Black Is Back (Quentin Black Mystery #4) (19 page)

I felt my jaw harden the longer she talked. I forced myself to take all of it in, but at the end, I found myself shaking my head.

“That’s not all of it, Ang.”

“What’s the rest of it?” She took another drink of the wine, still smiling at me bemusedly. “More of that alien, seer crap?”

I gave her a disbelieving look. “Now that you mention it, yes. There’s a hell of a lot of that ‘alien, seer crap,’ as you put it. And most of it, I don’t understand at all... and Black seems to think I should, even when he doesn’t bother to explain it.”

“Like what?” Angel said. “Or can’t you talk to me about that, either?”

Sighing in annoyance, I fought to think. “Like... I don’t know. We get really weird together, Ang. Like irrational weird. We went out for dinner one night and I thought he was going to beat the shit out of this old friend of his who owned the place, just for finding me attractive. I mean, we both get possessive...”

Angel let out a sarcastic grunt, but I blew past that too.

“...Unhealthy
possessive,” I added, glaring at her. “And he’s told me a few times that it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better... but he still hasn’t explained what any of ‘it’ is, much less what it means. My uncle made it sound like this bonding thing is kind of a...” I waved a hand in irritation. “...a
thing
of some kind. Like it’s not something normal. It definitely doesn’t happen every time two seers date, or start sleeping together. Uncle Charles made it sound like it would
change
the two of us. Permanently, I mean.”

 
“So have you asked Black to explain all of that? The bonding thing?”

“I told him we needed to talk,” I said. “About us.”

“You mean today?” she clarified. When I nodded, her frown deepened. “Okay, but what have you talked about in that area so far? Before today?”

“Nothing.” I shook my head, taking another sip of wine. Then I shrugged. “Well, he asked me not to sleep with anyone else. While he was in Paris. But that was months ago. Right after that night I got drunk and kissed Nick... so yeah, that was pretty much a direct response to him thinking I was going to sleep with Nick if he didn’t ask me not to.” Shaking my head, I combed my fingers through my hair, muttering. “...I’ll probably never hear the end of that.”

“Wait.” Angel held up a hand. “You’ve been sleeping together since Paris and you haven’t once even
talked
about it? About what’s going on with the two of you?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“It’s been what... three weeks? You haven’t had a single conversation about it?”

“No. We haven’t talked about it, okay?” I let my annoyance grow audible again. “And yes, okay, maybe that’s my fault. He tried a few times, but I guess I wasn’t ready.” Feeling another pulse of disbelief off Angel, I gave her a harder look. “I
know
we need to talk about it... okay? I get that. And I’m admitting it’s my fault. But when I finally put my foot down and said we need to talk about this, now, that it couldn’t wait anymore, his response was to tell me he needed space... and then to take off. Apparently.”

Fighting back my anger even as it hit me I was over-reacting again, I took a sip of wine to distract myself, staring down at Angel’s Persian-looking carpet.

“So yeah.” I shrugged deliberately. “Maybe I waited too long. Or maybe he’s mad about something else. I honestly have no idea. He seemed to think I was fucking with him deliberately or something... even after I told him I was confused.”

I shook my head, still thinking without looking up from that green and blue patterned rug.

“You really don’t understand how weird this gets, Ang,” I said next, looking at her seriously. “When it’s just the two of us especially. It gets really fucking weird.”

Angel grunted, leaning back in her seat. “I saw the apartment.”

“You haven’t seen
him
though, Ang. He acts... different.” Biting my lip, I went back and forth on whether I should tell her. In the end, I guess I’d had enough wine or maybe needed to talk to someone badly enough that I found myself saying it.

“He told his friend, that old army buddy of his, that we were married. He called me his
wife,
Ang. Like... loudly. He practically threatened the guy.”

Angel burst out in a laugh. “The guy at the restaurant?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t smile back. “It’s not funny, Ang. He let me pass it off like he just did it to get his friend to back off, but honestly, I don’t know...”

“You don’t know what?” Angel frowned, pouring more of the merlot into her glass from the bottle on the coffee table. “Why else would he do it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. But it didn’t feel like that.”

Swallowing, I turned my head, looking out her bay window. Low and rectangular and directly across from her comfy green couch, it gave an almost unobstructed view down the hill towards Castro Street. She’d had the same, rent-controlled apartment for as long as I’d known her, what had to be over ten years now. She’d joked once that she’d had it since college, which was likely true.
 

It was also likely the only reason she could still afford it, given the location. A few blocks up the hill from Divisadero Street, her two-bedroom, upper-story flat overlooked the busy intersection of Market and Castro, which made up the main strip where most of the parades and the crazy Halloween parties happened down there. Her bedroom had an equally amazing view of Divisadero going the other direction, and she was high enough up to see most of the way north to Geary Street.

And the place wasn’t small. It had to be over a thousand square feet.

“What did it feel like, doc?” Angel said, softer. “When he said you were married?”

I looked at her, and realized I was still avoiding, even with her. The truth was, I’d never admitted this even to myself until now. I found myself telling her the truth anyway, maybe so she could tell me I was nuts.

“It felt like he meant it,” I said, swallowing more wine. “Like he was telling the truth.”

Angel frowned. “Like he intends for the two of you to get married?”

I shook my head, giving her a nervous look.

“No,” I said. “Like he thinks we already are.”

HOURS LATER, I still lay on her couch, only now we had it folded out as a bed. I couldn’t sleep. I’d pretty much given up trying at that point. I stared up at the orange street-light pattern on her ceiling instead and tried not to think about Black.

I tried not to think about the Templar murderer, either.

Of course, no matter how intensely I thought about the killer, chances were, he wouldn’t
know
I was thinking about him. With Black, there was a good chance he would.

I probably needn’t have worried on that score though.

Black felt strangely distant to me, like he’d done something different in cutting me out this time. Like he really
didn’t
want me to find him, unlike those times in the past where he’d only pushed me out partway, or only enough to obscure certain details about where he was, or what he was doing. This time, he’d gone dark for real.

I didn’t really want to think about why that was.

I found myself thinking about what Angel said instead, after I’d confessed my fears about Black and his weird outburst with Cal, his friend who owned the Italian restaurant we’d visited in North Beach. Unlike some of Black’s old military pals, Cal wasn’t that much older than me, maybe in his late thirties, so probably served after Black already owned the security firm. They likely met while Black worked alongside the military as a private contractor.

 
Either way, I could tell Black liked him. Which might be why it shocked me so much when he’d gotten in Cal’s face about me.

Angel thought I should talk to another seer about Black.

When I laughed, asking her where she thought I could find someone like that, she’d only raised her eyebrows at me meaningfully, lifting her wine glass to her lips. My humor pretty much died when I realized what she meant. She was talking about my Uncle Charles.

I’d laughed again once I understood, but there hadn’t been much humor in it that time.

Instead, I’d followed it up with a curse.

Even so, as I lay there now, listening to the traffic down on Market Street and the occasional higher whine of a siren, I found myself thinking she was right.

I needed to talk to someone knowledgeable about these things.

Preferably someone reasonably objective.

Of course, I knew my Uncle Charles didn’t fit the second of those criteria, but he definitely fit the first. He couldn’t stand Black, or the fact that he and I were together, so I knew I couldn’t trust anything he might have to say about Black himself, or about our relationship specifically. But maybe I could still get some basic information from him about whatever was happening to the two of us.

By the time I finally dozed off, right around when the clear night sky began filling with cloud cover, obscuring the streetlights and the fainter stars shining through Angel’s bay windows, I’d more or less made up my mind to do just that.

THE GUARDIAN WATCHED.

He looked in the window of an upper-story apartment building, unmoving on a heavy branch in the tree outside that same window’s glass.

The person inside didn’t know he was there.

No one expected someone to watch them from a tree, not in the city.

The one he watched was still awake, however. Occasionally, the guardian saw the faint shine of their eyes through the window now that the lights were off. He knew they did not sleep, but stared out over the view of the city and the bay and the orange streetlights.

He wondered what they thought about. What moved them now, in these final hours.

Eventually, the man inside the apartment must have tired of trying to sleep.

The guardian watched as he threw the red silk covers back and sat up, rubbing his face with his hands after he’d turned on the light perched on a low table by his bed. Light scratches decorated one arm. A deeper set of scratches from the same set of fingernails also patterned his neck and the top part of his chest. A bruise discolored part of his jaw, even in the dim light.

This one had fought back.

Still, the man seemed pleased with himself.

The light on the bed table looked expensive. Colored glass twisted into artistic shapes, it didn’t look like it had been machine-made. Something about it looked vaguely obscene. Given where this man lived and how he lived, the guardian suspected no other lamp existed like it in the world––that it was original, and hand made, like the painting on the wall over the bed and the metal sculpture on the balcony overlooking the city lights.