Lover Arisen, page 3
The girl had held on to the nine millimeter, but not the phone.
“The operator who took the call heard the gun go off.” Trey went over and knelt by the boy’s body. “The girl was crying so hard, she could barely speak. But she managed to give his name, and tell the operator that he’d broken in and killed her parents. Then she provided her own address and… pulled the trigger a third time.”
“But it wasn’t her fault,” Erika whispered as she leaned across the bed to meet that vacant stare. “It wasn’t your fault, sweetheart. I promise you.”
As her voice broke, she cleared her throat. And cleared it again.
Without conscious thought, her hand went to a spot below her left collarbone. Through her jacket, she couldn’t feel the scars, but they were there.
Surrounded by the black-hole stillness of death, Erika’s own past came on her like a mugger, stealing reality from her, sucking her back to the one night she never wanted to relive and always did. Always. She had fought back, too, during the worst moments of her family’s life. And God knew, there had been so many times in the last fourteen years that she had wished she had killed herself—or could.
Trying to control the urge to vomit, she listened to a surge of voices down below by the front door. Some more people were entering the scene. No doubt the photographer. Maybe it was CSI already.
Erika looked at her partner, focusing on him properly for the first time. As always, Trey was military-trim in his trademark CPD fleece, his fade sharp as always, his clean-shaven jaw the kind of thing Superman would have envied. As he stared back at her, his dark eyes were hooded and his lips drawn tight.
“It’s okay,” Erika said. “I can handle this. But I appreciate you… you know, looking out for me.”
“If you want to go, no one will blame you.”
She looked back down to the bed, to the beautiful young girl whose life had been cut so short. All those family photographs in the living room? All those pictures that had been consciously and carefully taken to record her growing up with her loving parents?
No more pictures. Of any of them—
Out in the stairwell, steps creaked as someone ascended.
Actually, that wasn’t correct, Erika thought. There would be one more set of images, taken by somebody trained in forensics, to record the way they had all died.
“I can handle this,” Erika said to her partner.
And also to herself.
She didn’t believe the words at all.
CHAPTER TWO
2464 Crandall Avenue
Approx. 7.2 miles away
No! No, no, I don’t want this, I don’t want you! Stop—
Balthazar, son of Hanst, woke up shouting and shoving hands off his leather-clad hips. As he beat at his privates, he exploded up to his feet and tried to get away from the demon who was on him, all around him, inside of him. Banging into something hard—a tree?—he ricocheted into thin air, tripped, fell.
Landed in something soggy.
As he planked himself on his palms and the tips of his shitkickers, a nose-ringing combination of soot, toxic chemicals, and wet dirt drilled into his sinuses. The stench was what orientated him: He was at the site of the house fire where Sahvage and Mae had both almost lost their lives.
With desperation and a good dose of numb stupidity, he looked around his shoulder at the ruins of what had been a nice little ranch house. The cremated remains of the structure were bathed in shades of gray and pale blue, the ash-coated fragments of beams and boards, Sheetrock and plywood, furniture and belongings, nothing that could ever be put back together and made usable again. The blaze had been so intense that there was even scorching over the property line, the fences and houses to the left, right, and rear all airbrushed with soot.
The neighbors were going to have a helluva Windex bill, but at least they had something still to clean.
Crab-walking over to a drier patch of toasted grass, he rose to his full height and brushed off his leathers. Given all the shit that was going on, worrying about whether he had ash on his knees was ridiculous. Then again, the list of things he could control was a short one, and in life, you had to take what you were given.
Sometimes this was only keeping your pants clean. And of course, what he really wanted was to keep them on when he was asleep.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
Balz glanced back at the charred maple he’d run into and deconstructed his nap time. After he’d stalked through the rubble and come up with nothing, he’d copped a squat at the base of the tree to consider all his no-go. That split-second time-out was all it had taken. Sleep had claimed him with such force and stealth, he couldn’t remember fighting the tackle of it, and that was all the demon needed. His lack of consciousness was Devina’s open door and she never failed to take advantage of the invitation he never offered.
He needed that goddamn Book of spells. If he wanted to lose the demon, he was going to have to find the thing and use it.
Reassessing the debris field, he wondered if he should walk it once more. Then again, why would anything with pages and a cover survive this kind of heat?
Because the Book wasn’t just a book. That was why.
And to think that at one point, he’d had the stinking, repulsive weight in his hands, felt that human-skin binding, held the heft of the parchment pages—and he’d let it go.
“Lassiter… you fucking asshole.”
The fallen angel had told him there was another way to get Devina evicted from his mental. So at the moment it had really counted, during that tug-o’-war with Sahvage, Balz had gone the Frozen route and let it go. But since then, he’d thought better of the angel’s solution. True love wasn’t going to save him—
An image of a human woman in a navy-blue suit barged in and pulled a chair up to his mind’s eye.
Abruptly, all he could see was her looking at him over the gun she was pointing at him. Her eyes had been sharp, her brows locked into a stop-right-there-asshole glare, her stance like something out of an action movie. Funny, he remembered every one of her particulars, and not just because he was a thief and she was a cop and never the twain shall meet. To say nothing of the species divide.
No, he remembered her like she was something he had been searching for in all the homes he’d ever broken into, and all the gems he’d taken, and all the money he’d stashed in his pockets.
“But you’re not saving me, woman,” he said to the moonlit night, the ashes around him, the shithole situation he was in.
True love didn’t exist, for one thing. That shit was just a Disney delusion, peddled to humans for profit. For another, the fallen angel might well have tossed the romance angle out because he’d just finished a Sandra Bullock marathon and While You Were Sleeping was on auto-loop in his poindexter brain.
One thing that was real fucking clear? Thanks to Lassiter’s piss-poor advice, Balz was now out of options, stalked in his sleep by a sex harpy, and half insane from lack of REM.
As he checked to see if his fly was still buttoned, a wave of nausea spiked and he was glad he hadn’t eaten anything. The feel of that demon straddling his hips, while she stared down at him with glittering black eyes full of jealous hatred—
How dare you, you bastard. And she’s just a human.
The demon’s voice came to him clear as a bell, and as the words translated into proper meaning, Balz felt the blood drain from his head. Glancing over to the tree again, he wondered if he was dubbing that jealousy in out of paranoia or whether it was something that had actually been said to him just now.
Had Devina found out about…
He told himself to get a grip. There was nothing to find out about that human detective and him. For fuck’s sake, he’d crossed paths with her for a split second, when she’d walked in on him and Sahvage playing mine-all-mine over the Book at that collector’s crib. And she didn’t even remember they’d ever met because he’d been careful to scrub her memories.
There was nothing for Devina to get bent over. Nothing at all—
Yeah, except for your preoccupation with the woman, you sad-sack, his inner ass-kicker pointed out. And just now you fell asleep for the first time since you’ve seen her. You think your demon night rider ain’t going to know you want to do more than polish that detective’s badge and gun?
With a curse, he let his head drop back on his spine.
“Not her,” he growled. “You’re not going to fuck with her—”
The demon’s voice interrupted him, sure as if she were standing right behind him: I don’t like competition even if it’s beneath me.
Balz palmed one of his forties and swung around, pointing the muzzle at—
A whole lot of thin air. And yet he spoke up like his enemy was corporeal and within earshot: “She’s not fucking competition—she’s not anything! What the fuck are you talking about?”
As his yell echoed off a charred fence line, he could swear he heard feminine laughter coming back at him on the wind, mocking him. But if this was really happening, if the demon was making a target out of that innocent human woman, Devina was going to get a nasty surprise. It was one thing for him to be used as unwilling gym equipment. Another entirely if some bystander who had nothing to do with any of this was put in the crosshairs.
“She’s not anything, damn you,” he snapped, like the syllables were rocks to be thrown. “She’s nothing!”
Keeping his gun out, Balz stomped his way through the site again, kicking at burned beams and twisted metal with his shitkickers, determined to find the one thing that could save him. With any luck, there was more in the Book than just how to de-demon a person. Maybe there was a spell to get rid of Devina altogether.
When he came up all U2 again—still not finding what he was looking for—he stopped at what had to have been the garage, given the concrete slab that was under his boots. Rubbing his eyes, rubbing his hair, rubbing his face, he wanted to light the place on fire all over again. Instead, he mined what he could recall of the story Sahvage had laid out: Mae had taken the Book home here to resurrect her dead brother. Devina had shown up. Shit had gone down… and when it was all over, the Book and the demon had been destroyed, and Sahvage had saved Mae’s life thanks to a little tricksy-tricksy the guy’s first cousin had pulled centuries before. Everything tied up in a nice, if slightly ashy, bow.
Except Sahvage had to be wrong. The Book couldn’t be gone. It was part of the demon or the demon was part of it, and Balz knew firsthand that Devina was still around—
Do you know what I do with competition? More of that silky, evil voice entered his head. I eliminate it.
All at once, rage like Balz had never known seized him.
“Two can play at the elimination game,” he gritted.
Bringing up his gun, he measured the contours of it in the moonlight, the blue-black metal of its barrel and body gleaming like a gemstone.
Fine, he thought as he put the weapon up to his own temple. No Book?
And Lassiter talking shit about happily ever afters while Devina was busy drawing fresh battle lines around a woman who had nothing to do with this?
He’d take care of things on his own. All he needed was a really big nap. A dirt nap. Like, lights out permanently. Relief, finally—
Something came around the corner of a garage two houses down and he quick-shifted the muzzle in that direction. But it was just a human male, going by the scent—and the guy was hardly being any kind of aggressor. He was carrying a recycling bin out to the curb, grunting noises percolating from his mouth like the empty plastic bottles plus the weight of their bright yellow holder was more than his honed-by-a-desk-job bod could handle. When he got to his mailbox, he dropped the load and a clatter rang out.
As he pivoted around to return to his cozy Colonial, he looked up—and froze.
The expression on his middle-aged puss was a cross between total confusion and utter terror. Which was how Balz realized that between the unobstructed moon and the security lights around the neighborhood, there was enough illumination for even human eyes to get a bead on some guy dressed head to foot in leather with a gun to his head.
Jesus, Pops, why’d you have to ruin the moment, he thought. And this is not for you.
The next bullet in the chamber had Balz’s name on it, not Harry McHappyHusbandandFather over there with his recycling and his sciatica and his two weeks of vacation a year.
The human took a step back. And another. And then he was hightailing it for base like he was being chased, his Hanes undershirt and those Lands’ End plaid PJ bottoms as aerodynamic as the extra thirty-five pounds around his middle. A second later there was the clap of a door slamming, and Balz could just imagine the fever-pitch locking, the fumble for the cell phone, the 911-there’s-a-serial-killer-in-the-yard-of-that-ranch-that-burned-down call.
“Sonofabitch,” Balz muttered as he reholstered his gun under his left arm.
Can’t a vampire just shoot himself in peace for once? Fucking humans everywhere.
The obvious logic that perhaps said vampire should pick a better, more private place, like an empty city park or a tenement, was not something Balz was going to spend a lot of time on. And meanwhile, upstairs in Papa Panicker’s house, a light came on behind pulled drapes. Great, the wife had heard the commotion. They probably had a couple of kids, and Balz wondered whether Joey and Joanna and Jay-jay were being gathered up to Mama’s bosom and rushed into a closet—
And then he had another problem.
“I know you’re there,” he muttered as he closed his eyes and wondered how much more goat fuck could fit into one night.
There was some mushy tracking in off to the side, footfalls coming closer—and hey, at least it wasn’t a demon, although he couldn’t say he was excited to see his little visitor.
Fine, his big-ass, whiny, assassin cousin visitor.
Syphon was a highly trained, heavily muscled, green-and-black-haired sonofabitch dressed in black leather, too, and the thief in Balz—which was fifty-one percent of him, the other forty-nine percent evidently being a frickin’ demon—appreciated how quietly the bastard moved in spite of his size. The fighter was also a looker, which kind of made a guy envious from time to time. With his streaked hair shellacked back from his high forehead, his blue eyes were the focal point of all his wow-that’s-handsome… and his pupils were dilated thanks to the moonlight.
And also probably emotion, not that Balz had the energy to worry about the Dr. Phil stuff.
“What is up with you and the Dippity-do now?” he said to his cousin’s hairline.
The male ran a palm over his comb-job. “It’s a look.”
“Yeah, like Dieter from Sprockets.”
“Mike Myers is a god.”
“I’m more a Ted Lasso man myself. But tomato, tomahto.”
They both went quiet. And all Balz could think was that at least his cousin hadn’t showed up when the gun had been out.
“Balz, you’re killing me.”
Those brilliant blue eyes were locked on the house next door like the bastard had X-ray vision and was checking out the leftovers in the fridge. In reality, he had always hated making eye contact whenever things got confrontational. It was a trait that had always made Balz wonder. Did the guy not know he killed people for a living? If you could sight the center of a chest and hit that target, why couldn’t you look a person in the eye when you were in an argument?
Then again, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing.
Taking a leaf out of that book, Balz went back to staring at ashes. “Killing you? How. It’s not like I have a gun to your head.”
Har-har, he thought.
“You can’t keep avoiding home, Balz. It’s been three days. You need to come back to the Brotherhood mansion and sleep, for godsakes, not waste your time poking around out here.”
Didn’t we just do this, he thought as he sucked back his anger.
Trying to keep a level tone, he pushed a hand inside his jacket to take out another of V’s hand-rolleds. “I told you over the phone yesterday, the demon and that Book are both still alive. I can feel it.” I can hear her, he tacked on to himself. “I respect the hell out of Sahvage, but he’s wrong about them being consumed in this fire—and if the Brothers are making decisions based on that dangerous misinformation, we’re all fucked.”
“Everyone’s still out in the field. Wrath’s not changing the patrols—and we’re not finding anything dangerous. So what decisions do you think are being made badly?”
As Balz came up empty-handed from the cigarette hunt, he couldn’t believe he’d smoked everything V had given him already. Shit. And had it really been three nights and days?
It felt like a lifetime.
“I don’t have the energy to do this,” he muttered.
“Because you aren’t sleeping.”
“Thank you, WebMD.”
Syphon cursed. “See? The right clapback is ‘thank you, Dr. Obvious,’ given that I’m not on the Internet. Jesus, you’re a shadow of your former self.”
“And you’re making this differential diagnosis based on an insult?”
“Just come home. Please.”
As his cousin said the P-word, there was a hopelessness to the tone that was totally out of character for the guy. Syphon was a ridiculously nitpicky sonofabitch—although if your job was to drill things with little bitty bullets from a tremendous distance, you better have an instinct and an eye for perfection as well as an obsessive drive to rectify all kinds of micro-mistakes.
The fighter did not lower his standards, did not bend to any kind of battle stress, and never got tired or admitted defeat.
Except, apparently, in this situation.
“I gotta go.” Balz tried the pockets in his leathers, even though he always kept his hand-rolleds in his jacket. But like he expected V’s nicotine sticks to sprout like mushrooms on his ass? “I just… gotta go.”
“Where? Seriously. Where are you going?”
“I’m already in Hell,” Balz replied grimly. “The precise location of my body is irrelevant.”
