Brick lowered his mouth again.
For a long-feeling few minutes, he drank.
Neither of them spoke, but I felt Black’s mind and light around me as he opened, seemingly outside his control. His light softened more and more, the longer it went. I saw images flash through Black’s mind, and realized he was reading Brick as much as the reverse. I couldn’t make out a lot of those images, but I felt pulses of reaction off Black as he watched them––enough that I could tell he clearly did know what he was seeing.
I even felt fragments of his thoughts.
Charles.
I frowned, folding my arms tighter over my chest.
Clearly, Brick confirmed for certain that Uncle Charles was involved.
I saw another face, one Black clearly recognized, but that meant nothing to me.
The man looked military––heavily muscular, blond, dark blue eyes, a distinctive scar that ran down one side of his face in an odd pattern that reminded me of a snake. Whoever he was, he was huge, bigger than Black, around mid-thirties in age.
He looked like a killer.
It was something in his eyes. They were dead inside.
They were dead like the eyes of the vampire with the blond hair and the always-blood-colored irises.
I felt the desire ebb and flow on Black and Brick as the vampire continued to drink. I also felt Black pulling every scrap of information he could off the vampire. I barely noticed when Brick started massaging his thigh. I blocked him a second time when he tried to massage Black higher. When Brick raised his head that time, I tensed for real.
Violence stood in his eyes.
Not a single glimmer of humor or smugness lived there. I saw pure animal, crouched over a kill. More than that, I saw a possessiveness I’d sensed before but never seen.
Instead of making me back off, it flared something in my own light, my own mind.
I didn’t make a conscious decision.
My sidearm was in my hand before I’d thought about why, or what I intended to do. I pressed the barrel of the gun into the vampire’s forehead, hard enough to dent the flesh.
“You’re done,” I told him, my voice cold as ice. “Stop. Now.”
Brick’s expression didn’t move at first.
I saw a predatory flicker dart through his eyes, so quickly it was there and gone before I could be certain what I’d seen. I saw an animal-like calculation, a harder flare of possessiveness, mixed with a desire that was now on the surface.
Then, something in him seemed to comprehend something he saw in me.
His eyes turned from aggressive to wary.
They still looked more animal than human to me––if a smarter animal than a lot of humans I’d known over the years. Whatever lived there, assessing me, it seemed to take a relatively accurate read of the situation, and of me.
Receding backwards, he released Black, sitting up on his side of the couch.
Planting his hands on the blue and white upholstery, he stared at me, licking his lips.
I grimaced, watching him lick Black’s blood off his teeth.
I never took my eyes off him, or lowered the gun.
Instead, I followed him with it, still aiming it directly at his head. I knew there was next to no chance a head-shot would actually kill him. I also knew I could cut his head off while he recovered from it.
Brick let out a melodic laugh.
Realizing he was still connected to Black––well enough to have heard me through Black’s mind––I frowned. I kept the gun on him, though, my finger fully on the trigger.
“It’s all right, Maid Miriam,” Brick said.
He smiled, wiping the last of the blood off his lips and mouth with the side of his hand, and licking that hand.
“The danger is past, my dear. I believe we’ve both seen enough.”
I still didn’t lower the gun. I didn’t take my eyes off Brick.
“Black?” I said, without looking at him.
“It’s all right, Miri––” he began.
I cut him off.
“Get up,” I told him, still staring at Brick. “Get up and leave the room, Black. Now.”
There was a silence.
Then I heard Black begin to do as I’d said. I didn’t look over, but saw him in my periphery as he rose to his feet. I sat there, unmoving as he bent down, grabbing the leather jacket off the couch and shouldering it back on once he had his arms through both sleeves.
I felt him hesitate, standing there.
Without looking up, I shook my head, my eyes and gun never leaving Brick’s face.
“Go,” I said. “Wait for me in the other room, Black.”
There was another silence.
Then Black turned, walking out of the room.
I waited until I felt him leave the sunroom entirely, following him with my light until he’d re-entered the massive, plant-filled ballroom with the others.
Once I felt Black with lights I knew––Manny, Cowboy, Angel, Jem, Nick, Kiko, Dex––my light and mind returned to the vampire king seated in front of me.
“May I get up, too?” Brick said, amusement in his voice. “It is done, Miriam. Unless you intend to shoot me.”
I shook my head, slow, my jaw clenched.
“I wouldn’t fuck with me right now if I were you, Brick.”
There was a silence.
In it, I saw the vampire assessing me anew, his eyes wary.
“It was a transaction, Miriam,” Brick said after a pause. Still watching me, he shrugged, his eyes still holding that faint caution. “It’s over now.”
Smiling faintly, he added, “And don’t be too hard on poor Quentin. He really can’t help himself, you know. He fights it more than most of your kind––”
“That was the last time,” I cut in, staring at him. “With Black. That was the very last time with him, Brick.”
The vampire frowned.
After a pause, he let out a sigh, resting his arms on the sofa’s arm and back.
“I cannot promise that, Miriam,” he said, his voice a low warning. “You know I can’t promise that. It is an emotional thing that causes you to say this, and I understand, but it is not logical, my dear. We are about to embark on a joint enterprise, your mate and I. I cannot afford to be kept in the dark about––”
“Did he lie?” I said, my voice cold. “Did he lie about any of it, Brick? From what you saw just now. Did he lie?”
The vampire’s full lips pursed in a frown.
“Did he?” I said.
Brick lifted the hand on the couch’s back in a small wave. “No.”
“Then you don’t need to read him again,” I said. “You can take his word for it.”
Brick let out a half-laugh, shaking his head.
“How quaintly naïve. You must know it doesn’t work that way, Dr. Black. It doesn’t work that way for my kind any more than it does for yours––”
“Then you’ll read me,” I said. “You’ll feed on me instead. If Black’s there, you’ll see enough through me to get what you need.”
Brick exhaled with a kind of forced patience. “Did you not hear your mate just now? He would never go for that. You know he wouldn’t––”
“You feed on Black again, and I’ll kill you.”
My voice came out so cold I barely recognized it as mine.
My eyes never left his.
“I’ll wait until you’re both in your fugue-fucking-whatever-the-hell-it-is, and I’ll put a bullet in your brain. Then I’ll cut out your heart. I might even cut off your head, just for good measure.”
Pausing long enough for my words to sink in, I added,
“You can try having your attack-dog, Dorian, guard you while you feed. Maybe that will keep you alive for a few extra days, maybe even a few weeks. But I’m a patient person, Brick. I’ll wait as long as I have to. I’ll get as many seers as I need to help me. I’ll get my uncle to help me. He’ll do whatever I ask… especially if what I’m asking for is help killing vampires.�
�
The silence grew deep.
The wariness in Brick’s eyes was on the surface now.
He studied me, animal-to-animal, as if assessing if I meant it.
In the end, he nodded, once.
“Understood, Mrs. Black,” he said.
I think for the very first time I’d ever heard him speak, I didn’t detect even the faintest hint of sarcasm, smugness or humor in his words.
Rather, he looked at me as if we’d just sealed a formal agreement.
Possibly even a pact.
Staring back at him, I realized I’d meant every word I’d said.
More than meant it, I’d just made him a solemn vow.
Moreover, I didn’t care what Black had to say about it.
I didn’t give a fuck what Black had to say about any of it.
18
WASHINGTON D.C.
“HOW COULD YOU have possibly blown this so badly?” Charles turned, glaring at the other man, even as he kept his light coiled slightly around the human’s aleimi. “How is that even possible, given the advantages I practically hand-fed you and your team?”
He didn’t have to ask the question.
Even if he was serious about obtaining an answer, he didn’t have to ask.
He could have read him.
Hell, he already had read him––multiple times––on this topic as well as many others. At this point, he could have dispensed with talking to him altogether and just taken control over his mind, run the ops through the human’s light and physical form as though he were a walking, talking, and breathing marionette.
He was too angry to do any of those things.
Truthfully, he wanted to put the blond human’s head through one of the shatterproof glass windows of the upper-floor hotel suite where they both stood.
“Who screws up something so basic as a simple pick-up? With numbers and firepower so overwhelmingly on our side? Particularly with a subject so completely un-alerted to our intentions?” Charles glared into the human’s maddeningly blank blue eyes. “Who does that? Much less one in our line of work?”
Logan Silver frowned.
Even now, the frown developed slowly out of a blanker stare, as if the expression, and the emotions behind it, came through on a delayed reaction.
That delay might have struck Charles as borderline amusing, if the circumstances and the stakes had been different.
As it was, he found it decidedly unfunny.
Charles found he understood the reason for the human’s delayed reaction, however. The younger Silver was so unused to criticism from someone he considered an “inferior”––in other words, anyone not personally related to him by blood––he literally could not comprehend it as criticism at first.
He might not even physically hear it.
Anything approaching a rebuke did not compute for the first few seconds after it reached his ears. Having grown up rich, spoiled and utterly unaccountable for his own actions, he looked as much bewildered as offended by Charles’ words.
Even now, Charles could feel his muddy, un-reflective, crude human mind looking for another interpretation for what it was hearing.
Charles didn’t give him that out.
“You are a fool,” he said coldly. “An incompetent, arrogant fool.”
That time, Silver frowned for real.
Seeing him open his mouth to speak, Charles cut him off.
“I told you exactly what you would be facing in Black. I told you that you would never take him by ordinary means. Not even with my people there to help. I gave you multiple ways to approach him that would have ensured success, in spite of those things.”
Charles’ voice grew even colder, angry enough that he swore overtly, something he rarely did outside the confines of his tightest inner circles.
“I told you to hit him with a fucking dart,” he snapped. “I told you to hit him with a tranquilizer before you got anywhere near him. I said it more than once.”
Charles gritted his teeth, made even more furious by the other’s stare.
“I supplied you with the darts,” Charles hissed. “I supplied you with the rifle and the darts, at the exact dosages you would need. I offered one of my sniper-trained operatives, one who had relevant experience not only with targets like Black, but with Black himself. You assured me you could handle it. You assured me you could handle it easily.”
The blue eyes went blank once more.
That time, they looked borderline indifferent.
His broad shoulders shrugged, even as he pursed his lips, his drawn-in cheeks pulling at the scar on one side of his face.
Walking over to the drink cart on one side of the couch, Logan Silver set down his rocks glass, using the tongs to pull out a few square cubes of ice before he splashed expensive vodka over the top. Picking up the glass, he faced Charles, his voice and expression openly insolent.
“It would have hit the papers if we did it the way you wanted at the reception,” he said. “There was press there. Too many people from intelligence services. We had to make it look like a routine pick-up for questioning, or it would have hit the news circuit.”
“My people would have taken care of that.” Charles gritted his teeth. “I told you that, too. Multiple times.”
Logan took a longer drink of the vodka, then shrugged. “We should have had plenty of people to take him down outside. If he hadn’t killed my lead guy, Vic, everything would have gone like––”
“Clockwork?” Charles cut in, staring at him with open contempt. “Was that what you were about to say, Logan? If one of the deadliest men who ever worked for the United States government hadn’t fought back when you tried to kidnap him, to take him from his wife, at the funeral of one of his oldest friends, it all would have gone smoothly…? Is that your argument, Logan? Really?”
Silver’s eyes grew cooler. He shrugged. “He got lucky. It won’t happen again.”
Charles gritted his teeth.
That time, he did it hard enough they actually hurt.
Forcing his eyes off the young human, he stared down over the Washington D.C. mall, looking at the white obelisk of the Washington Monument at the other end of the shallow pool making up the longer and wider rectangle of green.
Despite the light pollution, he glimpsed stars in the moon-less night sky.
The Capital Building, to his right, was lit with yellow and dark orange lights.
“Gaos,” he muttered under his breath. Turning, he glared at the human. “Is there really nothing from the satellites on him? What about the tracker on the plane?”
“He must have removed it,” Silver said, frowning. Taking another swig of the vodka, he added, “I might have underestimated him––”
“You think so?” Charles said coldly. “How incredibly astute of you, Logan. You do realize he will come for us now? For both of us?”
The younger Silver snorted, tilting back his head to polish off the last of the vodka in his glass, sucking it off the remaining ice cubes.
“How the hell would he even know it’s us?” he said.
Again, Charles gritted his teeth so hard, he worried he’d crack his molars.
“Anyway,” Logan went on with one of those infuriatingly blasé shrugs of his. “He can’t come back into the United States. He’d be a total fucking moron to come back here. He’s got to know we have his information posted at every airport, every train station, every checkpoint along the border, along with every law enforcement agency in the fifty states. Every cop in D.C. knows his face. Every cop in L.A. and New York does, too. Not to mention the F.B.I., Home-Sec, ICE, all branches of the military. Not to mention the fact that we took all of his money…”
Charles gave him an annoyed, disbelieving look.
When the other didn’t seem to grasp the meaning of his frown, the seer gave up, folding his arms over the tan suit and green dress shirt he wore.
“If you think you got all of it, you really are a fool,” he muttered.
Loga
n Silver frowned, opening his mouth, but the other male cut him off.
“He will come back here,” Charles said, motioning sharply with a hand, pointing at the carpet. “He will come back here, and when he finds out you killed his friend, he will kill you.” Charles’ voice grew colder. “When he finds out I helped you, he will come after me.”
Silver smirked. “You’re not afraid, are you Charles? Of boogey-man Black? I have to say, your reputation makes that surprising.”
At Charles’ harder stare, Silver set down his glass on the rolling buffet, throwing a few more ice cubes inside and splashing vodka on top.
Shaking his head, he spoke as he poured.
“Relax. You’re like an old woman.” He glanced over his shoulder as he recapped the bottle, setting it on top of the silver and glass cart. “He won’t get far. We have people all over South America, Latin America, Asia. He’s bound to turn up. They always do.”
“If you’d gotten his implant code, like I said––” Charles began angrily.
Logan Silver waved that off.
His expression fell into an annoyed scowl.
“Do you ever stop?” he complained. “We took out a few hundred bloodsuckers today. Maybe more. Probably more. Why can’t you at least be happy about that?”
“Yet you still managed to miss their leader.” Charles refolded his arms, watching the other take a few swigs of the clear alcohol. “Even though we did have the implant codes for him. Even though you knew exactly where he was, just prior to the attack.”
Silver shrugged. “Those bloodsuckers move fast.”
“And why didn’t you track him?”
“We did track him. Tried to, anyway.” Logan Silver scowled, staring out the window at the night view of the mall. “He must have found the damned thing. Had one of his vampire buddies cut it out of him. We located the signal in the middle of a lake in the swamp.”
Charles stared at him.
Shaking his head in disbelief, he let out a hard exhale.
“In a swamp?” he said, his voice cold. “You found it in a swamp. Stationary. And yet you were unable to do something so simple as to track that location from satellites, once you saw it was no longer moving?”
Charles watched the other man drink more of the vodka, disgust in his voice.
In Black We Trust Page 25
