TO BLACK WITH LOVE: Quentin Black Mystery #10 Read online

  The realization of it crept up just as gradually.

  Until all at once––he knew.

  He was no longer the hunter. He was the hunted.

  The difference alarmed him so much, shocked him so much, he froze. He did so initially out of pure instinct. Looking back on it, however, it struck him that his heeding of that silent warning may have saved his life. He had no way of knowing how or why he believed that, either, but it felt true. Whatever that thing was… it could have killed him.

  What happened after that defied logic––defied any experience he’d ever had with another seer inside the Barrier, in this world or the world he’d left behind.

  A thick black wall of no-light rose up.

  It slid up liquidly, towering high above him, a tidal wave of dark, dense presence.

  Charles’ breath compressed in his chest.

  He could only stare up at it, knowing nothing he did would allow him to move out of its way. That presence enveloped him before he could recover, before he could catalogue it in any way. Rather than the gradual, subtle tendrils he’d felt before, this thicker presence wrapped into him, invading him, slicing into him and pulling him apart like he was a frog pinned to a dissection board. It proceeded to systematically assess him, swimming into his light, filling every crevice and crack, leaving no part of him unexplored.

  It examined his mind, the structure of his light, his thoughts.

  It proceeded next to his matter, to his very atoms, the building blocks that made up his person.

  It took him all in, inhaling him in a matter of seconds.

  Charles stared into it, lost, bewildered––

  Scared out of his goddamned fucking mind.

  The presence was like a highly-intelligent machine. It felt like a machine mixed with some kind of feral animal, and possibly a mad scientist.

  Whatever it was, he feared it might kill him just for irritating it.

  He felt hints of Black in whatever it was, but a Black that had been turned inside out and remade with different materials, or perhaps bred with a whole new species. This version of Black felt like another being entirely, one nothing even remotely like the Black he’d known, especially back when he last had intimate access to his light––back when Black was even younger than he was now, and Charles first encountered him in the jungles of Vietnam.

  Even so, it felt like him.

  It fucking felt like him.

  It contained flickers and flavors of that Black he’d known, despite its utterly alien and terrifying consciousness.

  Whatever it was, whoever it was, fighting that thing was out of the question.

  Resisting it in any way was out of the question.

  Charles was powerless under it, and he knew it instantly, without having a single fact or conscious awareness to support that knowing. He knew it the instant that, that… thing that wasn’t really Black, yet somehow was Black… actually touched him.

  He could only submit.

  He could only hope he didn’t piss it off.

  There was no time to even to call for help from his military infiltrators. There was barely time to realize what was happening to him. That abyss-like presence completed its assessment, contemplated what it found.

  There was a moment of silence, a tilting jerk––

  Then, whatever it was, it was through with Charles, too.

  That teeming wall of black slammed into him.

  It felt like a sledgehammer to his body and light.

  Charles was forced out of the other seer’s light––out of the Barrier––before he realized what was coming, before he had any idea of what was about to hit him. He wasn’t pushed out so much as shoved, hard, by a hand made of cement and opaque shadow. It felt like being tossed casually off a cliff. He didn’t have time to brace himself, to even try to break his own fall.

  In a split second, every hint of the other’s presence vanished.

  Miri’s presence vanished, too.

  Charles blinked, his eyes struggling to focus.

  He found himself panting, sweating, fighting to breathe, his heart hammering in his chest as he gripped the back of the leather couch. He didn’t realize how far he’d been pulled out of his body by that thing until he found himself back inside it. He couldn’t breathe. He seemed to have forgotten how to breathe, to work his jaw, his hands, his body.

  He hadn’t been knocked out of the Barrier so completely since he was an adolescent.

  Maybe not since he was a child.

  His mouth tasted coppery, like… blood.

  He was tasting his own blood.

  “Sir?” The lab tech stared at him, alarm in his silvery-gray eyes as he rose swiftly to his feet. “Sir! Gaos! What happened? Are you all right?”

  The male seer was already moving towards him, but Charles turned away, straightening with an effort as he fought to catch his breath. He waved the other male off as he pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of his suit jacket, unfolding it with a snap of his wrist.

  Fighting embarrassment, anger, fear, a confused disbelief… he glanced at the mirror on the wall across from the main monitor.

  His reflection looked like something from a horror film.

  Blood ran freely from his nose and ears, staining the collar of the white shirt he wore.

  He hadn’t imagined it.

  He’d been tasting his own blood.

  Wiping his nose and mouth with the handkerchief from his breast pocket, he turned to his ears next, staring at his reflection in the mirror as he cleaned himself up as best he could. He still found himself caught somewhere between competing reactions of disbelief, anger, shock.

  “What happened?” the other seer asked again.

  Charles’ jaw hardened. He finished wiping his left ear before he glanced at the tech.

  “Never mind.”

  He turned back towards the main monitor, still sniffling blood through his nose, still swallowing blood in the back of his throat.

  The images of Miri and Black were gone.

  His niece and her husband had vanished inside the mirrored windows of the luxury business and residential complex. The crowd of reporters and onlookers were already dispersing from the front of the building, most of them simply walking down the street, either to continue their days, or to return to their media outlet offices downtown.

  Charles watched them go, his jaw hardening as he clutched the blood-soaked handkerchief in one hand, his knuckles white.

  He needed to go talk to his infiltrators.

  He needed to talk to his infiltrators right fucking now.

  * * *

  CHARLES SQUINTED, LEANING over the back of an office chair occupied by a female seer with dyed, wheat-blond hair done up in tight braids. Peering over her shoulder, he read the summary on her monitor of the first few jumps her team had completed.

  Nothing. They hadn’t learned a damned thing.

  Even Jalisa, the blond seer in front of him, his jump squadron lead who boasted one of the most impressive sight-ranks on his team, couldn’t see past that wall.

  Like most of the female seers now working for him, Jalisa was new to this version of Earth. She’d arrived here when the portal doors opened, less than a year earlier.

  Charles couldn’t help but be relieved the female problem had been solved for his people on New Earth, in addition to the low-numbers-in-general problem seers had suffered from since he’d arrived here. He knew every male seer from his original team was more than a little relieved, as well. All of them, pretty much without exception, had been indulging with their newly-arrived sisters as much as they possibly could.

  Many hadn’t had sex with a female seer in decades.

  For a few, it had been more than one hundred years.

  There’d been a handful of fights, of course, along with a number of crushes and fixations. Some of that was still going on, with the most recent exploding in the infiltration barracks just that afternoon. There really was no shortage of females at this point, but
the scarcity mentality was proving tough to shake, particularly in some of the younger males.

  Since more female seers came through those doors than male, Charles hoped things would calm down relatively soon.

  Part of the issue was that normal sex and breeding habits had been disrupted on this version of Earth since he’d arrived here. A fair-few male seers explicitly wanted not just sexual partners, but mates––and children.

  Many felt they’d been cheated of such things for too long already.

  Others felt it was their duty to propagate the race.

  Still, the sudden influx of females was a damned distraction, truthfully. Charles hoped things would return to the usual levels of chaos and conflict that existed in seer sexual culture soon, hopefully within the next few months. In order for that to happen, the males would need to stop feeling like they needed to make up for lost time.

  Charles suspected the psychology was more the issue than the sex itself.

  Most of those males had resigned themselves to the likelihood they’d never have another female seer for a partner––or have biological children. While most had relationships with other male seers, in addition to female and male humans, Charles knew the inability to have children would have bothered a lot of them.

  He’d had a hard enough time keeping them away from Miri.

  Once they found out she was biologically compatible with full-blooded seer males, she became a lot more interesting to a lot of them.

  Luckily, after Solonik––and particularly, after what Black did to Ian––most of the male seers seemed to get the message that attempting to poach Miriam from Black wouldn’t end well for them. Charles made it clear he wouldn’t support such a move, either. Although he was loathe to acknowledge Black and Miri’s bond, Charles promised his niece, his now-deceased brother, and himself that he wouldn’t get in the way of Miri and any partner she chose.

  The promise to his brother, in particular, was one he couldn’t make himself break.

  As long as she chose her partner freely, he was off-limits.

  Charles had more than one occasion to regret that particular vow, but so far, he’d managed to keep it.

  Until recently, he’d still worried someone might get past him and Black to get to Miri. After all, it happened once already, and although Solonik wasn’t exactly a normal seer, it wasn’t inconceivable it could happen again.

  Now, his male seers had other distractions.

  Of course, the seer females who came through those doors were useful for more than simply their hirik pouches and their ability to have seer babies. A hell of a lot of them had worked in the West, and many were highly-trained infiltrators.

  Jalisa was now the highest ranked seer he had.

  Well… the highest ranked one currently in his rotation.

  Jalisa gave him a sideways look.

  She must have heard that.

  From her expression, she’d caught some of his thoughts, at least.

  She looked away at once, but soon after, feeling his eyes on her profile and the back of her head, she glanced up a second time, her dark, blood-orange eyes meeting his. Her expression and her craned neck pulled at the Nazi scar on her face, the same diagonal scar he’d seen on the faces of a lot of seers from Old Earth.

  Hers was thick enough to confuse the lines of otherwise striking features, making them all look just slightly askew, and out of alignment with one another, right at the point where the white line bisected her face. The scar appeared to slightly drag down the lines of her cheek and eye on that side as well, along with the tilt of her full lips.

  “You’re thinking about bringing him back for this,” she observed. “Solonik.”

  Charles frowned, glancing down at her.

  She’d heard more than he realized.

  She also knew a surprising amount about their operations here.

  He honestly couldn’t decide if he was annoyed or impressed.

  He might need to bring her further into the upper echelons of his leadership team, sooner rather than later. He’d planned to do so anyway, based on her working sight rank alone, but he might have to speed up the security checks his team had been surreptitiously conducting on her since she first appeared through those doors.

  “I’m thinking we need every resource we have,” he said, studying those blood-orange eyes. Exhaling then, he muttered under his breath, “…Even the crazy, intractable, and utterly unpredictable ones.”

  Jalisa nodded, her expression carefully neutral.

  “What about the new seer?” she said, her voice neutral. “The female from Black’s camp? Raven? I hear her sight rank is also high.”

  Charles frowned. After thinking for a few seconds, he shook his head.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Solonik might be crazy, but he’s damned loyal. I haven’t finished vetting her yet. For all I know, Black sent her here.”

  Jalisa nodded, her expression unmoving.

  Charles knew her sight rank was high enough that he likely wouldn’t know her thoughts unless she wished it, not without the aid of the construct and probably a few of his higher-ranked infiltrators. That knowledge made the look on her face essentially meaningless, as was the silence he felt on her living light.

  “What about your niece?” the female seer said, her voice as neutral as her face. “With Solonik, I mean.”

  Charles scowled.

  Rather than answer her question––either the one she spoke aloud, or the one implied under it––he nodded towards the team on jump seats in front of them.

  “What are they doing?” he said. “They’re not on the Black thing too, are they?”

  Twelve seers lay in rows on modified recliners, eyes closed, heads, chests and arms hooked up with electrodes. Those electrodes should be monitoring their vitals, and also connecting the individual team members to one another, as well as providing a partial feed into the rudimentary recording devices Charles’s team cobbled together from tech they were working on replicating from Old Earth.

  Jalisa’s eyes flickered to the rows of infiltrators.

  “No. They’re still with the Purists.” She looked up and back at him. “Do you want me to pull them off that? Get them to help out with the mapping of Black’s light?”

  “No.” Charles shook his head, adamant. “No, we go forward with our plans. If I have to put a bullet in Black’s brain myself––or,” he muttered darkly. “More likely, a collar around his neck––I won’t let him interfere with the work we’re doing here.”

  Jalisa hesitated. In the end, she only nodded.

  “I have a connection to Kalri now,” she offered. “If you want to talk to him.”

  Charles nodded towards the monitor.

  “Please. Put it on the screen.”

  She hit in a few keys, using the trackpad.

  The face of an unusually European-looking seer appeared, wearing dark blue contact lenses. For a seer, his hair was cut short, more in the style of the humans around which he currently worked. He’d also dyed his hair blond, but not that unusual, near-silver shade of Jalisa’s braids; instead, his looked almost brown, and utterly nondescript.

  The end result was shockingly close to the appearance of a Western human––a handsome, if completely unremarkable human male.

  Granted, Charles could feel what he was. Any seer would feel it, providing they could see past his shields. Without looking from his light, however, Charles would have been fooled, even with the strange flatness of the seer’s artificially-colored eyes.

  Of course, here, on this version of Earth, no one would know how unusual it was, to see a seer with such coloring and features. Humans here didn’t know about seers at all. Yet Kalri’s appearance still constituted a distinct advantage, especially in the southeastern United States and Texas, where he was currently posted.

  “I can’t talk for long,” the blond seer said, grim-faced.

  He looked over his shoulder, at the vast conference auditorium visible on Jalisa’s monitor. Gla
ncing around for possible witnesses, he switched to Prexci, the seer tongue.

  “…It’ll be starting again soon,” Kalri added, when he saw no one within earshot. “I’m the second speaker after the break.”

  “How is it going?” Charles said. “Progress report.”

  Kalri flinched. Until then, Charles hadn’t realized the visuals only went one way. Clearly, Kalri hadn’t known he was there.

  The blond seer recovered quickly, nodding once, seer fashion.

  It was a nod that verged on being a salute.

  “Of course, sir,” he said politely, still speaking his native tongue. “We’re continuing to solidify and grow the group. The ideology’s still a little amorphous, but that’s mostly our fault, as we’re still on a bit of a learning curve here. We’re doing everything we can to nail it down, while still maintaining some flexibility.”

  Glancing behind him, again looking for witnesses, he added,

  “I’ve got most of our non-public-facing people working on construct maintenance and manipulation. That’s partly to accommodate the larger crowds, but also to ratchet up the tension, infusing more fear and violence, as well as more urgency and paranoia. I want to wean the team off pushing individual humans. Really, I’d like humans to take over recruitment of other humans. I’d prefer to relegate pushes to the leadership team only. I am therefore telling my team to adjust the construct and/or the rhetoric first… to fall back on pushes and overt light manipulation only if the other tactics aren’t working. I assumed you’d want the ability to manage most of these cells remotely, once we get them up and fully operational––”

  “You would be correct in that,” Charles said.

  Kalri gave another of those formal nods.

  “Very good, sir. For the same reason, I have those of us who are public-facing focused on shaping the discourse and ideology as a whole, and creating an atmosphere that is more religious in nature and fervor. The hope is, more leaders will arise organically from the human ranks, once they are more fully radicalized within the ideology itself. If we keep their overall organization hierarchical in nature, the construct should adhere to that naturally.”

  Charles nodded, lips pursed.