Seventeen
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
WE TALKED MORE after that. Argued mostly.
Words were exchanged, a lot of them heated.
I didn’t ask him much about my parents.
I did tell him there was no way in hell that he or any of his religious cult weirdos were doing anything at all to my “light,” regardless of what he claimed Black had done to me. I told him Black and I would work that end of things out on our own.
That’s when most of the arguments started, truthfully.
Moreover, I felt something in my uncle’s attitude towards me shift after I said that. I felt some part of him tangibly close to me at the same time. Not “you’re dead to me” close, but he definitely took a few mental steps back when I wouldn’t budge on the Black thing.
In the end, there wasn’t enough time to talk about everything we probably should have talked about––not for the amount of mental power I had left. My brain was finished for the night, and Black’s seemed to be too. I honestly couldn’t tell with my uncle, but at some point, he seemed to recognize that we couldn’t hear any more.
Once Black’s wounds were fully cleaned and stitched up, Uncle Charles told us there was no point in us going any further with these talks for now.
I was relieved truthfully.
I wanted answers... I did.
I just was no longer sure I wanted them primarily from him.
I knew there were questions only he could answer, but before I got to those, I had other things I needed answered first, and I wanted those answers from Black, not from my estranged Uncle Charlie, otherwise known as Lucky Lucifer. I knew Black wouldn’t talk freely until we were alone––truthfully, I wasn’t sure he would talk freely even then––but I needed to start there, with Black himself.
My uncle made one thing abundantly clear to both of us before we left.
We weren’t shut of him.
Nor, in his view, would we ever be.
“You’ll keep her safe, little brother,” he’d said to Black.
It sounded less like a request than a threat.
Before either Black or I could answer, my uncle held up a hand, as if to preempt any protests from either of us.
“...You’re her bodyguard now.” His expression darkened as he looked between us. “Whatever else you might be to one another in addition to to that, I want your role in regard to her physical safety to be crystal clear, brother Quentin. Fail in that role, and you’ll be replaced. I doubt you would like that very much... especially under the circumstances.”
I folded my arms, giving Uncle Charlie a disbelieving look. He scarcely bothered to meet my gaze. When I opened my mouth to respond, he once again cut me off.
“...I doubt you’ll have much choice but to keep her alive anyway,” he muttered, that anger seething off him as he glared at Black. “You both seem to have made up your mind regarding that, so I recognize this is likely a moot point. But be aware I’ll be watching you, brother, and your performance on that front won’t be graded on a curve.”
As he spoke, his eyes shifted to the right.
I followed his gaze to where Ian was being led across the courtyard.
We’d left the Richelieu a few minutes earlier, and now Black, Uncle Charles, his four seer employees and I stood at the edge of the circular drive at the front of the Louvre. In another unmentioned display of control over one of Paris’ most carefully guarded sanctuaries, they’d opened the gates of the complex to the main road.
Two white vans now sat parked at the curb.
I wasn’t looking at those, though. Instead I followed Black and Uncle Charles’ stares to where a procession approached from the Denon side of the courtyard.
Seeing Nick and Angel walking behind the group guarding Ian, something in my chest immediately relaxed.
Nick’s shoulder had been bandaged and his arm now rested in a dark blue sling. He walked a bit slower than usual, but seemed to be moving just fine under his own power. Angel’s head was bandaged too. She kept pressing her hand lightly to her injured ear as she walked, possibly to check if her skull remained intact, but other than that, she appeared more or less normal. I wondered what they’d done about her ear, but pushed that from my mind as well.
Ahead of them, four seers walked.
Between those four walked Ian––cuffed and apparently unharmed. His ankles had been chained loosely together as well, giving him that odd, shuffling gait of a prisoner.
I noticed they had something around his throat, and glanced at Black.
He was staring at Ian as well, his gold eyes sharp. He still rested most of his weight on the two seers holding him up, but I saw him notice the metal ring around Ian’s throat right before he turned towards my uncle.
“You have collars now?” he said, raising an eyebrow.
Uncle Charles made a negative slash through the air with two fingers. “Not exactly, little brother. Nothing like what they had at home.”
Even so, I saw Black’s jaw clench, right before he glanced at me. I felt a kind of disbelieving fury on him even before I saw it in his eyes. It wasn’t only anger on him I felt, however. I also felt fear. That fear grew tangibly the longer he watched Ian approach––fear that history was repeating itself across the two worlds, and in all the worst possible ways.
Just then, Nick and Angel walked right up to me.
I hugged them both. I was so relieved to see them in one piece and moving under their own power, I couldn’t help myself. I felt a pulse of annoyance off Black when Nick clutched me a few beats longer than Angel had, and more full-body than Angel had, too.
I ignored both things––Nick’s slightly gropey hug and Black’s reaction, figuring both things probably had little to do with me.
Either way, I was distracted with my friends when the four guards and Ian came to a stop in front of us. I only looked over when I felt another ripple of emotion off Black.
I turned and found him and Ian staring at one another.
Ian looked at me then. His pale, nearly-white irises appeared so different from the blue I remembered––the blue I knew to be contacts now, never real at all––that it was easier to see him as a totally different person. It was easy to pretend he wasn’t anything like the man I’d almost married. In my head, they were two entirely different people anyway.
Still, seeing the small smile playing at his lips, lips I’d kissed over and over for over a year, that I’d traced with my fingers, smiled with...
I looked away, feeling another curl of nausea flicker through my gut.
When I glanced up next, I found Black’s eyes on me.
I couldn’t read the expression there exactly, but it nearly resembled... regret? An apology maybe. Even as I thought it, his mind rose in mine.
I’m sorry, doc... he murmured. ... I’m really sorry.
I felt myself tense, still holding Angel’s arms from where I’d grabbed hold of her again. I don’t think I knew what he was going to do, but in retrospect, maybe I should have.
He broke eye contact with me, then moved, shifting from wounded, half-staggering stabbing victim into... something else.
I’d never seen anyone move that fast.
He darted forward too swiftly for my eyes to track, for my mind to make sense of where he was going until it was too late. He didn’t hesitate at all but slid between the front two seers guarding Ian. He had hold of Ian’s jacket before I could follow that either, and then his leg must have hooked Ian’s too, because suddenly Ian was flat on his back on the courtyard, landing hard with an audible cracking sound as he felt straight back and hit his head.
Black didn’t wait.
My knife––the one he’d pulled out of the sheath in my boot––slid from inside his sleeve to his hand. In the same bare instant, he gripped Ian’s hair, holding his head to the stone...
And sliced his throat open ear to ear with a single, hard slash.
Blood splattered up in a gruesome fountain.
The two seers Black slipped past grabbed him seconds after he’d finished, but even I knew it was too late. Black cut deep––all the way to the bone.
Ian’s whole body jerked after that initial spray of blood.
As the seers dragged Black back, blood-spatter covering his face and neck and chest, what remained in Ian’s body emptied around him like a broken spigot. The process was deadly silent––somehow all the more brutal for the fact that it made no sound at all.
I heard Black panting, once more felt his pain. I heard the seer guards’ shoes scuffle on the wet stone. One of them crouched over Ian, his hand over the cut on his throat.
Then Black was the one being held, his arms wrenched behind his back, and my uncle was standing over Ian, a murderous look in his eyes.
He looked up at Black, his green eyes like metal.
Before I could recover from any of it, he backhanded Black, hard in the face.
“Endruk et dugra... dugra-te di aros...”
He hit him again, harder.
I took a step forward, but Black gave me a warning look, telling me to stay back.
“What the fuck did I tell you, you goddamned little shit... ?”
“You tasked me with keeping her safe,” Black said, his voice flat. “I’m doing my job... uncle.” I clearly heard the bite under the surface politeness of that word. “I thought you’d appreciate my initiative.”
“You thought I would appreciate it?” my uncle spat. “And just what gave you the impression I preferred him dead, nephew? Given that I already had him in shackles. Given that I already assured you and your mate I would take care of it... ?”
Black’s gaze remained flat.
“I found that risk to be unacceptably high,” he said politely. “...Sir.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. And having done a pretty thorough risk assessment of that particular individual, I wouldn’t say I acted without evidence.”
“He was a brother seer!”
“He was a psychopath,” Black said, meeting my uncle’s gaze. “And one fixated on your niece... whose personal safety you just now made my responsibility. Was I supposed to ask your permission before mitigating all perceived risks around her person? Or just those you were enabling... ?”
Uncle Charles’ face hardened to a furious mask.
Watching him stare up at Black, I felt the first real pulse of fear.
Not only for Black, although that was there too.
I felt my first real fear of this man––a man I’d unreservedly adored growing up.
Even as I thought it, Uncle Charles glanced at me. He frowned, almost as if he’d heard what passed through my mind. His expression smoothed in those same few breaths, but I couldn’t un-see what I’d glimpsed behind his fatherly mask.
I’d seen the monster living there.
“You’re walking a fucking tightrope with me, little brother,” he said to Black, his voice dangerously soft. Those green eyes again glimmered briefly like stones, once more devoid of feeling. “You’d better hope you don’t fall off it... for Miri’s sake.”
That he could turn it off and on so easily, rotate faces depending on what he needed, chilled me almost more than the monster those masks hid. I’d encountered very few people who evoked that specific reaction in me, but each one had been memorable. I’d seen that look on a child murderer I once interviewed for Nick. I’d glimpsed pieces of that lack of feeling on Solonik, and on those men Black introduced me to in Bangkok, the ones responsible for a good chunk of the human trafficking network in Southeast Asia.
I’d seen it on a serial rapist and torturer I encountered in Afghanistan.
Uncle Charles glanced at me a second time, as if he’d heard some part of that, too.
I watched him control his anger with an effort. Turning away from both me and Black, he looked down at Ian, who was clearly dead. His limbs twitched but the blood flow had slowed to a trickle, indicating his heart had stopped.
My uncle stared at his dead-eyed face, clenching his jaw.
Then he turned from Ian too, taking a step back.
Snapping his fingers, he made a series of hand gestures, indicating for his people to deal with the body. I watched as the four who had been guarding him approached at once. One began unrolling a tarp like the one they’d given Black to sit on in the Richelieu. Two others picked up Ian’s lifeless body and carried it out of the pool of blood to lay it on the dark blue material. Wrapping him up, they began taping the ends of plastic with duct tape.
I winced as they lifted him, minutes later.
They walked him to the back of the nearest white van, opened the doors, and set him inside. They didn’t treat him roughly though, or even perfunctorily––despite the lack of expression on their faces, I still got a sense of respect, even reverence.
I also caught a few harder looks at Black, and not only from my uncle.
Two other seers swept excess blood into a nearby drain in the stone.
Which made sense, really.
They couldn’t leave traces of an unknown, non-human species in the middle of a major landmark in Paris... much less a seer body that would be autopsied by a human coroner. I could only imagine the questions it would raise. From what Black told me, a lot of seer organs lived in different locations than they did on humans, despite how much seers resembled humans on the outside. He seemed to think the lookalike thing might even be an adaptive trait of some kind, aiding seers in camouflage on predominantly human worlds.
Either way, I strongly suspected that no seer bodies were allowed to stay in human custody for long.
When they finished bundling Ian’s body into the first of the two vans and locked the back door, Lucky turned towards the seers holding Black, and made another series of gestures.
They released him.
They did it so suddenly Black staggered.
I stepped towards him, and found myself supporting part of his weight, my arm wrapped around his waist on his unhurt side. The other seers didn’t wait, but climbed into the same van where they’d just put Ian.
They entered ahead of Uncle Charles, as well as a remaining seer now spraying the blood-streaked stone with some kind of chemical from an aerosol can. Whatever the chemical was, it disintegrated the remaining blood on contact, making it vanish wherever he sprayed the red-tinted stone.
In what felt like seconds, no trace of Ian remained at all.
When I glanced back at my uncle, he was staring at me, his eyes cold as he assessed me and Black standing together.
Catching my returning look, he averted his gaze.
“The other van is yours,” he said, indicating toward the vehicle behind his. “It will take you wherever you wish to go.” He gave me a harder look. “I suggest strongly that you make that destination the airport, niece.”
Black made a humorless sound.
I bit my lip, stifling the impulse to smack him, if only to tell him to be quiet.
The last thing I wanted was him antagonizing my uncle more, given what I’d just seen. Even in my annoyance with him, however, I felt the relief on Black where he held me. I knew a big part of me shared that relief, but I couldn’t think about that yet either.
Uncle Charles again looked from Black to me, that colder look lingering in his stare.
“As you are now his responsibility, niece... he is also yours. I expect you to keep him under control... keeping in mind, of course, that whatever your methods of discipline, I can guarantee he will prefer them to mine. Something to think about... for both of you, perhaps.”
My jaw hardened to granite.
Before I could say anything though, his green eyes grew a few shades colder.
“Oh, and by the way... don’t ever threaten me or any member of our shared race with exposure to the human authorities again.” Those cold eyes met mine. “Miri, dearest. I love you more than life itself, but trust me when I say these words... I will go to lengths you would not fucking believe to keep that exposure from happening. Do not test me on that particular point again. Ever.”
I opened my mouth to answer, but he disappeared into the van.
The sliding door slammed shut.
The seer who had been spraying that chemical on the stone courtyard climbed into the shotgun seat up front, slamming the door behind him, too.
Then they pulled away from the curb.
Nick, Angel, Black and I just stood there, watching them go.