Black The Sun, page 36
part #9 of Quentin Black Mystery Series
Brick nodded slowly.
“We would start this soon, I take it?”
“As soon as you can.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Before the missiles hit? Is five minutes long enough?”
Brick frowned delicately, glancing at Nick before looking back at the drone.
“Sure,” he said casually, his Louisiana drawl growing more audible. “And if we forget one or two of your friends in our haste… well, they’re only human, after all. I’m sure there are simply thousands of females out there who are, right at this moment, birthing more of the annoying creatures.”
Nick scowled.
Black chuckled. “Come, now,” the seer said humorously. “Play nice, vampire boy. I’ve warned you about pissing off my wife.”
“I am holding you to your promise, Quentin,” the vampire said, his voice warning. “I intend to collect my reward when this is done.”
Black exhaled, obviously in irritation.
“No one likes an eager-beaver, Brick. Get the fucking job done… and do it right this time. You deliver what you promised, and I’ll do the same.”
Nick frowned, glancing between the drone and the vampire.
Neither responded to his stare.
They certainly didn’t explain what they were talking about.
“Seven minutes,” Black said, his voice stripped of humor. “Get moving. This drone is armed, so I’m taking it down to join the others near your fire-obsessed friends on the ground.”
“And if we can’t get them out in seven minutes?” Brick said dryly.
“You will,” Black said. “Because if you don’t, you can kiss your chances of any kind of alliance with me and mine goodbye.” Pausing, he added, “More to the point, if anything happens to Naoko, my wife really will kill you.”
Before Brick could respond, the drone’s engines changed tenor.
Their oscillations revved higher as the machine began to rise, then to dart down through the branches of the tree like a giant insect.
Nick watched it go, frowning, until movement to his left caused him to turn.
He looked up as Dorian rose to standing, balancing on the thick branch where Jem had so recently been tied. The cords holding him to the trunk and branch had been cut. The tall seer hung disjointedly over the vampire’s shoulder, his dark hair falling down to obscure his face where it hung behind the vampire’s back.
Nick watched as the blond vampire leapt easily to another, higher branch, then began walking the length of it, toe to heel, moving as fast and as surely as if he were walking down a paved city street.
Before Nick could recover from that, Brick leapt up on the branch after Dorian, carrying a very annoyed-looking Dex over his shoulder. The vampire had climbed to the upper branch and picked up the Marine so quickly, Nick didn’t even feel the tree shudder until Brick already had Dex on that higher branch, and began leaving the tree with him.
Frowning, Nick settled in to wait, glancing at Cowboy and then Somchai long enough to see both of them frowning, too.
Cowboy broke into another, harsher and drier-sounding paroxysm of coughing.
Nick felt his worry grow as he glanced down the trunk of the tree. As he did, he noticed that the wind had changed, driving more of the smoke up the trunk, making it harder to see, and to breathe.
Seven minutes. Would it be long enough?
His eyes were watering and he was coughing too by the time Dorian and Brick returned.
They grabbed Somchai and Cowboy next, and disappeared into the smoke-filled branches above where Nick sat.
Before they left, Nick caught Brick giving him a long, intense look.
Something in that look unnerved him, but he was coughing too hard to really dwell on it.
He just wanted them to leave and come back for him.
Unlike before, he couldn’t see them as they leapt to that higher branch and walked off towards the nearest of the tall trees. They leapt up, swirling smoke in their wake, a person hanging down each of their backs––and then Nick couldn’t see them anymore.
That time, it felt like he sat there a long time.
He sat there so long, he decided Brick wasn’t coming back.
That thought, combined with his memory of Brick’s enigmatic stare, convinced him they’d decided to leave him here. Maybe they knew something he didn’t know, about how fast the fire was traveling to his branch, how high it was burning up the trunk.
Maybe it was a power play, based on what Black said about Miri going after Brick if anything happened to him.
Maybe Brick just didn’t like him.
The vampire had definitely seemed strangely focused on him, even before Nick managed to piss him off at the base of the tree.
Either way, and whatever the odd vampire reasoning, they weren’t coming back.
Despite what Black said, they’d decided to leave him here.
Brick was going to let him die.
A mild panic rose in Nick’s chest at the thought. He shook himself into motion, looking around at where he sat, fighting to take in breaths that weren’t all smoke as he tried to think through his options. He considered trying to get up to that higher branch, where he’d seen Dorian and Brick, but he couldn’t even see it now through the thick, black smoke.
At the same time, he knew he needed to move––now––before he passed out from smoke inhalation. Once he got up there, he’d still be operating in the dark, but maybe he could see enough to determine what his next step would be, once he was on that higher branch. He had no idea of directions at that point, or where the other tree might be, but he couldn’t just stay here, and wait for the fire to reach him.
He’d have to risk it.
He’d climb out as far as he could on that limb, and just jump for it.
The smoke kept getting thicker as he fought his way to his feet. He struggled to breathe between gusts of wind, gripping the trunk in both hands. His eyes streamed, and the air grew hotter the longer he stood there, trying to get his bearings.
By now, he was relatively sure the fire might be right below his feet.
Gasping, coughing for breath, he gripped the branch just above him with all of his strength, terrified now he’d lose consciousness and fall off the branch. He wondered if he’d catch on fire on his way down, or just bounce off one of the burning buttresses before he cracked his head open and smashed his body on the earth below.
He tested the branch with his hand and weight, bracing his weight by propping one foot on the branch where Jem had been sitting before.
He couldn’t see.
He was starting to struggle to draw breaths for real, fighting the constriction in his chest, fighting his eyes, which wanted to close.
He was still standing there, leaning against the trunk, gripping the upper branch in both hands… when rough hands grabbed him.
They pulled him off the trunk.
Before he could make sense of what was happening, they lifted him.
He heard a sharp report, even as his stomach lurched from being turned upside down.
He thought it was the branch cracking under them.
He thought he was dead.
He thought the vampire was dead, too.
His mind intervened when the sound repeated, injecting logic into the heavier layer of his thoughts. That came from too far away, his mind told him. No, his mind told him. No––it wasn’t a branch. You’re not dead. Not yet.
It was gunshots.
Nick was hearing gunshots.
In some clearer part of his mind, it struck him that he’d been hearing them for a while; his mind simply hadn’t picked out the sharper, higher reports from the sounds of the fire and made them significant. He wondered vaguely if he was hearing shots fired from drones, or if Brick had left him for too long and missiles were about to rain down on their head.
He couldn’t make sense of either thought for long.
His mind began losing cohesion.
He could scarcely breathe at all once his head and upper body hung down the vampire’s back. The pressure on his chest made the pain in his lungs worse, constraining his ribs, making it hard for him to draw breath. He made an attempt to hold on, gripping the vampire around the waist, but even that was done more out of instinct than any conscious decision.
He was exhausted.
Truthfully, he was too exhausted to care about any of it now.
Those days and weeks in the dungeon with Cowboy, Dex, Somchai and Jem left him in a state of waiting that never really dissipated. That waiting feeling returned now, telling him it wasn’t time to fight, or even to resist what might be happening to him.
It was too late to fight. He was too weak; it wasn’t a fight he would win.
He knew that, but some part of his mind rebelled against the thought anyway.
He felt like prey.
He felt like prey, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.
Closing his eyes, he hung there without moving, dead weight apart from his fingers gripping the vampire’s back. He let his weight grow still as the vampire’s iron-like muscles moved below the skin he could feel morphing under his hands.
The vampire held his bare ankle and part of his calf.
Nick shuddered when those oddly cold fingers stroked his bare skin. He found the contact strangely comforting, too, but a part of him felt the possessiveness behind it, a feeling he couldn’t reconcile with anything he’d felt or seen in the vampire before now.
That uneasiness returned.
Again, he couldn’t do anything about it.
He was prey.
The thought repeated, grew abstract.
He was prey, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.
At some point, he must have lost consciousness.
Nick’s last memories were of billowing smoke, of his lungs struggling to work, of painful dry coughs that seemed to wrack his body in half, of the vampire’s cool fingers stroking his leg. He remembered his stomach dropping as the vampire leapt, moving higher in the tree; he remembered him leaping again, sending Nick’s stomach into another sick roiling spin.
Then, it was like he was flying.
It was like he wasn’t in his body at all.
At the time, losing awareness of where he was, of his burning lungs, of the vampire holding him, of the blank emptiness of the smoke-filled air…
It was nothing but a relief.
27
BREACHING
“ARE THEY OKAY? All of them?”
I ran alongside Black, panting.
The smoke was right in front of us now. It looked like it had spread to at least one other tree, if not more than one.
Some of that might have been from the missiles, which impacted the tree only a few minutes earlier. I knew I was shouting in part because my hearing was still affected by the scream of their path through the late afternoon sky on their way to the target.
“Black?” I said, more frantic. “Are they okay? Are they out of there?”
They’re okay, honey. Don’t worry.
He glanced back at me without slowing his pace, sending me a curl of his heat.
Brick got Nick out in plenty of time. He’s inhaled a lot of smoke, but Brick says he’ll be okay. He and Dorian are carrying Nick and Jem to the helicopter… the rest of them are okay to walk. He glanced at me again. I have a drone marking the landing area for them, so we’ll have them back to our medical team in under ten minutes, providing nothing goes wrong.
And if they need more than the medical team? I sent back, still fighting fear, now a less rational, more unnamed fear. What then, Black?
Then we take them to Bangkok, Black sent. At once. They’ll be there in an hour. They have state of the art facilities there, Miri. We’ll send along seer techs to make sure they don’t harm Jem.
Giving me another bare glance, he added, Don’t worry, honey. I mean it. It shouldn’t come to that. Our people here are good. They can at least stabilize them for a safe transport. From what Brick said, Jem is the one they’re most worried about. Nick will be fine.
I bit my lip, forcing myself to swallow the response I wanted to give.
I knew that response wasn’t rational.
I could tell nothing about me was rational right then. I knew my heightened emotions had to be because of me and Black, and the odd mental and emotional state we’d been in since we locked ourselves inside that beach house.
I knew all that, but some part of me wasn’t buying it.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so paralyzed by fear.
That fear was unable to be reasoned with, unspecific as to cause; I couldn’t identify the specific trigger or source of the fear. The fear was making me physically sick, and I couldn’t even comprehend what was making me so afraid.
And why was I fixating on Nick?
Why Nick?
Black already told me Nick was okay. Nick was out; he was on his way back to camp with Jem. Angel was the one we knew nothing about. For all we knew, Angel was dead.
I fought to shove it from my mind, even as I saw Black giving hand-signals to Frank and Magic, who ran alongside us through the jungle. He motioned for Javier to flank the massive Tualang tree on the other side as we ran straight towards it––likely to provide us cover in the event the Nachtsonne stuck around to put up a fight.
I only saw two of their people as we came into the clearing.
Black shot the first one without slowing down.
I saw Frank pick off the second.
Then Black was making more hand-signals.
Black didn’t feel anyone else. We were heading up the mountain.
We ran around the blackened crater left in the ground from the missiles, and the burning remains of the huge buttresses of the Tualang tree. The ripped up earth from the plowed path of one of the missiles formed a long furrow we had to run around and jump over to get back on the main trail. That led to the steep slope leading up to the mountain.
Then it was running, hard, up volcanic rock under the afternoon sun.
That sun was getting lower in the sky already.
I found myself thinking we would get up there well before it set, but we’d likely be returning to the beach in the dark, whether by helicopter or on foot.
Do you feel them yet? Black asked in my mind.
I knew he meant Angel, Mika, Alice.
Fighting to get my mind off Nick, off whatever bothered my light about Nick specifically, I switched my concentration to Angel instead. Like I had with Nick, I focused my mind, my light on everything Angel––conjuring up memories of her face, her presence, her laugh, her voice, her light, everything about her I could pull into my light.
I knew Black was hoping I could speed up the process of finding them. From Nick, he was under the impression the Nachtsonne stronghold was large, and most of it was underground. He also wasn’t sure how well his own sight would work up there.
By then, we were maybe a third of the way up the sliding volcanic-rock slope.
The ground had gotten more and more unstable, the higher we descended.
I saw Magic struggling to keep up.
Her booted feet slid in small pieces of chipped, glass-like shards of obsidian rock. She climbed out of a deeper pocket of the same, pulling herself up and out before getting her balance back on a harder ridge of rock. She wiped sweaty black hair out of her face, a determined set and jut coming to her jaw. I watched her adjust the bow strapped across her chest, increasing her pace on the more stable surface once she’d caught her breath.
We were getting closer to the source of that weird light, the one that created a bubble-like shield over the mountain.
Even as I thought it, Black glanced at me.
He was dusty now, too, and sweaty from the climb.
Once he caught my eye, he motioned with his free hand to our right, holding his rifle with the other hand and pushing my attention and my light to what looked like another path that intersected with the one we were on.
I followed that path with my eyes, noting how it wound around the shadowed edge of the cliff that intersected with the high peak we were running towards.
A long, jagged line lived in that part of the mountain.
It was hard to see at first, as the two pieces of rock blended into one another, but the longer I looked at it, the more I suspected there might be an opening there.
I agree, Black sent. Get behind Magic. Keep her, Devin and Dog in your sights. I’m going to go ahead with Javier… and Frank, if he can keep up.
Before I could argue, he broke into a full run.
I hadn’t realized until that precise instant just how much he’d slowed himself down so the rest of us could keep up.
I admit, it pricked my pride to see how fast he moved without us. It also pricked my pride that he hadn’t asked me to go with him. I doubted I could have kept up with him exactly, but I suspected I could have kept up with Frank.
It also made me determined to get in better shape.
I watched him sprint up the slope like a running wolf, whistling for Javier to get his attention, and to get him to speed up and follow him.
He motioned to Frank a beat later, and the larger man also broke into a run.
They cut across the path towards the cliff, aiming for the shadowed ridge jutting out of the base of the mountain. Frank lagged behind Javier by a few lengths, and Javier lagged even further behind Black, but all three of them left us behind in seconds, vaulting up the volcanic rock slope before any of the younger natives realized what was happening.
I glanced at Magic and saw her staring up the slope, bewildered.
She looked at me. “Where are they going?”
Clicking my fingers to indicate for her to be silent, I motioned sharply for her to move ahead of me.
Dog and Devin followed her after I repeated the gesture to them.
I understood Black’s logic of wanting to keep one of us in the back, to keep an eye on Magic, Dog and Devin, all three of whom were on the young side, with Magic being a teenager, and thus more or less a kid.
Even so, I knew that likely wasn’t his only reason for wanting me behind him. I understood his protectiveness, but it still annoyed me.
