Black On Black (Quentin Black Mystery #3) (28 page)

I lowered the gun still more.

After a bare moment of indecision, I holstered it, then walked directly to him.

Once I got close enough, I saw that the thing that they’d stuck through his side was some kind of scepter made of glass. It was maybe only a centimeter and a half thick at the widest part I could see, but it had to be hurting him like hell. I couldn’t tell for sure where it would have gone through him, in terms of organs.

I was afraid if I took it out of him, it might kill him from blood-loss, though.

Since it was glass, I wondered if we could break it off.

“Miriam,” he said. Again, that gratitude came through his words, along with a darker urgency. “Come on, honey...
 
help me out of this.”

Heat bloomed on my cheeks at his words, but I didn’t look at his face. I walked closer, then knelt down at the base of the chair, looking at his ankles.

Whoever left him here had tied him with rope.

“They left me here,” Black said. “They left me and then they freed Ian...”

I froze, looking up from where I knelt by his feet. “Ian?”

He nodded. His expression relaxed, as if he was relieved he finally had my attention. I felt puzzlement on him as he continued to watch me, along with a mixture of other feelings that felt a lot more muted––things he might even be suppressing. It hit me that I’d felt that suppression on him before, only a lot fainter than I could feel it now.

I was so physically close to him now, I could feel everything.

He’d been shielding from me. A lot more than I’d realized.

“I had to,” Black said, hearing me. “I have to shield now, too. It’s all I had for defense in here...
 
the size of this place and shielding my light. I had to hope he didn’t start looking for me here first, that the shield would buy me some time.”

“Do they know I’m here?” I pulled the knife out of my boot, starting to saw at the rope holding his nearest ankle to the base of the chair.

“I don’t know.” I felt him watching me work. “They must know though, Miri.”

I felt a flush of pain on him. I felt him looking at me still.

“Thank you for coming,” he added after a pause. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t. I admit, I was worried he was right...
 
that you’d leave me here. They’ve been fucking with my head so much, I didn’t know what to think...”

I paused on that, then decided it could wait until I got him free.

I fought not to think about Black himself, focusing instead on the logistics of how they had him tied to the chair. I needed to get the rope off first, so we could deal with the problem of the glass rod.

I’d gotten his first foot free and was sawing through the second rope when I heard a noise behind me and turned. Glancing over my shoulder, I let out an exhale when Angel’s head appeared over the edge of the platform.

Nick’s dark head followed closely behind hers.

A wave of hostility hit me from Black, seemingly seconds after I could see Nick.

I glanced up at him, and saw him staring in the direction of the staircase, a colder anger in his eyes and face. I smacked his leg lightly from where I knelt.

“Hey,” I said softly. “Cut it out. They’re helping me.”

“Probably so that fucker can be sure I don’t leave here alive,” Black muttered.

When I glanced up that time, he was still staring at Nick.

“Black,” I warned. “That wasn’t Nick’s fault. It was mine.”

“Bullshit,” Black growled, his stare unmoving. “He fucking
wants
you, Miriam. If you think he’s dong this for any other reason, you’re kidding yourself.”

Following his gaze over my shoulder, I saw Nick and Angel reach the top of the platform, both holding tranquilizer guns.

After a few rapid hand-gestures between them, Angel crouched at the base of one of the pillars on the opposite side of the staircase, to the left of
Winged Victory
, and looking out so she covered the two main corridors. I saw her holster the tranquilizer gun from a crouch, pulling the other gun out of her jacket.

I knew a regular gun would be useless if we had to fight seers. A seer could simply use pushes to make it impossible for Angel to aim––or worse, tell her to shoot herself.

Even so, I remained silent.

The tranquilizer gun was strictly a short-range weapon. If she could get the jump on whoever might come for us, a regular gun was still probably her best bet.

I looked back at Black and caught him staring at Nick again.

I sighed. “Quentin. You need to chill. I mean it.”

Pain coiled off him, right before his eyes met mine.

I’d said his first name on purpose, in part to get him to look at me, to get his hostility aimed away from Nick, but even so, when I met his gaze directly it sent a jolt through me. For a few seconds, I couldn’t speak, or look away from his face.

Eventually, I saw him swallow, right before he broke eye contact. More pain came off him right before he nudged me with his knee, shifting the direction of his gold eyes down to where his wrists were tied.

“You got that ankle?” he said gently.

Swallowing, I looked down, then finished sawing the knife through the last few millimeters of rope. When I finished and he’d moved his foot away from the base of the chair, I started working on the rope at his wrists.

Nick walked up to us as I was finishing up the first one. I felt Black tense all around me, even as that aggression and hostility on him flared.

“What the fuck is this?” Nick muttered, lowering his gun as he looked over Black. I saw him wince visibly when he caught sight of the glass shard sticking out of Black’s side. “Christ. What the fuck
is
that?”

“Some kind of scepter, I think,” I told him, without looking up from where I sawed at the rope. “Walk around the back...
 
see if there’s any way to push it out of the chair,” I added. “I’m afraid if we take it out altogether it might kill him.”

“No,” Black said, shaking his head. “It’s a
urele.
They pushed it in from behind.” Seeing a blank look on my face, he explained, “...Seer training tool. There’s a bulb on the other end. That bulb’s got to be sticking out of back side of the chair. We’ll have to find some way to break it...
 
or pull me off it...
 
or pull it out of me from behind. You can’t get it through the chair.”

I shook my head, “Black, no.”

“I’ll be okay. They didn’t hit anything important. They weren’t trying to kill me. I think it was more to see if I’d yank myself off of it, or––”

“––Even if you’re right,” I said, my voice warning. “You could still bleed to death, Black.”

I cut him off partly because I could feel he’d been about to say something about seer organ placement. As it was, I hoped Nick missed the seer reference Black tossed out there already.

“And we can’t
break
it either,” I muttered, looking back down at the knife. “Jesus...
 
not while it’s inside you. It’s glass. The whole thing could shatter...”

I got through the last of that rope and slid over on my knees to work on the next one.

Black used his free hand to start stroking my hair, which was distracting as hell.

After a few seconds of him doing that, I slid further to the left on my knees, repositioning my body and the knife so I was on the other side of the chair’s arm. In the process I moved myself out of reach of Black’s fingers, at least without him twisting his waist and hurting himself. I felt his presence all around me now, so dense I could barely think through it.

The total lack of clarity around that scared the shit out of me.

I’d barely been around him for more than a handful of minutes and I already felt drugged. I’d been feeling like this on and off since Bangkok, but it was so much worse now I honestly wasn’t sure how I was going to keep my head clear enough to get us out of there.

I went back to sawing at the rope, even as Black pooled more of that presence at me. Finally I raised my eyes back to his, glaring at him with a clenched jaw.

“Cut it out. I mean it, Black.”

“I’m so glad to see you, Miri...” he said, his voice thick.

Hearing the emotion there, I softened, even as I resisted that pull.

“Not now, okay?” My voice lowered, growing softer too. “I need you to focus, all right? I know you’re wounded and I missed you, too...
 
but you need to
focus
right now, Black. Tell us who took you. Was it Lucky?”

He nodded. I saw him swallow, even as he winced from something Nick was doing to the chair behind him. I felt another pulse of anger off Black that Nick was even there and the irrationality behind it made me want to smack him again, harder that time.

“Cut it out,” I warned. “I mean it, Black.”

Nick frowned as he raised his head from behind the chair. “What the fuck is he doing?”

“None of your goddamned business.” Black’s voice was cold as ice as he looked up and back, grimacing in pain from twisting his body. “We’re having a private fucking conversation, do you mind?”

Nick met his gaze from where he stood over him.

“I do when she sounds like a crazy homeless person,” he said. “Maybe you two need to be a little fucking
subtle
about the psychic crap, is all I’m saying.”

I looked up at Nick, frowning as I shook my head perceptibly.

When I returned my eyes to Black, he was staring at me. “You told him?” He glanced at Angel. “Both of them?”

I sighed, smoothing my hair to get it out of my eyes from where it had fallen out of my ponytail. I focused back on the rope around his wrist. “I had no choice.” I glanced up at him again before I resumed sawing. “Now answer the question I asked. You said Lucky brought you here. I’m assuming you don’t mean Lucky himself. Do you mean your handler, Fontaine? Grigiore? That red-eyed seer? Who?”

Pain ribboned off Black again, and I realized it was because I’d seen so much through him. I felt him realize I’d seen him with Grigiore and those other seers and the emotions there strengthened, laced with more fear as his thoughts continued to churn.

Mainly that longing pulled on me though, mixed with a desire so intense that I closed my eyes longer than a blink, stopping what I’d been doing.

You need to control that...
 
I sent to him.
Please, Black...
 
please...

More pain plumed off him. His voice came out hard though, a sharper warning.

“Don’t speak to me in your mind right now, Miri.”

When I glanced up, he shook his head, once.

“It’s much more likely to be overheard than anything we say aloud. If Ian is here, and if he was listening from that space, you just told him where we are.”

I swallowed, nodding, even as my jaw hardened at his words.

“Okay.” Nodding again, I shoved it aside. It was too late now. “All right...
 
so talk, Black. Anything you can tell us. Anything that might help with whatever we’re dealing with here.”

“Grigoire’s people brought me here,” Black said, gasping a little when Nick did something from behind him, probably either yanking on or shoving at the glass wand to try and get it out of the chair. “...They told me they were holding Ian. Somewhere else. They roughed me up a little, asked me who you would have told about them...
 
then they stuck that thing in me and said they were going to give me two hours to get out of it, then let Ian loose...”

“Jesus,” I heard Nick mutter.

I felt my skin grow cold, remembering what I saw, remembering Ian in that warehouse, how he’d been watching, smiling because he knew he’d have his chance at Black.

“I was hoping like hell you understood me, Miri...
 
that you were coming here. I honestly think I would have died tonight if you hadn’t. But then...
 
maybe they only staged this because they knew you were on your way. In fact, that’s likely, really.”

I stopped as his words penetrated, even though I was almost through the last of the rope.

Staring up at him, I closed my mouth with a snap, only realizing then that it had been hanging open.