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THE REWIND

“ Y ou’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, he didn’t recognize 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 definitely was grateful 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.

He should be more relaxed by now.

He should be easing into this.

It had been almost two years since that crazy shit went down in Saratoga, and around eighteen months since they got back from New York and then Fiji. Why did it feel like he’d been walking around in a daze, only half-awake, for all that time? Somewhere in that bizarre fugue state that Miri seemed to have fallen into as well, they’d slowly found themselves in a genuinely new world. While that world might look like their old world in a lot of ways, it felt very, very different.

Black was back to being who he’d been before Charles and Brick derailed his life, for good but mostly for ill.

He’d stepped out of the limelight, stepped back into the shadows.

He was human again… as far as the rest of the world was concerned.

Eccentric, sure. A little unusual in terms of his looks, and his tendency to not visibly age. Rich to the point of being highly suspect, probably a bit shady on the business side, definitely overly connected to the military and the government.

But definitely, definitely human.

He might be freakishly good at anticipating the ups and downs of the stock market––he’d already gotten a friendly visit from the S.E.C. last month to make sure he wasn’t engaging in fraud or insider trading––and he might be overly brusque and standoffish when it came to his peers. He was a bit of a dark horse when it came to his motives, and often overlooked by most in his income bracket for that reason. He didn’t vie for power or political advantage along with the rest of them, or have any presence on social media.

He also wasn’t part of the Silicon Valley weirdo squad, and had zero interest in them.

No one really knew where his money went.

No one knew exactly how much he had.

But he was one hundred percent human, and no one would suggest otherwise.

Everyone absolutely agreed on that.

Of course, regarding his money, Black might need to find a few more pet projects to make real use of it now that Charles and Brick were gone. An enormous chunk of his hoard already went to various humanitarian and environmental projects around the globe; he didn’t need anywhere near as much for himself with Charles gone and the vampires mostly gone, too, and with fewer reasons to look for stray members of his own kind.

He still got the occasional request for an interview.

He still had the occasional profile done on him.

But Black was a fairly boring subject these days, and he intended to keep it that way. He’d deliberately allowed himself to be eclipsed by far more colorful, outrageous, and out-there characters who used their money in ways that got them more clicks and buzz and fake fainting spells from the media.

He still got calls from the police, the F.B.I., Homeland Security, and even the Treasury Department for law enforcement consulting work. He knew he might get calls from the military or the C.I.A. at some point, too, if any of the Admiral’s old pals thought to look him up.

Conspiracy theories about him and his company would persist, at least for a few more years. Most of them were bullshit, anyway, but only because the real conspiracies had been wiped away as part of their clean-up project post-Charles. Those conspiracy nuts who thrived in the dark corners of the web had no way of knowing who or what he was, or understanding it, even if they did know. They definitely had no way to act on it.

Black suspected he would never lose his notoriety entirely, but he could quash any truly threatening pockets that might emerge, well before they gained real traction.

The clean-up was mostly done now.

Black still had a handful of resources devoted to the project, led by Manny and Yarli. They’d been tasked with shutting down anything that wavered too close to the truth, erasing and destroying evidence, finding and emptying old facilities, removing any and all seer tech.

Most of their work now consisted of selectively erasing memories and collecting caches of physical artifacts left over from the war with Charles: photos, video, audio, and other files stored outside the cloud and on private servers, hand-written accounts and private journals, sketches and blueprints for biotech, drugs created from non-human blood, any lab notes or prototypes they might have missed.

His team still found blood and other bio-samples on occasion, too, although that had grown increasingly rare.

They’d even found one actual seer, who’d been passing as human.

Yarli spoke to them, gave them Black’s card in case they ever needed or wanted their help, then left them the fuck alone to live their life, where they’d married a human and seemed to be enjoying a pleasant existence in Zurich.

Most of Manny and Yarli’s work had been far less pleasant.

Over the year and a half they’d confiscated entire freezer units filled with nothing but seer and vampire organs, tissue samples, blood, and other body parts. They’d found safes with prototypes and external drives filled with specs and experiments, and even seer texts transcribed in the original Prexci. They’d erased DNA maps, virtual body scans, photographs of autopsies, and a few thousand other information caches someone might conceivably find and use.

They’d never get all of it, of course.

There’d always be video out there, written materials, audio files, even a few organic machines. That didn’t even get into the biological remnants of the seer and vampire dead, which were likely scattered in unmarked graves across every continent of the world.

Not everyone would forget, either.

But Charles had laid the groundwork already, mostly be destroying or cutting off any human labs that had begun looking into either vampires or seers or both. He’d done a lot of the work erasing top scientists working on such projects, destroying bio-matter and collecting and hoarding technology related to suppressing seer or vampire powers.

Enough was gone now that they could contain it.

They’d already spun all the highly-publicized stories as a massive global hoax.

It sounded crazy.

To the average human, the truth sounded completely nuts.

Black and his people were definitely using that, and would continue to use it.

Making people feel foolish for even asking the question was a surprisingly powerful tool, and shut ninety percent of the inquiries down. It was also the path of least resistance. They went with the most obvious, believable spin in their (very expensive) media and online blitzkrieg to suppress the damage the last few years had done: a highly-elaborate and well-coordinated hoax by hostile foreign powers trying to destabilize the U.S.A.

It worked beyond Black’s wildest hopes. For the first time, he truly understood how easy it was to fool people who desperately wanted to be fooled.

No one wanted to believe that crazy, terrifying shit.

No one wanted to hear that human beings might not be the smartest, strongest, most aw-inspiring, and most dangerous species on Earth.

Black used a good chunk of his accumulated wealth to give the human race a compelling reason to breathe a big, collective sigh of relief that none of it had been true after all. He had his seers work overtime to erase prominent media personages, and, perhaps more importantly, to give them a new story to tell… an easier, more digestible story.

A much more comforting story.

He had his people do the same with important people in the military, government, and scientific communities. He even tweaked the story of some conspiracy theorists, online influencers, and podcasters with big followings.

All of them had been singing some variation of the same tune for months now.

As they did, the rest of the human world gradually calmed the fuck down.

Important people were telling them everything was all right. Important people assured them everything they’d feared was all bullshit.

The sheer weight of that consensus made it far, far easier for the vast majority of them to ignore evidence that might have a bit more heft to it.

Luckily, every big, public incident with the dragons and Charles and the vampires occurred in the United States. The ground they’d had to cover in terms of actual, in-person witnesses was smaller than it might have been, as a result.

Black had been questioned, of course.

He still had enough contacts at the Pentagon that he’d been able to spin himself as a kind of innocent bystander of the whole thing––the focus of a conspiracy theory that got completely out of hand once foreign agents began intentionally amplifying the hysteria. He cooperated fully, erased and modified memories the whole time he was under interrogation, and walked out of there with a whistle on his lips and a spring in his step.

The biggest hurdle had been hunting down all of Charles’ genetics labs.

Charles had been much better at hiding things than his human counterparts.

Last time Black talked to Manny, he got an estimate of four to six months to complete their sweep. They’d been all over the world, tracking down those sites. Most recently, the team had been in Hawaii, making sure they’d removed all trace of everything that went down there. From what Manny said, they’d be heading to the Mexican desert next, then a potential lab site in Ukraine.

It wasn’t a small job.

It might never be finished entirely.

So maybe that explained it, Black thought.

Maybe that’s why he still didn’t feel quite relaxed and at peace in his new digs. Maybe that’s why he didn’t feel wholly at ease about returning to work.

He was waiting for it all to be finished.

He was waiting for it to be really finished.

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 about really fucking amazing espresso.

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 died roughly 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 fucking responsible for 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 even be in 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 to relax for a while?

Why was it all hitting him so hard now?

And why in di'lanlente a' guete was 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 taken that crap with him?

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

They belonged to Black. They were his life.

Those had been his decisions. They were his memories.

Gaos, he really needed to talk to the doc. He needed to cut the shit and own up to his goddamned wife about just how much had come back, not to mention how it was affecting him. She definitely knew something was going on; hell, they shared a bed. She’d heard and seen him thrashing around, fighting, waking up with cold sweats, unable to breathe.

Why was he being such a coward about telling her how bad it was?

What the hell was making him balk?

She would understand. Hell, she’d probably be relieved. It wasn’t only him who went through a major metamorphosis eighteen months ago. She’d gone through it, too.

She’d also lost friends, and even family, that she’d never properly grieved.

She’d been attacked and kidnapped and hurt and her mate had been kidnapped and attacked and hurt and both of them had their hearts broken and had hurt one another. He’d buried all of it under the shell of needing to run a war and not having time or the emotional bandwidth to do much else apart from that. She’d likely done the same.

But they didn’t have that excuse anymore.

It had been almost two years; he didn’t even have the excuse of waiting for the dust to settle. Manny and Yarli were almost done with their end of things.

He wondered if he’d never really learned how to deal with his emotions in an adult way. That fucking “Dragon” thing just burned through emotional traumas and pain without being particularly invested in them, and shunted aside any inconvenient feelings or mental-scarring when they overly impacted his ability to function.

That part of him had never been particularly empathetic.

It hadn’t been interested in emotions at all, including his.

The Dragon’s views on Miriam and his marriage had surprisingly not been what he’d thought at the time, either.

In general, he increasingly suspected The Dragon constituted more of a full-blown parasite than he’d fully realized. It had never been a true part of Black’s mind, much less his heart. Rather, it manipulated his thoughts and feelings to get what it wanted. It overwhelmed parts of him, buried things it didn’t like or didn’t find useful, numbed traumas without resolving them, and stunted Black’s ability to process a hell of a lot, or at least to process them in a healthy way. Black now felt like he’d been toyed with.

He’d been far more of a fucking puppet than he’d ever realized.

He wondered if Miri felt like that, too.

“Boss?” Kiko quirked an eyebrow at him until he glanced up.

She was still standing there.

She’d been standing there that whole time.

“Shall I send the two suits away?” She sounded puzzled now, verging on concerned.“Do you want me to tell them we’re not open for business yet? They’re pretty adamant they won’t let anyone else take their information.”

Black frowned. “Did they give you anything at all?”

“Not really. Just names––”

“Which are?”

She flinched at his directness, but answered at once.

“Mr. Gold and Ms. Silver.”

There was a silence. Then Black snorted humorlessly.

“Great.”

“You think they know about Manny’s project?” Kiko asked cautiously.

Black considered that. “Did you have Jax check them out?”

“He didn’t get anything.” She paused, clearly waiting for direction. “Did you want me to send them away? Or not?”

Black exhaled, mostly in irritation.

He tried to think it through rationally, and not through the lens of everything that had just gone through his mind. He wanted to talk to his wife, but she was likely busy now, anyway.

His little epiphany would have to wait.

“No,” he said, decisive.

He should probably check this out, for a lot of reasons.

It could be a threat. Or, if it did turn out to be a potential government client, it could be a way to strengthen those ties, and keep things friendly with the humans in charge here. There was a reason he’d chosen to involve himself with the military when he first arrived on this world.

He never again wanted to be entirely on the outside, looking in.

Not after being literal property on the world of his birth.

Dealing with these people personally would be a fuck of a lot more efficient than sending them away and having his team research them from afar. It would also be a lot more productive than whatever he was doing now, staring at his desk like a gaos- damned zombie.

He firmed his jaw, and met Kiko’s gaze.

“I’ll take it,” he grumbled. “But only if you make me a real fucking coffee, Kiks. You know. From the six-thousand-dollar espresso maker I got you whining, prima donna fucks to shut you up about what a tight-ass I supposedly am.”

Kiko’s lips twitched. “Sure thing, boss.”

He grunted. “Then do that. And tell Mr. and Mrs. Fake Name I’m on my way.”