I felt him blaming himself for what happened in New York.
I felt pain off him from losing me, when I took off to Hawaii.
I felt his conflicted feelings about his parents, his sister, his whole birth world being dead. I saw other faces, terrorist seers he’d fought with back on Old Earth, people he’d known, some of whom had been kind to him, some of whom he’d considered friends.
I felt his conflicted feelings around the new seers here, around how they viewed him. More than any of that, I felt his awareness that he was responsible for them now, that they might represent the very last of his kind.
I felt that responsibility weigh on him.
It weighed on him far more heavily than I’d realized.
I felt it, and realized I’d been feeling it for days, without understanding what it meant. I’d assumed he was avoiding those seers because he resented them being here, or because they dredged up bad memories of that world. Feeling him now, I realized that wasn’t it at all.
He’d been avoiding them because he knew they were his to keep alive. More than that, preserving what remained of his culture, his race, was partly his responsibility now, too.
He’d never had any intention of throwing them out on the street. He was more worried about what he might have to do about Charles.
He was worried because there were so few of his kind left.
He was worried about it because of me.
Black thought he’d might have to take Charles out for real now, to challenge his power at least, not to mention his vision of seer life here on New Earth. He wasn’t sure how I’d feel about that. He wasn’t sure he could do it without getting even more of his people killed.
He wasn’t sure if he could do it without exposing seers to the humans, and starting a whole new history of war, slavery and oppression between the two races.
He wasn’t sure if he could do it without losing everything to the vampires.
He wasn’t sure he could do it without losing everything to the humans… or to Charles’ seers… or to all three groups, if they teamed up against him.
He didn’t want to be at war with the human world. He saw the human world as his world, too. He didn’t want to fight his own people, either.
I felt more around that, a kind of higher strategy and thought in Black’s mind.
I felt his thoughts around what Charles might be doing, why he might be making this move now. As I felt all the emotions bombarding me from my husband, I found myself equal parts devastated at how much I’d missed in terms of what was going on with him, and in awe at how much he was trying to process all at once, and to strategize around.
I definitely hadn’t been giving him enough credit.
What I’d taken as Black pushing me away, or even a borderline unfeeling or sociopathic tendency of his––to immerse himself in tactical planning rather than express his emotions or deal with me directly––wasn’t actually as distancing as I’d thought. It also wasn’t purely an emotional coping mechanism of his, or even a disconnect from me, or from what was going on around him.
Rather, he was doing all of it at the same time.
He was processing emotion as he dealt with the tactics on how to deal with the concrete problems around those emotions.
By the time I came, I realized I was crying, clinging to his arms.
I think I was mostly ashamed.
Or maybe I just felt like a fool, for missing so much.
I even understood why he was telling me this now, and in this way. He didn’t know how to tell me verbally. He truly didn’t know how to express it through words. He didn’t know how to just tell me all of this, not without stripping all the emotion from how he experienced it. He wasn’t being silent to hide his emotions from me, I realized in the same set of breaths.
He’d been afraid of diluting them, or misrepresenting them, maybe.
He didn’t trust talking, not for this.
I had my hands on him even as the realization sank in, as I continued to process what he’d shown me. I found myself caressing the angular lines and muscles of his chest, his arms, stroking his throat and jaw, gripping the small of his back, massaging him up to his shoulders and chest. I kept doing it, even after he came, even after we were just lying there.
When I didn’t stop, eventually he let out a low sound.
I felt his pain worsen again, and then we were kissing.
His light opened even more.
He wanted me to “talk” to him the way he’d been talking to me, and I tried to accommodate him. I kept trying, opening more until I’d done it enough that I lost control over what he could see and what he couldn’t see.
I felt him react to the flickers and pulses of my mind once I had.
My thoughts seemed to come in no particular order, or maybe just a different order than I expected. My own worries about Charles swam forward first, and what he might be capable of. My worries about him, meaning Black himself, wound into that, along with my anger and fear about Brick being free, my fear of vampires in general, especially what they’d done to Black, especially after I’d been fed on in New Mexico.
My memories of New Mexico transition into my worries about the Native kids, then my empathy for the new seers and how lost they all seemed. That morphed back into my fears for Black, and my more selfish fears that the immigrant seers might pull Black deeper into that world and further from me.
Somehow, that brought me back to that shame for missing so much with Black himself, for not seeing him clearly, even after all this time.
Black was inside me again by then.
His pain slammed into my light, harder than before. Watching my face, he pinned my wrists, arching into me with a near-violence.
He still didn’t speak.
I could feel his inability to express himself, even then.
After we’d been moving together, wrapped around and into one another a while longer, I felt something else.
It startled me so much, I found myself gripping his arms and chest, first slowing him down, then stopping him.
He hung over me, breathing hard, sweating, his eyes half-lidded, pain coming off him in dense clouds. I found myself touching him all over again, unable to stop touching him as I stared up at his face.
“Black,” I murmured, kissing him. “Black… Quentin.”
His pain worsened. He closed his eyes.
“You don’t feel married to me anymore?” A harder, near-choking pain hit my chest as I said it out loud. “What does that mean? Tell me. What does that mean?”
I heard the fear in my voice.
He must have heard it, too. I saw him wince, but I don’t know if it was from my question, or the emotion he felt behind it. He shook his head, but I could feel it wasn’t really an answer to what I’d asked him, either.
Avoiding my eyes, he closed his. Another cloud of pain came off him.
“Black!”
His eyes opened, his gold irises nearly opaque. Gripping my hair in one hand, he pulled it back from my face, pluming heat at me.
“Miri, it’s fine. Everything is fine.”
“It’s not fine,” I said, my voice holding that fear again. “Black! What’s going on?”
He exhaled, and felt him fighting to control something.
Then, with a reluctance I could feel, he opened his light.
He spoke through it that time, but I felt most of what he was saying more intensely than I heard it. I felt it so intensely, it was hard to hold onto his actual words at all––at first, anyway. I found myself wincing, gripping him tighter in my hands, as he murmured in my ear.
“I’m willing to wait,” he said. “I’ll wait, Miri… we’re fine. I mean it. We’re totally fine.” Still stroking my hair, he exhaled. “I know you don’t really want to be married to me. You never wanted to be married to me. You hate the whole idea of seer marriage. You hate being trapped with me. You won’t let me tell anyone. You threw the ring I got you at me in New York…”
Pain rippled off his light, making my eyes close.
I gripped him tighter in my hands, fighting to speak, but I couldn’t.
I couldn’t speak.
He exhaled again.
“I’ll wait, Miri,” he repeated. “I promise you, I will. But I don’t know if it’s honest to consider us married until we’ve worked some of this out. You don’t trust me. You left for Hawaii and I had no idea if you were coming back.”
His jaw tightened, then he was clicking under his breath.
“I knew you probably would come back… I knew it rationally, at least. But I also knew that was probably mostly from the bond. I knew it would be hard to avoid me forever because of that. I also knew that was the good news, as far as I was concerned… and the bad news for you.”
Looking down at me, he winced at something he must have seen in my face.
“Miri,” he said. “Doc… it’s fine. I swear to you, it’s fine.”
When I didn’t speak, he averted his gaze.
“I’m really not trying to pressure you. I’m trying to respect what you want. I don’t know all of it, but I’m trying to respect the parts I’ve seen. I’m trying to… I don’t know…”
He pursed his lips, his eyes showing him to be thinking.
His mouth hardened, just before he made a vague gesture with the hand he’d been using to stroke my hair.
“I don’t know, Miri.” He looked back down at me, as if at a loss. “I’m trying to use what I know. What you’ve told me. What I’ve observed. What I’ve heard in your mind. I don’t know what else to do. You say I never ask you questions, that I just demand things…”
His jaw hardened.
Shaking his head, he looked away.
“…You never say these things aloud at all, so I’m trying to use what I have. I’m trying to wait this time. To ask the question.”
Looking down at me, he winced again at whatever he saw.
His eyes grew pained.
“Miri,” he said. “We’re okay. I’m not fucking threatening you, all right? It’s not even a question yet. I’m waiting on any more demands or questions. That’s kind of the point. I wasn’t going to say a fucking word about it, honestly. I was going to wait until… I don’t know. Until something felt different. Until you asked me, maybe.”
I just stared up at him.
I think for those few seconds, my mind was utterly blank.
I felt things. I felt too much, honestly.
I felt things in him, too.
The pain from both of us rippled into a kind of echo effect that wouldn’t let me think straight, or form coherent words. I could feel him separating out from those two things somehow, compartmentalizing, and somehow, that only made my own pain worse.
“Black,” I said finally. “Read me. Please… read me.”
He looked down at me, his gold eyes reluctant.
“Quentin, please,” I said, touching his face. “Please.”
Pain rippled through him, touching his eyes, and again, I felt him restraining it in some way, holding it back. His holding back somehow only worsened my pain.
He nodded though, meeting my gaze.
“All right.”
I opened my light… as much as I could possibly open it.
As I did, I thought about him, about us. I thought about all of it.
I thought about New York, about how I’d felt when I threw that ring at him.
I remembered lying in that bathtub, how devastated I’d felt, how completely broken. I thought about my time in Hawaii. I showed him every embarrassing, depressed, confused, hurt, crying, grieving, drinking, cursing the sky minute of it. I showed him all of my fears, all the pains it brought up from my parents dying, my sister disappearing, my uncles, my aunts, everyone from my life who vanished, leaving me alone.
I showed him Ian trying to kill me.
Solonik.
I showed him how he was the only person I felt safe with, how much it terrified me that I felt safe with him, even when I had no idea how he really felt about me. I showed him how much it ripped me apart––not only the vampires and what he’d done with them, but that he’d lied to me, that I’d felt manipulated and used and disrespected.
I told him I feared he didn’t see me as his equal.
I told him I felt like another pawn he was moving around the chessboard.
I showed him how touched I’d been by the rings he’d had made, how much they meant to me. I showed him I’d been looking forward to a ceremony in San Francisco, that I’d been imagining guest lists and scouring online catalogues for fucking dresses, something I hadn’t even done with Ian, even though Ian and I had been engaged for over a year––
“Miri.” His voice was gruff, thick.
I showed him how I’d spent the whole time in Hawaii trying to learn sight skills. When I wasn’t drinking at tiki bars and crying and midnight swimming, I’d spent every waking minute trying to learn sight skills so Black wouldn’t cut me out of his plans like that again.
I showed him how I’d invited Charles there to teach me, in the hopes Black might finally view me as some kind of asset, that he wouldn’t keep shunting me aside in favor of people he’d put in the “useful” bucket in that damned calculating mind of his––the same mind that intimidated me and turned me on and frustrated me and made me feel small.
“Miri,” he murmured. “Gaos, Miri…”
I thought about New Mexico, how I’d decided there that I had to surrender to all of my insecurities and fears with him, just accept I would be his employee in some ways.
I showed him how I’d tried to let go of my ego, the fact that I was used to having an advantage over most people. I showed him my awareness that I needed to just accept I wasn’t his equal yet, and do my damnedest to catch up, and not make it about my pride.
“Miri.”
His fingers stroked my hair. Leaning down, he kissed my face, then my mouth.
“Miri… stop. Please stop, honey.”
His voice lowered, turning deep, gruff, even as he switched to that other language.
He spoke to me for what felt like a long time.
I only understood a handful of the words, but I found myself relaxing under his deep voice anyway, opening my light, but that time more to rest in his than to convey anything.
“I’m sorry, Black,” I told him, soft.
“Don’t be sorry, Miri.”
“I am sorry, though.”
“Why?” He let out a grunt, what was almost a laugh, although I didn’t hear much humor in it. “I’m fully aware I’m the asshole in this scenario.”
When I rolled my eyes at him, laughing in spite of myself, he leaned down and kissed me. When I kissed him back, he deepened it, opening his mouth, using his tongue.
It wasn’t until we’d been kissing for a while that I remembered he was still inside me.
I don’t know how long that kiss lasted, or the sex that came after, or the sex that came after that.
At some point, someone knocked on the door, telling us it was time to go.
11
THE SANCTUARY
WE DIDN’T END up changing boats––not exactly.
We did ferry nearly our entire group to the land in smaller boats, sans the captain, his crew and a handful of Black’s people who would oversee the equipment and weapons we couldn’t bring with us. We did all of that before the captain brought the ship itself to the dock at Port Fourchon, Louisiana.
Jem and his seers, working with Black, Dex and Alice, were able to “push” the few Coast Guard patrols out of our path for those few hours we needed the opening.
Once the coast was clear––literally, in this case––a small group was sent ahead as scouts. That first group consisted of Ace, Javier, Alice, Mika, three more of Black’s people from San Francisco, and the blue-eyed seer none of the others liked, the one Jem called Raven.
Leaving us in the Gulf a few miles from the East Timbalier Island National Wildlife Refuge, our scouts took a mot
orized rubber boat across the remaining stretch of water.
There they met up with more of Black’s people. I heard from Dex and Black that Easton’s group was among them; apparently Frank and Dog had contacts among the local natives. As a result, they were able to help us secure guides and airboats to help us navigate the rivers, channels, swamps and lakes that surrounded New Orleans.
A different group of Black’s employees awaited the ship at Port Fourchon. That group had new names and IDs for everyone crossing the border there.
Black and I wouldn’t be among those re-entering the country officially, however.
Despite the risks that faced us on multiple fronts as we got ready to re-enter the United States, Black still seemed the most uncomfortable with the seer aspect of this––meaning, how much he was relying on Jem and the other immigrant seers in his plans already.
I couldn’t tell what bothered him precisely about that, but I knew it had something to do with fears that too much of the “Old Earth” mentality was bleeding back into his thinking already, not to mention into this version of Earth.
I couldn’t really get a sense of what he was worried might happen, though.
I mean, there weren’t enough seers here for it to matter, were there?
Black brushed off my concerns without really clarifying any of it.
“We’ll deal with that later, Miri.”
I exhaled. “I know. I’m just worried about you.”
“Don’t be,” he said, dismissive. “Really.” He looked at me. “Don’t be.”
He made an odd, graceful gesture with one hand, something that reminded me of the other seers now that I’d seen them all together a number of times. Frowning as I realized Black stood out more with them here, not less, I glanced up when he added,
“…Your uncle was bringing that here anyway. He has been for years.” He scowled. “He won’t be happy until he’s replicated that whole fucking world here, only with seers in charge this time, instead of humans.”
He didn’t look up as he said it, but continued to pore over the map on the table in front of him. It was right after Dex got everyone up and moving once more. We’d had a few minutes alone while Jem went back up to the top deck with Dex, Kiko, Jax and Holo.
In Black We Trust Page 15
