Black As Night (Quentin Black Mystery #2) (33 page)

Even so, that more intense thing seethed off him like smoke as he drove.

It felt like a long stretch of time before he exhaled, looking down at me.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He meant it; I could feel it.
 

Maybe because he did, or maybe for some other reason, I felt myself let it go almost at once. Sliding my hand back over his leg, I gripped the muscle there again and nodded, leaning my face against his thigh.

We’d only been driving for a few minutes longer when he cursed loudly, making me jump. The vibration of the wheels and the engine and my exhaustion had been lulling me into a doze.

As I looked up, he wrenched the SUV’s steering wheel to the left, then we were ascending up a sloped road. Through the windshield I could see trees and plants alongside the onramp from the angle, broken by swaths of blue sky and flashes of sunlight.

I could tell by the turns he made––a sharp right at the end of the slope that must be an overpass, then another sharp right and a slope downward before the road grew flat and fast once more––that he’d turned us around. We were driving back the way we’d come.

I didn’t say anything at first, feeling the anger seethe off him.

It didn’t feel aimed at me.

He drove for a few minutes more before he spoke.

“All right,” he said.

He clenched his jaw, his eyes locked on the road on the other side of the windshield. I couldn’t see his face very well, since he still wore the mirrored sunglasses.

“All right what?” I said, wary.

“All right, you’re going to help me track him,” he growled. “But we’re doing this
my
way, Miri. And we’re doing it now. I’m not going on the run from this fucker...and I’m not letting him chase you anymore, either. We’re taking him out now. Today.”

I tightened my fingers on his thigh, feeling a strange flush of relief.

He looked down. “Okay with you?”

I nodded. “Okay with me.”

“I’m going to shield you,” he said, his voice warning. “And I’m going to walk you through it...step by step. I still don’t want you getting
near
his fucking mind. I mean it.”

I nodded, staring down at the beige carpet on the floor of the SUV.
 

For some reason, I still just felt relieved. I didn’t even know why, not at first.

Maybe I was just done with running too.

He prodded me again. “Are you ready to do this?” he said. “We can’t wait, Miri.”

That time, I gave him a blank look. “What...now?” I glanced at his hands on the steering wheel. “You’re driving, Black.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“You’ve also got a bullet in your shoulder.”

Gripping the steering wheel harder, he rolled his eyes at me. Or that’s how it felt––I couldn’t see his actual eyes behind the mirrored shades.

“I can split my consciousness,” he said. “It’s seer combat 101, Miri. And I’d rather do this when he can’t pinpoint a location on us, in case I fuck it up...so driving is preferable to being stationary.” He glanced at me again. “My shoulder can wait. You’re also going to have to wait on asking me any technical questions about what we’re doing. I don’t have time to teach you. I’m going to use your connection to him to find him. That’s it.”

When I didn’t say anything, he nudged me with the leg I’d wrapped my hand around.

“I’m going to be heavy-handed about guiding you,” he added. “So don’t get pissy with me about it, doc. And don’t take it fucking
personally.
Just do as I tell you. For once. And trust me that I’m being an asshole for a reason.”

I found myself ignoring his tone, maybe because I could feel what lay behind it.

I thought through his words. “What about your people?”

“No. Absolutely no. He’ll be watching them. We’re on our own.”

I nodded, frowning as I thought about Dex and Kiko and Farraday.

“Are you ready, doc?” he said. “We shouldn’t wait. I’m betting he’s already on the move.”

Not really sure I wanted to know what that meant, I nodded when he glanced down at me again. Firmly that time.

“Okay,” I said. “Just tell me what to do.”

Fourteen

HUNTING

IT WAS A strange thing, to be under Black’s control in that space.

I’d been using my psychic abilities, conscious or not, pretty much my entire life. I’d used them with my psychology clients, during the war, working for Nick with the police...as a kid in school. My sister and I used to play games with them, trying to hide thoughts from one another while the other tried any way they could to break in and “hack” the information.
 

Even with my sister Zoe, though, I’d never shared that psychic space like this.

It wasn’t like what Solonik had done to me either.

Black didn’t invade my head at all, not in terms of any of my thoughts...much less anything personal. Rather, he kind of
enveloped
me in that space, so much so that I could barely feel myself within it. I felt Black instead, and pretty much only Black.
 

As a result, I ended up more of a bystander than anything else.

I watched him work, noting how careful he was about not going too far into the parts of me that still carried a flavor of Solonik. He wrapped himself around me as he worked, thickening that feeling of a darkness that dimmed me from view, making me invisible in some way. Deadened, like how I’d felt in Solonik’s room.
 

I couldn’t really follow most of it with my rational mind.
 

All I knew was, at some point, and really before I knew what was happening, he’d jerked me out of my body entirely.

I found myself floating somewhere above it instead, looking down.

I could actually
see
the two of us in the white SUV, barreling down a freeway with greenery flowing by on either side. I could feel that we were approaching the city––even saw myself sitting between the two front seats, leaning against Black’s chair while he drove.

Some part of me wondered if this was what it felt like to be dead.

True to his word, he didn’t let me anywhere near Solonik himself.

Well, not in terms of his mind anyway.

Rather, he pulled me away from that view of the two of us in the white SUV, following what felt like a kind of trembling thread back into the city ahead of the car.

I could feel Solonik inside that trembling thread. I recognized the
flavor
of him somehow, although there’s no way on earth I would have been able to describe that flavor to someone using words. It was both too subtle and too complex. It was filled with too many things that didn’t have easy equivalencies in language. I would have had to describe him using other people maybe. Or memories perhaps, feelings and flavors I’d experienced over the years.

None of it would have been quite right.

He felt like himself, that was all.

Beyond the psychosis, the fear I had of him, the faint whispers of death-stench I felt around him and his coldblooded fury at Black having taken me––there was a living being there. That living being had a distinct imprint that belonged only to him.

As I thought it, I found myself noticing the same about Black.

Black’s flavor was so completely different from Solonik’s, I almost couldn’t compare the two of them. My mind looked for ways to compare them anyway, and the closest it got was by giving them each colors. Black became a deep, indigo blue with sky blue highlights, almost like living flame. Dense and warm despite the coolness of the colors, he exuded a strange feeling of safety. He also felt familiar, more so the longer I looked at him there.

Solonik was gray with fire-yellow sparks.

His colors were harder, flatter––more chaotic.

I ended up with an image of a manic firebug dancing over ashes and smoldering flames. The image jerked, distorted, like it was being warped through cracked glass.

I felt more to both of them, beyond those surface impressions––

––but Black pulled me back before I got very close.

I did my best to just be still, to watch the city as it approached.

I saw the buildings grow up around us. I saw the park where we’d been...then a film speeding up in the projector as Solonik wandered around the segment where Black had fishtailed the SUV. I saw time roll back in a jerking cadence. The gun went off in his hand as I ran, slow-motion for the open door of the white SUV. I saw Black take the bullet in the shoulder, watched him grimace in pain as he was thrown into the driver’s side window without lowering his own gun. I hit the carpet then and slammed the car door. Black stomped the accelerator, the tires smoking in those few seconds before they caught, slamming us out of there.

Time sped forward again.

I watched a distorted film of Solonik watching us drive away...could almost see the calculation on his face as he tried to decide what to do next.

Then he walked to the road.

I watched him step out into the nearest lane, his hand up towards an approaching vehicle
 

Fear hit me as I saw it. I wondered if he would try to chase us––if he’d been following us all that time, a thought that hadn’t occurred to me even once since we left Solonik standing in our tracks in that park––but he didn’t. He got the driver to get out of the vehicle with a wave of the hand holding the gun. I watched the driver wander into the park in a daze as Solonik took his place in the driver’s seat.

He threw the silver BMW into gear and took off down the road in the opposite direction that me and Black had gone.

I watched him drive, somehow conscious that my eyes saw him through Black, too.

The BMW went down that wider road for several blocks, then turned left, into a smaller set of roads. I watched the car wind through the maze of streets, making more turns for a number of blocks, then it popped out on another main road, this one even larger than the first. Accelerating, Solonik drove down that road for a number of minutes, then turned at a large white building.

I felt Black’s puzzlement, minutes before I recognized the large red cross on the front of the main building, which was done in an old colonial style, although not as old as the Golden Light hotel where we’d had drinks with Anders and the others.

It wasn’t a church, I soon realized. It was a hospital.

I felt alarm from Black, but I didn’t get any specifics from him either.

I watched as Solonik parked the car by the curb right in front of the building, leaving it there with the door wide open as he walked through the sliding glass doors at the front of the hospital. A few people looked at him strangely and back at the car, but no one stopped him as he walked directly up to the front desk.

I couldn’t see or hear what he asked the woman there.

Even so, I definitely got the impression he got more information from her than what she said to him in response.

Seconds later, he walked to the elevator and boarded.

He hit a button for the eighth floor, and I realized I was watching that elevator ascend, somehow seeing him through the walls of the hospital itself, which glowed with faint transparent lines, and were invisible altogether in a number of places. I watched as he pulled a gun out of his shoulder holster, hit the button to release the magazine, and added more bullets from a pocket in his jeans to replace those he’d fired.