Black of Hearts, page 28
part #12 of Quentin Black Mystery Series
Studying Nick’s face, he added shortly,
“Can you handle that?”
After a pause, Nick had assured him, reluctantly, that he could.
Now, looking at Solonik standing there in the snow, he found himself wondering if he’d lost his mind. Solonik looked about as reliable as a toddler who craved sugar.
Shoving that from his mind, he turned to Dalejem, asking the question again.
“You really sure I can handle this?” he said.
Frowning when the other didn’t answer, Nick found himself thinking.
“I still don’t understand what happened,” he admitted. “I don’t know why I feel so differently now. I have no idea how long it will last… or if it will last.”
Dalejem dismissed this with a wave of his hand.
“It will last,” he assured him, as if the question was a given.
It didn’t feel like a given to Nick.
“How the hell could you possibly know that?” he said.
His voice came out annoyed-sounding, but he wasn’t really annoyed.
He was more worried. He more wanted a real answer.
Dalejem looked at him, then exhaled, hands on his hips.
“I don’t know for sure,” he admitted, making one of those eloquent gestures with his hands. “But I’ve never known someone to go from being totally closed down and psychopathic to as open and sane as you are now… only to flip back to closed and sociopathic for no reason.”
Giving Nick a more direct, shrewd look, he motioned again with a hand.
“Seers can go crazy, too,” he said with a humorless smile. “Believe me. I’ve seen it. The causes might be different, but there’s a similarity in the sense that the seer is cut off from whole parts of themselves. Usually, in the seer’s case, this happens via trauma, although I’ve seen more complex manifestations. Either way, they begin to act like animals… like psychopaths. When they are cured of this, I have never seen them flip back. Not with no reason.”
“More complex manifestations…” Nick muttered. “You mean that friend of yours? The one you said went through something like this?”
Dalejem nodded. “Yes. It was him I was thinking of.”
Pausing, he added with a not very convincing nonchalance,
“With him, it was very unusual. He had an abusive parent who deliberately broke his mind. Over years… many, many years of abuse. This abuse was not random, it was targeted, and quite specific to produce the effects it caused. It turned him into a different person.”
Nick frowned, staring at him.
“Why?” he said finally.
Dalejem sighed again.
“It is complicated, brother,” he said. “My friend was very powerful… born with abilities that are highly unusual, even among seers. He was turned into a weapon. The seer who raised him, his ‘uncle,’ found him very young, and molded him into someone he could control. It was extremely devious, and beyond anything I have ever seen, before or sense.”
“And you helped him out of this?” Nick said.
Dalejem shook his head.
“No,” he said, making that slashing, negative gesture with one hand. “Not me. I was there after, while he was still trying to put himself back together from this, when he was still recovering.” Exhaling, Dalejem shrugged. “Really, even that is not true. It was only one small phase of his recovery I was there for. It took decades for him to recover from all of this. It took multiple seers working on his light, all of them far more powerful than me.”
Dalejem gave him another sideways look.
“…In the end, it was his wife who saved him.”
Nick flinched a little at that, mostly in surprise.
He’d definitely gotten the sense this guy had been a boyfriend of Jem’s, so the introduction of a wife was new.
Keeping his face still, he only nodded.
Obviously, there was more to that story. Nick was skeptical that Dalejem had played as minor of a role as he was pretending, or that these other seers involved were “so much more powerful” than Jem… but he decided not to push it.
Clearly it was still a sore subject for some reason.
“But he’s okay now?” Nick said finally, if only to end it.
“In the end, yes, he was okay.” Dalejem looked at him, that harder expression still on his face. “I have no idea how he’s doing now. Or whether he’s even still alive. He disappeared when that world ended, along with his wife. And their daughter. And her unborn child.”
Nick didn’t miss the “her” unborn child part.
His police detective mind couldn’t help but pick up details like that.
Again, he struggled with whether to ask, then decided to drop it.
Still, he couldn’t help but wonder whose child it had been, if not her husband’s.
Was it Dalejem’s child?
The thought brought up an irrational wave of emotion, enough that Nick bit his tongue, trying to fight his fangs, trying to fight the intensity that rose in his chest at the thought.
Christ. Was he jealous?
After a few seconds of thought, he realized he probably was.
Glancing warily at the other male, watching him surreptitiously as he zipped up the front of his vest, then checked the two semi-automatic handguns he wore inside his heavy coat, Nick felt his mouth harden more.
Fuck. That probably wasn’t good.
“Are you ready, brother?” Dalejem asked then, glancing his way.
Despite his neutral expression, Nick distinctly got the impression the seer knew he’d been staring at him. That made him nervous, too, but Nick tried to keep it off his face… and out of his voice when he tilted his head nonchalantly.
“Yeah,” he said, staring up at the pale blue sky above the snow-covered trees. “Let’s do this.”
IT TOOK THEM FOUR hours to hike their way out to the nearest Russian town.
Dalejem claimed it normally took him three hours to make the trip, but they had to stop periodically to let Solonik rest, and to try and push him to eat.
Solonik wouldn’t eat, though, not unless Nick ordered him to.
When Nick asked Dalejem how the fuck long that had been going on, Dalejem informed him he’d basically had to force-feed the seer the last few weeks while Nick was recovering.
Nick found that answer… deeply disturbing.
He had no doubt Dalejem had done his best to get the other seer to eat, but Solonik had lost a lot of weight, really a disturbing amount of weight, what might have been a full fifty or sixty pounds, a lot of it in muscle. The infiltrator was skin and bones, and a lot weaker than the two of them as a result.
Dalejem mentioned that he’d lost some weight and muscle as well, but clearly, his walks in the mountains and occasional trips to town, not to mention a lot of rabbit and bear stew, had kept him more or less at a similar weight as Nick remembered.
Solonik looked like a different person.
With his six-foot-four or six-foot-five frame, he had the ability to lose the weight, but he hadn’t carried a lot of fat before, so now he looked seriously unwell. Not quite concentration-camp unwell, but damned close.
Truthfully, Solonik looked like he’d just been through a serious illness.
That, or like he’d just escaped from a lightless prison in some Third World hellhole, which wasn’t really that far from the truth.
As for Nick himself, he felt stiff, his muscles under-used, especially when they first began the walk. But the vampire constitution clearly worked differently than his human one had, and differently from the constitution of seers. He more or less recovered from that stiffness and the slight balance issues that came with it once they got moving.
As a human, he would have been weak as a kitten after months of lying in bed, much less being chained to a wall. Truthfully, he’d probably barely be able to walk, given the altitude and the cold and how much his muscles would have atrophied.
It was actually a testament to sheer physical resilience and recovery in the seer constitution that Solonik was as energetic as he was––particularly given that Nick was still feeding on him.
Nick’s previous body, the forty-something human he’d been before he got turned into a vampire, would be screaming at him right now… even if he’d been well-fed during that entire time, and wasn’t chained to a wall for the bulk of it.
But now, in this body, which looked closer to twenty-five than the near forty-five he’d been, and was better-looking than he’d ever been, even in his prime, he felt almost normal by the end of the first hour of hiking through the trees.
Dalejem noticed, and snorted a bit in his general direction.
They’d just begun walking after another stop where Nick ordered Solonik to eat.
Nick pushed the seer to eat until he could feel him starting to feel overfull from the dried deer meat and barley balls that Dalejem packed to bring with them.
Not a lot of greens up here, not this time of year.
They were eating like Tibetan monks on a dream walk.
“I guess I don’t have to ask if you need to stop and rest?” Jem said wryly.
The male seer hefted his pack up on his back as he spoke, readjusting the weight as he made his way down the narrow trail at Nick’s side.
Nick rolled his eyes a little, and without thinking, thunked into the other male with his shoulder. Unfortunately, he did it harder than he should have, as hard as he would have when he was a human… at least in relative terms.
For a vampire, a little physical effort went a lot further.
His playful nudge knocked the seer sharply sideways, making him stumble on the uneven path they were walking down the other side of a rocky, snow- and ice-covered rise.
The seer caught his footing before he would have slid all the way down the hill, but Nick’s hand darted out anyway, catching hold of Dalejem’s bicep and yanking the seer back towards him, more in reflex than intention.
Still without thinking, he dragged Dalejem up off the slope entirely, back to where he’d been walking before, again without fully realizing his own strength until he’d done it.
From behind them, Solonik let out strange, startled, half-alarmed sound.
The sound lived somewhere between delight and surprise.
Even so, Nick felt a glimmer of jealousy off the Russian infiltrator, probably because he’d touched Jem. Nick had already noticed Solonik didn’t like that much. Really, Solonik was possessive of Nick to the point of full-blown psychosis.
Glancing at the thinner, disturbingly pale seer, Nick frowned, seeing Solonik looking at him with utter adoration and the faintest flavor of hurt in his eyes.
Nick felt the jealousy stronger that time, even as the violet eyes stared at Nick’s fingers where they gripped Dalejem’s arm. Nick still had ahold of Dalejem’s bicep when the seer whose arm he held let out a half-amused sound.
“I’ll take my arm back now, brother,” he said. “If you don’t mind?”
Nick glanced over, and Jem lifted an eyebrow, his expression a mixture of that same amusement and a more subtle thread of disbelief.
For an instant, Nick didn’t move.
He found himself wanting to explain himself instead, although whether it was for Solonik or for everything he’d just done, he honestly wasn’t sure.
“Probably best if you do it before your pet attacks me,” Jem added cheerfully. “He’s looking at me now like he’d like to throw me off the mountain himself… only without catching me before I tumbled to my death.”
After a pause, the seer’s voice soured slightly.
“Although,” he added. “I suppose it might solve some of our problems if the wretch tumbled himself down the mountain. I’d just rather if he didn’t take me with him, if it’s all the same to you. Clearly, he’d like to do so, since he’s got it in his head I’m bound and determined to seduce you away from him.”
If Nick had been human, he would have flushed.
As it was, his fingers opened, all at once.
He released the seer so quickly, Dalejem lost his balance again, and Nick had to bite his tongue to keep from grabbing at the other male again to steady him. When Jem caught himself, the seer shook his head, pulling himself back to his own center of gravity with a half-laugh.
“Gaos,” he said. “I guess a part of this insanity of the past few months is you forgetting you are a vampire now, yes? Perhaps, along with being the Nick of before, you think you got back the body of a middle-aged human?”
Nick smiled, but felt another whisper of embarrassment anyway.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
Jem waved him off.
Even now, even after Nick might have knocked him off the ridge and killed him… or at least seriously injured him… the seer looked more amused than anything.
Something about the seer’s cheerfulness was infectious.
Despite where they were going, Nick found himself oddly in a good mood.
Maybe it was what Jem said, about him being the “Nick of before,” or maybe it was just being outside, in fresh air, with a blue sky overhead, birds in the trees, the occasional footprints of wolves and foxes, and even minxes and what he thought might be a black bear. Maybe it was being in motion after so many days of having nothing to think about but his own mental garbage.
Maybe it was Jem treating him like a human being again.
Or at least treating him as something other than a rabid animal.
Of course, Nick wasn’t letting himself think about Miri.
He didn’t want to think about her, not yet.
Not until they were in a position to help her.
As if he’d read his mind, Jem spoke into the silence.
“Is she okay?” he said. “Miriam. Is her condition changed? How fast should we be covering this ground, brother?”
Nick frowned.
He’d been checking on her, of course.
Despite his avoidance around thinking about her, either in terms of her current situation as a captive, or in terms of how she might react to seeing him, face to face, he couldn’t help himself from checking on her periodically, if only to determine her location.
Well… and to make sure she was still alive.
He’d been checking on her since he’d woken up that last time, sprawled out on Dalejem’s chest, with the fire burned down to embers.
“She’s okay,” he said, gruff. “She’s worried.”
“Worried?”
Nick nodded without looking away from the winding path.
“Yes,” he said. “I suspect about Black. Something’s really bothering her there… beyond that pain your people get, I mean. I can feel that too, that pain, but it’s more like background noise. There’s some specific reason she’s worried about him. Like she knows something about his situation right now. Like something’s happened. Something back in the States.”
Nick gave the seer a grim look.
“It feels really serious. Like life or death serious. The feeling I get off her is that she thinks his life is in danger. She feels like she’s running out of time. She’s trying to wait them out, somehow, but she’s risking Black’s life to do it. Or that’s how it feels to her.”
Jem nodded. “And you still have no idea what this ‘something’ is?”
Thinking, Nick shook his head reluctantly.
“No. I just get the feeling it’s urgent, and…” Nick frowned, shaking his head. “She’s worried about him on multiple levels. Like maybe even his health. Like apart from him being murdered or shot, I mean… there’s something weird there, something about him physically. Like there’s something wrong with him.”
“Is it possible he is being held captive, too?” Jem pressed. “Like he is being experimented on in some way?”
“You mean by Charles?” Nick said, turning.
“Well.” Dalejem gave one of those delicate, strangely nuanced seer shrugs. “I did not mean this, per se… but it is possible, yes? We know Charles was originally based out of Moscow. It is possible he is holding both of them. Charles might have separated them, taken them each to a different location… perhaps to give him additional leverage over each of them. He could have Black with him in D.C., where there is more military presence, more firepower. He could have Miriam here, with his colleagues in Moscow.”
Nick nodded.
Even so, he felt himself frowning.
Something about that didn’t feel right.
The logic of it made sense, but the gut feel he got on it was all wrong.
Maybe seeing the doubt on Nick’s face, Jem added,
“Separation pain, particularly between bonded mates… it can be quite motivating,” he added. “Moreover, it is a leverage that requires little work from Charles. All he has to do is collar both of them, and keep them apart. In time, this will wear down most resistance. It is possible this could be affecting Black more right now, especially if he doesn’t know where his wife is… or even if she is alive. Such games would not be beyond Charles, given what we know of him. And this is a kind of torture, to be separated from one’s mate.”
Nick nodded again, but didn’t comment.
“You do not agree?” Jem pressed, clearly not content with his silence.
Nick exhaled.
When he did, he was briefly weirded out that his breath didn’t turn to steam, the way Jem’s and Solonik’s did.
Of course, it made no sense that it would turn to steam, given that his body temperature was more like a lizard’s these days, and more or less conformed to whatever environment he found himself in.
Still, it was strange enough to distract him briefly.
He refocused on Jem, and his question.
“I don’t exactly disagree,” he said after a pause. “What you’re saying makes sense… the logic of it rings true. But for some reason, it doesn’t feel right, not with what I’m getting off her. I think she’s actively worried people are hunting Black. That would imply he’s not in custody… at least if I’m reading her right.”
