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

by JC Andrijeski

  I could have pinged him, of course… found him that way.

  I didn’t want to bother him though––not for what was essentially just me wanting a quick touch-base to know where he was.

  For some reason, I still felt a flicker of nerves around having all of these people here, even with the crazy layers of security, including a full-blown military construct around the entire resort. Maybe some of that was due to the last resort where I’d stayed with Black… the one we more or less burned to the ground when Black was forced to turn into a dragon while he was still inside our suite.

  Whatever the reason, if it was just crowd-phobia, or post-wedding adrenaline, or something more concrete I was picking up around things going on in the world more generally, I had to fight not to get clingy with Black, and just let him do his thing.

  As much as today meant to the two of us, it had been done this way––out in the open and under the watchful eyes of most of the world via journalists and livestreams––in part as a publicity stunt and a means of rehabilitating our image.

  Not only me and Black’s image.

  Really, we wanted to rehabilitate the image of seers as a whole.

  The reaction to the situation in Los Angeles had been mixed, to say the least.

  People who’d been there––everyone in Grant Steele’s crew, Grant Steele himself, the studio audience in the bleachers––had all known it wasn’t Black who appeared out of a wormhole and dive-bombed L.A.

  But Black’s people erased that memory on all of them.

  It wasn’t a comfortable decision to make, and the truth still might come out, but it made sense for them to do it. So now, the world outside our bubble believed that dragon had been Black. All of the subsequent news articles and video footage explained the new dragon away by repeating that same information––that it had been Black, that he’d made a dramatic entrance for his first interview since he’d come out, that it had all been a publicity stunt.

  That they’d erased memories to cover that up didn’t sit easy with me.

  I understood the logic of it, but I really didn’t like the precedent it set.

  We couldn’t get in the habit of just erasing unpleasant truths that circumstance thrust upon us, whether by other seers, vampires, or whatever else.

  In this particular case, however, I decided I was good with it.

  Everything was way too new for us to toss a second, blackout-induced dragon into the mix. Most of the mainstream press already expressed a lot of skepticism that Black actually was who and what he claimed to be.

  I needed to get through the preliminary talks with the human governments, first.

  Also, we needed to figure out how to handle the Purity Movement fanatics. Who, incidentally, staged a protest with several hundred people in downtown Santa Fe today, after reading about my and Black’s moved-up wedding.

  Luckily, we had a veritable army between us and them.

  I wasn’t too worried about them breaching the gates, at least not in any numbers.

  But we needed to deal with them.

  The biggest fear for today, however, was that another of those robot-cyborg things would show up, and open fire on the crowd. We had drones, people on the roof and street, people at every entrance and exit to the driveway, the resort grounds, any of the buildings, making sure that didn’t happen, but it was still by far the biggest danger.

  I smiled politely at the woman, who I realized was still talking.

  Then a commotion over by the pool caught my notice.

  Half-grateful for the distraction, I murmured my apologies and took myself in that direction.

  I’d already recognized at least one of the voices by the time I got there.

  It hit me that alcohol had been flowing pretty freely most of the afternoon by then. I was beginning to think a chunk of the guests, especially from the Raptor’s Nest, might have started in the morning, before the ceremony even began.

  “I don’t give a good goddamn if you like her or not, you fucking freak…”

  Alarm shot through me when Dex’s voice boomed in the acoustics between the main resort building and the pool.

  By the time I got there, I wasn’t the only one.

  “Brother.” Jax’s patient voice. “Calm down. Please. There is nothing untoward happening––”

  “I ain’t your fuckin’ brother… brother,” Dex cut in angrily. “We aren’t even the same damned species, bro…”

  I felt my heart leap to my throat.

  I was close enough now that I saw Dex jerk his arm away from someone else.

  “No! Let go of me, Javie! You know what I’m saying here. You know. These fuckers are all sniffing around Kiko, around Alice and Michelle, and I’ve had it… I’ve fucking had it! They nearly kill her, and now––”

  “Dex!” Kiko’s voice rose angrily. “You’re being ridiculous! Jax and I are dating! That’s it! We’re dating. Are you going to try to tell me who I can date now?”

  “How do I know you even chose to date this asshole?” Dex shot back, staring at her. “How would I even know, Kiks? How would you know? You saw what they did to those people in L.A. You saw what Charles’ people were doing, the whole time they were in power. What about when we see things that happen to be ‘inconvenient’? You so sure Black and his super-seer posse wouldn’t wipe your mind, too?”

  I felt a pain in my chest.

  I should have seen this coming.

  I should have realized.

  I’d known for a while that Dex was struggling.

  I thought it was with what happened to Kiko, with losing Nick as one of his best male friends on our team, then losing Dalejem not long after… then Nick coming back as he did.

  I’d known Dex was struggling.

  I just hadn’t had time to check in with him on it in a real way.

  “Brother…” Jax began, holding up his hands. “…Dexter. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I should have come to talk to you before. I thought it wasn’t my place, not before I knew how Kiko felt. I didn’t want to go to her male friend behind her back…”

  The anger only grew harder in Dex’s voice. “Are you trying to handle me right now? Is this you using that seer bullshit on my mind?”

  “No!” Jax said, frustrated. “I would never do that! Never!”

  “Why the hell wouldn’t you?”

  “BECAUSE YOU ARE MY FRIEND!” Jax snapped. “I never would do this! Never! Do you think you are my first human friend? That I have never held these boundaries before?”

  “Bullshit! Bullshit… to all of you… bullshit!”

  Dex aimed his finger at Jax, at Jorje, at Holo in his wheelchair, at Mika, at Kiessa.

  All of them stood there, silent, their odd-colored eyes shining in the light of the setting sun. Standing all together like they were, they looked suddenly, indisputably alien, not human, not from this world, even to me.

  My alarm spiked more.

  Jesus.

  It was starting.

  Even in our own team… it was already starting.

  I was still trying to decide what to do, whether I should be the one to try to talk to Dex, when another voice rose. It cut through the quiet that had fallen on the small group, so intensely the vibration of his voice hit at me on almost a physical level.

  “Is it bullshit with me, too, Dexter?” Black said.

  Every eye in the group shifted.

  They stared at Black, who stood there in his tuxedo, his gold eyes blazing in the end of day sun. Black didn’t look at any of them; he looked only at Dex.

  “Am I not your brother, either?” Black said, his voice gruff.

  Looking at Black, I realized why his eyes were so bright.

  He wasn’t angry. That wasn’t anger I was seeing in his eyes.

  He was crying.

  Dex seemed to realize the same.

  He stared at Black like he was looking at a ghost.

  I could almost feel the conflict there, his inability to not see Black as alien.


  He wanted to, I think… but he couldn’t.

  There was no going back with Dex, I realized. Some kind of threshold had been passed. I didn’t know if it was Kiko, or Black’s transformation into an actual fucking dragon, or me disappearing into other dimensions… or finding out seers could control his mind, even as vampires fed off his body.

  At some point, Dex crossed some kind of line.

  He couldn’t see Black the same.

  He couldn’t see any of us the same.

  And there was no going back.

  There was only going forward.

  The only way through this for Dex now was to push past it, to move forward, and I had no idea what he would decide on the other side.

  I felt Black realize the same.

  I felt the intensity of his grief, and not only for all the years Dex had fought by his side.

  I felt the memory of that other world, the one he’d escaped to come here.

  I felt the loss of that, of the human innocence here.

  I felt it, and I had no idea what I could do to make any of it better.

  Maybe Dex didn’t know what to do, either. Maybe he didn’t know what to think, or how and if he wanted to get past it. Whatever the case, at some point, standing there, face to face with Black, became too much.

  Dex turned around and walked away.

  “DEX!” Kiko shouted. “DEXTER! Goddamn it! Come back here! Are you really going to do this on his wedding day?”

  She walked after him, breaking into a jog when he didn’t slow down.

  I let her go, and Dexter, too. So did Black.

  So did Jax.

  “Brother, don’t give it a second thought.” Javier shook his head, sounding angry. “This isn’t about you, man. It’s about Kiko. He’s been fucked in the head about her for months. We’ve all heard it…”

  The other humans around him nodded, grimacing as they exchanged looks.

  “The idiot waited until she was dating someone else to realize he’s got feelings for her,” A.J. added. “It ain’t even you, man,” the human added to Jax, giving the male seer a grim look. “It started when her and Jem started screwing. Then the Nick thing happened… and you. Now he’s just mad at the world, and blaming all the wrong damned people.”

  Jax grimaced, but most of what I felt off him was sympathy.

  Also a touch of guilt.

  “I haven’t helped,” Jax muttered, his hands on his hips. “I’ve been jealous. I should have been more… diplomatic. I am bad at talking about feelings.”

  Wu shook his head, handing Jax a beer.

  “It’s really not about you. He’s looking for some kind of explanation, when it’s himself he should be pissed at. You’d never know it, but when it comes to women, Dex tends to shy away from the ones who are actually good for him. Ironically, Kiks is the one who’s been talking about that for years…”

  Jax took a drink of his beer, nodding.

  I approached the mostly-male group cautiously, watching Black wipe his eyes as he nodded to Javier’s words. I still wasn’t sure if I should be there, or if this was something between Black and the human vets on his team, many of whom had worked for him for decades.

  Ace spoke up even as I thought it.

  “I mean, Christ… it’s not like it’s some news flash, that you’re a total freak, boss,” the big human joked, winking at me before he looked at Black. “We’ve only watched you, you know… not age for like thirty years. I mean, even in the Hollywood, rich guy sense of not-aging, you were a freak. You don’t look even a tiny bit different, and it’s been like thirty years since you and I first found ourselves in a trench together…”

  Javier grunted.

  “And it’s not just the aging,” Javier threw in. “We all knew you were some kind of spooky weirdo psychic… Naz thought you were a damned medium or something.” Javier laughed with Ace. “Remember that? He thought Black here was moonlighting as some kind of paid psychic. At the very least, he was convinced he killed animals in some spooky psychic ritual shit. And that was loooong before you actually admitted it. We saw you playing the stock market and knew something had to be up.”

  Chase motioned around at all of them.

  “We all talked about it, man. You couldn’t hide that shit from us entirely. Hell, remember? The Colonel let it slip once they had files on Black stretching back to the fifties.”

  Black didn’t answer, but I could feel him wanting to believe what they said.

  In the end, though, he couldn’t unhear or un-feel what Dex’s words forced him to realize.

  “This is just the beginning,” he said. “It’s not Dex. It’s just inevitable. It’s why humans enslaved seers back where I am from. They couldn’t get past the fear. They couldn’t deal with the power imbalance. And there was no way to convince them seers could be trusted.”

  Black grunted, thinking about that.

  “The funny thing is, the seers they found back then really could be trusted. They were all basically a bunch of fucking monks.”

  Black looked at me.

  “At the end of the day… Dex is right. We don’t belong here.”

  There was a silence.

  Then another voice rose.

  “Or maybe they’re the ones who don’t belong,” the voice said.

  His words rang out through the early evening air, causing people to look over.

  “…Not anymore,” he added, colder. “Maybe they aren’t as entitled to this world as they seem to think. Maybe they’ve proven they aren’t up to the responsibility…”

  I turned, disbelief and horror warring in my chest as I saw a face I’d never thought I’d see again.

  It was Charles.

  It was my Uncle Charles.

  He was here.

  He’d found his way back.

  27

  Enemy

  I looked at Black, and he returned my gaze, his own deathly still.

  Then he looked at Cowboy, who I only then noticed standing on my other side, having walked up with Angel when they heard the commotion. Black motioned with his head, a bare gesture, and Cowboy melted backwards, into the crowd, taking Angel with him.

  I had no illusions that my uncle hadn’t seen me there.

  For the same reason, I stayed where I was, half-incredulous as an opening formed in the circle of our friends to let my uncle walk right up to us.

  I didn’t wait.

  I walked right up to him, wedding dress and all.

  I’d already geared into the structures in my aleimi that allowed me to jump dimensions. I focused on a different world this time, thinking it clearly wasn’t going to be enough to just dump him somewhere and hope for the best… especially since the vast majority of worlds I traveled to had some aspect of the Dragon living there.

  I would take him to another kind of place.

  One that would be much more difficult for my uncle to navigate as a seer.

  I’d been loathe to do that before.

  I knew Charles wouldn’t like where I’d left him; he’d always been a city and luxury kind of person, even back when I remembered him as a child. That predilection only grew more pronounced after we renewed our relationship in the previous few years.

  Charles liked caviar and expensive clothes, top of the line hotels and luxury suites, the very best guns and flying first class. He wasn’t someone who would enjoy living in a hut on a mostly-agrarian world, no matter how fresh the air, or how plentiful the food.

  But I’d hoped he might learn to like it.

  I’d really hoped he might grow into a better life there, and maybe even a better person, without the need to fight a forever-war against every species that scared him.

  Charles might like technologically-advanced worlds, but they didn’t seem to do him any favors, in terms of his state of mind.

  I decided to go a different route next time.

  I would take him to a world with cities, but a world where seers had a much slimmer chance of enslaving every h
uman on the planet.

  I’d come across a few that might work.

  A few of those options were pretty brutal, but I could think of a few that might allow him to carve out a kind of life for himself––again, if not the life he might have wanted.

  I was already resonating with one of those versions of Earth as I walked up to Charles, moving silently, keeping my light shielded so he might not notice my approach. My hand and arm tensed as I got closer, ready to reach out.

  Hand, throat, face.

  Possibly his chest where his collar lay open in front.

  Four steps away from him.

  Then three.

  I raised my hand, angling my outstretched arm to reach his skin––

  Something shoved me back.

  It threw me back––violently.

  The force behind it was so overwhelming, so utterly unexpected… it sucked the breath from my lungs. I couldn’t scream. I realized I was flying through the air.

  I felt myself hit into Ace, Mika, a few people I didn’t know.

  Then something… which scared me even more… slowed me down.

  I felt that tangibly, too.

  My velocity through the air noticeably changed. My body grew softer, lighter; it began traveling less fast, as if slowed by an invisible hand.

  Terror hit me.

  I wondered what in the hell was going on––

  My back crashed into one of the deck chairs.

  The impact stopped me cold. It also stopped my body before I would have slammed into the glass table behind it.

  As it was, I let out a grunt of pain as my spine connected with the metal and plastic.

  I also managed to crack the glass top, though I didn’t smash through it, at least.

  Then my knees gave out, and I fell straight down, halfway over the chair and table.

  I landed on the pool deck on my hands and knees, gasping.

  I was so stunned, so in shock, I couldn’t even decide how to feel.

  Not to mention the pain. There was a lot of pain. I couldn’t get up at all, not at first. Hanging there, on my bloody hands, I panted, my arms shaking. I was genuinely worried I would pass out. But I couldn’t pass out.

  I could already feel it.