Lover Arisen, page 27
“What do you hear?” she said while he grabbed the towel and wrapped it around his hips.
From out of the corner of his eye, he watched her stretch out to a little table, open a drawer, and palm a nine millimeter.
Balz looked around the room. The two windows across from the door out into the hall both had privacy curtains drawn. Closet was in the corner with louvers closed. Bathroom was open and dark.
Shit, why hadn’t he brought that duffle in with him?
Because guns weren’t romantic, that was why.
“You got an extra gun?” he asked as he looked at that open doorway.
“Right here.”
There was the sound of the drawer opening for a second time and then a rustling of sheets. When the butt of something cool and heavy hit his palm, he closed his grip on it. There was no reason to look down and see what kind of weapon it was. He didn’t care as long as it pumped out bullets.
“Safety’s off,” she said. “Fully loaded.”
More rustling now, like she was putting her boxers back on.
Double-palming the gun, he pointed it straight out in front of his chest, at the darkened stairwell.
“Stay here,” he said under his breath.
“Not a damn chance.”
“You’re a distraction,” he snapped as he started to walk forward.
“No, I’m another highly trained asset.”
He glanced over his shoulder. She had her back to him and was covering the windows, to make sure that he was defended.
Okay, that was hot. And she was right, she was goddamned useful.
They moved together toward the doorway, and he didn’t have to ask to know that she was also making sure the bathroom was going to have no surprises for him.
He hated that they’d been interrupted. But he wasn’t surprised. Just his fucking luck. He’d had four months of uninterrupted hell with that demon in his sleep—and only what felt like four minutes with the human he wanted like nothing else he’d ever come across. In all his years of sex—in his years of thieving, too—there’d been no female or object more precious than the one…
…who at this very moment was making sure he didn’t get a bullet through the back of his head.
Tiny waists and big tits were all fine and good. But sexy to him was so much more than that. And what do you know, Erika Saunders ticked all his boxes. If they lived through whatever the fuck this was? He was going to swallow the orgasms he gave her like they were wine and fill her up between her legs until he was dry as bone.
But first? Living through this next threat.
Fuck.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The King’s Audience House was located in a part of town where the population density was about two humans an acre, tops. Which according to V’s sense of proportion was two humans too much—but it wasn’t like the Caldwell zoning committee was calling him and asking for his opinion. With grand houses that were set back behind gates, and yards that were mowed by private gardeners in warmer months, this was where the rich lived and entitled themselves to their hearts’ desires.
As V drove his R8 up the hill, he was late. He’d taken the long way into town from the Brotherhood’s mountain, but the first drive of the year was always a good thing for his mood. When you lived in a place where snowbanks could get as tall as small trees, and sometimes Prince was right and it snowed in April, you waited with the bated-breath shit to drive your car properly. Granted, his Audi had that Quattro stuff going on, which helped with traction, and given that he’d gotten the performance engine, some front-wheel drive added to the rear-wheel vroom-vroom was handy no matter the weather conditions. But the supercar was still not an all-four-seasons kind of ride.
He’d learned that firsthand.
He’d taken it out in snow once, with Butch on shotgun. Things had gone pretty well in terms of traction, but the rate limiter had been the air dam in front. With ground clearance that could cover at most ten sheets of paper in a stack—okay, fine, twenty-five—it had been no time at all until they’d gotten stuck.
That had been a fun time.
This was not a fun time.
But the car ride helped.
When he got within range of Darius’s old place, he laid off the accelerator and coasted for a good fifty feet. The driveway was something he had to take real slow and at an angle, the R8 shifting to the side as he eased into the up-and-over. After that, it was a straight shot to the detached garage at the back of the property, and as he parked, for no particular reason, he looked up to the little building’s second story and recalled what Saxton had done to the male who had fucked with his mate there.
Talk about needing a wet vac.
And you had to respect a solicitor who could use both the pen and the sword. There might’ve also been a power tool involved, he couldn’t remember.
Getting out of the car, his back cracked, and the involuntary and unhelpful readjustment made him grimace. A side stretch got whatever vertebra was being a little bitch back in line, and as he started for the rear entrance to the Federal mansion, he lit up a hand-rolled. He never smoked in his R8, even when the top was down.
Just as he came up to the door into the mansion’s kitchen, he glanced back at his car. He’d murdered it, everything from the body color to the rims to the four overlapping circles that formed the Audi logo, black.
It was a missile with a gas tank and a pair of airbags.
A disquieting thought challenged him that he didn’t drive it much. But as if he would ever sell the thing? Audi, like most car makers, was going electric for their next bomb on wheels, and although he was all for taking care of the environment, there was nothing like the sound of that naturally aspirated V-10 engine sucking fossil fuel like it was going out of style.
Which he supposed it was—
The back door swung open and Fritz leaned out, the butler’s old face falling forward like a basset hound looking over the lip of a step.
“Sire? Would you care for me to wash your automobile?”
V shook his head. It went without saying that when this doggen offered something like that, there was no royal “we.” The ancient male would get a bucket and a clean cloth and some appropriate soap, and he would stand out here in the forty-five-degree weather playing Mr. Miyagi until the R8 gleamed like onyx.
“I’m good, but thanks.”
Fritz stepped aside as V entered. “A Grey Goose for you then, Sire?”
“On duty.”
The butler bowed low. “But of course. May I mention that the others have already arrived? I do believe they’re waiting for you and Master Lassiter.”
“Great,” V murmured.
Man, he wished he could have yes sir’d that vodka offer.
As he walked through the kitchen, with its cooking staff in uniforms and its homey smells that he’d never grown up with and only knew as a grown-up because Fritz was in his life, the sense that there was something on his heels dogged him.
That paranoia was the real reason he’d taken the car instead of just dematerializing here. He’d been hoping to lose the nagging awareness somewhere along the winding roads around the mountain, or on the Northway going a hundred miles an hour, or maybe even in the suburban sprawl of strip malls and apartment complexes and nebbish neighborhoods that eventually thinned out to this wealthy zip code.
Nope.
Stopping in the tall hall that connected the servant part of the house with the public rooms, he stared out to the front entrance where the civilians came in to meet with their King, and receive blessings, and advice, and rulings on disputes.
V glanced behind himself.
Then he closed his eyes. Sending his instincts on a recon mission, he searched the house without moving from where he stood, tracking the sounds of the brothers talking in the converted dining room where Wrath took his audiences… hearing the receptionist accept an appointment in the waiting room across the foyer… noting the genial pitter-pat of chat from the doggen in the kitchen. Up above, the second floor was silent, and for some reason he thought of the first time he’d ever slept next to Butch in that guest room there, those twin beds regressing them back to being kids.
Re-leveling his head, he narrowed his eyes. No vision had come to him during the day, and that should have made him feel better. When a person only saw previews of the future that were of the maim, flame, and war game variety, you were kind of relieved to have a blank screen in that part of your brain.
The problem was… he never saw things that directly affected himself. And that was what was worrying him. With all the shit swirling around, he had a feeling another shoe was dropping. He just couldn’t see the where. Yet.
Taking out his phone, he put through a call. And after things were answered on the second ring, his heart rate quadrupled—
“Well, hello there,” his shellan, Jane, said.
Thank fuck, he thought.
Immediately, her voice got tense. “Wait, you’re on rotation. What’s wrong—”
“I want you to do something for me.”
“Anything. What do you need.”
Goddamn, he loved her. “I want you to stay in at the training center for the rest of tonight.”
“Oh.” Pause. “Well, I was going to go to Havers’s and see about Nate. Manny’s been updating me, but I just want to check the kid out for myself.”
“You’re at your clinic now though, right?”
“Yes. Ehlena and I are catching up on medical charts.”
“Jane, you gotta stay there. You can teleconference for Nate, okay? And I don’t want you to go to the Pit, either. Stay inside the compound.”
“Vishous. What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know, and that’s what scares the piss out of me. But as long as you’re safe, I can concentrate on everything else.”
There was the briefest of hesitations. “All right. Should I tell Ehlena and the others to stay in?”
“Yes, all of them. All the shellans, all the young.”
“Okay. I’ll make sure of it.”
He closed his eyes. “Thank you.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“Always.”
As they ended the call with ILYs, he started walking again. The dining room was on the left and its double doors were closed. Before he went inside, he leaned into the waiting area and hi-how’re-ya’d the receptionist. She gave him a little wave with her pen and didn’t break stride with her rescheduling.
Made sense. She had at least eight appointments to cancel. Maybe more depending on whether the rest of the night was in the shit show or the floor show category.
One was just drama that took care of itself. The other required intervention to get right.
Over at those floor-to-ceiling doors, he grabbed the matching brass knobs and gave a pull. Instantly, the conversation on the far side dried up—and then when the group saw it was just him, the volume boomeranged to prior decibels. He re-shut things not because the real discussion was going down, but to spare the staff the noise.
At least the Brotherhood, the Bastards, and the fighters could fit in the cavernous space. With the long mahogany table moved out, and the chair contingency cut to two padded ones in front of the fireplace and only a couple by Saxton’s desk over in the corner, there was plenty of room. Searching through the bodies, V spotted his roommate over by the sideboard and he shouldered his way through the congestion to Butch.
As he came up to the brother, the cop put both his palms in the air. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I take one night off and all this shit happens.”
“Add a couple trays of pigs-in-a-blanket and this is one helluva cocktail party, true?”
“What the hell happened at the clinic?” Butch asked.
“Did someone say Hormel?” Rhage piped up.
Butch frowned. “Wait, don’t they do chili?” Then he refocused on V. “I heard something about Nate being brought back to life by some kind of magic?”
V exhaled and snagged an ashtray off the mantel. “No, not Nate. It was Balz, by some human woman, after he had a neck wound—”
“No, it was Nate, who was shot in the stomach outside Dandelion—”
“Yeah, I was there when we took him to Havers’s. But he died—”
“Actually, they do so much more than chili. But their dogs are first-rate.”
Both V and Butch focused on Hollywood:
“What?”
“Huh?”
As they played echo chamber with the inquiries, Rhage stepped up and turned their little group into a circle. “They own Dinty Moore beef stew also. But yes, I like both Hormel’s chili and their hot dogs.”
Vishous closed his eyes and rubbed his temple with his gloved hand. “Do you ever lose the food filter?”
“You were the one who brought up pigs-in-a-blanket—”
“Do we have an angel in this room or are we just fangs?” Wrath’s voice cut through the talking. “Lassiter? Where the fuck are you.”
The King was over by the fireplace, sitting in the armchair to the left, all black leather against the red brocade. With an expression of barely restrained hate-the-world, he was sweeping the room with his blind eyes, those wraparound sunglasses scanning left to right. Meanwhile, there was no angel, and nobody was volunteering to make that report. Then again, Wrath already knew that there was a copious absence of a Lassiter in the crowd, and this growling interruption was more along the lines of voicing his dissatisfaction at being made to wait.
Tohr, ever the peacemaker, cleared his throat and took the heat. “Ah, no. He’s not here. I’ll text him again.”
“Well, where the fuck is he,” Wrath demanded. “I want to know how two females, one of whom is supposedly a civilian and the other of which is a goddamn human, managed to magically drag two males back from the Fade tonight.”
V glanced at his roommate, and as he met those hazel eyes, Butch’s brows gave him a see-I-told-you-so.
Guess Nate had been saved somehow. V had had to go back to that bookshop to clear the scene as soon as they’d dropped him off at—
All at once, everyone in the room froze.
No more shifting of weight back and forth. No movements of hands or heads. No talking, no blinking, no breathing—and he wouldn’t have been surprised if all the hearts stopped, too.
His had certainly turned solid in his chest.
Something was wrong. Something… terrible was wrong.
As if every male in the room had the same instinct, the same feeling of dread he had, out came the guns, all kinds of palms finding all kinds of grips.
V was the only one who didn’t go for his forty. He went for his Samsung, and with a quick sequence, he initialized the defense protocol for both the Audience House and the mansion. Then he went into his monitoring feeds and played firsthand witness to the daytime shutters coming down all around the exterior of the two structures. Finally, he sent out a group text that he had only ever tested before.
It was the all-points-bulletin duck-and-cover, shelter-in-place alert to every single person in the First Family’s community, from doggen to shellan and everybody in between.
And within the dining room, there was an instant repositioning of fighters: Xcor and Tohrment flanked Wrath while Rhage and Qhuinn slipped out the double doors to cover the front entrance. Other brothers and Bastards paired off with fighters, the teams predetermined and practiced as they surrounded the house and sent everybody who didn’t have a gun underground for safety.
V just wished he knew what the hell they’d all picked up on.
But something was off in Caldwell, on a nuclear scale.
“Where the fuck is that angel,” Wrath gritted out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Lassiter had to wait until everyone left Rahvyn’s hospital room. It was a while. And when Nate finally walked out and took his worried father, who had been loitering outside in the corridor, with him, the angel did a double check before becoming corporeal.
Approaching the closed door, he pulled up the waistband on his leggings. Then he looked at them—and changed their color from pink and black to just black. Then he changed them altogether from spandex to a nice pair of slacks.
With pleats. And a razor sharp press down both legs.
No. Too formal.
He changed his bottom half to a set of Adidas sweatpants in black. Nice, normal, tight-legged on the lower part so that his thighs looked bigger and stronger. There, good. Oh, crap. Shoes. He needed shoes. Flip-flops with Disney princesses on them were probably not going to strike the right note.
And P.S., the fact that he’d had to enlarge them to fit his twelve-and-a-half flappers had offended him. As if real men couldn’t like Tiana and Ariel.
It was a somber night, though. He also wanted Rahvyn to take him seriously.
Especially after what she had wrought this evening. God, he’d had no idea what she was capable of, but he had sensed within her something unique, something… powerful. He’d just thought it was the effect she had on him.
It was so much more than that, though, wasn’t it.
Knocking on the door, he waited. When there was no response, he knocked again.
After pulling another look-both-ways-before-you-cross in the corridor, he pushed things open a little—and just in case she was changing or something, he was careful to keep his eyes on the floor.
“Hello?” he said.
When there was no response, for a split second, he thought she was dead—as if she had traded her own life for Nate’s. But then he leaned around the jamb and looked at the bed.
The female who had delivered a miracle upon a deserving young soul was lying back against two white pillows, the adjustable bedframe tilted up at a forty-five-degree angle. Her white hair, which was like fine, spun silk, was splayed out around her shoulders, and her civilian clothes, which were loose and contemporary, seemed ill-fitting, and not because they were the wrong size.
She should have been in silks and satins… a gown of old-fashioned sensibilities and cut, something handmade specifically for her with reverence.
Spring green. Yes, that color would be the perfect complement to her.
