot more time at the target range with handguns than I had with either of the other two weapons in the last six or so months.
If nothing else, I could cover the others, slowing down attacking vampires long enough for the seers and humans with swords to take them out.
It was a secondary job that had worked well within our team in the past.
In the same half-muttered conversation about the guns, however, Black informed me he would be starting me back up on sword-fighting lessons “right away,” so maybe this would be the last time I wasn’t carrying the double-scabbard worn by a lot of his senior team.
Angel wore the twin swords now.
So did Yarli, and Mika.
Normally Kiko would be here, wearing hers, too.
Normally she would be the one standing beside Black, acting as his bodyguard.
We entered the two-story warehouse room right as I shoved the thought from my mind. Whoever came here ahead of us already had it set up with a long, wooden table, surrounded by worn leather chairs.
Black clicked his fingers to Dex, conveying in a series of hand-gestures where he wanted everyone. Clearly, Black didn’t trust that vampires wouldn’t already have the warehouse under surveillance. He also likely didn’t trust that Brick didn’t already have someone inside our group, which is probably why he waited until now to deploy the teams to their final positions.
Knowing Brick, he would have sent at least a few vampires ahead, if only to look for signs of an ambush. One or more had likely been inside this building.
“They’re here,” Mika said, touching her earpiece and looking at Black. “Javier says they just pulled up in front of the building. The drones have their numbers at approximately sixteen. All of them appear to be vampires.”
Black nodded, once.
He looked at me.
Without hearing a word from him, or even a pull at my light, I walked over to where he stood at the head of the table. He sat down, and I took the seat to his right. Manny sat on his other side. Angel, Cowboy, Luce, and Easton sat down the table from me. Ace, Frank and two more humans from Black’s San Francisco team sat on the other side of Manny.
Behind us stood a row of seers, all of them carrying assault rifles and most of them wearing swords.
None of them sat down.
Jem stood behind me, next to Yarli, Holo, Jax and Mika.
Kiessa, the new seer with those eerie black and white eyes, stood on the other side of Mika, her dark face set in an unreadable mask. I counted eight more infiltrators with assault rifles I didn’t yet know, standing on Kiessa’s other side.
Dex stood with the seers.
So did Nadia, and a number of other humans high up in Black’s organizational structure. Black wouldn’t let Magic or any of the younger Natives come. I was there when a few of them threw a fit about that, but I was fully on Black’s side in that particular argument.
This was no place for teenagers, no matter how good they were with weapons.
I knew I was a hypocrite to say that, given how young I was when I first went to war, but I didn’t really give a damn.
I may have lied about my age to get into the military the first time, but I didn’t have to fight vampires in Afghanistan.
Javier was holding down the California Street building and monitoring the drone feeds. He was also keeping an eye on the refugees, the Native kids, and building security, not to mention making sure Kiko had both companionship and security guards posted outside her hospital room at all times.
I realized some part of me was still looking for Kiko… and for Nick.
Frowning, I finished my scan of the catwalks above us and the group standing behind us, and returned my gaze to the empty side of the table, and the black-painted corridor beyond.
/> None of us spoke.
After a few minutes, I heard sounds in the corridor.
Not quite footsteps.
Not even really the rustle of clothes.
It was more like the whispering echoes of movement, like ghosts shifting air down the narrow passageway between the high walls. The displacement of air was so soft, so subtle, I questioned my own ears, as well as my light, which seemed to pick up on the faint ripple as the vampires moved towards us through the building’s construct.
I doubt I would have heard or felt anything at all under normal conditions.
But these weren’t normal conditions.
Not only was every part of me on high alert, straining for their approach, those of us around the table, both seer and human, sat unnaturally still. The humans’ lights were as deathly still as mine and Black’s, probably aided in part by the construct and the row of infiltrators standing behind our chairs.
Here. Black reached into his pocket, and handed me something. Looking down at my hand, I realized was an earpiece. Wear this, doc. It’s already set to the right frequency.
I took it from him without question, fitting the small piece of green metal in my ear.
As I did, I glanced at Black’s ear and saw that he already wore one.
The instant I had the earpiece in place, a voice rose in my ear.
I realized it was that seer who reminded me of an anime character, Zairei.
“They should be reaching you now, lao ban,” he said.
I turned back towards the corridor and flinched, barely, when the first vampire face appeared. The pale, angular face turned both ways as his eyes darted around, taking in the space like a reptile––or maybe a predatory bird.
Like seers, vampires were beautiful.
Also like seers, some were more beautiful than others, but all of them ranked unnervingly high on the physical beauty scale.
My mind and light tracked that beauty differently with vampires than it did with seers, however. Vampire beauty struck me overtly as camouflage, barely masking the death they signaled to a more primal, flight-or-fight part of my brain. Looking into the eyes of a vampire was like staring into the eyes of a shark.
TO BLACK WITH LOVE: Quentin Black Mystery #10 Page 28