Lover Arisen, page 10
The demon started to laugh, although the sound was ugly because she couldn’t breathe.
“I… will… tell…” She hauled in some air and met Lassiter’s strange, odd-color eyes with her own. “… the Creator.”
After a glare session that would have melted paint off a wall—assuming the angel’s temper didn’t blow the whole house down—the ace in her pocket worked. The heat and the pressure were sucked back in a retraction, and then he dropped the psychic connection bullshit.
His voice had more depth than when it had been willed into her head. “Go to Him. Tell Him everything. You entered Balthazar’s soul without permission when he was in the transition between life and death. You’re in the wrong. You stepped over the line and you’re going to have to explain yourself if you bring me to His attention.”
Devina swept her hands up from her waist and tugged the bustier into place, her breasts aching in their whalebone cage. “How do you know I wasn’t invited by Balthazar?”
“Because he wants you the fuck out of him.”
“Lovers’ spat, and yet you’re treating it like domestic violence.”
“Get out of him.”
With an arched brow, Devina smoothed her hair and then once again ran her fingertips over her cleavage. As she imagined the angel’s mouth on her breasts, his tongue licking at her nipples, she was aware of a stinging need inside of her.
“You want me to leave that vampire alone?” She straightened off the pylon and took three steps forward, closing the distance between their bodies. “That’s what you want?”
God, the angel smelled incredible. Like fresh air and sunshine, even though the two of them were standing in the middle of a debris field of filth and human waste and river mud.
When she went to put her hand on his chest, he slapped a hold on her wrist. “Yes, demon. That’s what I want.”
Devina focused on the angel’s mouth and then licked her lips. “Fine. But you have to give me something I want.”
“I don’t have to give you shit—”
“Yes, you do. You’re stuck because you have no leverage. You see, if you try to turn me in with the Creator, you’re also going to have to explain yourself. And you can’t compel me, only He can. So you need to give me something and I’ll bet if you think really hard…” She bit her lower lip with her sharp, white teeth. Then hissed a little as she slipped her free hand inside the cup of her bustier. “I think you’ll figure out what it is.”
Lassiter’s gleaming stare narrowed. “I’m not fucking you.”
With a quick yank, she ripped her arm out of his hold. “Then I have no incentive to leave Balthazar and we have nothing to discuss. Have a good night, angel.”
Blowing Lassiter a kiss, she took off.
And she was smiling as she ghosted out.
CHAPTER NINE
Over on Market Street, about fifteen blocks away from the bridge, Erika’s unmarked rolled to a stop in front of a graffiti-covered walk-up that was battened down like its inhabitants expected a siege. The windows on all four levels were boarded over with plywood, and makeshift bars were screwed in on top of those sheets. The inset entry door was a solid steel panel that was totally at odds with the old brick building, and she half expected to see a sentry patrolling the rooftop.
As she got out, she glanced across the four lanes of no-traffic. Back about ten years ago, this end of Market had all kinds of local restaurants, hair salons, and tattoo parlors. It hadn’t been ritzy, but there had been plenty of going concerns. Now, the businesses had been deserted and the residences were either defended like this one or taken over by squatters after being condemned by the city.
Closing her door and locking everything, she went around the back of her vehicle and hopped up onto the sidewalk. With a dodge to the left, she squeezed by a rubbish bin that was bolted into the concrete. The thing was overflowing, the ring of litter around its base making her think of the wastepaper basket under her desk with all of her near-miss Post-it notes.
There were five cracked steps up to that steel door, and it went without saying that there wasn’t an intercom system she could buzz the third floor on—
As she gave the heavy panel a test-tug, she was surprised to find the thing loose in its reinforced jambs.
“Hello?” she called into the dim interior.
Stepping inside, she wrinkled her nose. They’d been cooking meth here—and recently. The chemicals in the air made her eyes water and her throat instantly irritated. Coughing into her elbow, she undid the buttons on both her coat and her blazer so she had access to her service weapon.
Just in case the chefs were still on duty.
The building’s layout was as she’d remembered, the stairwell on the right against the wall, the apartment doors on the left, one per floor. She thought about announcing herself, but she wasn’t here to make arrests.
The steps creaked as she went up, and every time they did, she looked behind herself. Shadows. So many shadows.
“Get a grip,” she said under her breath.
Up on the third floor, she paused—and then broke away from the staircase to go to the sole door on the little hallway. The thing had hunks out of its boards, like somebody had gone after it with a hammer, and most of its paint—red, it seemed—had flaked off, the wood underneath stained with dirt and filth from decades of no cleaning and lots of hard living.
“Connie?” she said as she went to knock. “It’s me, Erika…”
The door opened a crack as her knuckles made contact, and unlike everything else in the building, the hinges were silent, having been oiled. The smell that was released was bad… but it didn’t carry with it that telltale death stench. There was garbage, yes, but no rotting human remains.
Fresh kills didn’t smell like that, though.
“Connie?” Adding some more volume, she called out, “Connie, it’s me, Erika.”
Out of habit, she did some quick math on whether she had probable cause to enter the premises, but then again, if anything had happened to the woman, Olyn was by far the most likely aggressor and it wasn’t like they could prosecute Olyn from the grave.
“I’m just here to check on you, Connie…” she said.
The living area was cluttered with weeks-old pizza boxes, empty two-liter Mountain Dew bottles, and dirty clothes. A faded sofa was off-kilter, its front right foot busted, and a chipped coffee table was splintered down the middle, yet pushed together. Like whoever had broken it had tried to put it to rights.
Most likely, Olyn had slammed something into it, and Connie had been the fixer. Which was the bandwidth of their relationship, as far as Erika had seen.
“Connie?”
A filthy kitchen was next in the lineup of the long and narrow apartment, and it was clear things had degenerated in the three months since Erika had paid her last visit. Underfoot, plastic food containers crackled and crunched, and the smell was like a restaurant dumpster on a hot August night: With the windows all boarded up and the radiators pumping out heat, the flat was an incubator for spoiled meat, milk, cheese, and whatever else.
The far side of the kitchen put her by the bathroom, and as she leaned into the cramped space, she checked the tub, which was stained but not with blood, as well the shower stall, which was the same.
It was as she went farther down the hall toward the bedroom that she caught the undercurrent in the air.
Beneath the garbage stink… there was blood.
For the second time in one evening, she had to brace herself before entering a stranger’s sleeping space, and as she pushed open the half-closed door, she—
Erika froze. Caught her breath. Then threw a hand out for something, anything, to keep her on her feet.
“It’s… you,” she breathed.
* * *
At the sound of the female voice, Balz looked up from his kneeling position by a dead woman on a bare floor mattress. When he saw who was standing in between the jambs of the victim’s room, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Then again, that made two of them. His homicide detective—not that she was his—seemed equally poleaxed at his presence, the pair of them locking eyes and sharing a common astonishment.
She recovered first, shaking her head like she was trying to rattle loose some rationality in the middle of something that made no sense to her. “What are you doing here?”
And then she was groaning and putting a hand to her temple. The obvious pain she felt made him wince in sympathy, and God, he hated that he had stolen anything from her.
Kind of ironic for a thief, he thought.
“Hi,” he said softly. “It’s good to see you again—and no, I didn’t kill her. I came to see if I could help.”
As Erika Saunders looked down and opened her mouth, he didn’t really want to hear how there was no way she’d believe a piece of shit like him. But that wasn’t what came out at him.
“Oh, Connie,” she whispered in a sad way. “Shit.”
The woman he had watched at her desk earlier in the night entered the squalid bedroom on feet that were silent and careful. When she got to the mattress, she, too, kneeled down, one hand coming up to hold her chin, the other resting on her knee.
Her hazel eyes roamed around the bloody remains, seeing everything he had—and maybe more because this was her profession.
“I don’t think she suffered much,” he said dully. “That puncture through the heart… it happened fast.”
“Actually, she suffered mostly by being alive. Oh… Connie.”
The hand that was on her chin moved down to below her collarbone and she seemed to massage an ache there.
He wanted to tell her that the knife was in the kitchen, in the sink, where that piece of shit down by the bridge had gone to wash the blood off his hands. Balz also wanted to tell her that he was sorry the woman had died, even though he hadn’t known her. And that he was sorry this was obviously so hard to see.
Then again, it was a dead human, and Erika clearly had a heart. How could it not be hard?
As a period of quiet stillness seemed to permeate the whole building, he had to look away because he felt as though he were intruding on a private moment. Unfortunately, the body was the only other thing to really look at, and he saw what he had walked in on with fresh eyes: The victim was lying faceup, in the position that Balz had found her in. She was wearing blue jeans that had rips in both knees, a t-shirt that seemed way too thin for the season, and nothing on her feet. Her blond hair, which had a brassy tone to the frizzy ends and two inches of dark regrowth, was matted with blood that had darkened from bright crimson to black. The face was so bruised and swollen, the features were unclear, and the mortal wound, that penetration in the center of the chest, had bled so extensively that half of the mattress underneath was showing the stain.
“Why did you come here?”
At the sound of the brisk voice, his head came up, and as he met those hazel eyes again, it was clear his detective’s professional composure was back in place. No more sadness in her eyes or her expression; she was all business.
“Do you know them?” she prompted. “Connie and her boyfriend.”
“In a way.”
“And what way is that?”
God… even though this was definitely not the place, and completely not the time, he wanted her—and part of the attraction was the power in her. There was no come-hither bullshit, no flirtatious eyelash batting or that awful pet-the-hair-and-preen stuff. Nope, this woman was like a water cannon, hitting him with the force of her intelligence, her try-me-if-you-dare, her confidence. And what do you know, she blew him out of his boots.
“So how do you know them?” she repeated.
Yup, she was going to make him answer that—and his explanation, that he’d read a man’s mind and saw that he’d hurt his girlfriend, was not going to make her happy. Oh, and then there was the fun fact that he had cocaine in his jacket, unregistered guns under both arms, and a matched set of steel poke-and-tickles strapped to his chest.
But hey, as penetrating as that stare of hers was, at least he knew it didn’t detect metal. Important tip.
“From the street,” he said. “That’s how.”
When she rose to her full height, he did the same—and she had to tilt her head up to look at his face. “You’re a hard man to find, you know that.”
She mostly kept the grimace of pain to herself, and he wished he could tell her to please, please, stop probing those memories he’d buried.
“If I’d known you were looking for me,” he said, “I’d have made myself easier to locate.”
She blinked at that. “Do you mind telling me your name?”
“Balthazar, no last name. I’m like Cher. Madonna. Bono. Guess those references date me, huh.”
“Will you come down to the station and answer…”
Her voice drifted off, and for an egotistical split second, he entertained the fantasy that she was so captivated by him, she’d literally lost the ability to speak. But then a trembling came over her, her hands shaking so badly that she raised them in confusion and alarm. With a stumble backward, she arched as if she couldn’t control her balance—
Balz jumped over the body and caught her just as the whites of her eyes flashed and she went limp. “Erika? Erika—”
With an abruptness that made no sense, her face turned to his, and that sightless stare met his own as if she could see him.
In a guttural, unreal voice, she said, “You are in danger. I need to save you.”
CHAPTER TEN
Rural Route 149
Nate, adopted son of the Black Dagger Brother Murhder, was desperate… just really, really fucking desperate… for his best friend, Shuli, to finally stop talking about—
“—and then she took my shirt off. Listen, naked is all well and good, but I didn’t give a crap about my top half. I wanted the pants gone. But it was like she read my mind. All of a sudden, I feel her hands on my belt buckle and—”
“That’s enough,” Nate cut in with a wince. “I’m good with the details stopping here. I’m so totally good with closing the curtain now.”
Shuli looked over from the driver’s seat of his white-on-white Tesla like someone had insulted his taste in cars. The male was an aristocrat all the way, diamond studs the size of bowling balls in his earlobes, some kind of big, heavy rose-gold watch on his wrist, the air of someone who had gotten what he wanted all his life as golden a halo as anybody could get. And yet in spite of all that, he wasn’t a bad guy.
“But the details are the best part,” he said. “Besides, don’t you want to know what it’s like before you and your female bang—”
“Whoa. Hold up.” Nate put both his palms out. “There is no me and any female. And if I wanted to go the porn route, it’s not going to be hearing a blow-by-blow about you and some human woman you picked up in a club two nights ago—”
“There was only one blow, actually. The other three times were straight sex.”
Closing his eyes, Nate wanted to plug his ears. “Like I was saying—”
“I’m going to pay her back for that, though—”
“Stop.”
“Fiiiiinnnnne. But I knew she was going to call me. I knew it.”
“Why, because you slipped her a hundy along with your number?”
“No, it’s ’cuz I’m fucking hot.”
Nate rubbed his aching eyes. “You know, the only thing worse than you talking about your sex life, is you talking about how much you love yourself.”
“Okay. So how much do you love me?” As a death-glare came his way, Shuli shrugged. “What. You wanted to change the subject.”
The pair of them had just left a job site in a part of town where the houses were huge, the lots were measured in acres not feet, and the garages had spaces for four cars at least. The owner was finishing his basement by putting in a workout room, a sauna, and a movie theater, and the both of them had been called in to help with the drywall. Nate was the only one who’d been on time. When Shuli had finally arrived, he’d smelled like perfume and been wearing a wrinkled silk shirt and a set of slacks that should have had a belt, but did not. His hair had likewise been a mess—and, not that anybody had needed the confirmation, the hickey on the side of his throat had neon-lighted the virgin-no-longer vibe he was clearly dying to talk about.
“Anyway.” Shuli put his directional signal on. “It was phenomenal. Like I said, we did it three times, and the last one was up against the door as I was leaving.”
“I wouldn’t think that was possible.”
“Standing up is absolutely a position. A good one, too.”
“No, I don’t get how you were doing it as you were leaving—watch out for the deer.”
“Huh?” Shuli cursed as he swerved away from a doe at the side of the country road. “And don’t be pandemic.”
“Pedantic.”
“That, too.”
Fortunately, Shuli went quiet at that point, although the way he kept running his hand around the top curve of the steering wheel suggested he was in his mind where he’d been told his mouth couldn’t go.
Nate looked away from the stroking and stared out of his window. The landscape was all fields now, and as they passed by a rickety split-rail fence and then a stone wall, a kindling in his gut made him adjust himself in his seat. The closer they got to Luchas House, the more he fidgeted, and he supposed the one good thing about Shuli finally having sex for the first time was that the guy was too busy reliving his orgasmic glory to notice how itchy Nate was getting.
“At least we have tomorrow off,” Shuli announced.
“Do we?”
“It’s Saturday. And we’re going out, remember?”
“Oh, right.”
Why hadn’t he just dematerialized out here on his own?
Well, he answered himself, because then it was way too obvious. If Shuli was wingman’ing it, he had some kind of cover.
