In Black We Trust Read online

  A faint surprise touched Silver’s eyes.

  The Colonel found himself thinking it was because the other man didn’t expect him to notice the cameras. The realization only made Holmes frown more.

  If the young idiot wanted to hide something from him, maybe he shouldn’t be staring at the very damned thing he was trying to hide.

  More and more, the Colonel had seen Silver’s type invading the ranks of the Pentagon and the White House. Young. Arrogant. Positive they were the smartest guys in the room, even though they refused to learn a damned thing about anyone sharing the room with them––much less the history of the institutions and the accumulated knowledge they were exploiting, usually for their own private, personal gain.

  Maybe for the first time in his life, the Colonel was beginning to think he was getting too old for this. His wife joked he’d never retire, that he’d die with an armful of classified briefs clutched to his chest, but Colonel Harrison Hamilton Holmes III was beginning to wonder.

  Truthfully, he’d endured one too many arrogant thugs like this one––mercenaries who were willfully ignorant of the world yet convinced they were somehow entitled to make it over in their image anyway.

  He glanced at the vampire as he thought it.

  The creature’s throat had mostly healed from what Black had done to it.

  A thick white scar provided a lingering reminder, crossing its throat just below the creature’s Adam’s apple. Otherwise, it looked more or less healthy, if somewhat underfed and significantly less coiffed than the Colonel remembered from the video footage from that research lab in Louisiana.

  He wondered what they were feeding it exactly––and how often.

  When he turned back to Silver, the other man held a gun in his hands.

  The Colonel tensed.

  Silver wasn’t aiming the gun at him; he cradled it in his palms, looking down at it, a distant look on his broad, wind-burned face. Even so, adrenaline shot into the Colonel’s bloodstream as he studied the other man’s face.

  “How the hell did you bring that in through security?” The Colonel glared at him, his words a half-growl. “No weapons are allowed in this facility whatsoever. Doesn’t matter who you are. You can’t have that in here, son.”

  Silver looked at him, his blue eyes thoughtful.

  “We’ve made a few changes in the protocols since your time, old man,” he said. “I own this place now. In fact, you might even say this is my facility.”

  The Colonel’s frown deepened. “Your facility? What kind of nonsense is that?”

  Silver just looked at him for a moment.

  Then he broke into a smile, like he couldn’t help himself.

  “You really don’t get what’s happened, do you, old man?” he said.

  Without waiting for an answer, he turned the gun on the Colonel, and fired, before Holmes could even think about moving out of the way.

  He stared up at the younger Silver in disbelief, his hand on his chest.

  It registered only dimly that he was no longer on his feet, that he’d sunk to his knees on the dark, green-gray metal floor. Holding his heart, feeling it beat under his fingers, he fought to speak, but his chest hurt so badly, he struggled to form words.

  “You could have retired with grace, old man,” Silver said, aiming the gun at his head. “Hell, you could have retired rich. I would have been generous as fuck if you’d shared your files on Black and the other psychics with me. God knows my dad won’t share any of that crap with me, no matter what I do for this company. God knows none of those other assholes who work for you will, either… much less those who served with Black.”

  A harder frown touched his lips as he studied the Colonel’s face.

  “Instead, I find out you went behind my back. That you tried to turn other senators against me, against my company… against my dad. You went to the damned C.I.A., talked to your spook pals. You approached generals, members of the House Intelligence Committee, the N.S.A. Anything to protect your precious mutants.”

  He smirked, but that harder, angrier look never left his blue eyes.

  “Did you really think it wouldn’t get back to me? Are you that much of a fool, that you could work in the Pentagon for so long and still not know how things work?”

  The Colonel looked down at his chest, at his bloody hand over his uniform.

  His wife would be furious.

  They were supposed to go to that charity gala tonight.

  He’d promised Camille he’d go. She’d already accused him of trying to wiggle out of it. They’d had one of their bickering sort-of fights over breakfast about it, even as she served him blueberry pancakes, sausage and coffee.

  The woman could cook like an angel, even while she laid into him.

  Seeing her, in his mind’s eye, he let out an involuntary gasp.

  “Don’t worry.” Silver cut into the Colonel’s thoughts, drawing his eyes back up to that cold, blue gaze. “You won’t go to waste, old man.”

  Silver nodded towards the vampire, that smirk back on his lips.

  “You’re right,” he added with a smirk. “He’s overdue for a feeding.”

  The Colonel followed those blue eyes without thought.

  The vampire was staring at him, its hands pressed to the thick plexiglas wall.

  Its teeth were already longer. The Colonel saw that they’d lengthened when the creature licked its lips. It stared at him, pupils dilated, its chest moving faster, almost as if it panted as it watched his heart bleed down his jacket and towards the metal floor.

  The look in its eyes disturbed the Colonel.

  It disturbed him greatly.

  More animal than person, it revealed itself in its hunger. Its true face appeared, dissolving that thinly-worn pretense of humanity it hid behind, like camouflage. The look there brought a wave of disgust to the Colonel’s gut, curling his lip.

  It was lust, hunger, desire, a dense wanting that gave the creature a distinctly glazed look, one that implied it had already lost control of its mind, at least partly.

  That look disturbed him greatly.

  It disturbed him greatly indeed.

  Even so, he couldn’t help but see the inevitability there, in its eyes.

  He knelt there, panting, as Silver walked to the electronic panel that operated the locks and mechanics for the plexiglas cage door. Watching the younger man punch through the security code, lowering his eye for the retinal scanner to identify and authorize him to work the controls, the Colonel found himself thinking he should have called Black.

  He should have called Black––and warned him.

  He should have called Black first, before he came down here, before he made his last tactical mistake, in not recognizing how dangerous this man truly was.

  He should have called Black.

  But there was no point thinking about that now.

  It was too late now, the Colonel thought, watching the transparent panel open slowly in front of him. After all this time, it was finally too late.

  Black was on his own.

  1

  FUNERAL

  “HEY.” I LAID a hand on his arm, my voice low. “Are you okay?”

  Jumping at my touch, he looked away, wiping his eyes with his fingers before aiming a smile in my direction. I saw him mentally blow it off, could feel it through his skin as he shrugged, taking my hand with the fingers that hadn’t brushed away the tears.

  “Fine, doc,” he said, squeezing my fingers. “Fine.”

  Frowning, I tried to decide if I should press the point.

  Realizing this wasn’t the place, or the time, I just held his hand back, watching as people continued to walk past us along the stone path dividing the church lawns.

  Most of those people wore black. Most continued without stopping, barely glancing at us as they murmured amongst themselves, filing up the stone stairs of the church.

  Black brought us to the back entrance, likely in the hopes of avoiding the press swarming the front doo
rs. He’d kept his security detail low-key as well, knowing they’d likely only draw more attention to both of us. Regardless, I knew Angel and Cowboy were around somewhere.

  I knew Dex and Kiko were around, too.

  Even the back entrance of this particular church wasn’t exactly what I’d call “low key.”

  The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception was huge, the largest Catholic church in the United States and almost intimidating to look at, even from the outside. I’d never been here before, but it was hard to imagine any side of it you could approach in a totally inconspicuous way.

  That was true even at a funeral of this size, with this many guests.

  Black gripped my hand tighter as he began walking us towards the stone steps leading up to the back doors.

  We were about halfway to the small parking lot just under where those same steps began, leading up to three stone archways and doors, when Black came to a stop, frowning. Before I could identify what he was frowning at, he muttered under his breath.

  “What the hell is that prick doing here?” he said.

  A little alarmed at the aggression coming off his light, I followed Black’s gaze.

  I found the male seer immediately.

  Even so, I almost didn’t recognize him, not at first.

  Colored contact lenses shifted his normally pale green eyes to a darker hazel, so that was a lot of it. I didn’t realize how much it would change his whole appearance to cover over the shocking light green of his natural eye color, not to mention the distinctive violet rings that patterned his irises.

  Those rings were likely the real reason he wore the contacts.

  He wore a charcoal-gray suit over his tall, muscular form. His long, brown and blond streaked hair had been cut since I’d last seen it, so now it fell to just above his broad shoulders, rather than down his back as before.

  He’d further slicked it back with some kind of product.

  He’d also shaved. And wore cufflinks.

  “Gaos,” Black muttered, clearly annoyed. “He brought his whole fucking mutant squad.”

  My eyes found the other five seers, who lurked in a strange pattern on the garden to the right of the stone path, just about where the parking lot was about to begin.

  They all wore funeral-appropriate clothing.

  Most of them also wore contact lenses.

  Still, there was something… off… with all of them.

  It might have been the odd way they clustered there on that last segment of lawn, without talking––at least without talking aloud, by moving their lips. It might have been the way they stared at us, without any real expressions on their faces.

  It might have been some less-easily-identifiable difference.

  “Could they be any more fucking weird?” Black growled, gripping my fingers tighter in his, squeezing them against his thigh. “Why don’t they wear matching T-shirts: ‘I am not from this world. Please vivisect me’? It would be less damned conspicuous than them standing there like aliens at a garden party. And what the hell are they even doing here? Paying their respects to a man they never met?”

  I sighed, sending him a pulse of reassurance.

  “They probably want to know what’s going on,” I muttered. “You know. In terms of the government and seers.”

  “What’s going on?” Black turned, cocking an eyebrow at me. “Like they’d have a fucking clue how to handle it, even if they did know. They need about a year of ‘assimilation 101’ before I’m letting them anywhere near any of my government contacts.”

  That time I sighed for real.

  “I don’t know why they bother you so much,” I said, my voice still low as I glanced over my shoulder. “It’s not their fault. None of this is their fault.”

  I watched another group of humans wearing all black walking the path behind us. They were still far enough away to be out of earshot, but I checked their minds anyway before adding,

  “They’re like you. They’re from your world––”

  “They’re not like me, doc. Most of them are two hundred years older than me.”

  “They’re more like you than not,” I said, exasperated. “And that one guy, at least, seems to have known that relative of yours. That famous cousin or whatever. Aren’t you even the slightest bit curious to learn more about that?”

  “No,” Black said, his voice cold.

  Exhaling, I said, “Fine. But I think you should look at your emotional reactions to all of this, Black. They aren’t exactly rational. You’ll probably end up friends with these people. You’ll probably actually be happy at some point, that you have more people around you with similar backgrounds and life experiences…”

  Gripping his hand tighter when he scowled, I added,

  “And they aren’t the ones who sold you into slavery or abused you. They’re newcomers to your world, and they’re pretty lost right now. You have an opportunity to be the bigger person here. You have an opportunity to help out people who need you. People who would probably appreciate even the smallest amount of advice or help you’re willing to give them.”

  “Well, I know why you like him,” he grumbled, still glaring at the male seer we’d both noticed first. “You made that perfectly clear in New Mexico.”

  I frowned. “What? What does that mean?”

  “Most handsome man I’ve ever seen,” he said, giving me a dark look. “Ever,” he added with emphasis. “That was what the first thing you thought when you laid eyes on that piece of shit. Don’t think I wasn’t listening.”

  He scowled, looking back at the male seer, muttering,

  “…Most handsome ever. That’s a verbatim quote, doc.”

  I rolled my eyes, unable to help it.

  “It can’t be verbatim. I never said it out loud.” Giving him an annoyed look, I added, “You’re being ridiculous. You know that, right? Are you going to hold my dreams against me next, Black?”

  “Are you going to deny you meant it?”

  “Do I have to?” I snorted. “What difference does it make? It’s fucking meaningless.”

  “Well, he certainly seems to prefer talking to you over me.”

  “Because you give him a world of shit whenever he opens his mouth,” I said, exhaling yet again in exasperation. “You get pissed off whenever he’s even in the same damned room with you, Black. How is that my fault? Or his, for that matter?”

  He gave me a harder look, a plume of anger leaving his light, probably because I was defending the other seer.

  Shaking my head, I muttered under my breath, “That damned seer photographic memory. It’s not exactly an advantage a lot of the time, you know.”

  Grunting, he squeezed my hand.

  “You can’t blame my memory for the fact that you were checking out another male seer, sweetheart. A hotter seer, apparently. Right after you bailed on me for over eight weeks.”

  That time, he said it like he was kidding.

  I could feel from his light that he wasn’t, though.

  He really wasn’t kidding.

  He’d also managed to make it about the seer’s looks, instead of what I’d been trying to talk to him about, which was Black’s repressed trauma about his upbringing. I still suspected that was the real issue he had with the immigrant seers, but Black was disturbingly good as sidestepping the topic whenever I tried to bring it up with him.

  Clicking under my breath, I lowered my voice more, since we were getting closer to the seers waiting for us at the end of the path.

  “You’d think you’d be a little more understanding,” I murmured, gripping his hand with both of mine. “They haven’t even been here a week. They’re all in culture shock, Black. They fell through an inter-dimensional door, into a version of Earth they know absolutely nothing about. They have no clue how to ‘blend,’ anymore than you did when you first got here. You could actually help them with that, you know, since you went through the same damned thing. I’m certainly not going to be of much use.”
/>   I gave him a more pointed look.

  “Anyway, I still know next to nothing about your old world… since you still haven’t deigned to tell me much of anything about what it was really like there.”

  Black didn’t answer.

  Even so, I could almost hear him grumbling in his mind.

  “Have you talked to them at all yet, Black?” I murmured, frowning as something else occurred to me. “I know Charles and his people debriefed them, but did you? Have you even asked them about what happened to that world? Charles made it sound pretty… final. As in, end of the world final. As in, everyone who didn’t get out in some way is dead.”

  Black gave me a brief, hard stare.

  He didn’t answer that, either.

  It hit me, maybe for the first time, that Black might have feelings about that, too. More feelings than I’d considered, I mean. He was so dismissive of his birth world, so adamant he didn’t give a shit about any of it, or anyone he left behind, I hadn’t thought about the reality of that world being gone from his perspective.

  Whatever his claims of utter indifference to the people there, he’d lived the first forty or so years of his life on that version of Earth.

  He’d had friends there. He’d had lovers, emotional experiences.

  Now, everyone he’d known growing up was likely dead.

  Black’s family was likely dead.

  That meant his parents, his sister, his cousins.

  Still turning this over, I felt my frown deepen.

  We’d reached the other seers by then, so I tried to brush our aborted conversation out of my mind, at least until I could talk to Black privately again.

  The male seer in front, who I’d learned was named Dalejem, or “Jem,” as most of the other newcomers called him, gave Black a wary look, right before his eyes shifted to me.

  “We were hoping to come inside,” he said, giving Black another glance. “We wanted an opportunity to read some of the humans here. To help with the infiltration work.”

  Next to me, a plume of real anger left Black’s light.

  I glanced at him, alarmed, but he didn’t look at me.