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Something spiritual, perhaps, like when he last did L.S.D.

There was a strange sensation of pressure. His ears rang. Color and light exploded behind his eyes. He felt himself moving backwards, possibly even very rapidly, but he felt weightless, and it didn’t hurt.

The sound echoed only after it was done.

It filled his ears, rolling, thunder-like.

It lingered there, an echoing report that blanked out all thought in his highly exceptional mind. Sunlight flashed despite the darkness of the night. Everything went very very bright, like the sun had come out only for him, only inside his mind. He imagined himself looking into it. He imagined some meaning there.

Then, the light of that sun began to fade.

Lucian Ward Rucker… “Luc” to the media and to absolutely none of his friends, as for years and years he’d felt he didn’t really have any, a thought that made him sad sometimes at night, although he never would have admitted it… lost the light of that shocking sun.

He fell into darkness and silence and oblivion so effortlessly and uneventfully, it was as if he’d never existed at all.

2

THE REWIND

“You’ve got people waiting for you.” Kiko hung on the doorjamb, looking him over where he sat sprawled in a custom-made office chair behind a desk made of part of an airplane wing.

“Two of them,” Kiko added, a faint smirk on her lips. “Potential clients. Wearing remarkably decent suits. They’ll only talk to you.”

When this failed to get his attention, she cocked her head.

“If it wasn’t for the suits, I’d get an official vibe, boss,” she ventured next. “Government, maybe. Maybe F.B.I. But then… those suits. Really nice. Too nice for Feds.”

Black still didn’t look up.

He heard her, sort of, but he hadn’t stopped staring at his desk and the stacks of paper covering it. He stared at the brand-new computer and felt like he didn’t recognize any of it.

But then, hedidn’trecognize it, really.

They’d redone the entire suite… the entire building, really… gutted it from the inside out. It felt like the only thing to do, given what Black had done to the place over the past few years,thinking he would be fighting a full-on war for the conceivable future.

A war that was now over.

Which he should be grateful for.

Which he definitelywasgrateful for… only, he wasn’t entirely used to it yet.

In his business’ main business offices, here on California Street in San Francisco, they’d bought all new furniture and equipment, moved walls, painted, reorganized all the cubicles and offices and conference rooms, torn down the fencing on the roof, repainted the helipad and updated all of the security systems to make them slightly more sane, and a lot less lethal.

His personal office, the room where he sat now, had moved to an entirely different part of the suite. He still had the view over the Bay, but he could now see the suite’s reception desk, and the office manager, Lizbeth, if he changed the shade setting on the glass.

About the only thing he’d kept was the prow-shaped design and the massive copper doors leading into the suite’s lobby. Those had sentimental value, and had been designed by a friend.

Still… new beginnings and all that.

Everyone needed and wanted a clean slate.

The past however-many years of San Francisco being under siege had been over so fast, none of them had time to even process it, really. Charles and his cabal of anti-human seers disappeared, the vampires soon followed, (if in a far less permanent way)––and now, well, everything felt really damned quiet.

It was eerily fucking quiet.

Black might be in a state of mild shock.

They were just a business again. He was just a P.I. again, with the occasional security gig from whoever could afford his services for that kind of thing, which wasn’t many.