Lover Arisen, page 16
Later, she could wonder why she was so determined to rescue a suspect. Then again, he had come in here to help her.
Abruptly, the glow returned. An outline of light appeared around the man with the long blond-and-black hair, and its magical warmth reverberated outward from him, engulfing her, calming her, healing her pain and easing the burn in her lungs.
The man came forward and knelt down beside her—and that was when she recognized the sensation on her face, her body: Sunshine. She felt as though she were lying out on a towel, at the Million Dollar Beach at the base of Lake George, the late August sun shining down on her, getting into her bones as a breeze coming from the water kept her from overheating.
Rays of heavenly grace.
Is this Jesus? Erika wondered.
No, came an answer in her mind.
A hand extended toward her, and she had a thought that he was out of luck if he wanted to help her to her feet. As much as his presence seemed to magically improve how she felt, she was empty of energy, incapable of moving.
“I can’t…” Except then Erika frowned.
In the seat of his palm, a ball of light formed and hovered. And while she tried to comprehend what she was looking at, the man reached out and brushed her face. His touch was not sexual in any way, but it traveled through her bones, registering all over her as warmth.
As kindness and compassion.
Gently, he took her limp hand and turned it over. Placing the orb in her palm, he rose up to his full height again.
Erika gazed upon the energy source with wonder and awe. Then she lifted her heavy head and met his oddly colored eyes.
The man nodded over to the suspect.
After that, he took a step back and disappeared just as the brunette had: One moment he was there, the next… he was just gone.
With a moan, Erika held the ball of energy up to where he had been, like it was something that could bring him back. Then she refocused on the suspect.
He had disappeared. It was too late.
And what was she holding anyway?
That rumination was momentary. Even as she questioned what she was doing, she rolled over onto her stomach and started to drag herself over to the man she had been searching for, the man who, as with Keri Cambourg, had been in her dreams.
The man who had sacrificed himself to save her.
Snippets of what had been said between him and the brunette floated around her mind. None of it made any sense and she didn’t even attempt to sort things out. Trying to pull herself over the concrete with only one hand and her feet to push was all she could handle at the moment.
When she got to the man, she was breathing hard and getting dizzy. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do—
No, she did.
Erika pushed her palm with the glow under his throat, where the injury was. As she felt the warmth of his blood, she closed her eyes.
“Please… don’t die,” she prayed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The “what” was less important than the “why.”
That was what one of the TED Talks had said. Or maybe it had been a book? YouTube video? Certainly an Insta post from that CarpeDaDayum account.
As Lassiter stood outside the Bloody Bookshoppe, he looked up at the sky and breathed in deep. When all he could smell was frying food from across the street, and then a bunch of uninspiring clouds drifted across the face of a wan moon, he put his hands in the pockets of his Mark Rober sweatpants and started walking.
He didn’t know where he was going until he got there.
And then when the destination presented itself, his location struck him as inevitable.
Maybe all that should be in some human’s book. If he’d learned anything over the last couple of days of relentless self-improvement, it was that Homo sapiens could elevate almost any banal statement of the obvious to a self-referential mood-cue for profundity.
He’d read that in an article, too.
Tilting his head back, he read the sign over the entrance of the club: Dandelion. The place was painted a spring green, from the roofline down to the sidewalk, and the trippy music that atmosphere’d out of its block-long expanse was all syntho stuff, not a conventional instrument anywhere near the beats.
“Are you coming or are you going?”
At the stiff demand, Lassiter glanced to the front door. A bearded human male with a man-bun and some swallow tattoos was looking like bouncing anything out of the establishment that weighed over a hundred and twenty pounds was going to be a problem. Maybe he was banking on his librarian-like stare of disapproval to corral the drunken and disorderly.
Yeah, good luck with that, buddy.
Although maybe the guy was just cranky about his uniform. In keeping with the weed theme, the powers that were had made him wear a bright green t-shirt and brown pants. He looked like he had on a bad Halloween costume and was going as sod.
“Hello.” He waved a hand in Lassiter’s face. “Anybody in there. You can’t loiter here. You’ll fuck my wait line.”
A quick glance to the left, and either Lassiter was missing a lineup of humans, or this green-and-brown goaltender of absolutely nothing was flexing for shits and giggles.
“There’s a female inside,” Lassiter heard himself explain, “that I want to see, but I shouldn’t. Nothing good’s going to come out of it. I should leave her alone.”
Man Bun did a double take for show, like he thought the world was an Instagram story. “Do I look like your therapist? What are you doing. Or am I calling for backup.”
“Who am I bothering out here?” Lassiter indicated his feet. “This is public property, right? Maintained by the city, not you.”
The guy stepped right up and jutted his chin out, in a move that he clearly thought would work for him. Too bad there was a big rate limiter to all that aggression: The guy worked at a club named after a weed and was wearing brown pants.
As Lassiter remembered with fondness the opening scene of the first Deadpool movie, Man Bun arched every brow he had and then some.
“Are we having a problem?”
Lassiter shook his head. “No.”
“Then move along or get in line.”
Shifting his eyes over the guy’s shoulder, Lassiter took note that there were no windows to look in, and he tried to imagine what Rahvyn was doing inside. Who she was with. Whether she was dancing.
None of this was his business. But he couldn’t help himself, and the fact that he had his ass in a crack over a female who should, and had to, remain a stranger, made him move quickly from mild annoyance to downright pissed off when it came to the human in front of him.
“—calling the cops. Right now—”
Lassiter locked eyes with the guy… and suddenly, shit wasn’t funny for either one of them. The human stopped in mid-sentence with his mouth open, and although it was probably because something was showing in Lassiter’s face that was terrifying, the fallen angel side of things wasn’t going to worry about it.
He’d suddenly had it with everything and everybody, from Balz and Devina’s drama, to that human woman back at the bookshop, to this hipster right here, with his little seat of influence that he was determined to wield over a sonofabitch who was in love with someone he—
Oh… shit, Lassiter thought. He wasn’t in love with Rahvyn. He didn’t even know her.
Then again, wasn’t that how bonding worked?
“It’s okay, my dude,” the bouncer backstroked with a stammer. “Like whatever—”
“No,” Lassiter snapped. “It’s not whatever. And I’m not your dude.”
When the human tried to take a step back, Lassiter mentally held the bouncer right where he was, and as he began to tremble, the tables-turned power trip did what nothing else could. It brought Lassiter some relief, a cooling to his impotent rage, a focal point to release his tension.
Killing this random man, out here on the street, in the world of humans who were so much less than Lassiter was, who weren’t on his level in any way, who were like ants under his feet… was the only thing that felt right in what seemed like forever.
The itch scratched. The burn extinguished. The ache gone.
For only a moment, sure. But like he fucking cared about duration. A moment was enough—
“Say goodnight, you sanctimonious asshole,” Lassiter growled. “See you on the morning news.”
* * *
Back in the bookshop’s storage room, Erika had to lay her head down on her outstretched arm. As she did, she realized she was lying in a pool of the suspect’s blood, and she had a thought that this vantage point, of a floor, of the kind of puddle she was in, of the body beside her… was a version of what many of her homicide victims saw right before their ends. It was what her father, her mother, and her brother had seen.
The girl in the pink bedroom. The man down by the river, too.
With her eyes fluttering and her heart beating in an irregular rhythm, her fear ebbed and was replaced with a helpless sadness that seeped into her marrow. For so long, she had been fighting to find answers in the aftermath of violent death, but she had never thought about this moment here… this acceptance… that came when a person was about to die. And knew it.
It was shockingly peaceful.
Just before she passed out, she looked at her hand under the open wound. The glow of light in her palm was diminishing, fading away like an old-fashioned kerosene lantern when you turned the—
Thump. Thump. Thump…
Footsteps. Heavy ones.
Out in the shop.
Within a brief flare of energy, she tried to retract her arm and get to her service weapon. But then she couldn’t remember where it was. Had she dropped it? She didn’t know, couldn’t guess. What did it matter, though. She didn’t have the strength to point it at anyone.
Anything, that was.
The sounds of someone walking on the old floorboards got louder, and then it became obvious that there were two people out there among the shelves and the books. And she’d have had to be a different person, who’d had a different life, to believe that whoever it was was good news for her and the suspect—
The door to the storeroom reopened, the light from over the register streaming in on a slice that widened until it hit her face. As she blinked blindly, she heard a curse and then all kinds of illumination flared from what seemed like all directions. Someone had turned a ceiling fixture on.
Two men came in, and her first thought was that they were dressed in black leather, just like the suspect. The one on the left had a goatee and tattoos on his temple. The other was stockier, with a distorted upper lip. Both stopped and stared down at her as if they couldn’t understand what they were seeing.
“Help him,” she said in a guttural voice. “Save him…”
The one with the goatee turned his head to his shoulder and triggered a communicator. His voice was too quiet for her to hear what he was saying—but she prayed it was nine-one-one. The other man approached her and knelt down slowly, as if he were afraid of spooking her.
“Female, worry not. We shall take care of you both.”
His eyes bored in her own, and the steady confidence he projected made her vision go blurry with tears of relief.
“I’m trying to save him… he cut himself. With…”
His eyes left hers and locked on what had to be his colleague, his friend, his brother? When his lids closed briefly, it was as if he couldn’t hold in the pain he was feeling. And then he was leaning over her and laying his broad hand on his friend’s shoulder. The man started talking, but she didn’t understand the words, the language one that seemed to have words in common with both French and German.
She didn’t need a translation to know that he was rocked to his core.
“I tried,” she mumbled lamely, “to save him.”
“Female,” he said, “he’s still alive. He’s still breathing.”
“He is?”
The man nodded and then seemed confused. “Your hand… has stopped the bleeding somehow.”
“Not my hand.” When he frowned, she looked at where her palm was still pressed to the knife wound. “The light. The glow. It was… the glow. He’s alive?”
His brows got tighter, but then the man with the goatee ended whatever communication he’d initiated and spoke loudly.
“T minus five minutes. Manny’s not far.”
And then they were staring at her, like she was a stray at the side of the road and they were trying to decide if they had enough room in the back of their car.
“Don’t take my memories,” she blurted. “I don’t… understand any of this, just please. My mind can’t take any more amnesia.”
“We’re bringing you with us,” the stockier of the pair said. “Don’t worry.”
“Motherfucker,” the one with the goatee muttered.
“She’s his female,” came the counter. “She has to come.”
Abruptly, she heard the suspect’s voice in her head: I don’t care if I end up in Dhunhd forever if it saves her.
Annnnnnnnnnd that was the last conscious thought she had. As she took one last look at the injured man, and tried to see if he was drawing breath—or if maybe his friend was just wishful-thinking on that—she wondered if she hadn’t imagined the ball of light.
I’m his? she thought as she gave up fighting the darkness that rose to claim her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Lassiter rode the evil rush of holding the human’s life in his hands—right up until the moment someone came out of the club. He almost didn’t look over, but at the last minute, he glanced in the direction of the figure who emerged from the confines of the computer-generated music and the drunken crowd. It was a woman, and her hand went to her hair and lifted its weight up off her neck as if she were hot.
It was not who he had come here to find.
Species divide aside, this woman had dark hair, not silver, and she was wearing a short skirt that he couldn’t picture on Rahvyn. Still, as she noticed him and the bouncer, he transposed onto her the features he had in his mind every waking moment.
As she narrowed her eyes, it was Rahvyn looking at him with suspicion. Like she knew something was wrong.
“Is everything okay here?” the woman asked.
Her words were a devastating condemnation of his actions. His lack of self-control. His absence of perspective, compassion, and connection.
It was as if that demon had possessed him even as she didn’t enter him.
Lassiter released his casting over the bouncer, and then, because he couldn’t bear even a hypothetical Rahvyn having caught him about to do something unforgivable, he went into the woman’s mind and sent her right back into the club with no memory of what she had inadvertently walked in on.
Yet closing off her mental storage unit did nothing to reverse time and reengineer his intent. Reprogram his response—
“Am I okay?”
The bouncer in the grass-green shirt and the shit-brown pants was bringing his hands to either side of his face, going Kevin McCallister in a cautious way, as if he weren’t sure whether his head wasn’t going to pop off his spine, like, well, a dandelion.
“I don’t know… if I’m okay,” he said hoarsely.
Closing his eyes, Lassiter had the urge to run out in front of a car. It wouldn’t kill him, but maybe if he broke a couple of bones, got a concussion, and bled out a little, he might be able to atone for what he had almost done.
“You’re all right, Pete,” he muttered.
“Oh.” The guy shook his head. “Hey, how do you know my name?”
“I know everything.” And he wished he fucking didn’t sometimes. “Your father is Ted. Your mother is Marilyn. They almost got a divorce last year. Your sister married an asshole—she’s pregnant, by the way, and not sure how she feels about it. Your car needs to go back to Midas. They put in the wrong kind of oil, but you’re probably not going to do anything about it because you can be a lazy sod—no offense to your uniform. And yes, your girlfriend likes that kid you went to high school with, but she hasn’t cheated on you and she’s not going to. If you didn’t get so extra with the jealousy, you two could be really happy together, but like the oil, I don’t think you’re going to work on that, either. Oh, and your roommate used the rent money to buy seven hundred dollars of hash this afternoon. He’s not going to share any of it with you. If I were you, I’d sign up for extra shifts.”
Peter Phillip Markson, who had gone as Poopson in elementary because he’d had diarrhea at school once—and didn’t that seem like a predicator for this job’s uniform—blinked like he was fact-checking the run and shocked to find that it was all correct. And Lassiter could have gone on with how Pete had lost his virginity at sixteen in the back of his first cousin’s car with his first cousin’s best friend, and then continued with the bout of mono he’d shared with five other members of his frat because he was always drinking out of soda cans whether they were his or not. And also mentioned the STD he’d gotten last summer. But really, that would just be showing off, wouldn’t it.
“Jesus… Christ.”
“Yeah, still not me.” Lassiter glanced at the club. “Look, can you just chill with the attitude out here? You’re not exactly protecting the Presidential motorcade.”
And it had almost gotten you killed.
“That’s what Franny says,” Pete mumbled.
“You should listen to her.”
“Thanks…?”
With a nod, Lassiter turned away and just started walking. He didn’t care where he was going, as long as the inevitability rule didn’t pivot him back around and replant him on the threshold of the club again—
As he came up to the end of the block, he stopped at the curb even though the pedestrian signal was counting down to a light change so he should have hurried across the intersection while he could.
He pivoted and raised his voice. “Check your watch, Pete.”
Pete, who was still looking stunned, did as he was told. “It’s eight-twenty. Well, two. Eight twenty-two?”
There was a pause. And then Lassiter said, slowly and clearly, “In thirty-two minutes, a car is going to come around this corner.” He pointed to his feet to emphasize the location. “There are going to be two guys in hoodies in the front seat. As soon as you see it, I want you to hit the concrete and stay there. Cover your head and do not look up. Let it pass you by and take off. It’s not you they’re after, but bullets don’t use discretion when they’re flying through the open air.”
