Fourteen

HUNTING

IT WAS A strange thing, to be under Black’s control in that space.

I’d been using my psychic abilities, conscious or not, pretty much my entire life. I’d used them with my psychology clients, during the war, working for Nick with the police...as a kid in school. My sister and I used to play games with them, trying to hide thoughts from one another while the other tried any way they could to break in and “hack” the information. 

Even with my sister Zoe, though, I’d never shared that psychic space like this.

It wasn’t like what Solonik had done to me either.

Black didn’t invade my head at all, not in terms of any of my thoughts...much less anything personal. Rather, he kind of enveloped me in that space, so much so that I could barely feel myself within it. I felt Black instead, and pretty much only Black. 

As a result, I ended up more of a bystander than anything else.

I watched him work, noting how careful he was about not going too far into the parts of me that still carried a flavor of Solonik. He wrapped himself around me as he worked, thickening that feeling of a darkness that dimmed me from view, making me invisible in some way. Deadened, like how I’d felt in Solonik’s room. 

I couldn’t really follow most of it with my rational mind. 

All I knew was, at some point, and really before I knew what was happening, he’d jerked me out of my body entirely.

I found myself floating somewhere above it instead, looking down.

I could actually see the two of us in the white SUV, barreling down a freeway with greenery flowing by on either side. I could feel that we were approaching the city––even saw myself sitting between the two front seats, leaning against Black’s chair while he drove.

Some part of me wondered if this was what it felt like to be dead.

True to his word, he didn’t let me anywhere near Solonik himself.

Well, not in terms of his mind anyway.

Rather, he pulled me away from that view of the two of us in the white SUV, following what felt like a kind of trembling thread back into the city ahead of the car.

I could feel Solonik inside that trembling thread. I recognized the flavor of him somehow, although there’s no way on earth I would have been able to describe that flavor to someone using words. It was both too subtle and too complex. It was filled with too many things that didn’t have easy equivalencies in language. I would have had to describe him using other people maybe. Or memories perhaps, feelings and flavors I’d experienced over the years.

None of it would have been quite right.

He felt like himself, that was all.

Beyond the psychosis, the fear I had of him, the faint whispers of death-stench I felt around him and his coldblooded fury at Black having taken me––there was a living being there. That living being had a distinct imprint that belonged only to him.

As I thought it, I found myself noticing the same about Black.

Black’s flavor was so completely different from Solonik’s, I almost couldn’t compare the two of them. My mind looked for ways to compare them anyway, and the closest it got was by giving them each colors. Black became a deep, indigo blue with sky blue highlights, almost like living flame. Dense and warm despite the coolness of the colors, he exuded a strange feeling of safety. He also felt familiar, more so the longer I looked at him there.

Solonik was gray with fire-yellow sparks.

His colors were harder, flatter––more chaotic.

I ended up with an image of a manic firebug dancing over ashes and smoldering flames. The image jerked, distorted, like it was being warped through cracked glass.

I felt more to both of them, beyond those surface impressions––

––but Black pulled me back before I got very close.

I did my best to just be still, to watch the city as it approached.

I saw the buildings grow up around us. I saw the park where we’d been...then a film speeding up in the projector as Solonik wandered around the segment where Black had fishtailed the SUV. I saw time roll back in a jerking cadence. The gun went off in his hand as I ran, slow-motion for the open door of the white SUV. I saw Black take the bullet in the shoulder, watched him grimace in pain as he was thrown into the driver’s side window without lowering his own gun. I hit the carpet then and slammed the car door. Black stomped the accelerator, the tires smoking in those few seconds before they caught, slamming us out of there.

Time sped forward again.

I watched a distorted film of Solonik watching us drive away...could almost see the calculation on his face as he tried to decide what to do next.

Then he walked to the road.

I watched him step out into the nearest lane, his hand up towards an approaching vehicle 

Fear hit me as I saw it. I wondered if he would try to chase us––if he’d been following us all that time, a thought that hadn’t occurred to me even once since we left Solonik standing in our tracks in that park––but he didn’t. He got the driver to get out of the vehicle with a wave of the hand holding the gun. I watched the driver wander into the park in a daze as Solonik took his place in the driver’s seat.

He threw the silver BMW into gear and took off down the road in the opposite direction that me and Black had gone.

I watched him drive, somehow conscious that my eyes saw him through Black, too.

The BMW went down that wider road for several blocks, then turned left, into a smaller set of roads. I watched the car wind through the maze of streets, making more turns for a number of blocks, then it popped out on another main road, this one even larger than the first. Accelerating, Solonik drove down that road for a number of minutes, then turned at a large white building.

I felt Black’s puzzlement, minutes before I recognized the large red cross on the front of the main building, which was done in an old colonial style, although not as old as the Golden Light hotel where we’d had drinks with Anders and the others.

It wasn’t a church, I soon realized. It was a hospital.

I felt alarm from Black, but I didn’t get any specifics from him either.

I watched as Solonik parked the car by the curb right in front of the building, leaving it there with the door wide open as he walked through the sliding glass doors at the front of the hospital. A few people looked at him strangely and back at the car, but no one stopped him as he walked directly up to the front desk.

I couldn’t see or hear what he asked the woman there.

Even so, I definitely got the impression he got more information from her than what she said to him in response.

Seconds later, he walked to the elevator and boarded.

He hit a button for the eighth floor, and I realized I was watching that elevator ascend, somehow seeing him through the walls of the hospital itself, which glowed with faint transparent lines, and were invisible altogether in a number of places. I watched as he pulled a gun out of his shoulder holster, hit the button to release the magazine, and added more bullets from a pocket in his jeans to replace those he’d fired. 

As the elevator car slowed to a stop, he shoved the magazine back in and chambered a bullet. Rather than re-holster the gun as the doors opened, he pulled a silencer out of his back pocket and began screwing it onto the end of the gun. He was still working on that as he began to walk past the reception desk and down the nearest hall.

No one really looked at him, or seemed to see the gun.

I felt Black watching him, every ounce of his concentration focused.

Solonik approached a door guarded by two police officers.

He didn’t hesitate but aimed and fired, two shots each, head and heart. He didn’t slow but walked straight up to the door and opened it.

Inside, a man with gray hair jerked his eyes towards the door.

It was Lawless, sitting in a chair by a bed where a red-headed boy, maybe seven years in age, lay pale and still with his eyes closed.

Black’s presence practically suffocated me now.

I knew this was the past. I knew we were already too late, but I felt that same tension crawling over me too, making it impossible to breathe.

I saw Solonik’s mouth moving then, and realized he hadn’t yet fired.

He was talking to him. Saying something to Lawless.

Lawless’s eyes were round as saucers as he nodded. Then he was casting about, looking on trays and tables in the room, moving in a jerking kind of panic as Solonik kept his gun pointed at the boy on the hospital bed.

I saw Lawless find what he was looking for.

A pen and paper. He began to write something, running over the lines a few times to make them thicker. When he finished, he showed whatever he’d done to Solonik, who smiled.

Solonik waved the gun at him again, motioning it towards the ceiling. After a confused expression flashed across his face, Lawless held the paper up, his hands shaking slightly, so that the side he’d written on faced up.

Once he had, I could only stare.

ONE HOUR, Lawless had written, the words jagged but stark in black ink. COME TO ME, QUENTIN BLACK. COME ALONE.

BLACK HAD ALREADY hit the accelerator by the time I’d snapped fully out of the vision.

The jump in the SUV’s engine threw me against the seat, forcing me to let go of Black’s leg and grab the base of his chair instead. I was still trying to clear my eyes as the car continued to build speed. My chest hurt. I was breathing hard, fighting a kind of helpless rage that made it hard to think. It occurred to me that the rage likely came from Black too.

I could feel his thoughts now, as well.

He couldn’t bring his team into this. Solonik would have eyes on them. More than that, without knowing how he could control so many of them with his mind at once, it wasn’t safe. Solonik might turn them against us. He might get them to shoot him...or Miriam...rather than Solonik himself. Black couldn’t risk it, even if he kept them close enough to shield them.

I already knew we were going to the hospital.

I glanced up even as Black yanked a phone out of his jacket, handing it down to me as he continued to stare at the road through the windshield.

“Maps,” he said. “Find me a nearby building, Miri. Near the hospital. Same side as Lawless’s room.”

“You think he’s still there?” I said, already hitting the icon for the map program he had installed on his phone. “How long ago was that?”

“Twenty minutes,” Black growled. “He’s still there.”

I typed in the name of the hospital I remembered from the vision I’d seen as Solonik drove past the driveway. As I did, I found myself pressing closer to Black, maybe in an attempt to feel even more enveloped by that shield he still held over us.

After a few more minutes of searching, I found what he wanted.

“L-Tone Hotel,” I said. “Twenty stories. It’s directly across from the hospital on the east side, so the same side as Lawless’s room. There’s no cover, according to the satellite images.”

“Show me.”

I sent him an image of what I was looking at, and felt a reaction from him.

“Was that okay?” I said.

He nodded, once. “You’re getting good at that, Miri.”

I didn’t ask him for specifics on what he meant.

He wrenched the steering wheel to the left before I could ask him if he needed anything else, and I heard the sound of horns erupt around us as he accelerated faster. Some part of me was glad I couldn’t see what he was doing exactly. I strongly suspected he was driving on the shoulder, not in an actual lane, if not alongside the highway altogether.

I could still feel him thinking.

“We’re going to need help,” he muttered.

“What kind of help?” I said.

He didn’t answer. I saw his mouth harden though. He held out a hand then, giving me a bare glance. “You’d better give me the phone.”

Only hesitating a heart beat, I placed it in his palm. I looked up as I did it though. “Black,” I said, warning. “You were right before. About Solonik. He would know to watch your people. He’d be expecting––”

“Don’t worry, Miri.”

He was fitting a headset over his ear even as he said it. I watched him hit a key on the phone, which must be connected the headset already. After glancing at me, his attention shifted back to the road, his eyes flickering to the view out the windshield as he spoke.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s Black.” He barely paused. “I’ve got a new offer for your boss.”

I felt a whisper of some other presence around Black then and I flinched. I almost withdrew from him entirely, but Black’s fingers left the phone in his lap and coiled into my hair. I felt reassurance there, but mostly an insistence that I not move away from his mind––specifically away from the shield he held over both of us.

“...Yeah, I have her,” Black said then. “But this situation isn’t acceptable.”

There was a pause while Black listened.

He shook his head after another moment, clicking.

“No,” he said, adamant. “You promised me they’d be safe if I backed off of my operation here. You can’t take credit for her. She got out herself.” There was a short pause, then he raised his voice. “No, goddamn it. You go in there, guns blazing, and they’re both dead. Let me handle it. I’ll get him to come out in my own way.” 

There was another pause, then Black let out a humorless laugh.

“Bullshit. You still haven’t even found out––”

Someone on the other end cut him off. Black listened for a few beats more. I felt a coil of anger on him, even before he scowled.

“No,” he said. “That’s not acceptable either.”

I bit my lip in frustration, but I could neither feel nor hear what they were talking about. I strongly had the impression it had something to do with me, though.

“Look,” Black said then. “What if I got him to turn himself in to you? He walks out of there, away from Lawless and his kid, you can do whatever the fuck you want.”

There was another silence while he listened to the response on the other end.

“Yes,” Black growled. “I already said I’d do that if you agreed to my terms. Nothing’s changed.” His voice grew into another warning. “But that’s the end of this. She’s no risk to you. I want her left alone after this. I let the thing with the kids go. I’ll let the rest go too, if you’ll agree to that. I want your boss’s word.”

I bit my lip, fighting to remain silent.

There was another long moment where Black didn’t talk, then he nodded, his mouth grim.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said.

Seconds later, he hung up.

“What was that all about?” I said, my voice short.

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter right now, Miri,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter?” I said, incredulous. “Who was that?”

“Anders,” Black said, giving me a warning look.

“Did you make another deal with those assholes?”

“You don’t need to worry about that right now, Miri,” he said, his voice sharper. “We’ll talk about it later. In the meantime, we need to take care of this, okay?”

Before I could speak again, he dialed a new number on his phone. He spoke into the headset again as soon as that person picked up.

“Fah?” he said. “It’s Black. I need you to arrange something for me.”

I let out a low snort. When he glanced down, I shook my head.

“Translator, my ass,” I muttered.

He didn’t answer, but I saw him frown.

“Yeah,” he said into the headset. “It has to happen now.”

A memory reached my mind, of the woman’s silky black hair, her flawless face and lips as she stood waiting for me outside the airport’s baggage claim. I found myself remembering that Black had been sleeping with people since he’d been out here. For the first time, it occurred to me that Fah might have been one of those people.

Black gave me a darting glance, right before his eyes flickered back to the road.

“...The silver case in my closet,” he said into the headset. “Yes. L-Tune Hotel. The lobby.” There was a pause. “Yes. The long one. You can’t miss it. I need the leather bag in there too, the one with the red handles.” Another pause. “You shouldn’t have to ask anyone. Just go to my room...you have a keycard already.” He paused again. “Well, I authorized them to give you one before. If they give you any trouble, have them call me...”

He must have sensed my reaction to that, because he glanced at me again. He focused back on the phone, his voice openly warning. 

“...No. Not a fucking word. Not to Farraday, either. Get one of the hotel staff to help you. Or ask Bia if he’ll do it.”

Another pause.

“Thanks, Fah. Yes...perfect.”

Black hit the button to hang up the phone. I watched him pull the headset off his ear and toss it on the dash.

Then he hit the gas harder.

Now was definitely not the time to grill him about his sex life.

Even so, something about the thought made me pull my hand from his leg. I leaned against the base of his chair instead, pulling my feet around with a grimace as I looked at my blood-covered shoe. I felt more than saw Black notice.

“We’ll get that taken care of, doc,” he murmured.

I didn’t answer.

I contemplated taking off the shoe, then decided it would be better to wait. Wherever he was going inside the L-Tune hotel, I knew without asking that I would be going with him. 

“Doc...” he began, sighing. “Me and Fah––”

“Please don’t tell me,” I said, shaking my head. “Please.”

I felt him hesitate, then exhale again.

Then we were driving faster.