Of course, that was assuming vampires even were a species, in the usual sense.
But I knew that was mostly a rationalization, too.
Black’s fingers tightened on mine.
When I looked up, meeting his light-filled eyes, I saw the same tiredness reflected in his gold, flecked irises that I felt down to my very bones.
I also realized Black was right.
It was pointless talking to my uncle about this.
It was pointless trying to reason with him about any of it.
Still looking at Black, I spoke, my voice deadened-sounding.
“I want to go home,” I said, still staring into Black’s gold eyes. “I want our friends back, and I want to go home, Uncle Charles.”
There was another silence.
When it stretched, I turned, looking at my uncle’s face.
He was frowning, looking between me and Black.
Seeing me watching him look at both of us, he sighed, his gaze flickering away. That harder expression I’d glimpsed vanished, washed away by a more genial, understanding look.
I knew my uncle’s masks now, though.
I knew what really lay behind them.
Some of them, at least.
“Of course,” he murmured.
Leaning back in his chair, he folded long-fingered hands in his lap, smiling at both of us. His eyes remained raptor-like, assessing, as he looked between us.
“Just know that I meant what I said, Miriam. You are welcome to be a part of this, niece. Whenever you want, and in whatever capacity you desire. You are welcome to be a part of this at the very highest levels––both of you––whenever you, your mate, or any of your friends are ready.”
I nodded, numb.
“Go home,” my uncle advised. “Talk this over between you. Talk about it with your friends. Think about your options. Think about what you want for yourselves, for the humans you love. Think about what you will want for your children one day.”
He smiled that warmer smile, and that time, it seemed to reach his eyes.
“And call me anytime, niece––anytime at all. I will always make time for you, Miri darling, whenever you or your husband need it.”
I nodded again, glancing at Black.
I didn’t try to speak.
Truthfully, I could barely comprehend his words, at least not with the conscious part of my mind––at least not then.
Black didn’t say anything, either.
He just rose to his feet, gripping my hand tightly in his.
26
RISING UP
I DON’T REMEMBER how we got there. I barely remember being reunited with everyone we’d come to Washington D.C. with––everyone who wasn’t a vampire.
The next time I remember being fully conscious of where I was, and who I was, happened when I took a seat in the back of a limousine with Black. I heard the engine start up, and watched as we pulled out of the parking lot of the Pentagon.
Manny, Lex, Lawless, Nick, Kiko, and Easton sat across from us.
Next to me sat Cowboy, Angel, Frank and Javier.
Dex was in a different limousine, either in front of us or behind us. I could feel that, along with glimpses of others in our group––the native kids, Dog and Devin, most of Black’s employees, the immigrant seers.
None of us in our limousine spoke.
Black still held my hand tightly in his.
I grew aware that we were on our way to the airport, to a private plane––even though I don’t remember who told me that, or how I knew.
I was staring out the window at the dark when Black leaned closer. He kissed my temple, then murmured softly in my ear.
“I’m sorry I missed it,” he said, clutching my hand tighter. “I missed it, Miri. Your uncle was right. I should have felt this.”
I gripped his hand back, shaking my head.
“It wasn’t you who missed it,” I murmured back, just as soft. “Jem and Mika told me your light was damaged after New Mexico. I knew that. I should have talked to them about how different things felt here.”
Shaking my head again, I glanced up, meeting his gold eyes.
“They just got here,” I said, soft. “They wouldn’t have noticed anything changed. They had nothing to compare it to. It was me. I missed it.”
Black squeezed my hand, but didn’t speak.
I could tell he didn’t agree with me, though, not entirely.
“Can you feel it now?” I said, still speaking low, conscious of the seers in the front seat of the limousine. “Can you feel how it’s different now?”
Black’s lips firmed. Glancing down at me, he shook his head, but not in a hard no.
“Not entirely, doc. But I can feel some, through you.”
“Do you know what it means?”
His lips twisted into a harder scowl. “Not exactly.”
Exhaling, he gave me another glance. “We’ll talk about it later, doc. Suffice it to say, it feels a lot more like Old Earth. It feels like the Barrier is different, with all these seers here. We share abilities to some degree. Seers, I mean.”
“Share abilities?” I pursed my lips. “What does that mean?”
“It means seers will be different, too.” He gave me another brief frown. “When the Barrier changes, we change. Which means we might have more of the abilities I remember from Old Earth.” Scowling a second time, he added, “It means humans might be even more fucked than I’d originally thought.”
Catching a glance from the rearview mirror by one of the seers, I frowned.
Black was right. I shouldn’t be pushing him to talk about this here.
Even so, I couldn’t help turning over what he’d said, trying to make it real.
He’d told me before that seers could do more, psychically-speaking, on that other version of Earth. He’d told me he could do more, that he lost some of his abilities when he came here. I couldn’t remember the exact differences, but he seemed to think they were pretty dramatic.
“Not here, doc,” Black murmured, kissing my cheek. “Not even in your head.”
I nodded, fighting to clear my mind.
I knew he was right. I could feel Charles’ seers all around us, and not only the two seated in the front of the car. I could almost see them when I closed my eyes.
Then something else occurred to me.
“Your money?” I looked up at Black, frowning. “What about your money?”
Black glanced down at me.
A slight frown touched his perfect lips.
After a pause, he caressed my fingers with his. “It’s all back, Miri. According to Charles, everything is all back, exactly the way it was. A report will go to the media within the hour, clearing my name. All of my employees who were brought in for questioning will be cut loose at the same time.”
Still frowning, he gripped my hand tighter, studying my eyes.
“You okay, doc?” he said, softer. “You were there when he told me that. You asked him about Elspeth… about Farraday. He assured us they were both fine, and would meet us at the airport. He gave us that whole song and dance about how he was trying to keep me safe. How he was just trying to bring me in––”
But my mind was clearing slowly as he spoke.
I nodded, my vision clearing.
“I remember,” I said. “I remember now.”
“Keeping you safe, my ass,” Manny muttered from across from me and Black.
Black and I both looked at him, but Manny didn’t return our gazes, not at first. Clasping gnarled hands between his knees, he glanced over his shoulder at the two seers driving the limousine and sitting shotgun.
A scowl formed on his lips when he glanced back at us.
“He didn’t want you getting in the way,” he muttered, lower. “He wanted you out of the picture until it was too late for you to do shit. He wanted control first. He wanted control over anyone you might know in D.C. Any of your contacts from the Colonel.”
Black raised a finger slowly and
silently to his lips. Still holding Manny’s gaze, he shook his head, a faint, barely-perceptible warning in his gold eyes.
Manny’s scowl deepened, but he nodded, aiming that scowl back at the one-way windows. Watching his profile as he looked out at the dark D.C. streets, I frowned, too.
We were all still sitting there, silent, when Black pulled his phone out of his pocket and typed on it, two-handed.
Seconds later, he showed Manny what he’d written. He motioned with his fingers for Manny to pass the phone around the car after he’d finished reading.
When it came back around to us, I leaned closer to Black’s lap to read it, too.
I want all of you to come with me. Your choice, of course. But we can’t talk here. Those of you who know how to keep your minds blank, now’s a good time to practice what I taught you. This isn’t over. I promise you. This isn’t over. Not even fucking close.
I read the whole thing twice.
As I did, I felt that choking, sick sensation in my chest and gut ease for the first time since we’d left Ash Woods. It didn’t go away entirely, but I could breathe again without feeling like I might throw up on the floor of the limousine.
I watched Black send the message on to Dex, who was in one of the other cars, and to Ace and Dog, who were each in other cars, too.
Watching him stuff the phone back in the inside pocket of his leather jacket, I gripped his hand when he wound it back around mine.
“I don’t want to go back to San Francisco,” I said aloud.
Still thinking, I looked up at Black.
“I don’t want to go back there, Black,” I said. “Not now.”
There was a silence.
In it, we just looked at each other.
I didn’t hear his voice in my head, or see any pictures from his mind, clear or abstract. Even so, I felt him, maybe stronger than I’d ever felt him. I felt almost like I was reading him, or maybe that he was reading me. It felt like we were communicating, somehow, even though not a single word passed between us, in any of the ways we normally spoke.
In the end, he broke that silence, not me.
“Do you want to stay here?” he said, still studying my eyes. “In D.C.?”
Thinking about that, I hesitated.
Looking past him, I gazed out the darkened windows at the passing streets. Across the Potomoc, the lit Washington Monument was visible in the distance as we drove south towards the airport. Watching as the monument grew smaller, I shook my head again.
“No,” I said. “No. I don’t want to stay here.”
Gripping my hand tighter in his hand, Black nodded.
Raising my hand to his lips, he kissed my knuckles, then nodded again.
For a long time after that, neither of us spoke.
I knew though.
Somehow, I knew.
He understood. Black understood exactly what I was saying to him.
We couldn’t just go back to our lives in California and play normal. We couldn’t just go back to wait for Charles to make over the world in his own image––with Black picking up the pieces of his companies, me starting up my private practice again, taking P.I. contracts with Black, working with Nick at the Northern Precinct, going to yoga classes with friends from college, taking boxing classes with Angel and Kiko.
My uncle would follow us to San Francisco.
He likely had people there already, waiting for us.
His seers would definitely have another of those net-like clouds over Black’s California Street penthouse in downtown San Francisco; they’d probably started work on one the instant Charles realized we didn’t intend to stay in D.C.
No, going back to San Francisco was just another way for Uncle Charles to take over our lives. It was another way for him to pull us into his world. If it wasn’t, he would have fought us a lot harder about returning there.
We couldn’t let that happen.
The world was definitely going to get smaller.
I could feel that, and I could feel Uncle Charles would be working consciously to make that happen. But I could also feel we still had time. There were still places left that his seers couldn’t touch. There was still space left to breathe.
We needed to take advantage of that space, before it was gone.
Not all seers would see things the way Charles did. The immigrant seers following us in the other car were proof of that. We needed to give them a place to go––a place that wasn’t controlled by Charles.
Black understood that.
He understood all of it, better than I did.
It didn’t make everything better, knowing that Black understood.
It didn’t change anything, really.
Even so, the relief that washed over me was nearly physical.
Gripping his hand in both of mine, I followed his gaze out the window.
Together, both of us watched as the last glimpse of the capital receded into the dark.
* * *
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 him. 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.
In Black We Trust Page 36