Lover Arisen, page 37
“Except I can’t give up my job,” she said roughly. “You told me the worlds don’t mesh, and I know that there is a lot at stake, but I can’t desert my colleagues. My purpose. I need it to help myself. Help others—”
“I’ll make it work. Somehow, I’ll figure out a way to make it work. You won’t have to give up your job. There have been exceptions made before, and there’ll be one for you. We might have to live somewhere that’s safer for me—”
“Not a problem. I’ll move anywhere around Caldwell. Anywhere we need to.”
Balz started smiling, the idea there was a future for them a fantasy that he wanted to believe would come true. “Are we moving in together, then?”
“Yes, we are.”
They laughed together, giddy as lovebirds. And then she had to go to the loo.
As she hopped off the bed and her naked body danced across the dim room, he was looking forward to her return. Surely they had time for one more quickie?
In the doorway of the bathroom, her breasts and hips cut a hell of a silhouette as she turned the overhead light on and looked across at him. “I’ll be right back.”
“Take your time,” he murmured while she closed the door.
Except don’t, he thought to himself as he glanced at her alarm clock.
He’d told Sahvage, Syphon, Xcor, and Tohr to meet him an hour after sunset. So actually, he probably didn’t have—
“Balthazar…”
At the weird tone in her voice, his head snapped away from the glowing display next to her bed. “Erika? What’s wrong?”
When she didn’t respond, Balz flew from that bed, his feet not even touching the floor as he launched himself toward the bathroom. And as he pushed open the door, at first he couldn’t figure out what he was looking at. His female was standing at the sink, one leg braced on the counter, the inside of her calf and thigh facing him.
That was when he saw the bruising.
Her skin was marked with black splotches, the pattern running from the base of her foot all the way up to—
“What is this?” she asked weakly. “What’s wrong with me?”
And then she turned to him. Her entire body was mottled with discoloration, the skin like that of a corpse, gray and white and black.
“Help me…” she said as she collapsed.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Time was relative. Yes. It was.
And what that meant, in the emotive sense, was that something could take an eternity and also be of a duration shorter than the blink of an eye.
For example, when the love of your life, who you’d just decided to move in with, whose bed you’d been in all afternoon and into the evening, all of a sudden turned into a contusion, the diagnosis part of things was longer than the ice age, quicker than a gasp.
As Balz stood over the bed of his female, and watched as others tended her, he replayed each and every thing that had happened since he had caught Erika in his arms as she’d passed out. After he’d brought her back out here, his first call had been to Manny, and the guy had been right on it, firing up the mobile surgical unit that was downtown in the garage and rushing for Erika’s neighborhood. On the way, Manny had called in his fellow healer, Doc Jane, to dematerialize over to the townhouse STAT. And she had brought with her her medically trained mate, Vishous.
It was all such a blur, but too acute as well. While Jane performed an exam and took vitals, Balz had told V everything he knew. Which was next to nothing: Perfectly fine. Went to the bathroom. Bruises all over her.
Balz would never forget the way Doc Jane had looked up at her mate… and shook her head. Like she didn’t understand what was going on.
After that? V had taken his glove off. Balz had held his breath as the Brother stood over Erika’s body and put that glowing weapon so close to her mottled skin that a flush of blood rose to the surface, cutting through the horrible bruising. He’d swept that thing up and down a third time as the next arrival came up the townhouse’s stairs.
The Brother Butch. And as soon as Balz saw the male, he’d known… that they were not dealing with a medical emergency.
This was a metaphysical one. This was… about evil. Evil that had claimed his beloved.
Balz knew what Butch did out in the field, absorbing the essence of the Omega out of slayers who had been taken down. And it was with a feeling of absolute disbelief that Balz had said yes, yes of course, Butch could lie down next to Erika.
Proof positive that even bonded males could have a level head if the stakes were high enough.
And so Butch had lain down, chaste as could be, and taken Erika in his arms. By that time, it was clear that whatever process was occurring was speeding up. Her body was failing, her vitals slipping, her—
As reality snapped back into place, Balz transitioned from remembering things to experiencing them, his awareness shifting from the list of first-this, then-that, which he had been numbly detached from, to an achingly vivid this-is-really-happening.
It was the groan that did it.
The groan from the bed was agony. And it was not coming from Erika.
Butch, the former cop, jerked back from her and began to dry heave—and Doc Jane was on it, producing a wastepaper basket from somewhere and holding it off the edge of the bed so he could roll over and vomit into it.
As the retching echoed through the too-quiet room, Balz’s eyes traveled over his female. He’d pulled a sheet up to provide her with some dignity, and he’d appreciated that Doc Jane and the two males had been so respectful of her nakedness.
One of her arms was outside of the covers, and he recoiled at the deterioration of her skin.
“Manny’s bringing the oxygen concentrator,” Doc Jane said as Butch flopped over on his back. “And I’m going to run some saline into her.”
Balz had never felt so helpless in his life. He didn’t know—
A hard grip on his arm drew him away from the bed, and he looked over at V. “What—”
“Go,” the Brother ordered. When Balz stared at him in confusion, V lowered his voice. “Sahvage told me where you were heading tonight. Go now and get the fucking Book. She doesn’t have much time.”
“But I have to—”
“Butch is the best shot at keeping her alive you have, even above us medical types. There’s nothing you can do here. But you can bring that Book back. There has to be something in it that can help get whatever this is out of her.”
“Get whatever…” Balz blinked. “You think this is a possession?”
And yet he knew that was the truth of it.
“I’m not sure what the fuck it is. But it’s evil, that much I know—”
All of a sudden, Balz thought about the first time he and Erika had had sex. He could remember her orgasming… and her eyes rolling back. It had been right after that that Devina had stopped visiting him in his sleep.
What if the demon had merely relocated into Erika?
And she was killing the female out of spite, rotting her from the inside.
“Fuck,” he barked. “Fuck!”
So this was why, when he’d asked Lassiter to come to see if the demon was gone, the angel hadn’t sensed anything in him—but also hadn’t looked right when he’d left. Lassiter had known that Devina was still—
“I’m going,” Balz growled. “And I’ll bring that Book back even if I have to kill that bitch.”
Before he left, he went to the bed and dropped his head to Erika’s ear. She was breathing in a wheeze, the rise and fall of her chest so shallow, it was almost not happening.
“I love you,” he whispered. “I’m going to get you what you need. Just hang on. Erika, you’ve got to hang on.”
* * *
As Devina arrived back at her lair’s building, her frame of mind had seriously improved.
Then again, a good fuck had always been a mood elevator for her, a clear sign that even though she was a non-temporal force of nature, the dopamine receptors in the body she projected herself into worked just fine.
And holy fuck, Lassiter was a good lay. Ohhhhh, man, if she’d thought Balthazar hated being with her, that was nothing compared to the angel’s regrets. So obviously, she had stretched the fucking out for a good long time—and she wanted more of him. To make sure they weren’t a one-night stand, she had big plans to do shit all about keeping her side of the bargain.
She’d leave that female of Balthazar’s only when the woman was good and dead, something Devina could control by keeping the detective alive and suffering for quite some time.
God, Balz and that stupid human woman he loved so much. The demon had thought she’d use them for her spell, a great way to have revenge on him and get what she needed. And it was fun being inside the bitch and torturing them both: In the work of a heartbeat, she’d jumped from one to the other during a le petit mort moment in one of their sex sessions, her possession triggering an infection that had kindled for a day or two, before it had taken a firm toehold.
But as it turned out, the demon had found an even better candidate for her true love spell.
“You had a secret, angel, didn’t you,” she said out loud.
In spite of all the reasons she didn’t deserve it, fate had given her one hell of a present tonight: Lassiter was in love.
And Devina had ruined everything. The instant she had taken that angel’s virginity, which had been beyond enriching on an existential level, she had soiled him in his own mind, making him no longer worthy of the female he’d gotten soppy over.
What a surprise! And her spell’s last stricture was met.
So it had been a great night—and even greater because thanks to that angel’s sappy heart, she could now await the proper return of her blond Adonis.
Gliding through the building’s front door—literally, because hello, it was way after hours so the thing was locked—she resumed her striding in the lobby, her stilletos clipping out a snare drum roll as she strode over the marble floor. Heading for the back stairs to go down into the basement, she would normally have played around with the nightshift humans on security detail. It was always a kick to fuck with the guards, sneak up behind them, play a little spook game.
Not tonight.
She had to get ready for her male.
“Talk about Christmas,” she murmured as she descended and then hit the hall that took her to her lair. “Kwanzaa. Hanukkah.”
The demon was whistling a little tune as she came up to her door and stepped through the reinforced panel, piercing into the other plane of existence—
The instant she entered her lair, she could feel that something wasn’t right. Her eyes went immediately across to the Birkin display, but everything was where it was supposed to be, with the burned star on the top of her proverbial tree.
In the rest of the open space, her clothes were the same, the racks all orderly, nothing hanging cockeyed or anything.
The bedding platform was made.
The kitchen was neat. The furniture arranged as it had always been. Likewise, the tub and the towels and her sink were gleaming and static, just as she had left them.
But someone had been here, someone who shouldn’t have been. She could scent them… and they smelled like a meadow of wild flowers—
“Nooooooo!”
Devina whirled around to where the Book had been suspended in thin air. It was gone… and no trace of it was left behind, not the rancid stench, not a fragment of parchment, not a shadow of where it had once been. The whole lair was empty of the ugly, stinking thing.
It could not escape on its own, though. It needed a proxy to become mobile.
Who the fuck had been in her space—
At that moment, as if the universe were answering her demand, she sensed arrivals outside in the corridor. Many of them. A cadre’s worth of them.
Pivoting on her heel toward the door, she peered through the panel and what she saw got her attention, even though she was an immortal.
The Black Dagger Brotherhood and the Band of Bastards were just outside her lair, and they were fully armed and ready to fight.
“What the fuck,” she muttered. “I have to get dressed and do my goddamn hair.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
This is where she was,” Sahvage announced. “That last door.”
Even though the Brother had been their guide into the building, he stepped aside so that Balz could now lead the way down the long basement corridor. As the other males flanked in behind him, they paid honor to a bonded male’s right to ahvenge his female.
Protect his female.
To that end, a dozen more fighters than he expected had shown up in Erika’s living room—and they had come with supplies. He had been given a new pair of guns. And fresh leathers. And steel daggers in a holster. And the best backup any warrior could have asked for.
Except for his Erika, of course.
As they went along now, Sahvage said in his ear, “To get inside, my Mae had to open up some kind of access to the other dimension the demon keeps her shit in. I don’t think just busting down the door is gonna do it.”
“We’ll get in,” Balz countered in a grim voice. “She wants me, so if I’m here, she’ll come to me—if only because she’ll have to lord her possession of Erika over me—”
From out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash go by. It was so quick, so camouflaged, that if he hadn’t been expecting it, he might have ignored the visual disturbance or written it off as something that was immaterial—
The shadow popped up right in front of him, the ghostly, evil apparition taking substance and falling into a fighting stance.
Partytime.
Balz let out a battle cry and raised a dagger as well as one of his autoloaders. He would rather have gone hand to hand with the thing, but there was no time. So he aimed that fucking muzzle, and just as an “arm” extension of the entity snapped out and caught him in the chest, he started pumping off bullets.
The screeching was so loud, his ears rang, but like he gave a fuck—
As he heard a shout right behind him, he glanced over his shoulder.
It was an ambush.
Shadows were everywhere, an entire army of them, materializing in the corridor, pulling free of inset doorways, and the contours of pipes in the ceiling, and from the deep well of darkness that suddenly enveloped the stairwell they had descended—
The strike came to the side of his face, like a slap made up of a thousand bee stings. Blinded by pain, he jammed the muzzle of his forty forward, and as he felt resistance, he discharged more rounds, just let the autoloader autoload the fuck out of everything that was in the magazine.
The shadow in front of him was driven back, tripping, falling, in a way that allowed Balz to get closer to his goal, to that doorway Sahvage had pointed out. As his eyesight improved, he switched his dagger for his other gun and just kept forcing the retreat, the popping sounds of the bullets and the horrible screaming noise one hell of a concert.
And what do you know, it was in surround sound.
It was too dangerous to check behind himself again, but he knew that the Brothers and his fellow bastards were engaging as well. Except they were doing it with one hand tied behind their proverbial backs: They couldn’t use their guns because he would be downstream of any misses, and given how fluid the shadows were, there were a lot of lead slugs that didn’t hit their targets—
A second shadow jumped him, and the weight of the damn thing plus the stinging sensation that went all the way through him were so great an overload that he went down on his knees.
And that was when shit went GOAT fuck on him.
He had to lose his guns. As he was rolled and pummeled, he didn’t know which way was up, much less where his fellow fighters were. Unable to keep things straight, he couldn’t risk killing anyone on his side.
Dropping the autoloaders, he switched to daggers, jabbing his hands into his jacket and outing his silver-bladed slicers. With practiced skill, he swiped at anything he came in contact with, and the defense was good enough to earn him some space. Except it never lasted. The entities were relentless. They were winning.
His energy was flagging.
An image of Erika on her bed dying gave him a brief second wind, turning those daggers into an extension of his arms, of his body, of his will. But as the punches and kicks kept coming at him, the rally didn’t last.
Just as his head rang like a bell from him being thrown into the ground like a toy they wanted to break, at the very moment his consciousness started to ebb, as hope departed him and strength went along with it—
A wraith-like apparition appeared before him.
Dressed in black leather.
With a hand-rolled Turkish cigarette clenched between bright white teeth.
“V?” Balz mumbled as he stared up in confusion.
What was he doing here? Was this was a figment of his imagination—
The Brother didn’t get out a gun. No daggers either. As he exhaled a plume of smoke, he ripped off that lead-lined glove of his.
Annnnnd that, folks, was all she wrote.
Vishous took that nuclear-bright hand of his and he wielded it like a motherfucker, slapping the two shadows that had taken Balz to the ground like the entities misbehaved and it was the Middle Ages.
As the tables were turned and Balz’s attackers had to go on the defensive, he scrambled to his feet. Located his guns. Reloaded—
Poppppp! Poppppp!
Andjustlikethat the pair of shadows were gone.
Balz jumped up to the Brother, and grabbed the male’s leather jacket. “What are you doing here!”
“She’s still alive,” V said as they both panted. “But Sahvage triggered the emergency code so I had to come.”
Balz dragged the Brother in for a quick, hard embrace. And as he hugged back, V muttered, “You’re welcome.”
They pulled apart, and Balz said, “I have to go—”
“I’ll join the fray.” V cracked his knuckles. “But we might need a miracle. This is bad.”
