Black On Black (Quentin Black Mystery #3)

by JC Andrijeski

  I walked to the edge of the balcony overlooking the main lobby. A staircase stood to my left, a darkened escalator to my right. Below the terrace, it was even darker, despite some ambient light reaching the floor under the glass where the balcony didn’t intervene. Not a single thing moved on either level, not that I could see.

  I pulled out the broad spectrum signal detector, checking that, too.

  No cameras operating in here either.

  I scanned the walls and corners and spotted a few cameras with my eyes, including one aimed right at where I stood. None had visible lights showing them to be switched on. A few appeared to be on swivels to pan around in an arc, but none of them moved.

  Another swish of air and rubber seals made me turn back towards the door.

  Nick entered. Angel walked through directly behind him. She had the tranquilizer gun out and in her hand now.

  I watched them both look around, noting the same emptiness and silence that I had. Angel walked up to where I stood by the edge of the balcony. Nick remained somewhat behind her as he looked down the escalator then the spiral staircase on our other side. I watched him peer over the balcony wall too, frowning into that dimly-lit space, looking for movement.

  “What are we doing, doc?” Angel murmured from next to me.

  I gave her a grim smile.

  “Walking into a trap?” I suggested.

  She didn’t return my smile.

  From the top of the spiral staircase, Nick gestured for both of us.

  “This way,” he said, making a military hand-signal aiming down.

  Angel glanced at me, giving me a slightly more prominent frown, but only nodded when she glanced at Nick. As we got closer to the top of the stairs, she motioned with the gun for me to walk ahead of her, putting me between her and Nick.

  We descended to the main entrance of the museum.

  Nick had his own tranquilizer gun out now as well, but I kept hold of the GPS, watching the blue dot shift orientation as we made our way silently to the lower floor. It got increasingly darker as we reached the bottom, then darker still as we walked away from the staircase and towards the south side of the lobby. When I glanced up, I could see the palace building through the glass pyramid, which now formed an enormous skylight over our heads.

  I found myself wondering why since I’d met Black, I always seemed to be breaking into museums with glass pyramids in front of them.

  I didn’t realize I was smiling until Nick gave me a puzzled look.

  “Where to now, doc?” he said, once I’d wiped the smile away.

  I showed him the GPS, motioning with my hand.

  Nick nodded, and again led the way. We approached two darkened escalators with a staircase between them. Angel and I followed Nick up the staircase in the middle, making no noise apart from the occasional squeak of Angel’s rubber-soled boots. When we reached the top, I grabbed Nick’s arm, motioning for him and Angel to let me go ahead.

  When Nick looked about to argue, I shook my head.

  “I’m invited,” I said quietly.

  I saw him thinking about my words, right before he seemed to concede my point.

  I followed the GPS map under one of the smaller glass pyramids, which shone a smaller square of patterned yellow light on the floor. Just beyond that and a small souvenir stand stood the ticket collection gates.

  We entered a narrow corridor––pitch black apart from a few lit exit signs.

  I had my tranquilizer gun out now, too.

  I held it down by my thigh, gripping my phone in my other hand with the GPS map illuminating my fingers.

  We climbed a short flight of stairs, then a steeper spiral staircase, this one narrower than the one in the main lobby. The space opened up when I reached the top. I stood there, waiting for Nick and Angel to join me, the tranquilizer gun still gripped in my hand as I gazed down the length of a cavernous room.

  It was filled with human-shaped statues, most at least eight or nine feet in height.

  Ivory-colored pillars ran the length of the walls, each a few feet in diameter, and statues of women and men in classically Roman and Greek poses stood between those pillars and against the walls on either end and opposite the windows.

  I looked down at the GPS as Nick reached my side, double-checking our direction since the staircase turned me around. Through the windows it looked like we were back at ground-level. According to the broad spectrum signal detector, the surveillance had been turned off in here, too. I couldn’t help being unnerved at just how empty it was.

  It felt empty in here... like a tomb filled with nothing but echoes of whispers, the footsteps of ghosts. Black’s files on the Louvre said normally close to a hundred people worked here at night, depending on the time of year.

  We were really damned close to that blue dot on the GPS tracker now.

  Close enough that my heart started pounding in my chest.

  Motioning for Nick and Angel to stay behind me again, I followed the GPS to the corridor on our left. I led them through an arched doorway and through a narrow room lined with more human statues, these ones mainly life-sized, versus the marble giants from the other room. Windows to our left filled the high-ceilinged corridor with orange light from the courtyard, turning the statues near the glass into real-looking human silhouettes.

  That’s why I didn’t notice the light coming from ahead of us at first.

  About a third of the way through the corridor, I came to a stop.

  Steep stone stairs rose up at the end of our walk, two flights of them. The light that spilled down them wasn’t from outside. It shone a paler white-yellow, and had a harder tint.

  Holding up a hand for Nick and Angel to wait, I took a few more cautious steps forward. Now that I looked for it, I could see the craggy stone base of a statue at the top of that second set of stairs. It looked like a wide jumble of rocks, with a sharp chunk jutting forward like the prow of a ship. As I moved closer, the body of the statue was slowly revealed.

  A headless woman, with outstretched wings.

  I recognized it immediately.

  A 2nd Century B.C. marble sculpture, it depicted the Greek goddess Nike. It also happened to be a piece of art I would have traveled to Paris and the Louvre just to see. I knew it primarily as the Winged Victory of Samothrace, but it was also called Nike of Samothrace.

  Most people just called it Winged Victory.

  I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until I let it out. By then, I felt nearly light-headed. I began to walk, now in a low crouch to look up at the statue, conscious of the tranquilizer gun I gripped in one hand. Because of the steep stairs, I couldn’t see most of the base of the statue, but I knew from the blue dot that we had to go up there.

  I walked up the stairs cautiously, in awe of the lit statue even as my heart slammed loudly against my ribs. I still didn’t hear anything. I couldn’t see anything either.

  I was terrified I was going to find Black’s dead body at the top of those stairs.

  I remembered Ian’s fetish about winged creatures, both in San Francisco and Bangkok.

  By the time I reached the first landing, I fought to control my breathing.

  Shoving the phone into my back pocket, I gripped the tranquilizer gun in both hands, sparing a brief glance back at Nick and Angel before I began climbing the next flight of stairs.

  I was sweating, even though it was cold as a tomb in here.

  As I got high enough that my eyes rose above the highest step at the top, my heart started hammering for a different reason. Relief flooded through me, even as I found I couldn’t breathe for those few seconds.

  I also lost the last bit of caution I’d had about making noise.

  “Black,” I managed. My voice held an open relief.

  His eyes jerked towards mine. They widened, then filled with that same relief.

  “Miriam... di’lanlente d’ gaos. I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”

  I didn’t stop to think about his words at
first.

  I was too busy closing the distance between us. That, and looking him over.

  He’d been tied to a heavy chair. The chair looked like a piece of artwork itself, maybe from one of the historical recreation rooms. Truthfully, it looked like a throne, although maybe one from a lesser reception hall, not a formal receiving room.

  Whatever it was, Black didn’t look much like royalty sitting in it. His hairline was bleeding and a fresh-looking bruise darkened one side of his face.

  As I got closer to him, still gripping the gun in my hands, I saw that wasn’t the worst of his injuries. Someone had stuck something in his side. In addition to the bindings holding his wrists and ankles, that thing seemed to be impaling him to the chair. The upholstery under where he sat was already soaked with his blood, which explained why he looked so pale.

  I kept the gun in my hands, but pointed down as I ran up the last few stairs to reach the landing platform. Apart from the chair where Black sat, which obviously didn’t belong there, Winged Victory was the only piece of art there.

  Now that I stood directly below it, it was enormous.

  “Fuck... cut me loose,” he said, jerking my eyes back to him. “Miri, we need to get out of here. Now.”

  I lowered the gun still more.

  After a bare moment of indecision, I holstered it, then walked directly to him.

  Once I got close enough, I saw that the thing that they’d stuck through his side was some kind of scepter made of glass. It was maybe only a centimeter and a half thick at the widest part I could see, but it had to be hurting him like hell. I couldn’t tell for sure where it would have gone through him, in terms of organs.

  I was afraid if I took it out of him, it might kill him from blood-loss, though.

  Since it was glass, I wondered if we could break it off.

  “Miriam,” he said. Again, that gratitude came through his words, along with a darker urgency. “Come on, honey... help me out of this.”

  Heat bloomed on my cheeks at his words, but I didn’t look at his face. I walked closer, then knelt down at the base of the chair, looking at his ankles.

  Whoever left him here had tied him with rope.

  “They left me here,” Black said. “They left me and then they freed Ian...”

  I froze, looking up from where I knelt by his feet. “Ian?”

  He nodded. His expression relaxed, as if he was relieved he finally had my attention. I felt puzzlement on him as he continued to watch me, along with a mixture of other feelings that felt a lot more muted––things he might even be suppressing. It hit me that I’d felt that suppression on him before, only a lot fainter than I could feel it now.

  I was so physically close to him now, I could feel everything.

  He’d been shielding from me. A lot more than I’d realized.

  “I had to,” Black said, hearing me. “I have to shield now, too. It’s all I had for defense in here... the size of this place and shielding my light. I had to hope he didn’t start looking for me here first, that the shield would buy me some time.”

  “Do they know I’m here?” I pulled the knife out of my boot, starting to saw at the rope holding his nearest ankle to the base of the chair.

  “I don’t know.” I felt him watching me work. “They must know though, Miri.”

  I felt a flush of pain on him. I felt him looking at me still.

  “Thank you for coming,” he added after a pause. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t. I admit, I was worried he was right... that you’d leave me here. They’ve been fucking with my head so much, I didn’t know what to think...”

  I paused on that, then decided it could wait until I got him free.

  I fought not to think about Black himself, focusing instead on the logistics of how they had him tied to the chair. I needed to get the rope off first, so we could deal with the problem of the glass rod.

  I’d gotten his first foot free and was sawing through the second rope when I heard a noise behind me and turned. Glancing over my shoulder, I let out an exhale when Angel’s head appeared over the edge of the platform.

  Nick’s dark head followed closely behind hers.

  A wave of hostility hit me from Black, seemingly seconds after I could see Nick.

  I glanced up at him, and saw him staring in the direction of the staircase, a colder anger in his eyes and face. I smacked his leg lightly from where I knelt.

  “Hey,” I said softly. “Cut it out. They’re helping me.”

  “Probably so that fucker can be sure I don’t leave here alive,” Black muttered.

  When I glanced up that time, he was still staring at Nick.

  “Black,” I warned. “That wasn’t Nick’s fault. It was mine.”

  “Bullshit,” Black growled, his stare unmoving. “He fucking wants you, Miriam. If you think he’s dong this for any other reason, you’re kidding yourself.”

  Following his gaze over my shoulder, I saw Nick and Angel reach the top of the platform, both holding tranquilizer guns.

  After a few rapid hand-gestures between them, Angel crouched at the base of one of the pillars on the opposite side of the staircase, to the left of Winged Victory, and looking out so she covered the two main corridors. I saw her holster the tranquilizer gun from a crouch, pulling the other gun out of her jacket.

  I knew a regular gun would be useless if we had to fight seers. A seer could simply use pushes to make it impossible for Angel to aim––or worse, tell her to shoot herself.

  Even so, I remained silent.

  The tranquilizer gun was strictly a short-range weapon. If she could get the jump on whoever might come for us, a regular gun was still probably her best bet.

  I looked back at Black and caught him staring at Nick again.

  I sighed. “Quentin. You need to chill. I mean it.”

  Pain coiled off him, right before his eyes met mine.

  I’d said his first name on purpose, in part to get him to look at me, to get his hostility aimed away from Nick, but even so, when I met his gaze directly it sent a jolt through me. For a few seconds, I couldn’t speak, or look away from his face.

  Eventually, I saw him swallow, right before he broke eye contact. More pain came off him right before he nudged me with his knee, shifting the direction of his gold eyes down to where his wrists were tied.

  “You got that ankle?” he said gently.

  Swallowing, I looked down, then finished sawing the knife through the last few millimeters of rope. When I finished and he’d moved his foot away from the base of the chair, I started working on the rope at his wrists.

  Nick walked up to us as I was finishing up the first one. I felt Black tense all around me, even as that aggression and hostility on him flared.

  “What the fuck is this?” Nick muttered, lowering his gun as he looked over Black. I saw him wince visibly when he caught sight of the glass shard sticking out of Black’s side. “Christ. What the fuck is that?”

  “Some kind of scepter, I think,” I told him, without looking up from where I sawed at the rope. “Walk around the back... see if there’s any way to push it out of the chair,” I added. “I’m afraid if we take it out altogether it might kill him.”

  “No,” Black said, shaking his head. “It’s a urele. They pushed it in from behind.” Seeing a blank look on my face, he explained, “...Seer training tool. There’s a bulb on the other end. That bulb’s got to be sticking out of back side of the chair. We’ll have to find some way to break it... or pull me off it... or pull it out of me from behind. You can’t get it through the chair.”

  I shook my head, “Black, no.”

  “I’ll be okay. They didn’t hit anything important. They weren’t trying to kill me. I think it was more to see if I’d yank myself off of it, or––”

  “––Even if you’re right,” I said, my voice warning. “You could still bleed to death, Black.”

  I cut him off partly because I could feel he’d been about to say something about seer organ p
lacement. As it was, I hoped Nick missed the seer reference Black tossed out there already.

  “And we can’t break it either,” I muttered, looking back down at the knife. “Jesus... not while it’s inside you. It’s glass. The whole thing could shatter...”

  I got through the last of that rope and slid over on my knees to work on the next one.

  Black used his free hand to start stroking my hair, which was distracting as hell.

  After a few seconds of him doing that, I slid further to the left on my knees, repositioning my body and the knife so I was on the other side of the chair’s arm. In the process I moved myself out of reach of Black’s fingers, at least without him twisting his waist and hurting himself. I felt his presence all around me now, so dense I could barely think through it.

  The total lack of clarity around that scared the shit out of me.

  I’d barely been around him for more than a handful of minutes and I already felt drugged. I’d been feeling like this on and off since Bangkok, but it was so much worse now I honestly wasn’t sure how I was going to keep my head clear enough to get us out of there.

  I went back to sawing at the rope, even as Black pooled more of that presence at me. Finally I raised my eyes back to his, glaring at him with a clenched jaw.

  “Cut it out. I mean it, Black.”

  “I’m so glad to see you, Miri...” he said, his voice thick.

  Hearing the emotion there, I softened, even as I resisted that pull.

  “Not now, okay?” My voice lowered, growing softer too. “I need you to focus, all right? I know you’re wounded and I missed you, too... but you need to focus right now, Black. Tell us who took you. Was it Lucky?”

  He nodded. I saw him swallow, even as he winced from something Nick was doing to the chair behind him. I felt another pulse of anger off Black that Nick was even there and the irrationality behind it made me want to smack him again, harder that time.

  “Cut it out,” I warned. “I mean it, Black.”

  Nick frowned as he raised his head from behind the chair. “What the fuck is he doing?”