Page 7 of Black to Light

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 mightlooklike 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,definitelyhuman.

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 wasone hundred percenthuman, and no one would suggest otherwise.

Everyone absolutely agreed onthat.

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 notorietyentirely,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 getallof it, of course.

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