Read Online Black On Black (Quentin Black Mystery #3) by JC Andrijeski - Free Book Online

religious somehow, with no people in them. He felt more like that now, with all the crap Lucky’s people had been shoving down his throat. He closed his eyes briefly, sunlight playing on the backside of his lids.
    He jerked awake a few seconds later, coming out of a light doze. I felt Black’s nerves ratchet higher as he used the scope again to stare down into that hollow space. I felt him holding his breath, his mind as still as a windless pond.
    He spent a lot of his time in hideaways like this since he’d gotten here.
    He’d also been shot at, more than once, by Ian, when the other seer had found him, and several times when Ian had been waiting for him before Black got set up.
    One of those got close––too close, to my mind.
    This was different than the other jobs he did for Lucky.
    Black took it more seriously, for a lot of reasons.
    I could feel glimmers of emotion off him as he held his breath, cursing himself for dozing off, for exposing himself to being shot at again. I’d already noticed that some of Black’s cockiness had dimmed in the months he’d been gone. He’d sobered in some way I still struggled to pin down––maybe partly due to what happened with Solonik in Thailand. I definitely got the sense he’d grown more cautious when it came to other seers.
    I felt whispers of his thoughts around that.
    Self-recriminations, mainly. He saw himself as having grown soft, overly complacent. He’d gotten too used to having an advantage over the people he went up against.
    Like Solonik, the seer he hunted now was older than him.
    Ian had probably fought in wars in that other world, too. Maybe dozens of them. Most seers had, especially those trained as infiltrators.
    Black had no way of knowing what kind of training Ian had received though, or anything about his background really, apart from what made it to human records on this version of Earth. Black didn’t intend to underestimate him though, like he had with Solonik.
    Lucky’s people wouldn’t tell him anything. Nothing he could believe.
    He knew the seer hated him.
    Worse––in Black’s mind, at least––the seer had a serious grudge against me.
    The main thing I felt from Black however, was that he couldn’t let Ian get too far out of his sight. He couldn’t lose track of him here, with everything else going on. Black was hyper-aware he’d left me alone in San Francisco. I felt his fears around Ian and the things he might do––to me, especially. I felt him aware of my vulnerability, with the two of us physically apart.
    It was interesting to me, in a morbid-fascination kind of way, just how different Ian looked through Black’s eyes compared to mine. More than that, it interested me just how different the situation between the three of us looked to Black than it ever had to me.
    In Black’s mind, Ian would be furious that I was with Black now.
    Black assumed that me and him being involved would be an unpardonable offense in Ian’s eyes. Really, from what I could tell from Black, it would be an unpardonable offense to any seer. Black broke some “code” seers had around sexual partners by dating me.
    He’d done it more or less knowingly too. Enough so that he felt vaguely guilty about it, if only for the danger he’d put me in.
    I still didn’t know exactly what that code entailed.
    Whatever it was, in Black’s mind, Ian killing those poor kids in Thailand had been about that. Ian killing newlyweds in Paris was about that, as well. Further, Black seemed to think Ian wouldn’t be able to let it go. Black thought Ian still wanted to kill me primarily to keep me away from him, meaning away from Black himself.
    I found that difficult to believe.
    It also didn’t explain the original murders––meaning the Wedding Murders in San Francisco. From what I could tell, Ian killed those women mainly because he resented having to marry me, likely after being ordered to do so by Lucky.
    All that started before I’d even heard of Quentin