Black Blood: A Quentin Black Mystery Story: Quentin Black Mystery #5.5

by JC Andrijeski

  BLACK BLOOD

  A Quentin Black Story

  by

  JC Andrijeski

  Copyright © 2017 by JC Andrijeski

  Published by White Sun Press

  Cover Art & Design by J.M. Rising Horse Creations

  2016

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an official retailer for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Synopsis for BLACK BLOOD

  Is a vampire more or less dangerous when victim to a broken heart?

  After Black spent weeks imprisoned and tortured by the evil vampire, “Brick,” Miriam is still dealing with the fallout of her husband’s nightmares and strange silences. When Black asks her to accompany him to New York for an extended business trip, Miri quickly agrees, but before they can leave, Brick ambushes them again.

  This time, he wants Miri, though.

  Kidnapped and blindfolded, she’s positive he’s using her as bait to lure her husband. But it turns out Brick wants her for an entirely different purpose… to act as psychic psychologist to his vampire girlfriend, Lila, who is suffering from trauma of her own.

  Forced to work for a creature she despises, Miri finds herself drawn into his personal life in a way she never could have imagined, even as she fights to stay alive.

  1

  Trauma

  MY HUSBAND WAS kidnapped by vampires.

  I know how that sounds, believe me. I was definitely living in a pretty intense state of denial myself when I first found out who had him. I also went a little crazy trying to get him back. Now that I had him back, and more or less in one piece, I still couldn’t fully wrap my head around it.

  You’d think it would be easier for me.

  After all, my husband’s not human, either.

  Neither am I, for that matter, although perhaps I’m still in denial about that as well.

  Anyway, I’m half-human at least, so I still feel like I qualify a little. In the human being department, that is.

  My husband, Quentin R. Black, is not human. He’s 100% not-human.

  He’s not a vampire, either.

  He’s a seer.

  What’s a seer, you say?

  Exactly. I had no idea what they were, either. Not before I met him.

  Yet somehow, it was easier on my mind to accept my husband’s being not-human simply because I had no previously conceived notions about what being a seer even meant. His entire backstory was such an utterly foreign concept to me, my mind just sort of accepted it.

  But I didn’t have to ask what a vampire was.

  Vampires are fairy tale monsters.

  Seeing them as real, not in the metaphorical or psychological or sociological sense, but actually real, as in a genetically different race living alongside humans, with a different culture, history, biology, political structure and belief system... a race that fed on humans and had a taste for seers, too... well, that was a lot harder.

  My husband hadn’t dealt with that information very well, either.

  He hadn’t known vampires existed any more than I did. To him, just like to most humans, vampires were nothing but a myth––a myth a lot of humans happened to share in different forms across the span of history.

  Black had no idea another species shared the planet with us.

  He said he would’ve had trouble believing it, too, before they’d kidnapped him in the middle of a LAPD murder investigation and held him captive for a few months.

  He hadn’t known anything about them then.

  But he definitely knew now.

  HE WOKE ME from a heavy sleep. Writhing next to me on the mattress, he let out a low groan, threaded with pain, then a heavier cry.

  It wasn’t the good kind of groan... it wasn’t the good kind of pain, either.

  It was nothing like the sounds he’d made earlier that night, when we first got back to his penthouse apartment. Those sounds brought up a much different reaction in me, especially after he threw me down on his couch after spending about two seconds removing every article of clothing I wore.

  Since we’d only just gotten off a plane after a five hour flight from Birmingham to San Francisco, I’d been thinking I’d take a shower first... but, yeah, that didn’t happen. Then again, we didn’t have the best track record when it came to making it to the shower when Black was in one of his moods.

  We’d spent most of the car ride from New Orleans to Birmingham getting reacquainted with one another as well. After that first, initial conversation when he first got in the car, we didn’t really talk. But I was worried about him, yeah.

  To be honest, I was really worried.

  So when I heard that groan, I found myself wide, wide awake, first staring at the ceiling, then looking down at him where he lay naked on the bed next to me.

  He was still asleep.

  He was sweating though, panting.

  His light, that part of a seer that allowed us to read minds, communicate feelings, create walls against one another... and a million other things I hadn’t fully discovered, much less comprehended or wrapped my head around yet... coiled around him like an erratic cloud, emitting sparks I could almost see with my physical eyes.

  A hard pulse of anger left that cloud as I watched. That anger and frustration mixed with a darker thread of grief that brought my heart to my throat.

  When he groaned again, closer to a growl that time, I didn’t think.

  I slid up against him, wrapping my arms and body around his back and chest. I’d intended to massage him awake, or massage him into a calmer sleep, at least.

  But he shocked the hell out of me.

  First by wrenching away from me roughly––

  ––then by twisting his body around liquidly and, lightning quick, pinning me to the mattress. It happened so fast I couldn’t take a breath.

  I found myself staring up, frozen, at his raised fist. Fury twisted his features, more anger than I’d ever seen in his face before, at least prior to the last forty-eight hours.

  Seeing him that way was terrifying.

  Black is not a small man.

  “Black...” I managed, raising my hands to shield my face. “Black, it’s me... it’s Miriam. It’s Miri... don’t hit me, please... wake up...”

  I watched him blink down at me, that hard expression still on his thinner-than-usual face. I almost didn’t recognize him in the dim light coming from the penthouse window. That window was bright even at three in the morning since it overlooked most of downtown San Francisco, but his face appeared alien in his single-minded rage, especially coupled with the weight he’d lost in the weeks he’d been gone.

  I saw him recognize me then.

  Disbelief plumed off him once he had, right before he lowered his arm.

  Slowly, that fury dissipated from around his living light, leaving something closer to shock. His light continued to coil around me. I felt him using that light now to make sure I was okay, to make sure he hadn’t hurt me before he remembered where he was.

  Replacing that shock was a kind of horror when he realized what he’d almost done.

  Because his light was all over me now, I knew he’d been really damned close to hitting me. I also knew why, so my fear towards hi
m had evaporated, too.

  Well, fear for myself anyway––my worry about him got a lot worse.

  I knew it wasn’t me he wanted to hit.

  “Hey.” I rubbed his chest, watching his face as he fought to come back from where he’d been. “Hey,” I said softer. “You’re okay... I’m okay. Everything’s fine, Black. We’re at home. You were having a bad dream. That’s all it was.”

  I knew it might have been more than that. I’m a trained psychologist after all.

  It already crossed my mind I might be seeing trauma symptoms, that he might have been having a full-blown flashback, in addition to the bad dream. It was too early to tell of course, but I couldn’t help worrying he might develop some form of Acute Stress Disorder or even full blown Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.

  Given how little I still knew about his past, I really had no way of knowing how the experience would affect him, or what triggers it might set off.

  Just the thought brought my heart to my throat, though.

  I don’t know if he felt me thinking any of that or not.

  He shook his head, avoiding my eyes. Then he rolled over onto his back. Letting his head fall to the mattress, he shook it again, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Gaos,” he said, using the seer word. “Gaos... I’m sorry, Miri. I’m sorry.”

  Shifting to my side, I went back to massaging his chest, knowing he needed the contact, even if he was avoiding me now with his light.

  Maybe more so, because of that.

  “I’m just glad you’ve got good reflexes,” I joked.

  “That’s not funny, Miri.”

  I smiled. “Believe me, I know.”

  He turned his head, quirking an eyebrow at me, and I smiled for real, in spite of myself. I was relieved when I saw the barest edges of an answering smile touch his perfectly sculpted lips. It wasn’t a real smile though. I’d only seen maybe one of those since I got him back.

  I bent down, kissing his mouth. When he kissed me back, I coaxed his lips apart with my tongue, and then we were kissing for real. After what must have been a few minutes of that, he fisted a hand in my hair, lifting my mouth off his.

  “Gaos.” He was breathing harder, staring up at me. “You’re impossible.”

  “I’m impossible?”

  “Yes,” he growled. “...I almost hit you. I almost hit you, Miri. Now you’re trying your damnedest to give me a hard on.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Yes,” he snapped.

  He glared up at me, still breathing hard, and I tried to decide what I could see in his face, if teasing him was helping distract him into a lighter space or just making him feel worse. I found myself looking down at his bare upper body as I thought it, wincing before I could stop myself.

  He was still beautiful, of course. Perfect lines made up his chest and shoulders, which had lost some of their bulk while he was gone, but very little of the muscle. He was leaner but hard as a rock... he was also bruised, beat up, and covered with new cuts and marks, some of them fresh enough that they hadn’t even started to heal really.

  But my eyes wanted to keep going back to the crescent-shaped series of cuts covering a lot of his upper body and arms.

  I could barely make myself believe what they were, but I knew what they were now.

  Bite marks.

  Most of those crescent shapes had two harder puncture holes at the top of the arc. I knew what caused them––I knew what had bitten him. I’d seen the damned things in action, face-to-face, but I still had trouble wrapping my college-educated and used-to-be-highly-rational brain around the reality that my husband was covered in vampire bite marks.

  He still hadn’t said much about it.

  When I glanced at his face, I saw him watching me look. I studied his gold, tiger-like eyes, which I could see even in the dim light. A hard pulse of heat came out of me––not desire that time so much as love. I knew some part of me was still in disbelief that he was back, that he was alive, that we were really here.

  That same part of me felt almost psychotically protective of him.

  He’d been gone for over four weeks.

  Four weeks, three days, seventeen hours.

  As the reality of that hit me again, an even hotter pulse left my light.

  I saw him wince, right before his expression softened. He sighed then, looking up at me. Rubbing his face with the hand that wasn’t still coiled in my hair, he exuded a pulse of what felt like surrender.

  “Go ahead and look,” he said gruffly, giving me a bare glance before he went back to looking up at the ceiling. “Ask me whatever you want, Miriam. I told you the worst of it in the car, but I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  I shook my head, biting my lip. “I don’t want to ask. I want you to tell me what you want to tell me... when you want to tell me. Same with anything you want from me. If you want something, ask. You can ask me for anything, Black.”

  He nodded slowly, as if thinking about my words. Still looking up at the ceiling, he exhaled then, the barest edges of that anger coming off his light, even as he wrapped his free arm around my waist, tugging me further on top of him.

  “All right,” he said.

  He met my gaze, his eyes deadly serious, holding a colder kind of determination.

  “You’re right. I want things from you.” His voice matched his eyes. “More to the point, there are things I want to do... and some of them require money. Which means I need to shift gears for awhile, build up the reserves. That means going to New York.” He paused, still holding my gaze. “You’re coming with me, Miriam. As in, I’m not going without you. If I have to, I’ll do it from here and hire proxies, but I’d prefer to be there in person.”

  I nodded, ignoring his usual asking-while-sounding-like-giving-orders thing.

  “Why New York?”

  He grunted. “Why do you think? I want to make money... a lot of it... fast.” Pausing, he added, “Either way we do it, I’m not leaving you alone. You’re going to have to deal with overprotective me for awhile.” His jaw hardened as he studied my eyes. “Can you deal with that? Without taking it the wrong way?”

  “You’re feeling overprotective?” I snorted.

  His eyes narrowed. “What the fuck do you think they threatened me with while I was in there, Miri? Because it sure as hell wasn’t my life.”

  I stared back at him, then swallowed. “Oh.”

  “Yeah... oh.” His mouth hardened more. “There are other things too, Miri. But the rest of it can wait. I need money first. We start there.”

  I nodded, relaxing into him more. I knew this was Black’s way of dealing with this. I was actually good with him being proactive about it, even as angry as he was. Resting my chin on my hands, which remained splayed on his chest, I nodded again.

  “Okay. Do you want to tell me anything about why you need the money?”

  “I’m going to build out the company,” he said. “And hire a lot more fucking people. I also need to start training them... some of them, at least... to kill vampires.”

  I flinched at the word, but nodded again. “Okay.”

  I knew that would be a lot more complicated than he was saying, given that his employees were human. I also knew Black already knew that, so mentioning it would be redundant. Black always had a plan for everything, anyway.

  His voice remained hard as metal when he went on.

  “There are other things, like I said, but we’ll start there. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, a little warier.

  Black exhaled, staring up at the ceiling again, his jaw in a hard clench.

  “So...” I ventured, a little more cautiously. “The plan is to go full-bore vampire hunter, is that it? Is that your new business venture?”

  “It might be,” he growled. He looked over at me, his gold eyes flashing. “Miri, what exactly do you suggest I do?”

  I held up a hand in a peace gesture. “Black, I’m not saying it’s wrong. But yeah, it makes m
e nervous. Aren’t there like... millions of them? Far more of them than there are of us?”

  By “us” I meant seers, not humans.

  That time, Black didn’t answer.

  When he continued to stare up at the ceiling, I went back to massaging him with my hands. I could practically feel the wheels turning in that giant brain of his, but I tried to coax him out of it, wrapping him in more of my light as I took my time exploring his body.

  When I followed my fingers with my mouth, he let out a low sound, laying back on the bed. After a few minutes more, his hands were back in my hair, even as I felt his light start to open. He was breathing harder, too, his light turning molten, into liquid fire. I felt desire come off him in a hotter plume when I started pulling on him with my light, using my tongue on his bare skin and pulling more of his light inside mine as I did.

  I hadn’t been doing that for long when he let out a groan, that time from deep in his chest.

  We’d both been deprived while he’d been gone... sex-wise, I mean.

  I’d been deprived enough that I pretty much lost all sense of rationality every time we got into this. His mind flashed images at me, some of them explicit enough that I closed my eyes, gripping him tighter as I gasped against his skin.

  Another reason I’m not going anywhere without you, Miri... he spoke into my mind. I need about a month of solid fucking as it is. He pushed at me gently, insistently with his mind. You’re coming with me to New York, Miri... you’re fucking coming with me... all right?

  I knew that was a question in Black-speak.

  Raising my head when he did, I nodded, still stroking his skin.

  When I did, he closed his eyes, his face tightening as he lowered his head back to the pillow.

  “Good,” he said aloud, his voice somewhere between a gasp and a groan. “Now give me head. Please. Before I lose my goddamned mind...” His voice got deeper, gruffer, even as his hands tightened in my hair. “Do that thing with your light, Miri... gaos... I’ll do whatever you want after... anything... I promise...”