I couldn’t help wondering if that had anything to do with Kiko.
Glancing between him and Kiko at the thought, I noticed their light was pretty damned closed to one another. Even as I thought it, Kiko glanced in his direction, even as she appeared to be pretending not to. I saw the faintest scowl on her lips as she did.
Whatever had been going on between them, it felt like it was over.
It also felt like it hadn’t ended well.
I was still watching Jem, puzzled, when a flicker of reaction reached me from another part of the room. Since I’d felt absolutely nothing in Jem’s anything that came across as sexual, not even in a joking, flirty way, which was pretty ho-hum for seers, I found myself quirking an eyebrow pointedly in Black’s direction.
It’s not that, doc, Black sent, his thoughts a little annoyed. It didn’t feel like that annoyance was aimed at me. It’s nothing to do with you.
I pursed my lips, staring at him harder. Then what? I thought you said Jem was doing an unbelievable job here. You said him and Yarli were the most highly-competent seers you’d ever worked with, that you were damned lucky to have both of them––
We’ll talk later, okay?
I hesitated.
When he sent me a plume of heat, I frowned.
Later, doc. I promise. Now isn’t the time.
Feeling his concern that Jem would overhear us, even if we talked solely via our bond structure, coupled with the fact that he wasn’t ready to talk to Jem about whatever it was yet, I reluctantly backed down.
Okay, I sent. Soon, though.
Before he could answer, the door opened behind me a second time.
That time, Holo, Jax, Mika and two more people walked into the room, pulling my eyes off both Jem and Black.
Holo, Jax and Mika each started when they saw me, too. They also each gave me a hug while the two newcomers hung back. I glanced at those two long enough to determine they pretty much had to be seers, just from their height, their oddly near-Asian features and weird eye colors.
I smiled at both of them.
Following my eyes, Mika made introductions.
One, the female, had eyes that were nearly black, with a ring of white around the outer iris. Her long, dark blue hair contained streaks of black and gold. Mika introduced her as Kiessa, and I don’t think I’d ever even laid eyes on her before. Her name definitely wasn’t familiar. The other, a male, had one silver eye and one light blue eye, black hair, and looked Eurasian.
His name was Zairei, and I vaguely recognized him from the team of new infiltration recruits Black and Jem had been training on Koh Mangaan.
“All right?” Black said, his voice a low growl. “Can we start?”
He looked pointedly at his watch, then at Mika, lifting an eyebrow.
When no one moved, he added, “I’m glad to see everyone. I’m really impressed with everything I’ve heard and seen regarding what you’ve done while we were gone. But we’re under the gun here, in terms of time. Let’s get business done first.” Grunting, he added, “We’ll bring food in here and catch up after… if you’re not all fucking sick of me by then.”
Everyone fell silent, looking at him as if they weren’t sure if he was kidding.
When Black didn’t move, or change expression, they seemed to make up their minds. I watched the few people still standing move quickly, finding seats around the table.
Once everyone was settled and quiet, Black looked back at Yarli and Kiko.
“All right,” he said, giving Jem a brief, dark look. “Now tell me about these crackpot Purity assholes. Start from the beginning.”
So they did.
3
Everybody Wants To Rule The World
“HE’S DEFINITELY BACK in the country,” the seer said grimly. He swiveled his gaze, returning his boss’s stare. “We’re getting live footage now, if you want to see it.”
Charles barely hesitated, then nodded.
Loosening his tie from the meeting he’d just left with the National Security Council, where he still acted as “informal advisor” to the President, he clicked his fingers, motioning, seer-fashion, towards the largest monitor in the high-ceilinged room. It stood directly across from the dark blue leather couch he currently stood behind, and where he’d been leaning his hands when the seer asked the question.
While Charles waited for the seer to comply, his mind lingered on his last meeting.
It left him more annoyed than not.
That was a different set of problems though––problems that would be much easier to fix, presuming no one interfered. Problems considerably more straightforward than those relating to his niece and her maddeningly inflexible husband.
President Bradford Regent might not be the brightest bulb Charles had ever encountered, even compared to most humans, but he was relatively easy to manipulate. That was true even without having to rely solely on tricks of aleimi or Barrier constructs to nudge him towards the right decisions. Regent’s motivations were straightforward, as were his reasons for being mostly onboard with their plans.
Keeping him on message was the hard part.
That, and getting him to keep his mouth shut.
Already, he seemed to have convinced himself this whole thing had been his idea. He was beginning to actually believe the messaging Charles’ team had created about him, versus the reality of his role. Charles needed to remind the good President the true nature of that role.
He also needed to remind him just how easily he could be replaced.
Charles might further explain how potentially effective a political assassination would be, in terms of solidifying popular support among the people.
Clicking in dark humor at the thought, Charles unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt, taking another, more genuinely relaxed breath that time.
In the end, Regent was only a temporary tool.
Charles needed to remind himself of that fact, and not get worked up over the man’s antics, or his delusions of grandeur.
He was pulled from his thoughts when the live stream popped up on the monitor directly in front of him.
It appeared absent of sound at first.
Then the sound blared abruptly to life.
Calls and shouts of reporters filled the lounge area, along with traffic noise in the background, horns honking, pedestrians talking excitedly as they recognized Black’s face and build as he emerged from the limousine.
Charles watched Miri climb out of the limousine after him, looking overly thin and clearly elsewhere in her thoughts. She walked around to the back of the limousine, seemingly in rote, and proceeded to grab their bags. She’d only grabbed the first one, however, when one of Black’s employees waved her off, grabbing the bag’s handle more or less right out of her hand and smiling as he bent closer to her.
A second security agent behind him grabbed two more designer suitcases out of the trunk and placed them on the curb.
Miri watched them work, emptying out the rest of the trunk, a faint frown on her lips.
Then Black appeared by her side.
Charles hadn’t even begun reading the Barrier space yet, but he could practically see the protectiveness emanating off the tall seer’s light.
Frowning to himself, Charles watched his niece’s husband wrap a muscular arm around her, encasing his wife in his light, and more or less surrounding her with his body. Miriam was hardly a weak woman, but she fell into Black’s light and body with an ease that made Charles frown more.
Maybe to get his eyes off the two of them, he focused on the lines of security guards. Black’s logo was emblazoned on T-shirts that stretched across two rows of muscular backs. They held up their arms, holding off the crowd.
Most of those employees were human, but Charles saw at least four seers standing shoulder to shoulder with the worms. He knew Black had a lot more seers working for him now. It was bad enough that he’d gotten that Adhipan seer, Dalejem… he also had at least four other highly-ranked seers with com
bat experience under Syrimne d’Gaos himself.
Black had lieutenants of the Sword, for fuck’s sake.
The fact that a pup of his age had such seers answering to him would have been entirely ridiculous even if that young seer wasn’t Black himself––an immature, oversexed, ideologically inconsistent, irreligious mercenary who surrounded himself with worms.
That one seer, Yarli, was worth a king’s ransom all on her own.
Even without reaching out, Charles felt the construct Black’s seers had woven around Black’s building. He couldn’t help noting in some irritation that it was military-grade, and clearly contained Adhipan-like features, along with a number of features and connections he wasn’t familiar with at all.
Truly, he’d never seen a construct like it before.
He hadn’t even encountered one like it on Old Earth.
He had to assume that was the Bridge and Sword training, as well.
According to reports he’d gotten, which were nowhere near as detailed as Charles would have liked, that ex-Adhipan seer, Dalejem, was their primary construct architect, and therefore behind the unusual design. Charles’ infiltrators told him Dalejem was an unlikely recruitment opportunity, which irritated Charles even more, and not only because it meant he might have to eventually take him out.
Charles didn’t like killing his own kind.
He didn’t like killing his own kind even for a good reason.
He’d heard from his people that Dalejem, or “Jem,” managed to survive whatever happened to him in Thailand, despite how badly he’d been abused by those feral jungle humans. Damned stupid of Black, to risk his most highly-trained operative on two essentially worthless humans––human tourists, no less, who’d been stupid enough to get lost in the jungle, then captured by those deranged lunatics.
For Charles himself, it was a pity, really, that Dalejem survived.
It would have solved one of his problems, at least.
Although, if Charles were being fully honest with himself, he wouldn’t mind taking another crack at recruitment––regardless of his infiltrators’ assessments. If he could learn more about him, about his past, possibly even his religious beliefs, maybe he could find a way in.
Everyone had a weak point.
Everyone had something they wanted, something that motivated them.
For a lot of seers that was family.
At the thought, Charles’ gaze flickered to Black.
He watched the tall, dark-haired seer as he began steering Miri by the waist, still enveloping her visibly with his physicality and light as he walked her towards the glass doors of his flagship building on California Street.
His wife had been with him the whole time he’d been in Europe.
Of course she had been. Black would never go without her, regardless of the risk to her person. It wasn’t exactly the first time Black had put Charles’ niece in the direct line of fire of entire covens of vampires.
Scowling, Charles’ gaze flickered back to Miri.
He didn’t get too close, not with his aleimi at least. Miri, even more than Black, always seemed to know when he read her light.
He couldn’t help studying her intently with his eyes, however.
As he’d noted when she first stepped out of the limousine, she’d lost weight.
She’d lost too much weight.
Was that left over from the bonding? Or was there another reason?
The seer standing over the keyboard glanced back at him.
“I think that’s as good as I can get the image for now, sir,” he said apologetically. “They’re making it really hard to surveil the place… this camera was only able to be snuck in because the reporters were already there.”
“When did they arrive?” Charles said. “In the country, I mean. When did they land here?”
“They flew into SFO on one of his private planes just over an hour ago. Pretty much alone, from what we can tell, just him and his wife, plus a four-person crew. The team he had with him in Europe appears to have remained there; they’re continuing to work on the ground with law enforcement and local military branches in Germany and France.”
“Looking for Nick Tanaka?” Charles clarified.
The seer nodded, once. “From what we know, yes.”
“Any seers? In Europe?”
The East Indian infiltrator shook his head slowly, but not really in a no, frowning as he examined the data on his screen, a compilation of intelligence readouts from several different teams.
“We suspect they have at least two there,” he said after a pause. “But we haven’t been able to ID exactly who, so they might be newcomers, via the portals. Someone we never tagged and entered into the database when they came through.”
He glanced up at Charles.
“Just about everyone he had with him in Thailand, including his new seer military team, the refugees who defected to his side, and his human allies, all got back to San Francisco a few months ago. All but a few have been identified and accounted for by our infiltrators. All but a few appear to be living and working out of one of six main buildings, with the majority of the military and infiltration-trained personnel living at the two high-security buildings, highlighted on the map in blue. But we don’t have IDs on everyone yet. We especially don’t have IDs for anyone working outside the United States.”
A map appeared on one of the smaller monitors. The seer pointed at lit spots on a map of San Francisco, most of them blue and green.
“These are the structures where most of the seers appear to be housed,” he said, pointing out a number of the blue spots. “He has them broken out into various categories. The primary demarcations is the civilian/military split… meaning, the ordinary seers are generally housed together, and away from those with infiltration and/or military experience. He has some guards living with the civilians, presumably to keep them safe until they assimilate, and to make sure we aren’t actively infiltrating them. But most of the infiltrators are housed separately, under a different security designation.”
Charles gave the map a bare glance.
He would look at that in more detail later, when he didn’t have a live feed of his niece and her husband right in front of him.
He did look long enough to note the names and locations of the main buildings.
It looked like most of the core group lived at California Street.
That meant they now lived with Miri and Black.
Thinking about that, Charles tore his eyes off them a second time, scanning the list of security measures they’d already ID’d for the main building. He knew that list wouldn’t be exhaustive. Also, knowing his nephew-in-law, Black would add to that list now that he was back in town. The main security would come from the construct itself, of course.
That construct would be entirely useless against vampires, however.
Then again, Black seemed to think they were the enemy––not the bloodsucking monsters who’d tortured and abused him, stolen his people, abducted him, abducted his niece, betrayed him, lied to him again and again.
Charles’ leaf-green eyes focused back on the main monitor.
Leaning his hands on the back of the leather couch, he watched Black and his wife getting ready to enter the building, two of Black’s staff trailing behind them, both wearing concealed weapons, and pulling a trolley containing all of their luggage.
The limousine pulled away from the curb as Charles watched.
He frowned, his jaw clenching.
He found himself examining the other male’s living light, or aleimi, in more detail––Black’s in particular, although he’d already noted changes in Miriam’s light, as well.
Something was definitely different.
Some of that would have come from the bonding, which they’d clearly completed.
Charles fought to bite back his annoyance at that fact alone.
Delusional as it had been, he’d begun to hold out hope that bonding might never be completed, thanks to Black�
��s immaturity and his seemingly insatiable need to screw things up with his wife, right when they should have been consummating for real.
Charles had even begun to wonder if Black was sabotaging things between them intentionally, or if Miri was, or both of them together. Whatever the truth of it, he’d let himself believe Black might really fuck things up between them––as in, permanently fuck them up––before he managed to get Miri to fully agree to him.
It was a fool’s hope.
Charles had known it. He hadn’t been able to stop himself from entertaining it, though, however briefly.
Feeling his emotions roil around that end of things, he never lost his focus on the other male’s aleimic light.
The bonding being completed didn’t explain all of it.
It didn’t explain everything he was seeing.
Whatever was different in their light, in his light, Black’s specifically, couldn’t have occurred simply due to their being fully bonded to one another. Although, Charles supposed the bonding could have acted as a catalyst in some way, to other, more hidden changes. Perhaps Miri helped him grow beyond himself in this area, as well.
Charles slid into the Barrier, focusing his light more intently on Black’s.
Cautious, he moved closer to the other male, keeping his light totally still.
When he felt no reaction in the other to his presence, he moved closer.
Then closer.
Then closer still.
He slid carefully past the younger male’s shields, into the edges of the light that coiled around his body, and the aleimic structures that lived over Black’s head.
Charles didn’t know exactly how, or even precisely when, it changed.
He didn’t feel anything different, in terms of the quality of light. He felt no prior warning that he was about to get too close.
At some point he did get too close, though.
In retrospect, it was more like he’d stumbled over a tripwire in the jungle, like he or his people might have left for Black back in Vietnam or Guatemala. Only, instead of a click and an explosion, the difference crept up on him, coiling around him silently, seeping into his light.
TO BLACK WITH LOVE: Quentin Black Mystery #10 Page 5
