Lover Arisen, page 14
He was going to need a different upper, but that was a problem he had at least ten hours left to solve.
First things first.
As he rounded a particularly wide shelf that housed a matched set of black-and-gold volumes that seemed to number in the hundreds, he—
Froze.
Blinked a couple of times.
Couldn’t understand what he was seeing.
Against all reason and probability, it appeared as if Detective Erika Saunders of the Caldwell Police Department was standing at the check-out counter of the bookstore, talking to a man who was old enough to be considered a fossil. She was focused on the shop owner, but Balz would recognize that profile anywhere—and now she was turning her head to him.
As they locked eyes, she paled. Then she put her hand out to steady herself, patting around a pile of books on the counter, looking for purchase—and not the cash-in-exchange kind. She seemed like she was going to have another seizure.
On the far side of the old-fashioned cash register, the elderly man tilted his head, his loose skin shifting to one side as his features found a new equilibrium.
“Oh, you are friends, I see,” he murmured in that quavering voice. “How nice.”
“What are you doing here?” Erika asked.
“I’m looking for a book,” Balz replied. And wasn’t it a relief to be honest with her about something, anything.
“So is she.” The shop owner smiled and tugged at the sleeve of his patched-up cardigan with an arthritic claw. “Perhaps you are looking for the same book?”
Some instinct had Balz checking out the old guy again and all he got was the impression of tufted white hair growing from the eyebrows, the sideburns, the ears—then again, given the clutter of the shop, he wouldn’t have expected a fade and a set of manscaped arches and lobes on its owner. And how the poor guy managed to sell anything to anyone was a mystery. There were books all over the counter, and even more books in the back, an open door that led into a dim storeroom revealing stalagmites of tomes sprouting from the floor and heading for the ceiling.
“Allow me to answer your question, young lady.” The man smiled at Erika, his watery eyes as focused as Mr. Magoo without his Coke-bottle specs. “The book you speak of, the one I sold to Mr. Herbert Cambourg, came to me by chance. My best finds are always by luck, as if there is a channel of good fortune that brings them to me. In the case of Mr. Cambourg’s purchase, a man simply walked in off the street with the volume. He had no idea what he was holding in his hands and told me so quite plainly. He wanted a hundred dollars for it. I gave him the money without hesitation. I knew before even opening the cover that it was very old, very rare.”
There was a pause, as if Erika was hoping Balz would leave. Then she cleared her throat. “Did the man say where he got it from?”
“He told me he’d found the book in an alley, as if someone had thrown it away. Can you imagine?” The old man glanced at Balz. “Is this the reason you have come as well? The book you were looking for?”
As Balz’s instincts prickled, he looked past the shop owner again, to the darkened storage room.
“I’m afraid it’s rather a mess back there.” The old guy turned away from the register and creaked over to shut the door. “I’m going to get to cleaning it, however. Very soon.”
As the shop owner returned, he linked his gnarled fingers and leaned into the chipped counter. At his elbow, a series of handwritten receipts had been stabbed onto a nail stand, and given the fine coating of dust over the flimsy slips, it seemed like they were a record from a year ago. A decade ago.
“What was the title,” Balz asked in a low voice. “Of this book.”
“It did not have one.”
“So what was the content?”
“It was in a language I do not speak.”
“But you paid a hundred dollars for the thing.”
The shop owner smiled, revealing a broken picket fence of stained teeth. “The inking was quite extraordinary.”
Erika spoke up. “All right, thanks for the—”
“You couldn’t read a single page,” Balz cut in, “but you knew to call a collector of gothic and ghoulish shit to buy it?”
“Why, yes.” The old man smiled again, as casual as anything in spite of the curse word used in his presence. “As soon as I held it in my hands, I knew it was perfect for Mr. Cambourg’s collection.”
With a frown, Erika stepped between the pair of them and put one of her arms out. Like she could sense the aggression. “That’s all I wanted to know—”
Balz took out his gun and pointed it over her shoulder at the old man’s head. “You’re full of shit.”
“What the hell are you doing,” she demanded.
As Erika tried to grab his arm, Balz shuffled her around behind him and held her in place. “We’re leaving—”
“I’m not going anywhere with you! What the—”
“Back in my day,” the shop owner said in a clipped voice, “men knew how to control their women. And people were not rude.”
That was when the shadow came out of nowhere. The damn thing popped up from the floor, or maybe it came around one of the shelves—but like that mattered? As Erika continued yelling at him and yanking at his hold on her, Balz swung his gun to the right. The entity was the size of a fighter, broad in the shoulders, narrow at the waist, thick in the leg, but it had no facial features and no true corporeality. Translucent, but capable of wielding weapons and throwing punches, Balz didn’t need to stare into any kind of eyes to know it was soulless, dangerous, and out for blood.
Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger three times in a row. The shadow was hit once, twice, three times in the chest, its dark cloud-body taking the bullets as if it were solid, an unholy screeching exploding into the air as it was driven back.
Except that retreat wasn’t going to last, even with the special ammo he had. To truly eliminate the thing, he was going to have to pump it full of lead, and he had something else he needed to worry about first.
Then again, two birds with one stone.
Two evils with one trigger.
Balz pointed his weapon at the old man—
And blew the bastard’s head clean off.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Everything went into slow motion as the suspect Erika had been looking for, and not able to forget, and feeling really bizarre about, started shooting into the shelves of dusty books. Three discharges popped off, one after the other, at a victim she couldn’t see because he was holding her in place against his bulk.
And then he swung his gun back around at the shopkeeper.
And pulled the trigger.
As Erika shouted, the old man was blown off his feet, his hands breaking free of their grip on the counter, his arms flopping wide open as he stumbled and fell to the floor. For a split second, shock rendered her utterly frozen—but she got over that quick. A heartbeat later, she unholstered her service weapon and jammed her muzzle into the man’s side.
“Drop your weapon!” Her voice was loud as she yelled up at him. “Drop your fucking weapon!”
“Stay behind me,” he hollered back, his free arm flailing around, batting at her. “Stay back!”
“I will shoot you—”
“Do you want to die!”
As he twisted to the side to glare at her, she—
Stopped moving. Stopped breathing.
Across the shop, about twenty feet away… silhouetted against a stack of books… something was rising off the floor. For a split second, she thought it was a man and that what she was seeing was the shadow he was throwing. But then she realized there was no man.
It was just a shadow.
As her blood ran cold, she steadied herself on the suspect’s strong arm. “What… the hell… is that.”
And yet she knew: It was what had been in her dream. A shadow that was so much more, and so very evil.
The suspect squared off at… whatever the hell it was. “Fuck you! Fuck you!”
He opened fire at the thing, emptying a clip’s worth of bullets into what she had been attacked by in her nightmare. With every impact, there was more of that high-pitched, scream-like sound she’d assumed was a person in pain. With every wounding, parts of the entity billowed out in response, the shape shifting like water.
Even as Erika witnessed this with her own eyes, her mind refused to process what she was looking at—except then everything clicked. This had to be another nightmare. She was asleep again, probably at her desk in the Bull Pen, her subconscious coughing out more of this crap—no doubt because she had been to see Keri Cambourg, and they had stood in her husband’s book collection room, and they had talked about the ancient, ugly tome that had disappeared. And then right after Erika had almost had another seizure, just as she’d headed for the triplex’s door, Keri had remembered the name of the bookstore. After which, she had gotten in her car and driven over…
Oh, God, maybe this was actually happening.
Stopping her thoughts, she pointed her own muzzle at the shadow, and as the suspect in front of her took out another gun from somewhere, she started to shoot.
’Cuz if this was just a dream, it wouldn’t matter. And holy hell, if this was actually for real? She needed to defend herself, defend him.
Pop, pop, poppoppop—
Just as she was coming to her sixth discharge, as the suspect began pulling his trigger once again, she heard a female voice in her ear. “That’s my pet you’re fucking with.”
The words were so unexpected, so calm and measured, so out of place in all the high-pitched shrieking from that entity, that Erika yanked her head around to see who was—
It was the brunette. From down by the river.
But instead of her clothes being red and skintight… she was wearing the old man’s cardigan.
“You are really underwhelming in person,” the woman drawled through the noise, in a way that couldn’t be explained. Unless she was implanting her words directly into Erika’s mind. “And you’re coming with me.”
Before Erika could respond—or fight back—a crushing weight bore down on both her chest and her back. It was as if she were pinned between two walls, and her body went limp under the pressure. As her gun dropped to the floor, she strained against suffocation and pain, tried to fight the compression, groaned to get the suspect’s attention.
“Yeah, you’re not going to get anywhere with that.”
As the suspect switched to a set of long knives and attacked with the twin blades flashing, Erika went into a tilt, her stiffened body drawn backward by some invisible force as if she were on a dolly. While her vision phased in and out, she caught sight of the cash register and the back of the checkout counter, and then she was sucked into the darkened storage room—
Down on the concrete floor, by a pile of books that had been knocked over, the body of an old man was lying faceup on the floor, the eyes open and seeing nothing. Blood had pooled under his head, and going by the pasty white skin tone, he had been dead for at least an hour or two. He was wearing… the exact same cardigan as…
“Oh, shit,” the female voice said, “do I still have that mothball sweater on—ah, much better.”
A clipping sound, of high heels on the bare floor, circled behind Erika, and then the door started to close, seemingly on its own. She got a last look at the suspect out on the far side of the counter. He was fighting with a ferocity that only came with serious training and experience, those silver-bladed daggers flashing as he battled the shadow. And in response, the thing, whatever it was… was slapping back at him with these arm-like extensions, and when there was contact, the man hissed and reared back as if hurt—
The storeroom’s door slammed shut, cutting off Erika’s view.
“I hate when you look at him like that,” the woman’s voice said. “It makes me want to kill you right now.”
* * *
Even though Balz was fully engaged with the shadow, he was aware of when Erika stopped shooting from behind him. As he transitioned from his gun to his daggers, he prayed that she’d gone the self-protection route and run out the back of the shop—
“You fucker,” he growled as the shadow nailed him another good one in the shoulder.
Doubling down on his slasher routine, he leaned into the fight, the blades of his steel weapons flashing in the low light, slicing through the shadow’s punch-like offensive. Whenever he came into contact with the entity’s form, the thing screeched and shifted away—but it always returned. Two magazines’ worth of bullets, and now this up-close-and-personal, and the bastard was showing no signs of slowing down.
Balz was getting into trouble as he was forced into a retreat that took him up against the counter where the cash register was. Along with a horrible burnt fish stench, he could smell his own blood, and he was sweating more than he should have under his leather jacket, his body like a car engine overheating on a hill, smoke pouring out from under its hood. He was not going to make it through this alone, but how was he going to get a break to call in for help—
Clink!
As the heel of his shitkicker hit something that answered back with a metal note, he glanced down.
A fire extinguisher. Where the hell had that come from—
Use it.
As a third-party voice entered his head, he didn’t waste any time wondering where the hell the advice came from. He grip-switched his dominant hand, releasing the hilt and grasping the point of the dagger between his thumb and first two fingers—then he threw the weapon end over end at the “head” of the shadow.
Perishable skills that were all nice and pruned and fucking tended-to meant that even if you were a coked-out, self-induced-insomnia train wreck, when you absolutely needed to hit a target in the middle of a fight you damn well could: The dagger went right into the head-like top of the shadow, and as the entity let out a roar of pain, Balz pulled a power-squat, palmed the extinguisher, and reholstered his remaining dagger. Yanking out the pin on the handle, he pulled the hose off the side and pointed the nozzle forward. As his opponent righted itself, he discharged the chemical cloud at the thing—
The sound was like a semi-trailer truck braking on hot concrete, the ear-splitting soprano-scream so loud, Balz froze, sure as if he’d suffered a blow to his head. Fortunately, his hand stayed in squeeze-mode, and within seconds, he couldn’t see anything as the fog filled the shop.
And then he realized all he was hearing was the hissing of the extinguisher. No more screaming. Backing off the handle, he stopped the stream, but remained braced as he wheezed in the white cloud of chemicals swirling around the stacks of old books. As it dissipated, it revealed…
The shadow was gone.
“Erika!”
Conventional fighting and survival rules would have him popping two new magazines into the butts of his autoloaders, calling for backup, and doing a quick search of the aisles to clear the shop. Instead, he kept the extinguisher with him and jumped over the counter. Landing on the far side, the “old man” he’d shot was nowhere to be found. Big surprise—and there was a quick shot of satisfaction that the demon had had to clothe herself not only in that Mr. Rogers’s cardigan, but in the loosey-goosey skin of the elderly human.
“Erika!”
There was no way she’d gone out the front.
Balz bum-rushed the closed door of the cluttered storeroom, and as he ripped it open, he saw the body of the actual shop owner on the floor. A pool of blood had emanated from his head, and something had been dragged through the congealing plasma, leaving a trail, as if from the heel of a boot or shoe.
“Erika…”
As true terror gripped him, he let go of the extinguisher’s nozzle and went for his shoulder communicator—
Fuck. He hadn’t put it on because he wasn’t on rotation.
He took out his cell phone. His hand was shaking so badly that it was hard to get the thing to work. A voice command. He needed to do a—
“Call Vishous,” he ordered.
Under any other circumstances, he would have hit up Xcor, the head of the Band of Bastards. And if he had the chance for a second ring-a-ding-ding, that male was up next. But this was not a lesser he was dealing with. This demon was something else—
“Why, thank you.”
Balz jerked his head up.
Devina was standing in front of a leaning tower of plastic bins, the look on her beautiful, evil face like that of someone about to buy a new car: delight, excitement, and a good dose of self-satisfaction. In her black skinny jeans and a skintight black turtleneck, her body’s curves were set off to perfection.
And left him completely cold.
“I dressed up for you, by the way.” She swept a hand over her hip. “Do I look like a thief? Well, except for the footwear. But honestly, those soft-soled shoes you wear when you steal shit are not my thing—”
“Where is she,” Balz said in a low growl.
“Where is who?”
“Hey, Bastard,” came V’s voice out of the speaker. “What’s doing?”
Keeping his eyes on his enemy, Balz lifted the phone closer to his mouth. “I have the demon right in front of me. I need you here right now.”
“You bought Marlboros?” Vishous cursed. “I can’t believe you’re slumming like that—”
“What?”
“—after my shit. Listen, I’ll bring you some more. I’m going into a meeting with Wrath and the brothers. Soon as I’m out, I’ll hook you, true?”
Balz raised his voice. “I need you! You know where I am downtown! I have her in front of me—”
“Sure, I can do food—”
“I don’t need food!”
“Meeting’s starting. See you soon.”
As the connection was cut, the demon smiled. “He seems like a real prince of a guy. And it’s Uber Eats just with fangs, right? How chef’s kiss perfect.”
Ignoring her lip-press/finger-flare, Balz stepped over the body of the shopkeeper. “Where is she.”
