Black of Hearts, page 16
part #12 of Quentin Black Mystery Series
Black knew that thing had done it.
The part of Black’s light his wife called “Coreq” had stopped the drug in midair.
The techs didn’t notice.
Well, they didn’t notice in the right way, the relevant way.
“His heart rate seems to be stabilizing again,” the male murmured, still focusing down, looking at something on one of the screens. “I guess it was a blip.”
“Bad dream, maybe?” the female joked.
“Could be,” the male said, without humor. “Possibly some reaction to the drug that worked its way out.”
The male’s voice changed subtly. Behind his closed lids, Black saw the tech looking over at his colleague.
“We’ve had other seers respond to the sight-blockers with extreme anxiety,” he explained. “We haven’t worked out all the kinks in terms of his dosages, or his tolerance to various kinds of sedatives… as you know, that can vary pretty widely from seer to seer. It’s possible he rose out of a deeper sleep and his self-preservation instincts kicked in, telling him his seer’s sight was impaired, and therefore he was in danger.”
That’s one theory, the Coreq part of Black’s light murmured.
Black fought not to smile.
Over him, Black felt the two technicians freeze.
Inside his mind, he saw that dark, endlessly dense, strangely machine-like part of his light exude a different flavor of presence, one Black hadn’t felt on the thing up until now.
It came close to a smile.
Somewhere in that, Black realized he’d opened his eyes.
He stared up at the male tech’s face, at his ruby-red eyes, and saw his own eyes reflected there. They were glowing, he realized. They were glowing brightly, a fiery, yellow-gold glow that brightened in reflection as Black watched.
He saw the fear past that reflection.
He saw the boredom, the irritation, the arrogance fade from the male’s expression.
He watched the male’s living light contract around his narrow form as he stared down into Black’s face. He felt the precise instant the seer’s bladder voided, sending a warm trail of liquid down the inside of his pantleg.
Black found himself smiling, too.
The female tech had frozen, wide-eyed, where she held an organic machine in one hand, what looked like some kind of sensing device.
She was pretty, Black noted.
Strawberry blond hair, rare for a seer, contrasted dark brown eyes that were nearly black, that held light blue flecks like stars. She had high cheekbones, lean, muscular arms, a long neck. Despite the hair color, which may have been from dye, everything about her screamed seer.
“You should go,” Black told her. “You should go now.”
The female seer blinked.
Her jaw hung loose as she stared at him.
“…Or not,” Black said, shrugging.
There was a silence after he spoke.
He could feel the dense, fire-liquid-ocean-sky reconfiguring under his feet. He felt it pulse up from the soles of his feet to his legs, up to his hips and belly, his chest, his shoulders, his arms, up his neck, heating his face.
The heat pulsed up against the organic metal bands holding him to the table.
The heat pulsed, like a beating heart, straining against his skin, straining more and more against the harder matter of the metal.
That time, there was no effort.
There was no rage, no panic, no pain.
The silence changed as Black watched, as he felt the technicians stare.
They seemed paralyzed now.
They barely seemed like fully sentient beings to him at all.
They felt trapped there, inside Coreq’s light. Black felt Coreq strongly now, almost like an absorbed twin, his own dark half, living inside his own skin.
Shall we begin? Coreq asked into the silence.
Something in those three words made Black’s blood run cold.
11
Dark Half
THE TECHS DIDN’T MOVE.
They didn’t fight.
They didn’t even try to run.
They just stood there, as if in a trance.
Technically, Black didn’t move either, not when the presence first started.
He lay there, curious, somehow detached, somehow completely present and aware, somehow lost inside the machine-like presence of “Coreq,” who, in some ways, Black felt like he was meeting for the first time.
He felt like he was truly seeing and meeting it for the first time.
It was as if Coreq were introducing himself/itself to Black.
It was as if the being Coreq were saying, This is how it’s going to be from now on, brother. You’re going to have to make room for this, because this is who we are.
Black had… feelings… about that.
He didn’t know exactly what those feelings were.
He didn’t really let himself go there, not now.
The feelings were intense.
He could feel that intensity. He could respect it. At the same time, it wasn’t the important thing. That hotter part of him burned with a far more pressing need, an urgent desire. He had to find Miri. He had to get free of this place, so he could go find Miri. Even with the drug out of his system, he didn’t exactly feel… normal.
Coreq was his way out.
Coreq was his only way out right now, the only way Black could see.
Coreq was a means to an end.
If that presence could swallow him whole, leaving nothing Black recognized of himself, leaving nothing Miriam would recognize, leaving Miri bonded to a monster, Black would simply have to… well…
He’d have to deal with that later.
…after he had his wife back.
Our wife, the presence whispered. After we have our wife back, brother. After we get her back from the humans who took her, the humans who wanted to fuck her––
Black couldn’t listen to that.
He shook his head. He couldn’t listen to that.
He watched Coreq instead. He watched, following Coreq’s movements, his orchestra of light, of Barrier sound and light, more of both than he’d ever seen. He watched with his eyes and light, following all of it like a scripted dance…
…as Coreq dangled the two seer techs off the organic metal floor.
He dangled them there, as if from invisible hands holding them off the green mirrored tiles, their eyes bulging out of their heads. He watched…
…as Coreq broke their necks, one by one.
He heard the sound, the crunching sound, the sound of bones crushing, spines twisting with oddly satisfying sounds that disturbed Black, and not only for just how satisfying it was, how strangely disturbingly satisfying that sound was, shivering his skin…
He couldn’t look away.
He couldn’t decide whether he even wanted to look away.
He lay there, unmoving, as Coreq released the two bodies. He barely flinched as they landed with hollow thuds on the mirrored panels of the organic-infused metal floor.
He didn’t move until the first band of metal cracked open around his wrist.
He jumped, looking down at that hand.
His eyes took in the jagged rip in the organic metal band, the green, strangely liquid material that pulsed inside like blood. He saw the cuff fall open, bleeding more of that green liquid, but creating an opening wide enough that he could jerk out his wrist.
He held his hand up as far as he could with his arm still strapped to the table, and stared at his hand, at the pulsing, fire-like light that seemed to throb under his skin.
The second band cracked.
That one was different.
The organic inside that one showed blood red, fire red, lava red, where it opened around his chest. The metal was thicker, darker, almost black in color. The organics inside had more to them, more of a mind, like maybe the electronics were connected to sensors monitoring his organs, possibly even paralyzing him physically in some way, aiding the drugs they’d dripped into his bloodstream.
The third restraint broke open, falling to lay flat on either side of his neck. Cold liquid hit the skin of his throat and ran down to his shoulders and chest.
For the first time, it occurred to Black that he was naked.
They’d chained him here, naked, like some kind of animal.
Like a medical experiment gone wrong.
The cracks came faster after that.
They also came louder, shockingly loud in the near-silent room, now that the technicians lay quietly on the floor. They sounded almost like gunshots.
Black still jumped at each one.
He was ready now, though. He was getting impatient now.
He knew it was only a matter of time before someone noticed what was going on down here. Then they would try to stop him. They would gas him, dart him, do whatever they’d done the first time to knock him out, only more so after what Coreq had done to the technicians.
Those blank faces seared into his memory.
Those faces had been slack even before Coreq pulled them off the floor, squeezing their necks. They hadn’t felt afraid at all after those first few seconds, or even shocked. Instead, it was as if the being Coreq had simply shut down their higher brain functions, leaving them free to stand there passively and breathe, giving their hearts permission to beat, their blood permission to pump steadily through their veins.
Then Coreq took that away from them, too.
Organic metal ripped, cracking open around Black’s ankle.
The next ankle went an instant later, with an even louder crack and pop.
Then the band ripped apart around his left thigh.
Black lay there, panting now, breathing hard, his chest rising and falling. It took him a few seconds to realize that had been the last restraint.
He was free.
Sound exploded overhead.
It echoed painfully in his head, ricocheting against the insides of the mirrored panels, making him wince and squint even as it jerked his body back to life.
He sat up. He pulled his body carefully out of the restraints, pulled his body liquidly over to the side of the table, moving more gracefully than he came close to calculating, especially given his throbbing head.
It struck him that he felt Coreq in that, too.
Just as abruptly as it started, the alarm cut out.
The ear-piercing sound continued to reverberate for a half-beat more, leaving the room in stages as the echo finished its final few bounces against the living walls.
Black slid off the table.
Again, he moved in a way that felt almost alien, almost reptilian…
His bare feet touched the cold floor.
They landed there, solid, then held up his weight.
He straightened to his full height…
…when a voice rose on the inner speakers.
“What the hell is going on in there?”
Black fell partway into a crouch.
He moved without thought, without hesitation. He fell to that half-ready-to-pounce, half-ready-to-fight crouch, and froze.
He knew that voice.
He knew it, well enough that the familiarity shocked him.
After a pause where he remained statue-still, he turned his head smoothly, liquidly, animal-like, and stared up at the corner of the room from which the voice came. His eyes found the speaker, embedded in the wall.
A beat later, his attention pulled slightly to the right, and he found the camera.
He stared into the camera.
Somehow, he knew.
He knew the seer whose voice he’d heard stared back at him.
As soon as that much clicked, he felt him. He felt the male seer on the other end of that speaker, felt his light coiling around his body, his shock, his fear as the other seer took in everything in the mirrored-tile room.
“I can’t let you leave,” Charles said.
Black had to hand it to him.
His voice sounded surprisingly calm.
He sounded calm… in control.
Still, Black could hear something else there, barely audible, barely tangible within the warning, and the anger that swirled within that warning.
Before Black himself could speak, however…
Coreq did.
Instead of going only to the mind of Miriam’s uncle, it spoke through the intercom system, its voice a bare murmur, a faint hiss touching the ends of its words.
“I’m afraid you have no choice in this, Faustus. Tell your people to stay away, brother. Have them stay away, command them to let us go… and no more of your children need be hurt.”
Silence filled the room when he finished.
Black didn’t move his head, or his body, but his eyes took in the room in a flickering glance––the dead bodies, the organic-steel table, the IV stand and tubing with its gravity-defying liquid a few inches below the bag.
Realizing the tubes were still attached to him, Black ripped the needle out of the crook of his arm, flinging it away from his naked body with disgust.
He wondered if he should try to reason with Coreq.
He wondered if he should try to reason with Charles.
In the end, he remained silent, avoiding looking at the two dead seers at his feet. He could feel them there, though. He could feel the light bleeding off their cooling corpses. He could feel the meat of them where they lay crumpled just below the wall-length monitor.
“You won’t get out of here alive, Black,” Charles said, his voice still calm, if slightly louder. “You must know that. I wouldn’t have taken you if I thought I had any hope of reaching you any other way. I’ll kill you before I let you go––”
“And kill Miri?” Black growled, speaking for himself that time. “You’ll really kill her? Before knowing who or what she even is? Or what her being here means?”
The silence grew more absolute.
Then Coreq spoke.
It was Black’s voice… but not.
He felt the thoughts form into words, but from far away.
His lips moved, but that felt strangely far away as well.
“We have no time for this,” that heavier, denser voice said. “We are leaving. We do not wish to kill more of our brothers and sisters… or our cousins… but we will…”
“You’d better listen to him,” Black growled.
“Listen to him?” Charles’ voice was openly bewildered through the high speaker. “Listen to who, Black?”
Black felt Charles thinking then.
He felt the seer thinking that Black must be high on the drugs from the IV, that they were causing him to talk nonsense.
That, or Black was having some kind of psychotic break.
As Black listened, he realized he could hear actual thoughts translated into words.
…if he really went on a dimensional jump with Miriam, to some other version of Earth, maybe it did something to him. Not just to his light but to his mind. Maybe it did something to his brain, something the drugs made worse… or the trauma of being separated from his mate. His actual fucking voice sounds different… and now he’s talking like there are two of them, like there’s another person in there with him…
Charles’ voice changed.
Black heard the words grow louder, more viscerally somehow, even though they remained relatively quiet. It sounded like Charles was speaking to someone else in the room wherever he was.
It was far away, but Black heard every word of it clearly.
“Check the tapes… see how he killed them. Orken and Lanki. I want to see every second of what occurred before the alarms went off––”
“We don’t have time for this,” Coreq said.
He didn’t sound bored, as the male tech had earlier.
He didn’t sound warning, or angry, or impatient.
He sounded utterly matter-of-fact.
Black could almost see Coreq checking his watch, noting how far they were falling behind schedule, telling anyone who would listen that it was time to go.
“You’re not going anywhere, Black,” Charles said.
That time, his voice came across as excruciatingly patient, in a way that convinced Black the older seer really had decided that he, Black, had lost it. Charles seemed to think he was dealing with someone who was only playing with half a deck.
“Do you have any idea where you are?” Charles said, his voice rising.
Black began walking towards the door.
Only after he was in motion did Black realize he wasn’t powering the moves entirely that time, either. His body moved with alien fluidity, as if a part of him was part liquid, part snake. He watched the muscles slide under his own skin in a kind of fascination, watched his feet place themselves around the dead seer techs, stepping over them easily as that liquid light propelled him towards the oval door.
Charles’ voice rose higher and louder.
“You are in the Pentagon, Black,” the seer warned. “This entire building is filled with infiltrators. It’s also filled with trained, military humans under me and my people’s control. Do you really think you’re going to get past all of us? By yourself? With no weapons?”
“I do not wish to kill,” Coreq said.
Something in how it felt told Black it was the last warning Charles was going to get.
“Please, Brother Faustus. Keep your people out of my way, and none of that will be necessary. But we cannot tolerate any attempts to stop us––”
“You’d better fucking listen to him, Charles!” Black growled, raising his own voice.
“What the fuck are you talking about, Black?” Charles said, exasperated, but now sounding angry enough that he might actually be unnerved by the Coreq voice. “Do you have some army waiting in the wings I’m unaware of? Or have you finally lost your damned mind? I know you’ve been through a lot in the last few years… but gaos.”
Black frowned, staring at the wall speaker as Coreq brought his body to a halt. He wasn’t sure there was anything he could say to convince Charles to listen, to take the warning as a gift, but for some reason, he found himself trying anyway.
“It’s not only me in here,” Black growled. “And whatever it is… it’s fucking dangerous. You’d better do what it says and get the hell out of our way.”
