Black Of Wing: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery Romance (Quentin Black Mystery Book 14)
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BLACK OF WING
Quentin Black Mystery #14
JC Andrijeski
Copyright © 2021 by JC Andrijeski
Published by White Sun Press
Cover Art & Design by Damonza.com (2021)
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 vendor for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
To my friend SKQ, who never, ever stops trying to make this a better world.
Contents
Free Box Set!
Synopsis
Prologue
1. The Bigger Dragon
2. Real Talk
3. Diversion
4. Movie Studio
5. Interview
6. Eclipse
7. The Bad Sound
8. A New Problem
9. Light Bond
10. Too Many Ours
11. Go To Black
12. Nothing Is Ever Easy
13. Emotionally Twelve
14. A Shower And Pie
15. Another World
16. Home
17. Saying Everything Wrong
18. Rank 10 Seer
19. Hostages
20. Missing Time
21. That Nagging Voice
22. What She Took
23. The Morning Of
24. The Day Of
25. Under The Blue-White Sun
26. Unbelonging
27. Enemy
28. Backup
29. Black Of Wing
30. Under The Light Of The Moon
31. Just A Little Longer
What to Read Next - BLACK OF WING
What to read next - VAMPIRE DETECTIVE MIDNIGHT
Join the Light Brigade!
Reviews are Author Hugs
Sample Pages
1 / Smells Too Good
2 / The First Sign
3 / Midnight
Recommended Reading Order
About the Author
Synopsis
“There is always a bigger dragon,” my mind whispered.
Black’s secret identity is out… as in WAY out… as in, he more or less announced who and what he was to every media outlet in the world.
But not everyone in the human world is thrilled at the prospect of losing their status as “dominant planetary species.” Some will do just about anything to prevent that from happening… including risk wiping out every living being on Earth.
The real problem of course, is fear.
Miri and Black walk a tightrope around the growing fear of their kind, with Black hitting the talk-show circuit while Miri sits at the table with world leaders, trying to come up with solutions that won’t lead to inter-species war.
Oh, and Black’s trying to plan a wedding.
Not to mention the fact that Nick is back, and his presence, after everything he did as a baby vampire, can’t help but split their team apart.
But an even bigger danger looms from the shadows of another world.
Miriam’s Uncle Charles, after banishment to a distant dimension, has grown to hate his niece, along with everything Miri and Black stand for. When he gets an opportunity to fight back, he grabs it with both hands… and brings a new kind of monster with him to Earth.
THE QUENTIN BLACK SERIES encompasses a number of gritty urban fantasy and paranormal mystery arcs with science fiction elements, starring brilliant but dangerous psychic detective, Quentin Black, and his partner, forensic psychologist Miriam Fox. Follow Black as he solves crimes, takes on other races and tries to keep his and Miri’s true identities secret to keep them both alive.
Prologue
Paradise Lost
Love’s breath ignites in pools of gold, but it is not the first…
…Nor the last, nor even the beginning.
A people swim the surface of Muuld, in a world marked garden for the chosen.
~ The Myth of Three
It is said The Demon would live in paradise for a month and a day…
…And they would writhe in pain
As though a thousand knives punctured every inch of their skin.
So much would the One Light wound them.
~ Anonymous
Charles… Faustus… raised his head from a soft surface, squinting into the sharp sunlight shining through a tall doorway made of thick, green and black trunks.
He remembered.
He remembered where he was.
He remembered who put him here.
That she would leave him here, of all places. That she would dump him here, knowing he would hate it here with every fiber of his being. There was no possible way she wouldn’t know how much he would detest the base existence such a world offered.
All of it was so primitive.
It reeked of early life, of the vapid idiocy and superstition of primitive minds. The hut was like something his one and only human wife’s people would have made, beginning a thousand years earlier, back on the version of Earth he’d left behind.
Of course, that had been a different history.
It had been a different people… a different Earth.
Sadly, this new version of Earth had apparently never evolved past that stage of existence at all. They’d never climbed out of the mud and base simplicity of a subsistence culture, or learned to command the vagaries of their environment.
They remained at the mercy of the elements.
They remained at the mercy of the indigenous animals and plants.
Hell, they remained at the mercy of the weather.
From what Faustus could tell from the months and months he’d spent here… easily over a year by now, and likely more than one, although he loathed to think about it… no one had advanced any form of real civilization at all.
Nor would they, likely until long after he was dead.
She’d done it to him on purpose.
She’d sent him here, a final stab of the knife into his heart.
Faustus stared at the carvings in the dark wood, and fought to make them mean something to him. He fought to make sense of where he was, in a way that didn’t anger him beyond reason.
He couldn’t do it.
His mind simply returned to the same thing, the same face.
Miriam.
His own goddamned niece.
Little Miri.
That race-traitor cunt had destroyed everything.
Literally everything he had worked for, she’d blown to ash and dust.
Remembering her, remembering how she’d looked at him, in the seconds after they landed here, those few seconds she bothered to regard him at all before she jumped away, his rage turned to something blinding, something murderous. She’d looked at him pityingly, maybe even with some maudlin sense of nostalgia.
Then she’d simply vanished… leaving the air to rush back into the space she’d occupied with a shocking POP.
Remembering that look on her face, the bullshit, performative regret in her eyes, he felt a cold hatred that made it difficult not to scream into the rising sun.
She had betrayed him.
Not just him… she had betrayed her entire race.
She had betrayed all of them.
Like every morning here, the thought got him out of bed.
Anger powered most of what he’d done here, in the years since he’d arrived.
He knew that wouldn’t sustain him forever, but for now, he wouldn’t think about that.
The locals were easy to push into feeding him, and into giving him the largest of their primitive shelters. He’d slept with a different female every night, more out of rage and feelings of impotence over his situation than out of any true desire.
He’d become their king in less than a day, and it meant nothing to him.
He punished the primitives because he had no one else.
He had nothing else.
Walking out of the fifteen-foot tall, narrow doorway, he gazed down a grass-covered hill towards a swampy lake. He’d more or less pinpointed where he was on the planet that roughly approximated the other Earths he’d known, in geography at least.
This version was relatively unspoiled, for all the same reasons he despised it.
The waters teemed with fish.
The trees they cultivated were mostly the same as those he’d known before, with versions of fruits and nuts he’d known from those other Earth. Between them, the venison, the fish, even the occasional bear, the land provided more food than he would ever need, in a temperate climate with few meaningful predators.
An idiot would love it here.
Someone who required no real intellectual stimulation, who could sit around eating berries and nuts, watching the sunrise and going for a naked swim before spending their day doing needlepoint and rug-weaving, sewing their own clothing, making pots from mud and clay, whatever… they would probably find this wooded existence some sort of spiritual paradise.
Kneelers would love it, too.
They could pray and chant and commune with the Ancestors.
They could spend all of their days congratulating themselves for their incorruptible magnificence… build constructs full of fluffy animals and rainbows and perfect peoples living together in harmony without any sense of reality or self-preservation.
If an alien race ever landed here, this settlement would be wiped out in nanoseconds.
More to the point, as far as Faustus was concerned… this type of living was what ruined the seer race on Old Earth.
It practically ensured their enslavement, when humans finally stumbled upon them. The ancients sat in their sanctimonious caves, chanting their sanctimonious, superstitious nonsense, and allowed themselves to culturally atrophy to the point of learned helplessness.
They’d destroyed themselves.
Seers on Old Earth conquered themselves.
They made themselves into sheep.
They created slaves out of warriors, through sheer force of will.
Faustus raised a hand against the bright sunlight, squinting over what had been called the Potomac River in the two worlds he’d occupied before this one. Old Earth, he now realized, had been far more similar to the version he’d just left than he’d ever known.
The location also told him just how much thought and care Miri put into bringing him here. She’d left him on this version of Earth more or less in the exact same geographical location from which she’d taken him.
Clearly, she hadn’t much cared… as long as he was out of the way.
His stomach growled.
Realizing he was famished, remembering he’d barely eaten the night before, he turned away from the view of the river and the verdant valley below.
He was about to walk to the center of the village, get one of the squaws there to cook him some breakfast, then maybe suck his cock while he ate it––
When something trembled his seer’s light.
Power.
So much power, he came to a dead stop.
It brushed him again, and he sucked in a breath.
It barely touched him, both times, but every hair on his arms and the back of his neck rose. He felt it in his gut, his groin, his tongue, the ends of his fingers, his lips.
He stood there, feeling the vibration and reverberations for seconds after the presence had left his light. Holding his breath, he remained totally still.
He waited to see if it would return.
Then he was breathing hard, his heart pounding in his chest.
Gaos.
Holy fucking gaos, gaos, gaos…
He hadn’t felt anything remotely like that since––
His head and eyes jerked around, looking behind him, then up the hill.
His body followed, a half-second later.
He walked in the direction of his best guess, then stopped again.
He never stopped looking around.
He scanned his environment frantically, with his eyes and light, searching for the source of that intense flood of presence that scarcely passed through his aleimi, or living light. He searched the hill above him, the trees, the grass, the bushes, the various wooden houses and tents that dotted the settlement of humans.
He felt a yearning so intense, he cried out in frustration.
Then… out of nowhere.
“Do I know you?”
Faustus turned, so violently, he hurt his neck.
A male seer stood in front of him, stark naked.
Seer in cock, in height, in the eyes, the strange symmetry of his body.
The male stood there, eyes glowing the palest of golds, nearly white with a faint reflection of gold sunlight. The being’s expression remained blank as he stared, utterly lacking in emotion. Despite his words, the question they formed, he didn’t even sound curious.
He didn’t sound anything.
He sounded blank.
Faustus turned around, looking for where he might have come from.
There was nothing nearby.
Not a tree close enough to have hidden behind, not a bush.
The doorway to the house where Charles had slept stood maybe twelve feet away. It was the closest thing, but surely, Charles would have seen him? He had been staring up the hill, right in the direction of that door. The door stood just to the right of his focus, the carved wooden trunks of the doorway directly within the main arc of his view.
Behind the man himself, Faustus saw only the sloping field of grass.
“I felt you,” the male said. “I felt you come.”
There was another silence.
In it, Faustus only stared at the other seer.
“It took some time. I was… away. I was in another world.”
Faustus blinked.
The strange, blank seer now stood so close, Faustus felt his heart pounding in his chest. His skin flushed from the contact with this brother’s aleimi. He had never felt so much power in a single being before. The closest he had ever felt, was––
“You were not alone,” the being said. “You did not come here alone.”
Faustus stared up at him.
He fought to think, to make sense of this new development before he spoke.
If there were other seers here, if he wasn’t alone, as he’d believed––
“I have been looking for her,” the being said. “I cannot find her now.”
Faustus stared at those pale, glowing eyes.
He remembered the old stories… the ones from the First Earth.
He remembered what they said about beings whose eyes glowed.
First Race.
Intermediary.
The Old Gods.
“Where is she?” The gold-eyed seer took a step closer. “Where did she go?”
Faustus blinked.
“Can you take me to her?” he said.
For the first time, Faustus truly noticed the being was naked.
He’d noticed of course, almost in rote. He’d noticed well enough to identify him as a seer, without thinking about the nakedness itself.
But now, that information penetrated his forward mind.
It impacted him in a way that was meaningful.
The male seer’s skin steamed in the morning sun.
He emitted so much aleimic light, it blended with that steam, making the creature’s skin appear to be smoke and shadows. The combination gave his whole outline a strangely blurry quality, like he only half-existed here, like he only had one foot in this world, and the rest of him remained elsewhere.
Staring at that nakedness, at the glowing eyes, the steaming skin, Faustus found he understood.
He understood how the being had come to be here.
He understood how he, Faustus, hadn’t seen or felt him approach.
He understood how he’d felt the being’s presence, a bare second before he appeared.
He understood.
When Charles’ vision clicked back into focus, he found the naked seer looking at him, head cocked, that inhumanly calm expression on his face.
Faustus remembered Black inside that bunker under the Pentagon.
He remembered talking to the thing inside Black, right before his nephew-in-law ripped his entire research facility apart.
Looking at the naked being in front of him, Faustus felt the first faint flicker of hope.
Redemption.
Resurrection.
Revenge.
The being in front of him seemed to understand.
Relief flickered across that empty face, even as those pale eyes glowed brighter.
“Can you take me to her?” the being asked. His voice remained calm, polite, but now the faintest edge of eagerness tinged his words. “Can you show me where she is?”