Page 98 of Black to Light

“No one on record, sir,” Vixen repeated.

As if they’d coordinated this, Rafe jumped in.

“We’d like to start running scenarios for tonight,” he added. “Unless there’s something else you want us doing to find the shooter?”

Heads nodded around the room.

Black grunted, not without a tinge of dark humor.

It was funny almost, how much easier a lot of the humans on his team found it to pair with seers these days. He knew the Old World seers had done what they could to make that easier for them. They dressed more human now, wore their hair human, spoke English most of the time, and even other human languages. A number of seers, like Vixen, also changed their names to sound less alien to the humans here. It wasn’t only Kiessa, although her name change might be one of the strangest.

Rafe’s seer name had been Wurai.

Sutech now called himself “Sully.”

Zairei now called himself “Zach.”

Black hadn’t ordered them to do that. Really, he hadn’t even mentioned it as a suggestion. It was something they’d all decidedto do on their own. More of the seers on his infiltration team were wearing contact lenses around their human counterparts, too.

Rafe was one of those who didn’t bother, but his eyes were less dramatic compared to a lot of seers. They didn’t freak humans out like Zach’s, for example, who had two different colored eyes, one silver and the other pale blue, each dramatic and inhuman on their own. Or Sully’s, which were bright sunset colors, and didn’t look human, either.

Black appreciated them making the effort.

At the same time, he hoped it was only a transitional thing.

The contact lenses, in particular, were fucking irritating.

“Let me see it first,” he said to Rafe. “I want to see the shadow.”

The seer nodded obligingly and connected him to the digital video of one of the sightings. He then added the Barrier recordings he’d made during one of his jumps, so that the layers overlapped, and Black could see both.

They showed him the nighttime one first.

Probably because he knew to look for it, Black saw it right off; he picked up the shadow even in the raw recording, which had to be where Dex first noticed it. Black studied the strangealeimicsignature connected to the being standing there. He immediately saw what Rafe and the other seers were talking about.

The light there had been completely snuffed out.

It was shielded to the point of being nearly invisible.

The Barrier recording showed where birds startled out of the shadow’s way, mice and voles avoided its footsteps, a squirrel hung upside down from a tree, flicking its tail and staring right at where the shadow was. Bees flew around it, as did butterflies, dragonflies, another cluster of birds, while a cloud of gnats swarmed closer, intrigued.

When Rafe paused the frame, the outline of the shadow grew even more stark.

Still, that lack ofaleimicfootprint was even more jarring.

Only a astoundingly talented seer could have gone that dark.

If Black’s eyes couldn’t make out the human-shaped shadow caught on the tree and ground, or see a hint of its fingers as they wrapped around the trunk, he might have thought it was a stone statue, or a trick of the light.

Black couldn’t have done that, not even while he was Dragon.

He couldn’t have shielded that completely.

Which was the exact reason for everyone’s hesitancy.

If itwasa seer, the individual was formidable.

But the very fact ofhowformidable made Black question whether it was a human with an implant, instead. After all, wasn’t that the more likely scenario? Just how many unknown seers were kicking around who’d been trained to Adhipan-like levels of skill?

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