Black Is Back (Quentin Black Mystery #4)

by JC Andrijeski

  BLACK IS BACK

  Quentin Black Mystery #4

  by

  JC Andrijeski

  Copyright © 2016 by JC Andrijeski

  Published by White Sun Press

  Cover Art & Design by Jennifer Munswami at

  J.M. Rising Horse Creations

  www.facebook.com/RisingHorseCreations

  2015

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an official retailer for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Synopsis for BLACK IS BACK

  He was the guardian. He would protect his saint, no matter what it took...

  Black and Miri get thrown into the middle of a high-profile murder case when one of Miri’s ex-clients becomes the next victim. When the body is found, beheaded and tied to a pier, detectives arrive in San Francisco from Los Angeles, convinced it’s the infamous serial killer they’ve been hunting, known only by his media name of “the Templar.”

  When the Templar continues to cut a swath through San Francisco, his victims begin to show a new pattern, however––a pattern that appears to have Miri at its center.

  To complicate everything, Miri and Black are going through a Seer-mate bonding, and having a strange effect on everyone around them as a result. When Black decides to use his old black ops connections to try and find the killer, Miri is left in San Francisco to try and help Nick, until the killer forces both of them into a final showdown.

  Book four in the paranormal mystery romance series starring brilliant but dangerous psychic detective, Quentin Black, and his partner, forensic psychologist Miri Fox.

  Prologue

  THE GUARDIAN

  “FUCKING BITCH...” THE man nearest to him muttered, pulling the guardian briefly out of his contemplative space.

  The guardian looked down the bar, focusing on the man in the rumpled but expensive suit. The man hadn’t noticed him. He was speaking to himself. He slumped over the lacquered wood a handful of barstools from where the guardian sat, drinking soda water with lime.

  The guardian watched the rich man scowl drunkenly at the rocks glass being spun aggressively between his fingers. The other man spoke to himself, but in the tone of a person used to others listening.

  He wanted to be heard––he wanted people to listen.

  He wanted everyone to pay attention.

  “Fucking bitch... thinks she can cut me off.” He fought with his own words as meaning competed for space. “...Cut me off. Didn’t do anything. Didn’t do anything. I was paying that cunt. She can’t just call off a professional relationship with no reason.”

  He took a drink off the glass in front of him, muttering louder.

  “...Well, she’s fucking ruined in this town. I hope she knows that. If she doesn’t, she will soon. Her career is fucking dead. Hell, maybe I’ll get her goddamned license yanked. She’ll be begging to take me back...”

  The guardian was intrigued, in spite of himself.

  Not in terms of the man himself.

  The man was human garbage. A vampire.

  The guardian could tell that just from his few muttered words. From the self-pity that came off him in a cloud. People like him just walked around, sucking juice off everyone around them. Always a story of someone wronging them. Always some reason why they were owed. Always some excuse for the horrible things they did to get their fixes at someone else’s expense.

  The guy was a blank spot on the canvas, sucking in color and light.

  No, that’s not what intrigued the guardian.

  He moved a few stools closer.

  Sliding into the one right next to the man, he spoke in a low voice.

  “Bitches, eh?” he said conspiratorially.

  The man jumped, looking at him in surprise. The guardian smiled, pulling the appropriate mask down to replace his true face.

  “Ex-girlfriend?” he said sympathetically, more to prod the man into speaking more.

  The man’s eyes relaxed. Like all vampires, he wanted an audience.

  He wanted validation. Really, he wanted a crowd to hide behind.

  Vampires always operated in the shadows. Just like the myths.

  “No,” the man said, moral superiority already seething off him like a scent. Gearing up to snow Joe Dumbshit with his bullshit. “No, she was my psychologist. I paid her goddamned salary for over a year. Now she just expects me to start over with someone new? Someone who knows nothing about me? Like that doesn’t represent a significant loss of time and money for me? I should sue her... I really should.”

  “She fired you as a client?” the guardian said.

  The man gave him a hard look.

  Seeing nothing in the guardian’s expression intimating he was either mocking him or didn’t believe him, the vampire relaxed again, letting out a derisive snort.

  “Stuck up bitch was full of herself. She thought I was hitting on her or something. I’m married for fuck’s sake. Cunt said I was being ‘inappropriate with boundaries’ and forced me to take a referral for someone else...”

  The guardian nodded sympathetically.

  He was Joe Dumbshit. The guy who believes the vampire. Who buys his sob story about being wronged. The guardian knew there were Joe Dumbshits everywhere, too. This guy would believe in Joe Dumbshit because he surrounded himself with Joe Dumbshits on a daily basis.

  Joe Dumbshit nudged him with an arm. “She beautiful?” he said.

  The guy gave him a grudging look. “She’s all right.”

  Joe laughed. “I bet she was more than ‘all right.’ I bet she’s a real looker, ain’t she?”

  The man in the rumpled suit frowned. Staring again at Joe Dumbshit as if trying to figure out his angle, he eventually conceded his words with a shrug.

  “She certainly thought so,” he said stiffly, finishing off the last of the alcohol in his rocks glass. “I’ve definitely had hotter.”

  Joe Dumbshit laughed again. “Like I said. Bitches. All the same.”

  The man smiled a little more genuinely that time. “Some of them certainly think a lot of themselves, don’t they?”

  “Buy you a drink, friend?” Joe Dumbshit said. “My old lady just left me for a fucking stock broker, so I could use a drinking buddy tonight...”

  The vampire’s eyes glittered.

  Vampires loved free shit. They were shameless about taking. Even one as rich as this fucker. In fact, in the guardian’s experience, the rich ones were the worst. He looked positively hard from the idea of getting a free drink off Joe Dumbshit, even though poor Joe only wore threadbare jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt under a jean jacket and beat up running shoes.

  “Sure,” the vampire said, still wary of a catch.

  Vampires knew only two categories of people: marks and other vampires.

  The guardian was neither. As a result, he was invisible.

  Joe Dumbshit raised a few fingers to signal the bartender. “What’re you having?”

  “Another of the same would be great,” the other man said, motioning towards his empty glass.

  The guardian stifled a smile. He’d seen the guy order. The vampire ordered a double of the most expensive Scotch the bar carried. Nothing but the best for the vampire. After all... he deserved it. Like all vampires, he would buy the most expensive thing just to have it.

  Vampires were gr
eedy little hoarders and one-uppers, too.

  Joe Dumbshit only nodded though, motioning for the bartender to bring them both another round of the same.

  Truthfully, the guardian didn’t mind.

  He could buy a few drinks.

  He would get the vampire’s tongue looser, get him to tell him more.

  Maybe this man would be the clue he’d been looking for. The reason he was here.

  Maybe this man would lead him to the saint... his beloved St. Francis.

  Regardless, the guardian would do his duty with the vampire. That was a given––it had been as soon as he saw the vampire walk through the door.

  The difference was, now he was intrigued.

  Not by the vampire himself, of course. The vampire was a breadcrumb. A common, moldy little breadcrumb, left to him by God, to be disposed of by God. No, the guardian was intrigued by the psychologist.

  The psychologist had refused to suck this particular vampire’s cock.

  That was rare, the guardian knew.

  It was rare that people turned down rich vampires.

  In the guardian’s observation, most people would lick the dirty ball-sack of anyone with money or fame, just so they could be close to it. No matter how vile the person was, no matter what a lying, conniving, manipulative piece of garbage they were, or how many people they’d destroyed to get what they had, they’d stand in line to lick them, to offer them their asses and cunts. They’d listen to their blatant lies, laugh at their stupid jokes. They’d slather them all over with whatever bodily fluid the vampire asked of them, and never once notice they only got robbed and degraded in return.

  They’d laugh when the vampire talked casually about ruining someone’s life. Then they would turn around and suck his dirty ball-sack some more when the vampire cried crocodile tears about how others forced him to do it.

  People had turned into sheep. Carrion-eaters and jackals.

  Every year, it got worse.

  Vampires. Sycophants. Cowards. Children.

  They walked around looking for rich people to suck off, for vampires to lie to them and steal from them, for the famous and important to bestow them with a vicarious sense of significance. They looked for people with no soul to validate them. They looked for liars to teach them the truth. They searched desperately for someone to defile themselves with––for anyone they could hand their integrity to, their dignity, their principles, their dreams––as long as they might feel important and liked, if only for a few seconds.

  No one had grace anymore.

  No one carried the fucking light.

  He came here, thinking it might be different.

  He’d tried before, in the mecca of decadence and depravity, the City of Angels which had fallen to earth, betraying their One True God. He had tried there, so very very hard. But the longer he dug in the sand, the faster those demons worked to fill up the hole.

  Then he got a sign. A woman on the street, an old woman. A beautiful woman, made of light...

  She was kind to him. She saw his pain. She saw what he was. After they talked, and she asked him if he knew of God, if he had a personal connection to Jesus, she touched his arm. She handed him a picture of St. Francis.

  The guardian did not know what it meant at first. He did not understand.

  But after that, he saw St. Francis everywhere. He saw statues in every garden. He saw images on necklaces around the necks of people at work, stuck to the dashboards of cars, in a stained glass window of a neighborhood church. He saw St. Francis on advertisements, outside a veterinary clinic, on bird baths and next to a pond where he sometimes ran.

  Then one day, he understood.

  He knew where he needed to go.

  He knew where God was sending him.

  The guardian took no pleasure in righting those few wrongs he could. He continued to send the message, even if most were too deaf dumb and blind to understand. Those few listening might hear. Those few who understood might even take up the torch with him some day, become guardians themselves. Enough guardians and the world would be a different place.

  For now, he would be work alone, unrecognized.

  Unthanked.

  Anyway, the job had its own rewards.

  It would be a good night.

  And perhaps this psychologist would be one of the awake ones.

  A guardian-in-training. A muse.

  Perhaps she was even the reason he was here.

  Perhaps she would be worth teaching the true meaning of the Light.

  One

  ADJUSTMENT ISSUES

  “MOVE IN WITH me,” he said, his voice a murmur.

  I tried to turn my head, but he held me against his body, pressing into me from behind. He kissed the back of my neck. When he started working his way down my spine with his lips and tongue, I shivered, fighting to clear my mind... to try, anyway.

  It came and went, that clarity.

  Mostly––if I was being totally honest––it went.

  “Black.” I started to turn over, but he wrapped his arm around me tighter, pulling me deeper against him. Seconds later he shifted his weight, dragging me up the bed until I was lying under him. When he kissed me that time, I forgot he’d asked me anything.

  Well, if what he’d said could be construed as a question.

  When he raised his head, what felt like a long stretch of time later, he was hard and lying between my legs. The long fingers of one hand wrapped around my thigh. He yanked it up and around his waist, avoiding the bandage there out of rote as he repositioned his body. He held himself up on his other hand and arm.

  He was inside me before I’d recovered from the kiss.

  Once he was, I let out a low moan.

  He groaned too, his heavier than mine. When I opened my eyes he was watching my face, his gold eyes half-lidded. “Fuck... Miri. Move in with me. Move in with me...”

  I gripped his hair, letting out a half-laugh once I could make sense of his words. It got cut off when he arched into me harder––hard enough to blank out my mind for real.

  When I looked up next, he was watching me again.

  “Are you really not going to answer me?” he said, frowning.

  Those flecked irises had gone a shade colder, making me pause.

  I found myself remembering he’d been really touchy the last few days. Really touchy. Even more touchy than me, and both of us had been borderline hair-trigger about things that didn’t always make a lot sense to me afterwards––not even when I tried to piece together the sequence of events rationally. Some of those things didn’t make a lot of sense during, to be honest.

  Remembering that now, I gripped his shoulders in both of my hands, hard enough to get his attention, even as I massaged the muscles there.

  “Black, relax, okay?” I murmured to him, sending a pulsing warmth through my fingers, a trick I realized I’d picked up from him. “...Relax. Both of us need to just calm down...” I let out another low gasp when he arched into me again, curving my back involuntarily. “You don’t need to worry about this... I’m not going anywhere.”

  His eyes softened, but only a little. His gaze remained fixed on my face. “You aren’t going to talk to me?”

  “We should either talk... or do this...” I said breathlessly. “Not both. I can’t do both...”

  He pulled out of me at once.

  I admit, that wasn’t the thing I was thinking we’d wait on.

  I let out a surprised cry.

  I found myself clutching him tighter, shocked by a flood of pain that hit me, that strange, nonphysical thing that happened between us––increasingly more and worse since we’d started this. I couldn’t think at all until it passed. I felt it hurt him too, but he only clenched his jaw, closing his eyes for longer than a blink and lowering his head. Then he wrapped his arms around me again, pulling me on top of him.

  “I want to talk,” he said, breathing harder. His eyes still held that intense sharpness. “Are you going to fucking talk to me this tim
e? Or are you going to blow me off again, like you did at that restaurant?”

  I stared down at him in bewilderment.

  “I didn’t blow you off,” I protested. “You flipped out––”

  “I didn’t flip out!”

  “You totally flipped out! You accused me of using you for sex. Then you tried to fuck me in the middle of the restaurant. And your friend was there...”

  He grimaced, looking away.

  I watched him, my voice incredulous that time. “You told him we were married for crying out loud! You might as well have pissed on my leg, Black.”

  “You were flirting with him!”

  Anger exploded through me. “I was NOT!”

  He blinked in surprise, then backed down. “Okay. Maybe you weren’t.” His eyes narrowed. “But he wanted to fuck you. I heard him thinking it, Miri... I fucking heard it. All that bullshit about how I’d get tired of you. How maybe he could get your number for when that happened... how I never stayed with anyone for more than a few weeks...”

  “I’m supposed to be able to control that?”

  He conceded that, too, but I felt his anger worsening again. “You still believe him? That I’m incapable of having a real relationship?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Black, Jesus. I never said I believed him. I just said it was accurate as far as he knew, and that he didn’t think it maliciously, or because he doesn’t respect you. Anyway, I didn’t mean to read him like that... or defend him. So I’m sorry. I’ll never read or defend one of your friends in a non-life-threatening situation ever again...”

  “You’re still defending him,” he muttered.

  He didn’t seem annoyed with that though, not really.

  He was annoyed because he still thought I was side-stepping him.

  “Because you are,” he growled, clutching me harder against his chest.