Page 9

He was waiting for it to bereallyfinished.

Something about that explanation didn’t quite sit right with him, either, though.

His mind fell on the espresso machine he’d shelled out a ridiculous amount of money for, all so he could put it in the brand new break room of the newly-designed business suite. It hadn’t been wholly about espresso, not even aboutreally fucking amazingespresso.

Lately, nothing ever seemed to be about just one thing.

The imported, Italian-made espresso machine was no exception. The brass and chrome monstrosity made dangerously, decadently strong and rich coffee drinks, which had been Black’s purported reason for buying it, but Black bought the thing off the estate of his friend, Cal, after he’d diedroughly nine months ago. It used to live inside Cal’s Italian restaurant in North Beach, where Cal also worked as head chef.

Black bought it and put it in storage when the restaurant had their going-out-of-business-because-the-owner-is-dead-by-possibly-supernatural-means auction.

Black had it installed in the main break room California Street Building during the remodel, partly to lure Miri back to working here, partly because he was a massive coffee snob who preferred making his own to most coffee shops, and partly from a more sentimental wish to have something in the office to remember his friend, which is why he’d bid on the damned thing in the first place.

Cal had been a coffee snob, too. They used to joke about it.

He knew Cal’s death was one of the things he was struggling with still.

He also knew that was only a fraction of it.

His nightmares were back.

Brick throwing him in that prison a few years back had returned to his dreams. What Nick had done to Miri while he’d been a newborn vampire had returned to his nightmare rotation, too. Miri being kidnapped by those Russian gangsters. Cal dying.

Feeling really fuckingresponsiblefor Cal dying.

And those were only the most recent things.

He was dreaming about Old Earth again.

He was dreaming about his family… his childhood… those years of living enslaved on a different version of Earth, even a different version of San Francisco. He’d been struggling to evenbein certain parts of San Francisco lately, particularly Nob Hill and parts of downtown, where he would get occasional flashbacks of a mirror image of the city he’d now known for most of his life.

That had never been a problem before.

He’d thought he’d been thumbing his nose to all of that, establishing his primary business offices in San Francisco in the first place.

But now, more than seventy years later, he was suddenly having a problem with it.

He’d even considered moving his flagship offices somewhere else.

Rationally, he knew it would be better to work through his issues like an adult, not attempt to bury them again by wasting another shit-ton of money, moving his offices somewhere else, only to realize the problems had followed him to the new location. He really should start seeing a shrink, if he could find one he wasn’t married to that was worth half a damn.

Some part of him was resistant to going to therapy, though, too.

With that Dragon fuck gone, Charles’ anti-human seers gone, Brick essentially gone, shouldn’t he get torelaxfor a while?

Why was it all hitting him so hardnow?

And why indi'lanlente a' guetewas he suddenly remembering so much?

Why was it suddenly crystal clear in his mind’s eye, the exact moment his father jovially clapped him on the shoulder for the last time and told him he’d get to live a life full of adventure? Black now had full, surround-sound, perfect recall of every day and moment he’d endured while he’d been owned as a slave. He remembered all the degrading and morally shady shit he’d done, just to stay alive. He remembered the fights in the pens, the beatings, the shit he’d done to humans and other seers, the shit he’d let others do to him.

He remembered everything.

Why couldn’t that Dragon fuck have takenthatcrap with him?

Black knew why, though; those things hadn’t belonged to the Dragon being.

They belonged to Black. They werehislife.