Lover Arisen, page 4
With that, he took off, dematerializing into the cold, damp spring air. The only thing he knew for sure was that he had to stay awake. As long as he had even the thinnest grasp of consciousness, the demon couldn’t get at him, at least not fully.
What he needed was some wakey-wakey that was more reliable than his will alone.
Time to go downtown.
CHAPTER THREE
Caldwell Insurance Building
13th and Trade Streets
As the demon Devina sat in her secret basement lair, surrounded by her clothing collection and all her precious shoes and accessories, she was feeling pretty fucking premenstrual: She was irritated to the point of wanting a shotgun, seriously considering cracking open a pint of Häagen-Dazs chocolate chocolate chip, and she might—might—be getting teary. The only thing she had going for her was that she wasn’t bloated.
Then again, when you could conjure up your body at will, you didn’t have to worry about water retention.
She wasn’t about to get her period, though.
That goddamn fucker, Balthazar. That cheating fool.
And oh, he’d been sneaky, too, hiding that human woman in the way-back of his mental meat locker while he deliberately stayed awake.
After a good couple of days of not being able to get to him, she’d been so damned excited when he’d slipped up and fallen asleep by that house fire smudge-fest in the ’burbs. All she’d needed was a momentary departure of his conscious mind and she’d jumped at the chance to take him on her terms again.
Say what you would about the vampire, but dayum. He had a magic wand between his legs, he really did.
Except the second she’d gotten her hands on him, literally, she’d received a nasty surprise from his memory banks, sure as if he were a house-trained dog who’d left a pile of shit on the living room rug. A woman, a human woman, with an average face and a suit that was right out of T.J. Maxx, was on his mind.
Unbelievable. Even though Devina was the fuck of the century, once again, some idiot with a cock was looking in an opposite direction when they should have been seeing her, and her alone.
And this wasn’t the only time she’d been jilted. Jim Heron, her one true love, hadn’t wanted her—had chosen a pasty-faced virgin over her, for fuck’s sake. Then Butch, the Black Dagger Brother, had likewise passed because he was married. Mated. Whatever. And sure there were other fish in the sea, but as for all the other humans in Caldwell? They were easy marks for her and therefore uninteresting except for a now-and-then orgasm on her part.
Maybe a murder if she was bored and felt like playing.
Well, and she had been making entrées out of some of their hearts.
“Fat lot that’s gotten me.”
As her temper—which was on a hair trigger on a good night—started to boil over, she went on a stomp up and down the racks and racks of haute couture fashion she had collected over the years. Even though the silks and satins, velvets and brocades, were usually enough to buoy even her worst mood, none of it helped.
All she wanted to do was wreck something.
That was the thought that went through her mind as she came up to her Birkin display. And of course, something already had been wrecked there, hadn’t it.
“Thank you, Mae,” she snapped.
Struggling to control herself, she focused on her babies, her favorites among favorites, her prides and joys. The gold-leafed table supporting the Hermès purses was a good eight feet long and six feet wide, and on it were more than a dozen Birkins in different sizes, colors, and skins, all arranged on Lucite stands that ascended in height, forming a veritable Mont Blanc of beauties. She had lisse porosus crocodile in rose tyrien, and black matte niloticus croc, and Horseshoes that were combinations of rouge casaque and black, as well as ètoupe and gold, and white and gris. There were also four ostriches, two lizards, and a Touch.
The only thing she refused to have were the 25s. Too small. She liked the 30s and the 35s.
“You would never forsake me,” she whispered to them as if they were good little children. “You are always here for me.”
Yeah, assuming no one came in like a serial killer and brutally dismembered somebody in her collection.
The demon needed to brace herself before she could bear to look at the top of the display, at the highest Lucite stand… at the crucifix on her altar to the atelier’s very best creation.
“Oh, God…” She clutched the center of her chest as the pain hit as fresh as it had when she’d found the bag destroyed. “Oh…”
For the last three nights, she had not been able to bear the sight of the burned Birkin corpse. But she hadn’t been able to get rid of it, either.
Then again, the Himalayan crocodile with the diamond hardware was the rarest and most spectacular of all the world’s handbags—and even more valuable because she had the matching diamond bangle. With a central snowy-white skin that faded on both sides to browns, grays, and a sprinkling of blacks, not only was the masterpiece a shining beacon in her collection, it was the very finest testimony to the fact that the best things in life were not actually free.
Andthensomevampirebitchhadlitthethingonfire.
How the fuck did anybody do that? If the stupid cunt had been so desperate to try to get out by triggering the fire alarm, she could have lit up a Balmain jacket. A Chanel suit. An Escada gown. But nooooooo, out of all the racks of clothes, and the shoes and boots, and the other, hello, regular boring flammable shit like sheets, pillows, the fucking Saks catalog, for fuck’s sake—that female had had to pick the Himalayan. With the diamond hardware. And the matching bangle.
That waste of skin had picked the most expensive, most rare, and most desirable purse to try to get out of this parallel dimension.
It was almost like she’d known what she was doing. Which she had not.
Torching that stupid little ranch in retaliation hadn’t gone nearly far enough. And then the vampire had managed to waltz away with her immortal fucking mate, all in love and happily ever after and crap.
Who knew Sahvage had been immortal? It was like finding out a housewife could bench-press a car.
And when all was said and done, what did Devina get? Not true love, yeah, not at all on that, but rather a toasted-beyond-recognition Birkin, and now PMS—without the period.
Looking down at the floor between her Louboutins, Devina wondered if maybe she needed to put the bag’s remains to rest. Considering the way the night was going, what with her frustratingly sleepless vampire lover betraying her with thoughts about a human, how could she feel worse? And hadn’t her therapist said something about part of mourning being a gradual confrontation of loss? Like you bit off the death in pieces, working through your horror d’oeuvres in degrees?
God… the Birkin had been so perfect.
At least the diamonds still sparkled.
As she took the burned carcass off of its stand, she cradled the remains to her heart and closed her eyes. Tears started coming and she pictured that human therapist, the one who had always worn earth tones that had blended her into her brown sofa.
Feel your feelings, Devina. That’s all you have to do.
“I’m trying…”
That Balz thing had cut really deep, the idea that the guy she was fucking was actually into someone else such a goddamn stinger. She definitely could not feel worse than she did right now.
When she was ready, she conjured a child-size coffin out of thin air and willed open the lid. The glossy white-and-cream box with its tufted satin interior seemed like a fitting reliquary for the cream-and-brown-and-gray color scheme of the Himalayan.
With resignation, she placed the Birkin onto the cushioned interior, setting its handles on the little tufted pillow. As tears blurred her eyes, she ran her manicured fingertips over the pattern of scales where things were not burned and she tried to shut out the campfire smell. She could still remember what it had looked like as she had first seen it in the private room at the mothership at Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, so fresh, so clean, that fragrance of the crocodile hide rising up as she had held it as if it were holy.
Because it had been. Because it still was, no matter its marring.
With trembling hands, she closed the lid. Then she rested her palms on the lacquered contours of the top and bowed her head. Breathing shallowly through her mouth, she told herself that she could get a new one.
But this one had been hers.
As the grief became unbearable, she willed the remains away, sending them down to the Well of Souls. For a split second, she remembered that that vampire Throe was still there on her worktable, and then that thought went right out of her mind.
The silence surrounding her registered as total isolation, sure as if the humanity had been wiped off the earth along with every animal, insect, reptile, and fish. She felt alone, like she was no longer even tethered to the blue-and-green planet she had for eons called home, but rather lost in a galaxy, floating through space, cold and useless, passing by uncaring planets and suns that had no time for her.
The thought that she was, in fact, not by herself snapped her back to reality.
She glared over her shoulder at her roommate. “But you’re going to change all this. Aren’t you?”
When there was no response, she embarked on a walk across the vast open space—only to pause by a rack of formal gowns to check herself in a full-length mirror. Her long brunette hair was a cascade of waves over her bare shoulders, and the bustier she had cinched on her waist made her tits look incredible. The leather pencil slacks were as always a nice touch, but she wasn’t sure she liked all the black. It was a bit of a dour one-note.
Tilting her head, she willed the shrink-wrap outfit blood red.
“And people say perfection can’t be improved.”
Resuming her strut, she clip, clip, clip’d across the bare concrete floor. When she got to the far corner of the lair, she stopped in front of a municipal-parks-and-recreation trash receptacle, the kind that could be found all around downtown Caldwell, the kind that people threw nasty trash out in, like half-eaten sandwiches, the last inch of coffee that was cold, dog shit in bags.
Used condoms and needles.
Okay, maybe those last two mostly ended up tossed to the ground, but surely there were some prostitutes, some johns, some casual vein fuckers who were tidy.
“Enough with the bullshit,” she said. “It’s time for you to give me what I’m owed. I’ve been fucking patient, but that is so over right now.”
She wasn’t talking to the bin.
She was talking to the piece of shit sitting on top of the goddamn bin’s square lid. “You owe me, and you know what I want. So get to it.”
Crossing her arms over her breasts, she stared down at the closed cover of the Book. Bound in human flesh—or maybe it was vampire skin or that of a demon, who the hell knew—the ancient tome of spells had body odor like roadkill, pages that could say something or nothing at all depending on its mood, and a checkered history of compliance.
“We had an agreement,” she reminded the thing. “You give me my one true love, a male who will love every single part of me, the whole me, for eternity—and I rescue you from the ashes of that house fire.” When there was no response, she pushed at her gorgeous hair and tried not to show how much this game was getting under her skin. “Might I remind you that without me, you’d be on your way to the dump right now, which is more than you deserve—”
A soft, rhythmic noise rose up from between its hump-ugly covers, the sound so quiet that Devina had to lean in to figure out what the part purr, part snuffle was.
Oh, hell no. “Do not pretend to be sleeping. Don’t even try that bullshit with me.” As the Book just continued to snooze, she stamped her stillie. “Goddamn it, self-care doesn’t apply to you—you’re an eternity old, not a millennial. And P.S., in an earlier life you were probably a Publishers Clearing House fucking mailer, so don’t get it twisted and pull this attitude.”
The top cover popped up a little and the pages ruffled like it was repositioning itself on a Tempur-Pedic mattress. Then the snoring got louder.
“Wake up!”
With a swipe of her hand, she cast the Book to the floor—then sent it for a big ol’ ping-pong ride off the walls of her lair, the pages flapping, the front and back covers flying, more of that horrible smell wafting around. She would have torn it apart, lit it on fire, drowned it in her claw-foot tub…
But she needed the thing. Especially after this Balthazar shit.
And it knew that.
Pinning the recalcitrant volume against one of the stout, graceless columns that held the ceiling up, she marched over to her perfume tray, grabbed a bottle of Coco Noir, and stiletto’d back. Holding the Chanel bottle over the rancid stench, the atomizer made little shcht, shcht, shcht’s as she pumped it with her forefinger—
The sneeze was loud and strong enough so the front cover almost opened wide. And then the Book’s pages let out a couple of coughs.
“You fucking stink. And I hope you’re allergic.”
The Book coughed one more time. Then it blew its cover wide, stood all of its folios straight out of its spine, and—
Phhhhhhhhhtttttttttttttttttthhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhpppppppppppppp.
The raspberry was drawn out for so long, and at such volume, only someone who didn’t require an air supply to make such a noise could have pulled it off.
Something, rather.
“Fuck you,” she snarled. “You’re going to keep the bargain with me or you’re going to learn the real meaning of print-is-dead, you useless, motherfucking, ungrateful, piece of shit, ass-biting, no good…”
She kept up with the ranting, hitting her stride and throwing in some Urban Dictionary just to get the vernacular going, the vile syllables tearing out of her blood red lips, her anger resplendent, her body humming with rage. She was so pissed off, the air around her warped and racks of clothes and bureaus all around her rattled. As the perfume bottle shattered in her hand, the sting of the alcohol sizzled into the cuts, the resulting wetness part blood, part fragrance, not that she gave a crap—
Not that the Book gave a shit.
At some point, the pragmatic disinterest of the tome registered, and what do you know. All that advice about not giving drama more air to feed off of was right. The frustration eating Devina alive gradually drained out of her veins, and all that was left was the hollow realization that for all her glorious temper tantrum, she remained alone in a space crowded with things.
As her voice dried up and she stood there panting, the dripping from her hand was like a snare drum as it hit the concrete floor.
“You’re going to give me what I want,” she said weakly.
More snoring was the only response she got. Then again, the damn thing knew that everything she said was just a threat.
Gripping the cover with both her hands, she yanked at it and got nowhere: Even when she threw her caboose out and pulled with everything she was worth, the thing remained stuck to the concrete column. She gave up when sweat bloomed across her forehead and her décolleté.
She was not going to cry in front of the fucking Book.
That was not going to be part of this shit show.
Not tonight.
“Fine, I don’t have to sit around and be ignored by you,” she said in what was absolutely not a Fatal Attraction voice. “I can leave here. You, on the other hand, are going nowhere fast without any legs. Enjoy your night.”
Fluffing her hair, she pivoted and stalked over to the door. As she got to the reinforced steel panel, she passed right through the seam in the space/time continuum that insulated her private quarters from all kinds of things that went bump in the night and lame in the day.
As she re-formed on the sidewalks of downtown Caldwell, she sealed up the cuts in her palm and smoothed the contours of the bustier. The night was laid out before her, all twinkling lights and possibilities for distraction, the clubs open and full, humans everywhere, in their cars, in their homes, in their party places.
She’d find something to amuse herself with.
No… really. She would.
As a soul-sucking wave of I-don’t-wanna nearly swamped her, she was reminded of another thing the therapist had shared with her: Unfortunately, everywhere she went… there she was. So she took with her her jealousy over Balthazar, and her frustration with the Book, and, worst of all, the dogging, nagging fear that, for however powerful and immortal she was, she might possibly be alone for the rest of her unnatural life.
Which would mean that she really was as awful and unlovable as she suspected she was.
For all the busyness of this city, for all the things that she owned and cherished, for all her strength and resolve… true love was as ever nowhere to be found for her.
CHAPTER FOUR
As it turned out… no, Erika couldn’t handle it.
Sitting at her desk in the Bull Pen, a.k.a. the Caldwell Police Department’s homicide division, she was having a hard time believing that she had left a murder scene. Voluntarily. And not because she had somewhere she desperately needed to go.
Like an emergency room for an arterial bleed.
Trey had been right with all his warnings, and she knew she should be grateful that he’d tried to look out for her. Instead, she was annoyed with everything. It felt like a theater light was trained on her fragile parts, and everybody, from the patrol officers who’d stepped out of her way as she’d run for the bathroom to the CSI people she’d mumbled to as she’d left the house to Trey who’d seemed like he was thinking of following her back to headquarters, was seeing way too much of her behind-the-scenes.
That was the problem with being the only survivor of a family massacre that had been so awful, it had been national news, so gruesome that there had been renewed coverage on its ten-year anniversary, so true-crime-discussion worthy it had its own hashtag. With something as high profile as the #SaundersTragedy on your existential résumé, you wore that proverbial name tag for the rest of your life, particularly if you’d insisted on living in the town where it had happened and decided to become a homicide detective.
