“You were sleeping with someone else?” I saw him flinch from the pain in my words. “Why?” I said. “Why, Black?”
He caught ahold of me, yanking me up against him.
For a moment he only looked at me, that anger still in his expression, then he seemed to really see me and that anger crumpled.
“Honey... no.” His arms grew warmer, softer, pulling me deeper against him. “I wasn’t fucking people. I didn’t have a lover... I got raped. More than once. And not only by humans. This isn’t...” He shook his head. “I didn’t say it right, okay? I was talking about rape. I thought you got that. I thought you knew what I was telling you.”
I stared at him, feeling that pain in my chest change.
Then it grew a lot worse.
It pooled darkly into my belly as I watched him avoid my gaze, coiling there until I really did feel physically sick. I remembered Solonik, and what he’d done to me. I remembered what my uncle had done to Black in Paris. The longer I sat there, the more that anger and grief turned into something closer to hate, until I could barely breathe.
I didn’t even know who I hated at that point.
Maybe some portion of the world, the people who would do these things and just walk away, always seemingly unscathed.
“It’s okay.” He kissed my face, leaning against me for real. He sighed, and when he did, his light opened more. I felt relief on him, even as he pressed into me, but I felt his embarrassment, too. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to tell you like that.”
I shook my head, wrapping my arms around him. “Tell me whatever you want, Black. However you want.”
He shook his head, still leaning on me. “I’m sorry,” he said, without raising his head. “It’s not you. It’s nothing you did, Miri... but when you bit me...”
He hesitated, and that time I looked up.
Again, that shame glanced across his eyes.
“It was a conditioned response. Okay? I’m not angry with you. I’m embarrassed. That fucking thing fed on me and got me to like it...” Shaking his head, another plume of shame went through him. “...Not like it. I don’t mean like it, Miri.” Disgust filled his voice. “I don’t know what I fucking mean. He’d project your light at me while he fed on me. He’d make it so I saw you... and felt you, even with the collar.” His voice grew bitter. “He told me he’d train me to get hard whenever he bit me, and he was right.”
I just sat there in his lap, curled up in his arms, letting his words sink in.
When neither of us said anything after a few minutes more, I felt that shame begin to creep back over him again. I felt him wishing he’d stayed silent. Or told me some other way... or later at least, not sprung it on me the first second we were alone.
I spoke before I knew what I meant to say. My voice came out strangely cold.
“So?” I said.
When he stiffened, raising his head, I bit my lip, but held his gaze.
“So what?” I said, my voice harsher. “I’ll bite you whenever you want, Black. I’ll do whatever you want... no matter where that urge comes from. So he did that? He trained you to get off on his twisted crap? So what? You belong to me.” I stared up at him. “You belong to me. Whatever he taught you to like, that’s mine now... and yours. Not his.” Tears came to my eyes as I watched his face. “You belong to me, goddamn it. Do you understand?”
That pain in his eyes faded slowly, the longer he looked at me.
“Do you?” I said, wiping my face angrily. “Do you understand, Quentin?”
He nodded. Even more of that tension faded from his eyes as I watched.
“Say it,” I said. “Say you belong to me.”
“Untielleres, ilya...” he murmured, stroking my cheek with his hand.
“No. Say it in English,” I said.
“I belong to you, Miri. I belong to you.”
“For how long?”
“Forever, wife.”
I nodded, clenching my jaw, my arms folded. “Good. And fuck that guy. I am so going to kill him when we run into him again.”
Black stared at me for what felt like a long time.
Then slowly, as if he couldn’t help himself, he broke out in one of those killer grins.
* * *
WANT TO READ MORE ABOUT BLACK & MIRI?
Check out the next book in the series:
BLACK OF MOOD (Quentin Black Mystery #6)
I thought I’d known what angry looked like on Black before all this. I hadn’t.
Black takes Miri with him to New York, where he thrusts her into a world of Wall Street, talk shows, fancy dinner parties and being hounded by paparazzi. Although he’s playing the part of smirking Wall Street pirate, all of this is part of his new business venture, which, as far as Miri can tell, consists of hunting down and killing every vampire in existence on Earth. Mostly, however, Black wants Brick. He flat-out won’t stop until he’s cut the head or heart from the vampire king who put him in that federal prison in Louisiana. When a series of terrorist attacks take place in the southern United States and Black appears to be involved, Miri’s fears worsen. More and more, she starts to wonder who is hunting whom, whether Black is baiting the vampires into a confrontation or Brick is just manipulating him once again for his own purposes.
See below for sample pages!
Prologue
DREAMS OF DEATH
I DREAM IN other minds sometimes––or that’s how it feels.
It’s something that’s happened since I was a kid, although I don’t remember thinking about it that way, at least not consciously.
Just one more of those little quirks of being born psychic, I suppose. My mind wandered strangely in the night, seemingly outside of my control.
Tonight, I didn’t know whose mind I was in.
I didn’t recognize him, or know him in any way.
I just knew he was awake, and I was asleep.
“Hey, what’s that?” he said, nearly a shout.
He spoke loudly to the man with him, over both his safety noise-suppression headphones and the sound of the compressor working behind him. Glancing at the engineer crouched down on the platform next to him, a burly guy with a gray-streaked goatee, whose thick torso strained his dark-blue jumpsuit, the man whose mind I shared pointed at the sky.
Two more of the dark objects sped past overhead while he watched.
“Are those drones?” He frowned. “What are drones doing over here?”
He’d counted three of them so far.
Apart from the heavy machinery, I didn’t know where they were. The sky was overcast, but it was hot. They were sweating, even in the middle of the night.
The other man, who was still on his hands and knees on the platform, peering into the open panel of the nearest loud machine, didn’t seem to have heard him. Nudging him with the toe of a steel-toed boot, the first one tried to get his attention. His boot poked the other engineer right in the most strained part of his blue jumpsuit, right around the love handles.
His head jerked around and up. “What the hell, man? I’m trying to get us out of here.”
Another dark object flashed past one of the tower lights.
“There!” The one standing pointed. “You see that?”
I didn’t know him, but I recognized the accent. Definitely somewhere in the South, not overly far from the Gulf.
Both of them were standing now, watching the sky from the mesh platform as four more whizzed by, all from different directions.
“Yeah,” the other one breathed, frowning. “I think you’re right. I think those are drones.”
“Something weird’s going on,” the first man said, loud above the sound of the machines. “Why’s the plant so damned empty? They’ve never emptied this place for an ‘inspection’ before.”
“We’re still here,” the other man pointed out.
The two of them exchanged looks.
Hesitating another beat, the first one yanked his phone out of his back pocket. He hit the button for his
boss’s contact number and raised the phone to his ear.
The instant he did, an explosion rocked the platform where he and the other man stood.
I gasped a little, somewhere inside his mind.
I gasped, hearing steal beams scream, seeing the crumpling of metal.
I watched the two men reach out in instinct and panic. They gripped the iron railing, holding on and planting their booted feet. The first man lost his phone. I watched the glass front shatter as it bounced off the side of the tower, heading for the ground below.
The first explosion was followed by a second.
And a third.
I felt a kind of sucking pressure––of the air leaving the man’s lungs, of the oxygen being sucked out of the space around him, rushing down out of the sky above his head.
A heavy rumble started. My mind flashed to dragons, to winged creatures breathing fire, bursting out of the molten earth. I listened to that snarling monster as it rose from the depths, and fear exploded over my entire being.
I’m going to die.
I’m going to die right here.
It was the last thing I felt him think...
...AND THEN I was someplace else.
Unlike the faraway platform with the strange man, this place was intimately familiar.
So was its inhabitant.
I watched her writhe on the padded table, doctors clustered over her, strapping down her wrists, her ankles. Screams echoed in the metal and glass-enclosed room, and a part of me screamed with her, lost in her anguish and frustration.
Her blond hair was full and thick now, not matted and thin like it would be in a few months’ time. In this brief, fleeting snapshot, it still reflected the real her––a mane as wild as her thrashing limbs and beating heart. I watched her head-butt one of the orderlies who came for her with a syringe, smashing the glass in his hands, bloodying his fingers where the glass cut him.
He gasped, pulling away, gripping his bleeding fingers as he backed away from the table, watching her in fear, awe, even bewilderment.
She hissed at him, fangs extended.
She would eat his heart. She would suck every ounce of life out of him.
I knew her.
I knew her… somehow.
Her pain felt like mine.
Love, passion, death, blood––all of it was her, but not her. The real her and the imposter rolled into one. She hated. Loved. Lived. Died. Killed. Created.
She was everything I wanted to be.
She was everything I despised.
When they threw a leather strap over her throat, buckling her neck flush to the padded bench, she screamed in fury. Anguished defeat filled her, a knowing.
She would die. She would never break free from this place.
She screamed in rage.
A part of me screamed with her––
WARM FINGERS WRAPPED around my side, pulling me close.
“Hey.” A familiar voice. “Hey, honey… relax. Relax, ilya… it’s all right.”
I was panting. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see in the dark.
Still, I knew him. His voice pulled me back, more familiar than my own.
It was Black. Black was there, with me.
He kissed me, pressing his face to mine. “Ilya… honey. Wake up.” His voice tugged at me, warm and soft, as he kissed me again. “Wake up… you’re dreaming.”
Slowly, my heart rate came back under control.
As it did, I remembered where I was.
Glancing up at the ceiling in the dark, I watched light patterns flicker across it from skyscrapers outside.
We were in a high penthouse, but we weren’t at home. I knew that even before I’d glanced around the darkened room to confirm it to myself, noting the hotel’s long bureau near the bathroom door, the unfamiliar silver and crystal light fixture overhead, the abstract art painting on the wall. My eyes lingered on a pale green divan in the corner by a giant window, and the empty tea cup of mine that sat next to it, along with my book.
Sighing, I sank my head back to the pillow.
Black continued to stroke my hair, his light warm, soothing.
Neither of us had been all that peaceful in bed lately. Usually it was him who woke me up, though, not the reverse. He woke me up in a panic some nights. Other nights, he woke up full of rage. Some of those nights, he even scared me––but only until I could get him fully awake.
He’d spent over four weeks in a maximum security prison. It had left scars on him.
Truthfully, it left scars on both of us. I’d only just begun to acknowledge the ones it left on me. It wasn’t only that he’d been kidnapped in the middle of a damned police investigation and vanished without a trace. It wasn’t only that I hadn’t been there, that I had no idea where he was, or that I nearly lost my mind looking for him. It wasn’t even the horrible stories he’d told me about his time there, how they’d collared him and beat him, how he’d been raped and abused.
It wasn’t even the sheer insanity of the fact that the whole thing had been done to him by vampires, something I still couldn’t wholly wrap my mind around.
No, those were just the facts of things. The timeline.
The part I struggled with was what it had done to both of us since.
I didn’t feel safe.
I knew Black didn’t, either. I knew he probably worried about me as much as I did him.
Watching him change hurt me more than noting those changes in myself. I didn’t blame him for those changes, but I felt helpless against them. Being a psychologist didn’t help, even a highly-trained one. If anything it made it worse, because, like it or not, my mind couldn’t help but analyze what I saw, or draw conclusions from what it might mean.
He’d grown distant in some ways. I could tell he was trying hard to be there for me. I could tell he didn’t want to cut me out. But some things made that next to impossible, at least in the way they had been. He’d grown reluctant to be touched, which was pretty much the opposite of how he’d been before his stint in prison and those labs. He wanted me with him all the time, but that distance remained.
In some ways I’d never felt so far away from him.
More than any of that, he’d grown obsessed.
He’d promised me he would kill the vampire who had done this to him.
He obsessed on that vampire more than the rest, a male named Brick who’d taunted him in that jail, threatened to hurt him, threatened to hurt me, played head-games with him. Brick paid the guards to use the collar on him, then look the other way while other prisoners abused him. He blackmailed Black into going to that lab, where vampires were being kept prisoners.
Black hated Brick to an almost frightening degree.
He seemed to have erased all of his usual rules on means and ends to hunt him down. Truthfully, I was beginning to think he wouldn’t be happy until he’d wiped out the entire vampire race, or found some way to contain it permanently.
I understood those feelings, too.
Well, as much as I could––as much as I could deduce from what he let me feel, and how much he’d told me about where his mind lived since his imprisonment.
I knew he’d soft-pedaled a lot of what he’d experienced in that prison, even with how horrible his descriptions had been. I knew he’d done the same with the labs where he’d been held during that same period. He did admit he’d been abused there as well, mainly by the vampires who had also been imprisoned there, but also by the scientists and staff of the government facility. He’d been drugged, experimented on... fed on.
The human staff had allowed their pet vampires to feed on him.
He’d also nearly been killed.
He didn’t tell me that part. I’d felt it. I felt him screaming at me from that place, even through the sight-restraint collar they put around his neck––a collar that should have kept me from feeling him totally.
Thinking about that brought the dream back to me, in flickers and starts.
Remembering the woman,
remembering her writhing on that padded bench, I turned my head, looking at him in the dark.
His eyes met mine, carrying a faint circle of glow, like cat’s eyes.
He was watching me cautiously, the deeper shadows mixing with the light from the windows to sharpen his high-cheekboned face. He was beautiful, I couldn’t help thinking, watching his light irises on mine. It was a feral, almost animal-like beauty, particularly when he wasn’t hiding it behind one of his many roles. I’d always found him beautiful, pretty much from the instant I saw him, but the longer I’d known him, the more beautiful he looked to me.
His expression softened.
I found myself thinking again that he must be picking up on my thoughts, both the good and the bad. Then again, that was hardly unusual with him. He had zero compunction about reading anyone, at any time, but especially me, and I hadn’t made any effort to shield my mind.
“Did I scream?” I asked him.
My voice came out calm, despite my heart still thudding too-fast in my chest.
Brushing another strand of hair from my face, he smiled. “Loud as fuck,” he said, chuckling softly. “I thought Cowboy might come in here brandishing a gun, thinking I was killing you.” A frown touched his lips, visible in the orange wash of the skyline visible through the window. “We’re quite a pair, the two of us.” A faint guilt reached his voice, even as it softened. “At least you never hurt me with your dreams, doc,” he murmured.
I couldn’t think about that, though. Not now.
I looked out the window, glimpsing the skyline.
It wasn’t the one I wished it was, truthfully. It wasn’t San Francisco, or the view of the Bay Bridge from Black’s penthouse apartment on California Street. Rather, I found myself gazing over a much denser profusion of lights, from much higher up. The Empire State Building shone in the distance, its distinctive lines lit in dramatic red, white and blue.
I swallowed, remembering that the colors were to commemorate the anniversary of September 11th.
I knew why we’d come to New York. I understood Black’s reasoning.
Black And Blue (Quentin Black Mystery #5) Page 32
