Black On Black (Quentin Black Mystery #3) (9 page)

And yes, I’d been angry with him.

I’d been
really
angry at first. Angry enough that I didn’t take his calls for weeks after he first took off. Angry enough that I kissed Nick one night in a somewhat misguided attempt to get revenge on Black.

Really, it was more than a kiss.

I might have slept with Nick, if I’d been a little drunker.

Some of that had been the difficulty of not having Black around while I still felt unsafe from what Solonik had done. Some of that had been the difficulty of not having him around when I could feel myself changing...
 
seemingly more every day...
 
and I didn’t know how worried I should be about those changes. Some of it had been that Black still hadn’t told me jack shit about who or what I was. Some of it was that I missed him and wanted him to regret leaving.

But I went through all those different stages, and I got over it.

Around Christmas, we started talking again.

Fingering the Native American pendant I wore around my neck, my Christmas present from Black, I bit my lip until I tasted blood. This wasn’t in my head. This wasn’t me being delusional or paranoid. This wasn’t just Black being a commitment-phobe, either.

I no longer believed Black took off because he didn’t want to be with me.

Truthfully, I don’t know that I ever believed that, despite my fears.

Dex implying that I was too delusional to see the difference between being rejected by Black and being worried about him infuriated me. The fact that I could feel some sympathy on Dex for my situation didn’t help at all. He thought he was doing me a kindness. Giving me some tough love, rather than enabling me in my fantasies about Black and wherever he might be right now, and whoever he might be with.

The bottom line was, I knew I wouldn’t get any help from him.

I wouldn’t get any help from either of them.

Like in Bangkok, I was on my own.

Five

WAKING UP

HE CROUCHED IN a high alcove, looking down over the pews of a church. I had to figure he was on a balcony to be so high above the floor.

Wherever he was, it was dark.

It was also quiet despite the time of day. A few whistles and whispers of wind snaked through the pockets and curves in the high-domed ceiling, but otherwise, the nearby area exuded silence. I heard a few voices carrying from outside. Despite the darkness of where Black waited, blue sky showed through white pillars around him, the sunlight hitting the white walls above where he knelt. White clouds scuttled by as he watched, high and pushed by a fast wind.

He was cold, being out of the sun.

Wherever he was, it looked familiar to me, although I couldn’t quite place it. Some of that might have been the strangeness of the angle where he sat. In fact, as I continued to look down through his eyes, I realized he wasn’t in an balcony at all.

He was somewhere higher––likely in the dome itself.

Wherever he was, it was high enough to give him a bird’s eye view of the church pews below, as well as a section of the gilded and white-clothed altar.

The church was closed. Repairs, maybe. Or maybe for some other reason.

Gold and royal blue and white, a curved mosaic of Christ with arms outstretched hung over the altar itself, just visible from his angle.

Christ in Majesty...
 
Black thought, looking at the same mural.
Same as our world. I saw it... in a book maybe? I know I never saw that version of Paris...

I felt the voice listening too, listening to Black think.

He would definitely want a body here. Just like in Notre Dame...
 
Black thought.

Even so, I felt Black’s skepticism. He didn’t think Ian would come here today. This felt like a set-up to him, a way to wear him down, to keep him dancing when they said dance. He’d already been informed his presence was expected at some religious meeting that night, along with a handful of others new to the organization. He would have to meet with his handler before that. He’d be up all night.

He honestly wasn’t sure which was worse.

They usually went after his light while he slept.

The voice whispered,
He’s right. Your ex-lover will want a body here...
 
but he won’t come today. Lucky knows.

Do you know him?
I asked the voice softly, so Black wouldn’t hear.
Ian?

The voice exuded his answer, even before he spoke it.
No.

Do you know Lucky?
I pressed.

No.

The wind picked up, whispering through the high dome. I feel Black scanning the floor of the church. I feel how tired he is, how long he’s been awake.

Guilt always worked with him,
the voice tells me.

My throat tightened.

I didn’t answer. I can feel Black’s mind wandering, remembering things from that other world. I can feel that he didn’t travel much, in that other place. When he did, he had no control over the destination. He moved when people bought him, when he had his ownership papers transferred to new owners.

Since he’d been in this world, he’d traveled though.

He made up for that lack of freedom in movement by making sure he saw any part of the globe that struck his fancy. For any fucking reason. Even to fight in another human war. Or to spend a weekend getting drunk and losing money on the tables in Macau.

Exhaling, he leaned into the short wall behind him, propping the rifle against his leg. Inside the church, the lights were all out. The only light illuminating the rows of benches and the stone statues and mosaic floors came from the sunlight filtering through colored windows, and from the dome itself, where Black crouched.

It was pretty, he thought. Churches always were more religious somehow, with no people in them. He felt more like that now, with all the crap Lucky’s people had been shoving down his throat. He closed his eyes briefly, sunlight playing on the backside of his lids.

He jerked awake a few seconds later, coming out of a light doze. I felt Black’s nerves ratchet higher as he used the scope again to stare down into that hollow space. I felt him holding his breath, his mind as still as a windless pond.

He spent a lot of his time in hideaways like this since he’d gotten here.

He’d also been shot at, more than once, by Ian, when the other seer had found him, and several times when Ian had been waiting for him before Black got set up.

One of those got close––too close, to my mind.

This was different than the other jobs he did for Lucky.

Black took it more seriously, for a lot of reasons.

I could feel glimmers of emotion off him as he held his breath, cursing himself for dozing off, for exposing himself to being shot at again. I’d already noticed that some of Black’s cockiness had dimmed in the months he’d been gone. He’d sobered in some way I still struggled to pin down––maybe partly due to what happened with Solonik in Thailand. I definitely got the sense he’d grown more cautious when it came to other seers.

I felt whispers of his thoughts around that.

Self-recriminations, mainly. He saw himself as having grown soft, overly complacent. He’d gotten too used to having an advantage over the people he went up against.

Like Solonik, the seer he hunted now was older than him.

Ian had probably fought in wars in that other world, too. Maybe dozens of them. Most seers had, especially those trained as infiltrators.

Black had no way of knowing what kind of training Ian had received though, or anything about his background really, apart from what made it to human records on this version of Earth. Black didn’t intend to underestimate him though, like he had with Solonik.

Lucky’s people wouldn’t tell him anything. Nothing he could believe.

He knew the seer hated him.

Worse––in Black’s mind, at least––the seer had a serious grudge against me.

The main thing I felt from Black however, was that he couldn’t let Ian get too far out of his sight. He couldn’t lose track of him here, with everything else going on. Black was hyper-aware he’d left me alone in San Francisco. I felt his fears around Ian and the things he might do––to me, especially. I felt him aware of my vulnerability, with the two of us physically apart.

It was interesting to me, in a morbid-fascination kind of way, just how different Ian looked through Black’s eyes compared to mine. More than that, it interested me just how different the situation between the three of us looked to Black than it ever had to me.

In Black’s mind, Ian would be furious that I was with Black now.

Black assumed that me and him being involved would be an unpardonable offense in Ian’s eyes. Really, from what I could tell from Black, it would be an unpardonable offense to any seer. Black broke some “code” seers had around sexual partners by dating me.

He’d done it more or less knowingly too. Enough so that he felt vaguely guilty about it, if only for the danger he’d put me in.

I still didn’t know exactly what that code entailed.

Whatever it was, in Black’s mind, Ian killing those poor kids in Thailand had been about that. Ian killing newlyweds in Paris was about that, as well. Further, Black seemed to think Ian wouldn’t be able to let it go. Black thought Ian
still
wanted to kill me primarily to keep me away from him, meaning away from Black himself.

I found that difficult to believe.

It also didn’t explain the original murders––meaning the Wedding Murders in San Francisco. From what I could tell, Ian killed those women mainly because he resented having to marry me, likely after being ordered to do so by Lucky.

All that started before I’d even heard of Quentin Black.

Whatever the truth of Ian, I had no doubt Black believed his own theory around broken seer “bro-codes.” The fact that Black saw it as personal only made him more cautious, not less, however, which is all I cared about.

I watched the rifle’s scope as he panned it over the floor of the darkened church. He scanned every visible inch of the cathedral through the telescopic lens. It only hit me then, why this rifle looked so different from the ones I’d seen Black using over the past however-many weeks.

He was holding a tranquilizer gun.

He was here for a live capture. Not a kill.

That had to be Lucky’s doing, too.

Whatever my feelings for Black, I had no illusions about how he’d deal with Ian, given the choice. If Black was trying to bring Ian in alive, it was because he was under orders to do it.

Truthfully, given what Ian had done and the unlikelihood of the police ever catching him, given what he was, I was more in sympathy with Black’s preferences than Lucky’s. I also knew Lucky couldn’t be trusted to have good motives for wanting Ian alive.

Anyway, I knew it wasn’t about revenge for Black.

Fear wasn’t his primary motivation either, although that played a part.

At the end of the day, Black was risk adverse. More than that, he had strong feelings about people who posed a risk to anyone who fell under his personal rubric of “family.” He would kill Ian simply to warn others away from what was his. He would do it because in his mind, taking the long view, it was the safest course of action for himself.