Page 97 of Black to Light

He had them looking for the shooter, since they were pretty much ready to go for the Prometharis thing that night. Black needed something, anything to go on, in order to track him.

Right now, he had diddly-squat.

Worse, the best infiltrator he had was in the midst of adugra a’ kitrenervous breakdown. Despite what he’d told Jem,Black absolutelydidn’twant Jem to quit. It wasn’t until now, when the older seer decided to become fucking useless for the indeterminate future, that Black realized just how much he’d grown to depend on him.

Dex cleared his throat, drawing Black’s eyes.

“We’ve got something on the surveillance at Rucker’s house,” Dex said. “It looks like his security team missed it.”

Black walked over to where Dex and Rafe sat as a paired team.

He looked at Rafe, then back at Dex. “When?”

“Three days ago, boss,” Dex said.

Rafe chimed in. “I’m not surprised they missed it. It’s a fucking miracle Dexter noticed the nighttime one, just with his eyes. But we were able to find a second incident during the day after we nailed down that first one.”

The green flecks in Rafe’s dark-brown eyes shone in the overhead lights.

“Dex was the first one to notice anything,” Rafe said, a little proudly, maybe because Dex was his partner. “Even with four of us looking at the same tapes, he saw the flicker in a night camera, something the rest of us dismissed as an insect or a flash of light. Then Sully glimpsed a light shadow in the backyard cams, not far from the pool. We did time jumps to verify both, then looked for other angles and managed to piece together their rough movements. Someone was definitely watching the house, boss. At least a few days. Whoever it was, they were shielded tight as a drum. That’s why it didn’t come up in the original scans or time jumps. I only found them through secondary sources.”

Rafe let out a faint laugh, glancing at Dex, who grunted back at him.

“Mostly by the reactions of birds,” Rafe said, looking back at Black. “And a few other animals in the garden. We tried toget a camera angle on the intruder, but no luck. They definitely did surveillance prior to getting that close. They knew how to avoid every camera, even the hidden ones. The dogs didn’t bark, either.”

“Seer?” Black asked.

Rafe shrugged. “That, or the dogs already knew them.”

“I meant with thealeimi,”Black clarified.

“Well, we thought they might have had the implant,” Rafe hazarded. “We were holding off on calling their race until we knew for sure.”

A.J. added sourly, from a nearby station, “None of the seers want to call it, but the dog thing definitely makesmethink seer. If the dogs knew whoever it was, at least one of them would go up to the person, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t ignore them entirely. And a dog’d bark at a vampire. I remember Nick saying that once.”

“Panther adores Nick,” Sully pointed out.

“Nick’s a freak,” Javier said. “A.J. meantnormalvampires.”

A few people in the bullpen chuckled.

“One of them came during the day,” Alisha said, from another desk, her eyes still fixed on her own screen. “So probably not a vampire.”

“It could be one of Rucker’s people.” Dex looked up at Black. “Or they could have drugged the dogs. We need to know more about that tech, boss. Otherwise we’re just speculating. We don’t even know if it was the same person both times.”

Black scowled.

He appreciated the team’s thoroughness, but he got why A.J. was annoyed, too. It wasprobablya seer, but they couldn’t call it with the same certainty they would have a week ago. It all came back to those damned implants. Holo was looking at the one they’d brought back from Rucker’s place, but Holo had beenwaiting for Jem, and now Jem was bloody useless for that, too. Fucking unbelievable.

Kiessa, a female seer who now went by “Vixen” for some inexplicable reason, looked over at Black from her own console.

“We went through all the known contractors for a professional hit, boss,” she said, matter-of-fact. “That excludes a lot of people, of course, including probably half of Archangel, but we’ve managed to account for the whereabouts of the rest. Like you asked, we took a closer look at anyone on record who could’ve conceivably made a shot like that.”

“You mean humans,” Black clarified.

“Yes,” Vixen affirmed.

“None of them could have done it?”

---