Black As Night (Quentin Black Mystery #2) (27 page)

UNDER LOCK AND KEY

BLACK DIDN’T WANT to leave me.

I could feel it, as much as I could feel his indecision about whether he should go to that meeting he’d scheduled with Anders. His people had found four barges that might be the one I’d seen in Solonik’s mind, but Black had looked at all four psychically and he couldn’t find Pete.
 

He claimed that was because either a) none of the four barges were where Pete was being held, which meant the barge had likely been moved, or b) the barge in question had the same kind of psychic shielding around it that Solonik used over the apartment where he kept me.

Black leaned heavily towards thinking it was “b.”

He thought he could get inside the shield from the ground.

The problem was, he didn’t want to leave me.

He also didn’t want me to go with him.

He still hadn’t answered the question definitively when I left his hotel room in search of food, but I could feel him leaning in favor of leaving for a short while to get Pete back at least. He also seemed to think it would raise too many questions if he didn’t go to the Anders meeting in person, at least for a few minutes, but he thought he could retrieve Pete first, which might make the conversation with Anders more “interesting,” as Black put it.

Either way, I could tell he didn’t intend to be gone long.

I had mixed feelings about Black going too, honestly.

I didn’t bother to tell him why. I knew if I mentioned my concerns about Solonik, it would probably have the opposite effect to what I intended.

I could feel that Black would welcome any excuse to run into the other seer.

That feeling had grown more intense on him over the past eight or so hours. So my half-assed plan to let Black “calm down” before I tried to talk to him about Solonik again didn’t strike me as overly realistic. He wouldn’t listen to me on it, I could tell. There would be no talking Black down, not when it came to that particular issue.

I slept with Black in his room. Not in terms of sex, but I slept wrapped around him, my head on his chest, my leg coiled around his.

I refused to feel embarrassed about it.

Luckily, Black dismissed that as a “seer” thing, too.

He didn’t budge on the sex issue, which I’d dropped by then anyway, but he also didn’t argue when I climbed into his king-sized hotel bed and insisted he not sleep on the floor...or anywhere else for that matter.

Truthfully, I didn’t even have to ask him really.

He’d followed me into bed when I demanded it of him, then more or less opened his arms to me as soon as he was lying down. After I settled into a comfortable position against him, he wrapped himself around me too, basically letting me use him as really warm furniture as he stroked my hair and back, talking to me until I dozed off.

Somewhere in that, he asked my permission to start removing those structures Solonik attached to me psychically. He explained he wanted to start work on that as soon as possible, since Solonik had done it in part so he could find me wherever I was.

I admit, that freaked me out.

It also got me thinking about how I’d gotten away.

When I voiced the question aloud, Black explained the psychic “shield” he believed Solonik built over the basement apartment where he kept me, and how it likely worked. That shield was why I hadn’t been able to reach Black from the apartment even with Solonik gone. Which made sense, given how I could hear Black again once I got away from the building, but I still wondered how Solonik hadn’t felt me leave.

Black said he probably had, but that he’d been too far away to get back in time.

That thought chilled me, too.

It also made me realize how lucky I’d been.

Either way, I definitely gave Black the go-ahead on removing anything he found.

When I woke up the the first time the next morning, Black was gone. Once I could feel he was still inside the building, I fell back asleep.

The second time I woke, he’d been there with me, in the room.

After dodging questions about where he’d been the first time I opened my eyes, he informed me with a semi-dramatic knuckle-crack and a grin that he’d gotten most of the big structures off my “light” already, at least in terms of what Solonik might use to track me. He said “resonances” still lived there (which he didn’t bother to explain) but the actual
structures
Solonik built to maintain a psychic hold on me were significantly damaged.

Black warned me I couldn’t leave the hotel, however.

He said Solonik would still be able to track me fairly easily in Bangkok itself, through those resonances and the structures he hadn’t fully removed. He was concerned when I told him how much Solonik had read me for information about my past and family, too. According to Black, he might have done that for tracking purposes as well.

The whole thing unnerved me.

Truthfully, it made me feel sick, and not particularly safe, even here, with Black hovering. I could tell Black himself felt more or less the same way, since despite his assurances, I had an armed escort for my elevator ride to the restaurant on the tenth floor.

While I dressed and he worked over a laptop, he reminded me that humans would be vulnerable to Solonik too. He said his team was big enough and well-dispersed enough to be safe; numbers were the best protection, according to Black, in terms of overwhelming a seer’s abilities. He had a lot of his people on the ground in Bangkok now, staking out different parts of the hotel. He insisted I would be perfectly all right, and that he would keep a line to me with his psychic ability at all times.

He also assured me that if he left, he’d be gone less than an hour.

In a weird way, I found the overall conversation comforting, if only because Black managed to get me thinking strategically again. The only area where we really disagreed was in how to deal with Solonik himself.

I’m fairly certain that was because I’d actually
met
Solonik.

Or maybe––although the thought disturbed me more than a little––it was because I could still feel Solonik in some sense, through those “resonances” Black alluded to.

Whatever the reason, I knew Solonik would like nothing more than for Black to come after him. He wasn’t just hoping for Black to come. He was actively planning on it.

I was also pretty sure Solonik would kill Black if that happened.

I don’t know why I thought that either, but I felt it strongly. Maybe I believed it because Solonik believed it, but whatever the reason, I couldn’t shake the certainty. Solonik was older than Black, more experienced, crazier.

He’d been killing people a lot longer.

Even if Solonik was warping my mind around his abilities in some way, his confidence unnerved me. I could practically feel Black underestimating him. Or maybe he was just so blinded by rage from what Solonik had done he didn’t care.

Either way, it wasn’t a subject Black would be reasonable about.

Maybe he even
couldn’t
be reasonable about it.

“MS. FOX! HEY...Ms. Fox! Over here!”

I stiffened before I turned, unable to help myself, then smiled when I saw who summoned me. Lawrence Farraday smiled back, sitting at a glass table splashed by early morning sunlight. He’d nabbed a table not far from the pool, and his stark white legs already looked a little pink where they faced the sun under his plaid shorts. A dark red umbrella stood over the smoky glass top, but given the low angle of the sun, it didn’t do much but provide colorful decoration.

Farraday looked a lot more rested than the last time I’d seen him.

“You’ll have brunch with me, won’t you?” he said, smiling as I approached his table. “I really do hate eating alone.”

“Of course,” I said, pulling out a chair and sitting at once.

I smiled back at his grin, and was almost surprised when it was a real smile.

A waiter appeared at my elbow before I’d fully settled into a comfortable position, handing me a menu and asking if I wanted coffee.

I did want coffee. Cappuccino. About a gallon of it...which made the waiter laugh.

I was famished too, I realized, as I glanced at the menu he’d placed in front of me.

For pretty much everything but Phad Thai.

The thought brought a tight grimace to my lips, but I immediately wiped it away.

“Black has turned this hotel into a veritable Fort Knox,” Farraday grumbled as the waiter left with my coffee order.

Seeing the direction of his gaze, I turned my head, following his eyes behind me to a table full of people. Blinking at faces, I realized a lot of them looked vaguely familiar to me, despite the uncharacteristically bright clothes they wore. Seeing Kiko’s face among them, her muscular body encased in a dark blue sundress and white, strappy sandals, I started a little, then smiled when she raised her hand in a wave.

I raised my hand in response, then looked back at Farraday.

“Jeez...you aren’t kidding.” I scooted my chair forward, picking the menu up off the glass table before I glanced over it. “Did Black fly his entire company out here?”

“More or less. Did you see there’d been another murder?” He tossed the morning’s paper at me. “Two of them, actually.”

I tensed, then lowered my voice. “Not Pete?”

Farraday immediately raised his hand in reassurance. “No, no. Black already checked. He’s certain it’s not his friend’s grandson. Wrong height, weight...age.”

I relaxed slightly. “He’s seen this, then?”

“Of course.”

Nodding, I picked up the paper dutifully. The image on the front page was a little too graphic for me to look at it for very long. I’d noticed the Thai papers didn’t pull any punches when it came to showing photos of the dead children. I made out the two bodies. I also saw their basic positions in front of a stone statue of what looked like a winged lion.

Unlike the others, where both arms had been tied out like wings, these victims each had one arm outstretched, their two hands tied together in the middle.

Almost like they were holding hands.

“A girl this time,” Farraday said, disgust in his voice. “...A girl
and
a boy. The very first girl. Also the first time there’s been more than one body at a time.”

“Have they identified them yet?” I said. “The kids?”

“No. They’re working on that now, mostly by comparing the basic physical data to what they have on file for missing kids.” Farraday gave me a grim look. “They’re assuming it’s back to the original pattern. Trafficked kids. Rural families. So it’s harder to do a DNA match or dental records. They need to narrow the pool first.”