Black Of Wing: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery Romance (Quentin Black Mystery Book 14)

by JC Andrijeski

  I geared into those structures in my light…

  …there was a crunching, telescoping sensation.

  Then everything went dark.

  11

  Go To Black

  Light spiraled in a dense vortex, blinding me.

  I’d set a trajectory.

  Sort of.

  I mean, it was enough of a trajectory.

  It might have been more wishful thinking than a full-blown, locked and loaded, precisely targeted destination.

  I didn’t even resonate with an exact place to create that trajectory, but I made a rough calculation. I just happened to base that calculation more on altitude, atmosphere, and a kind of “vibe,” versus precise coordinates in terms of latitude and longitude.

  Still, I did aim for a place I’d been before.

  I just combined the feeling of that dimension with coordinates of a more transitional nature, meaning the one and only time I’d made an effort to collect light impressions while I traveled on a non-dimensional plane.

  Which meant, if I did everything exactly right, and resonated exactly the way I’d intended, then I was likely going to bring us out––

  ––Light flashed, sucking in my breath.

  Again, I felt like someone punched me.

  I felt like I’d been punched in the center of my chest.

  I broke out in a sweat.

  I couldn’t breathe––

  Abruptly, my stomach dropped.

  I plummeted through cold, wet clouds.

  Light and shadow flashed around me, making me panic.

  Vertigo hit without warning.

  I was still holding onto him.

  Wind whipped my face, throwing my hair violently against my neck, back, cheeks, lips, forehead. Gasping, I looked up at the light.

  I was falling.

  I couldn’t see him, but I gripped his arms tightly in mine.

  I grew conscious of the feel of my last air flight, remembering how I’d consciously tried to feel the air outside the plane as we flew through it, hoping I could get enough of an imprint into my light that I could do exactly this.

  During my brief few months of training in interdimensional travel, I’d been advised to gather such impressions whenever I could. The idea was to give myself, and Black, as many options as possible for potential jumps.

  For the same reason, I’d made an exercise out of it, whenever I got to a new or interesting location. I’d gathered such impressions all over London, San Francisco, at the airports on both ends, not to mention the Raptor’s Nest, Angel’s apartment, Golden Gate Park, the beach, the house in Santa Cruz, the Presidio, Chinatown, the Albuquerque airport, the resort hotel and spa in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where our wedding was supposed to take place…

  The airplane one had been pure experimentation on my part.

  I had my doubts I could jump accurately enough to make it inside a plane––not without killing myself, or possibly Black, or likely both of us––but it was an interesting exercise.

  I wasn’t in a plane now.

  I was roughly thirty-five thousand feet above the ground, though.

  That elevation was dropping fast.

  I’d popped us out on a different version of Earth, only at the same height I’d been when I played around with my light on my last transatlantic flight on our Earth, which happened to be somewhere along the journey between San Francisco and London.

  This dimension’s Pacific Ocean should be below, and growing closer.

  All of that went through my mind in a flash.

  It couldn’t be considered “thoughts” really.

  Rather, the packed timeline smashed into my consciousness, and abruptly, remembering the point of all this…

  …I let the other seer go.

  I geared back into those structures in my aleimi, or living light.

  I changed my resonance from memory.

  That time, I attuned my living flame to the easiest, fastest, most natural resonance there was, at least for me. Basically, I told my light where it always wanted to go anyway, no matter where else I might be.

  I even spoke the words out loud, maybe in the hopes of giving it a little extra punch.

  As I did, my heart felt nothing but relief.

  “Black,” I murmured into the wind. “Go to Black.”

  I yanked those structures into the precise order I needed––

  ––and again, everything around me disappeared.

  12

  Nothing Is Ever Easy

  I must have been in a strange position when I reemerged.

  Then again, I’d never jumped from a free-fall through space, in an attempt to land back on solid ground.

  Really, I was damned lucky I didn’t land with my foot embedded in the asphalt road of the studio’s backlot… or broken in half from smashing too hard into the curb.

  As it was, I popped back into existence maybe a half-inch above the pavement, and still in the position I’d been in while falling.

  I landed hard, my body’s weight and the odd position of my limbs throwing me from the bottom of one bare foot and the top of another, so that I sprawled face-down onto the pavement, letting out a cry when I landed on my palms, then forearms, and knees.

  “Goddamn it.”

  A voice exploded in relief and fury over me.

  He was down on the ground with me then, crouched next to me.

  Then, wrapping an arm around my waist, he picked me up, doing it with surprising gentleness and care, despite the rage expanding off him.

  He tried setting me equally carefully on my feet, but when he started to let go of me, I sucked in a breath, grabbing onto his arm when my full weight landed on my foot, putting pressure on my ankle.

  I was still leaning on him, gasping, when I heard footsteps pounding in our direction, a yelp and a gasp from a voice I knew as well as my own.

  “MIRI!” Angel cried out. “Miri, are you okay?”

  Black’s light practically smothered me by then.

  I fell into it with a gratitude that briefly brought tears to my eyes.

  Realizing at least part of that was from having been separated from him for the past few weeks, I gripped him more tightly, letting go of his arm to wrap myself around his waist.

  He opened his arms to accommodate me.

  Then he just held me.

  I felt his relief expand over me, too.

  Cowboy and Angel must have just stood there.

  Then Black nodded to one of them––probably Cowboy––and muttered something that had the word “clothes” in it somewhere.

  I heard Cowboy say, “Ayuh,” right before he ran off.

  He was likely relieved.

  I knew Cowboy still wasn’t overly comfortable with the boss’s wife being stark naked, even if he knew the reason for it, and the fact that it couldn’t be helped.

  “Where?” Angel said then, breathless. “Where did you take him, doc?”

  Still holding on to Black, I turned slightly so I could look at her, my cheek and the side of my head still leaning against the thin, black T-shirt he wore.

  “I don’t know what it’s called,” I told her, shaking my head. “One of the other places I’ve been. One of the more primitive ones… although…” I frowned, thinking. “I seem to remember they had some pretty nasty, dinosaur-like creatures. Including in the ocean. So if he survived the fall, he could end up eaten by something with a lot of teeth.”

  Realizing I might have actually murdered him, I felt my jaw harden.

  I looked up at Black, then back over my shoulder at Angel.

  “I dropped him,” I explained. “I aimed for the sky… and when we got there, we were falling. I let him go. Then I jumped back here.”

  I fell silent when Cowboy ran back up to us, panting now, and holding out a robe.

  I noticed he didn’t look at me at all as he handed it over vaguely, in a way that made it difficult to know if he was trying to hand it to me, or to Black, or to both of us at the same
time. Either way, I wasn’t willing to let go of Black just yet, so Black ended up being the one to take it from Cowboy’s outstretched hand.

  He wrapped the terrycloth covering around my back, and I let go of him with each arm, one by one, but only long enough to shove my hands and arms through the sleeves, and then tie the belt around the front to keep it closed.

  Sighing in relief, I sank into Black again.

  I knew it probably looked weird.

  I didn’t care.

  For Black’s part, he wrapped a hand into my hair, and his other arm around my back, gripping my shoulder. He pulled me into him even more tightly, then turned to Angel and Cowboy.

  “Get every piece of footage you can,” Black growled. “Anything. Any angle. Anyone who got eyes on that fucker… and most of all, how he got here. Tell the seers they need to start dealing with witnesses. Anyone who got a good view of what happened. Read them for any details, then erase whatever they can… especially in relation to there being a second dragon down here, one who came through a fucking portal.”

  Pausing, still thinking, he added,

  “Actually, come to think of it, have at least one of them come in here. Zairei would be best, but I don’t really care who… it’s probably more realistic to have them erase any memories they find of people who saw me on the ground at the same time that other dragon fuck was in the air. We’ll tell everyone the other dragon was me. It’ll still make the press lose their minds, but we can at least do damage control on the worst of it.”

  I felt him shaking as he spoke, and not wholly from anger.

  It wasn’t wholly not-anger, either.

  Anger. Adrenaline. Anxiety.

  Fear.

  Shock.

  Relief mixed with terror around how close we’d come to a true disaster.

  Just sheer reaction around the reality of it all.

  It hit me a second later that he was Black again.

  Not Coreq… Black.

  I didn’t hear an ounce of Coreq in his voice. I didn’t feel the smallest whisper of the alien, not-Black presence in Black’s light.

  I gripped him tighter when the thought reached me, snuggling into his body.

  I wanted to get him out of there.

  I still didn’t feel safe, and the irrational, animal-instinct part of me just wanted to wrap my arms around him under the shirt and take him… away. Somewhere better.

  Somewhere that wasn’t here.

  I was about to tell him as much, when a booming sound echoed across the sky.

  All of us looked up.

  For the first time, I stepped out of Black’s arms. Moving a few feet backwards, away from Black, I stared up at the sky with the rest of them.

  A hole had ripped through the sky.

  What I’d scarcely glimpsed in that monitor in London, I now saw in technicolor detail, almost directly overhead. I saw the ring of light I’d heard the commentators describe. I glimpsed a black sky through the opening, a patterning of stars I only halfway recognized.

  Then, the biggest damned dragon I’d ever seen in my life flew through that opening.

  The creature beat massive, vein-covered wings, larger than any airplane’s––its body an ugly, corpse-like gray-white, with bumpy, rock-like skin, a lumpy, scarred nose, muzzle, and throat, bulging, pale gold eyes.

  This new dragon couldn’t have been more different than Black’s if it had been designed that way purposefully.

  Like before, I didn’t think.

  I took one look at that bulging, diseased-looking monstrosity with the massive jaws and teeth and turned to Angel and Cowboy, clicking my fingers at them, even as I grabbed hold of Black’s bare wrist below the end of his leather jacket.

  When Angel and Cowboy got close enough I held out my bare arm.

  “Grab hold!” I snapped. “Right now!”

  “Miri!” Black said. “We can’t! We can’t just leave everyone here!”

  “He’s after us,” I shot back. “He’s after us, Black. We need to get out of here––”

  “I can slow him down,” Black growled.

  “No. FUCK no. We’re going. Now. We need the construct.”

  I wasn’t asking him.

  I wasn’t even really warning him.

  I definitely wasn’t opening things up for some kind of discussion.

  I was already gearing into the jump structures in my aleimi.

  Angel and Cowboy both reached for my free arm, which I’d tilted upright so the robe sleeve fell down to my elbow. The instant I could feel Angel and Cowboy gripping hold of me, the instant I was sure both held me tightly enough, I reinforced my grip on Black…

  “Miriam! Doc!”

  …and winked all four of us out of Los Angeles.

  13

  Emotionally Twelve

  Nick scowled, staring at his boyfriend through the laptop monitor.

  “Why are you calling me from there? Do you have a death wish?”

  Grunting, thinking about his own words, he muttered,

  “Or are you just sick of me? Maybe you’re hoping for a nice, traditional, vampire-killing mob armed with torches to set Angel’s place on fire?”

  “You’re such a drama queen,” Dalajem remarked affectionately.

  Nick barely heard him.

  He scanned the entirety of the view through the rectangular screen, unable to help himself. He’d already identified the area of Black’s offices where Dalejem sat, inside the bullpen just outside the main conference room. Realizing anyone else in the room could likely hear his voice, or see him if they ambled by, he felt another whisper of nerves.

  Dalejem had his back to the main doors into the front office, for fuck’s sake.

  Anyone could walk through there.

  Anyone.

  The front lobby area of Black’s company offices had always reminded Nick of the prow of a ship. The space had a triangular, prow-like shape, tall metal doors, and two burnished copper pipes as handles on those doors leading to reception.

  The private elevator, which still served as the only way onto the penthouse floor, had been beefed up quite a bit in security since the first time Nick came up here, back when he’d been investigating Black as a possible murder suspect.

  Despite that, the front offices remained open, and more or less accessible if you had an appointment, or made it through the elevator protocols some other way.

  The only time that wasn’t true was during some kind of security lockdown.

  Then again, in the last few years, security lockdowns weren’t exactly an uncommon occurrence.

  “Just come home,” Nick said, gruff. “Unless they still need you there. Yarli’s got plenty of other seers who can do Barrier jumps, for fuck’s sake––”

  Jem was already shaking his head, his voice incredulous.

  “Have you not been watching the news at all, Nick?”

  Nick frowned.

  Watching the news?

  Why the fuck would he be watching the news?

  What was Jem talking about?

  “No,” he said, blunt. “And I don’t want to know.” Pausing, he added, “We’re supposed to do dinner at my parents’ house tonight. Did you forget?”

  “Nick, for fuck’s sake… look at the news. Then tell me if you still think tonight is really the best night for me to meet your father and mother for the first time, and inform them that you’re no longer human…”

  Nick scowled.

  He hadn’t just said it; he really didn’t want to know.

  “Is it vampire-related?” he said, gruff. Thinking about that, he frowned. “Is it Brick related? Or something to do with what happened to Dorian?”

  “What ‘happened’ to Dorian?” Dalejem grunted an unamused laugh. “Interesting euphemism, Nick. Do you mean when I shot three explosive arrows into your vampire lover’s chest and blew him up all over your friend Angel’s foyer?”

  Nick scowled again, but didn’t respond to that, not directly.

  “Fine.” He ex
haled in frustration. “What is it? Is it the London thing? Because I thought Miri’s whole meeting with the EU bigwigs was supposed to be super hush-hush. Did Regent get pissed off at being uninvited and leak it?”

  Dalejem stared at him.

  He blinked, once, then shook his head again.

  “No,” he said, that incredulity sharpening. “Nick, look at the news. Look at the breaking news in Los Angeles. Trust me, you’re not going to be able to guess what this is. And frankly, I have no idea where I’d even begin in explaining what’s occurred today. Look at the news. Drink some blood. Then get back to me when––”

  Behind him, there was an odd whoosh sound.

  Dalejem turned his head.

  Nick followed his boyfriend’s stare.

  Four, totally nude people appeared in the middle of the bullpen.

  They just appeared… with little or no fanfare, standing in the open area of the lobby not far from the massive reception desk made of black marble.

  Nick somehow missed seeing Lizbeth, Black’s executive assistant, sitting behind that same desk.

  When the four people appeared, however, she let out an ear-piercing shriek.

  The shriek, more than the four nude people, made Nick just about jump out of his vampire skin.

  The fifty-something woman––or possibly sixty-something, Nick had never really gotten a handle on Lizbeth’s exact age––with her fluffy blond-white hair and a gold cross around her neck, let out a second terrified shriek after the first, standing up too fast from her seat and half-falling into the back counter behind the desk.

  The stack of papers she’d been doing something with all ended up on the floor.

  Honestly, it might have been darkly funny, in different circumstances.

  As it was, seeing Black, Miri, Cowboy, and Angel all standing there, looking shell-shocked, sweaty, panting… and very, very nude… Nick felt a thrill of panic of his own.

  Seeing Black suddenly staring at him, seeing his face on Dalejem’s monitor, Nick didn’t think. He didn’t even wait to see what look would come to the seer’s face.

  Reaching over to the top of the laptop screen, he brought it down with a sharp snap.