Lover Arisen, page 9
When nothing happened and nothing changed, she patted the carpet with her palms. She was too shaken to look around properly, too confused as to whether she was awake or not, but she better get over all that quick. As fear shimmied over her skin, she turned her head and went eye to eye with the wastepaper basket under her desk. The Post-its she’d wadded up earlier and thrown badly in a series of near-misses were a little halo of yellow and blue on the carpet.
Did that little detail mean she wasn’t dreaming anymore? Or was her subconscious just getting the minutiae right like a good film editor?
Sitting up slowly, she took her hair out of the band she always had it in. Then she ran her fingers through the waves and resecured things.
Like maybe she could pull herself together that way.
A quick check of her watch informed her that, at least in theory, she had been asleep at her desk for a couple of hours: It was just past two a.m. At some point, she must have put her head down, and then…
The dream. The one she’d been having lately, the hazy details of which haunted her during the day. And after that a second nightmare where she’d been hunted in her house by something she didn’t believe in.
The only true evil was human. She’d learned that at age sixteen.
Demons didn’t exist in the real world.
As she finally looked around, she got scared for a different reason…
How did she know any of this was real?
In a desperate attempt to ground herself, her eyes skipped over the empty office chairs, the buff-colored felt walls of the cubicles, the darkened computer monitors, the silent telephones. As she closed her mouth and started breathing through her nose, she smelled the chemical fragrance of the shampoo they regularly scrubbed the carpet with—and remembered commenting to Trey that licorice had been a weird choice for the scent.
It was like they’d used Dr Pepper as a cleaner.
Getting to her feet, she turned in a slow circle as she righted her jacket, her blouse, her slacks. Oh, look, she’d blown out of one of her shoes—and as she reached down to grab it, she had to ignore how badly her hand was shaking.
Everything looked too normal, was too quiet, and there were shadows everywhere, thrown off of file cabinets and lurking under chairs and desks, each one of them like what had attacked her in her house.
In the nightmare she’d just had, rather. Unless she was still dreaming—
The door to the Bull Pen was thrown open behind her, and she whirled around, her gun up and pointed at the invasion before she could think anything through.
“Put your hands up! I’m armed!”
“What the hell!”
As the shout back echoed around the empty division, the uniformed cleaning woman splayed her arms out and hit the floor facedown so hard she bounced.
“Shit,” Erika barked as she swung her muzzle away to the ceiling.
For a split second, she held her position.
On the far side of the woman, the door was propped open by a cart of supplies, and out in the hall, there was a bright wash of fluorescent ceiling lights and yellow walls and that laminate flooring that had been installed a year ago.
No shadows.
“You think I’m a robber?” the cleaning woman muttered as she turned her head to the side. “Like anybody would come to police headquarters to steal something?”
Erika put her weapon back in its holster—then again, bullets only worked against living things, and what she was scared of, what had been so close to her when she’d been asleep… wasn’t alive.
It just wasn’t.
Rushing over, she helped the woman up to her feet. As she recognized the maintenance worker, she studied every detail about her, from the way her gray hair was pulled back with barrettes to the pores of her face and the wrinkles around her watery blue eyes.
She was real, Erika told herself.
“I’m so sorry, and I’ll be reporting the incident to my superior,” she said. “I just thought—well, it doesn’t matter what I thought.”
The woman brushed off the front of her dark green uniform, passing a hand over a stitched-on name tag that read “Brenda.” “I got clearance to be here, you know. I got a pass card. You’ve seen me before. You always work late.”
“Yeah, I’m really sorry. There’s no excuse. I just—you surprised me.”
Brenda patted at her hair, pushing it back into place. “Well, you deal with frickin’ dead people all the time. Guess I can’t blame you for being jumpy. And don’t worry about telling your boss. I don’t want to waste a lot of time talking about something that doesn’t matter.”
“It’s a departmental requirement.”
“Whatever, you do you. I gotta get back to work.”
The woman gave a nod, like things were done as far as she was concerned, even though she’d just had a loaded gun pointed at her. And then with a pragmatism that came from either her age or the kind of life she’d lived, she pushed her cart over to the twin bathroom entrances. Popping open a tripod caution tent, she put the orange warning in front of the men’s room, and disappeared inside.
Okay, surely, if this were a nightmare, sinks would not be getting cleaned—
The sound of her cell phone going off on her desk snapped Erika’s head around. Instead of lunging for it, she let the thing ring a second time, and when she picked the iPhone up, she turned the screen over slowly.
You know, in case a demon was calling or something.
Nope. Dispatch.
She took a deep breath. “Saunders.” Then she tried to focus on what was being said to her. “Ah, no, no, I left the scene at Primrose so I’ll take it. No reason to wake up Creason—you already did? Okay, fine. Where’s the body again?” A quick glance to the right gave her pause as she wondered whether a coat across the aisle had moved. “Another one under the bridge, huh. Do we have patrol there? Good. Tell them I’ll be there in five—what? No, I’m at headquarters. Ah, no, I didn’t go home.”
As she ended the call, she measured all the shadows on the carpet, on the walls, by the filing cabinets. Over at the bathrooms, there was a muffled singing coming through the closed door, the cleaning woman—Brenda—running through some kind of song that Erika didn’t recognize. Or maybe it was no song at all.
The strange tune was like something you could open an episode of American Horror Story with.
Grabbing her bag, Erika headed out, still unsure of what kind of reality she was in.
The sense that evil lurked everywhere persisted.
Or stalked her, was more like it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I know him.”
As Erika made the ID down by the bridge, she was kneeling beside the cooling body of a man who appeared to have shot himself in the head. The entrance wound was on the right temple, and the gun was still gripped in his hand.
Twice in one night, she thought as she noted the bomber jacket, the hoodie, the dark clothes and the bright white sneakers. But no pink nail polish this time.
“Who is he?” Detective Kip Creason asked.
She glanced up at her colleague. Kip was a lean man who always wore skinny cut slacks and bow ties. He and his husband were just back from their honeymoon, and she had a passing envy at his tan and the natural sun-streaks in his dark-blond hair. Kip was born and bred in California, and coming to Caldie hadn’t changed the fact that he always looked better, more rested, and happier than everybody else did. Even down here by the river, after two a.m., he was fresh as a daisy. And didn’t that make her feel older. More tired. More crazy.
“Christopher Ernest Olyn.” Erika refocused on the body. “He’s got a long rap sheet for drugs and assault, and he brushed up with homicide for the first time about six months ago. Remember the case? He almost beat his girlfriend to death—we were sure she was going to die as soon as she was taken off life support. She survived, but refused to testify, and there were no witnesses. The DA had to drop the case, but Olyn was ready if it went forward. He lawyered up with some big-time, mob-connected criminal attorney from Manhattan.”
“I remember, yes. You really were good with the victim. She trusted you.”
Erika stood back up. “I’m worried he finally killed her tonight—and then came down here, unable to live with himself. They had a really toxic, codependent relationship. We need to do a welfare check on her.”
“You should go over and do that. If anyone else in uniform or with a badge shows up at her place, I’ll bet she won’t answer her door. I can handle things here.”
Looking around, Erika took some quick mental pictures of the scene. The body was at the far edge of what was considered “under the bridge,” lying at the base of an old brick wall that encircled one of the original Caldwell warehouses.
“We’re not going to have any witnesses,” she murmured.
“No,” Kip agreed as he pulled his fitted peacoat closer across his chest. “Nobody will have seen a thing.”
No one was around to even be interviewed. The population who lived in and among the forest of concrete pylons had emptied out, the burning drums of trash casting flickering orange light over the littered, vacant acreage.
“Erika? Are you all right?”
She shook herself back to attention and smiled at her sun-streaked colleague. “Fine, thanks. And absolutely I’ll do the welfare check. They were living over on Market, assuming they haven’t moved. I can confirm with the probation database.”
Getting out her cell phone, she signed in to the CPD system and ran a search under the name of Constance Ritcher. Street name had been Candy. She’d had some prostitution convictions on her record, but no drugs, nothing violent.
Erika could still remember what the emaciated woman had looked like hooked up to a ventilator in the ICU over at St. Francis.
“Yup, she’s still on Market.” She put her phone away, and took note of the uniforms who were bringing over a privacy screen. “It won’t take me long.”
“As I said, I’ll take care of things here.”
She nodded and murmured a few more things to Kip, not that she was tracking—and then she was walking to her car, stepping over brown-paper-bag-wrapped bottles and twisted-up cloth wads that could have been towels, shirts, sweaters. As she came up to her unmarked and unlocked it with her remote, the sense that she was being watched brought her head around.
Reaching up to the nape of her neck, she rubbed at the tingling sensation and then she looked back at the scene, which was only about fifty feet away. In the lee of the brick wall, the uniformed officers were unfolding the screen and Kip was kneeling where she had just been, talking into his phone, recording notes.
As a breeze came off the river, she smelled shore funk and dirt and the greasy smoke of trash burning in those steel drums.
Everything was right about this… just like back at headquarters. And yet her instincts were telling her—
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of something red, and she pivoted quick. Then she frowned and wondered if she was seeing right. The flash of one-of-these-things-does-not-belong was actually a woman, and she was leaning against one of the bridge supports, looking as out of place as a cultivated rose in the middle of a landfill. With long, wavy brunette hair and a breathtakingly beautiful face, she was wearing nothing but Christmas-red skintight leggings and a matching bustier, seemingly impervious to the cold.
The scent of a grapey perfume drifted into Erika’s nose.
Poison by Dior, she thought. God, she hadn’t thought of that oldie-but-goodie since college, when she and her friends had bought designer perfumes on the cheap from CVS’s locked case of rejects, resales, and fakes.
“Erika? You forget something?”
Erika jumped and glanced back at the scene. Kip had risen to his feet and was staring over as if he were thinking about doing a welfare check of his own. While he fiddled with the navy-blue-and-gold bow tie that peeked out under his peacoat’s lapels, she realized he was wearing the same expression Trey had had back at Primrose—after she’d emerged from the Landreys’ bathroom.
“Yup, just great,” she called back to her colleague.
Opening the driver’s side door, she dumped herself behind the wheel and immediately locked the unmarked. As she started the engine, she looked back to where the brunette had been leaning against the bridge pylon.
The woman was gone.
As if she had never existed.
Erika squeezed her eyes shut. The sense that the world around her wasn’t as solid as it had seemed made her want to tear up. Made her want to sob. Especially as she had a feeling she was going to find another dead body when she got over to that address on Market.
But instead of losing it, she put her car in drive and hit the gas.
* * *
Over by the bridge’s support, the demon Devina made herself invisible not because she couldn’t handle that cop. Detective. Whatever the fuck the woman was.
Nah, she poof’d out because she was looking to have some fun with this. God knew there was nothing much else happening in her life, and as she felt herself once again falling into the sulk that had dogged her for the last couple of months, she had to do something to cheer herself up.
Driving Balthazar’s woman insane was going to be a little pet project.
Unless that fucking Book gets off its ass, she thought as an utterly uninspiring American sedan drove off. Why did it have to be such a little bitch?
That piece of shit collection of parchment had given so much to so many as it had come down through the millennia: Death to enemies, riches to the greedy, sickness as an act of vengeance, lovers back where they belonged. Always on its terms, though.
That last one was the problem, of course. The thing was like a gun with an opinion about its targets.
“What the hell do I have to do to get what I deserve—”
Not much really. Just jump in front of a train.
Gritting her teeth, Devina pivoted around to the disembodied voice—and got an eyeful of somebody who, under different circumstances, would totally have been worth a fuck or two.
Lassiter, the fallen angel, was standing in the cold wind just as she was, half naked and unaffected by the outside temperature. With his muscular torso bare except for all his gold chains, and his blond-and-black hair blowing around his handsome face, he was like Magic Mike without a stage. And of course, those beautiful gossamer wings rising up on both sides of him were a nice touch, too.
They were a deliberate reminder that she was dealing with somebody out of this world, and not just because he was so fuckable.
All things considered… she wanted to scream at him.
Instead, she smiled and then nodded toward the crime scene. “Come to save the soul of some poor wretch? Isn’t that how the song goes? I think you’re a little late, going by the lack of an ambulance. Nothing to revive, Lassiter.”
Actually, I’ve come to see you.
Devina flushed and felt the need to plump her already luscious hair. As she gave in to the impulse and brought some of the waves over one shoulder, she ran her eyes all the way down the angel’s body. In those leggings he insisted on wearing, his thigh muscles were nice and obvious in all their corded strength, and what was between them, that bulge, was downright impressive.
Why had she never considered him before, she wondered.
“What exactly are you looking for, angel. And FYI, I’m not sure you’re my type.”
This was a lie, of course. He absolutely was her type. He would hate fucking her, and getting him to compromise his principles would be a very good time. And then there’d be the orgasms.
Well, what do you know. The night was looking up.
I think you and I need to have a little discussion about property lines and boundaries.
Devina frowned. “I beg your pardon.”
You heard me. I want you out of Balthazar. You’re trespassing and you know it.
Oh, she thought. That.
“It’s more of a time-share, really.” She smiled and wondered what it would feel like to have him on top of her. “And my sex life is none of your business, is it.”
I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. Get out of Balthazar.
“Nope. Sorry.” She shrugged and then ran her fingertips from her collarbone to her sternum, lingering on the bustier’s contouring of her cleavage. “And not to go five-year-old on this, but you can’t make me. I’m also pretty sure the Creator is going to have an opinion about you getting overly involved. Isn’t that a thing? I think it is, what with your new promotion and all.”
This is just between you and me. You’ve got a million other people in this city to play with. You can have another.
“I don’t want another.” She leaned forward toward the male. “And you’re not very bright, angel. I want him even more now that you have an opinion about my little infestation.”
All at once, the air between them changed, the charge of heat so intense, it came at her in a warping, nuclear rush that pushed her back against a concrete support and held her in place. As she fought to get free, she didn’t really want the liberation. The power wielded on her made her nipples tighten and her thighs loosen.
“I didn’t know you had it in you,” she moaned as she arched into the pain, knowing that the bustier wasn’t going to be able to keep things decent given how full her breasts were in the cups.
Lassiter stalked up to her, his iridescent wings unfurling fully over those strong shoulders, his body a thing of both beauty and vengeance. In the wind coming off the river, his blond-and-black hair pulled back off his face, and the gold chains around his neck, his wrists, and his waist gleamed like they were alive.
“Careful… angel.” She smiled even as she began to pant from the suffocation. “You started… this about boundaries. Now you’re… treading on mine.”
Get out of Balthazar, Lassiter snarled without moving his luscious lips. Leave the male alone.
Devina shifted her eyes over to the crime scene, where humans both uniformed and plainclothed milled around doing their duty for one of their dead, totally oblivious to the fact that no more than two hundred yards away, a pair of elementals were in a dogfight over the soul of a vampire.
