Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(100)

She needed to leave this place and time, and the fewer ties she had, the easier that would be. She did not belong here, with these people, in this year.

She feared that she did not belong anywhere.

But at least she could not hurt anyone if she departed. These kind souls here, of which there were many, would be so much safer without her.

Though she had a feeling it would break her heart to be without them.

Especially the one they called fallen angel.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN




A dawn of pinks and yellows rose in Caldwell’s eastern sky, the rays spearing through the dark gray petticoat of cloud cover that was departing along with the night’s black velvet skirt.

As Erika stood on the shallow front porch of her townhouse, she had a steaming coffee cup in her palms, and an ache between her legs that was the kind of thing that pulled a secret smile out of her mouth. And while the other people in her neighborhood headed off to work, she stayed where she was.

Enjoying the sunrise. Which was the most beautiful one she had ever seen.

Yes, the colors were especially arresting, so vibrant and bright, the hard edge of the weather front providing a unique set of atmospheric conditions resulting in the brilliant display of chromatics. But it could have only been a smudge of yellow at the sole of the sky and the sunrise would have made her breathless.

She hadn’t expected to see the sun again. There had been too many opportunities to die the night before—and it turned out that a couple of stiff reminders of a person’s mortality was like being hungry when you sat down to dinner. Everything was more vital, more special, more extraordinary, afterward.

She felt positively reborn.

Then again, she’d had sex for the last six hours straight with a man—a male—who not only knew how to use his spectacular body… but had taken allllll kinds of care to make sure she knew how beautiful hers was to him.

Lifting her hand, she slipped it inside her bathrobe and ran her fingertips over the uneven scars below her collarbone. The t-shirt had stayed on the whole time. He’d more than figured out how to work around it, however.

When she dropped her arm, she exhaled long and slow, and watched a neighbor from the pair of units next door back down his shallow drive. The curl of steam coming out of his tailpipe made her wonder how cold it was. Sure, she was in her bathrobe, but her hair was wet from the shower she’d just taken—and given the way the man looked at her like she was nuts as he passed by, she had a feeling she really should be in a parka with dry goldilocks.

The next sip of her coffee reminded her of the dead-soldier cups on her desk in the Bull Pen, and sure enough, as she peered into the mug, there was barely an inch left in the bottom. Turning away from the show in the sky, she went back inside—and in a rare moment of optimism, she decided those dark clouds leaving to the north were a sign that things were going to get better.

How? She hadn’t a goddamn clue.

On that note, she threw the dead bolt and tiptoed through the living room. Out in the kitchen, she was equally quiet as she went over to her coffee machine. A filter full of Dunkin’ later, she was sitting at her table with her laptop propped open and a fresh steaming mug at her elbow.

It felt utterly bizarre to check email, like she had hacked into someone else’s account, someone else’s life. So much had happened, and she supposed it was like coming home from a months’ long vacation and feeling like you were lost among the familiar.

Yeah, except her night had been about as far from R&R as sunbathing in a hurricane.

As she went through her in-box, there was the usual spam and then a couple of work things. It dawned on her that she didn’t have a personal email, just this CPD-issued one. Then again, who was she emailing outside of her job?

Sitting back and cradling the warmth of the mug in her hands, she frowned as she looked around the counters and cabinets of her antiquated kitchen. Nothing was out of order and there was no clutter. The same was true for the rest of the townhouse. But there were also no personal items anywhere. No photographs of friends, families, or pets, no mementos from vacations to warm places or cold places, dry places or high places. No knickknacks. No art. Just bare walls, clean floors, and windows that had the drapes pulled.

And not just because there was a vampire sleeping in her basement.

Funny, how she kept using that word. She found herself wanting to get used to it.

Then again, she wasn’t sure why she bothered. She didn’t believe that Balthazar was going to leave her with her memories.

She believed he wanted to, but there was no way the others were going to let him.

Picturing that guy with the goatee and then the blond-and-black-haired whatever-he’d-been who’d helped her save Balthazar, she considered, from their point of view, the happy idea that there was a human woman, who worked for the CPD—in homicide, no less—out in the world with the knowledge that there were vampires in Caldwell.

Not going to happen.

They were not the Mafia, it was true, but the same rules had to apply for them to continue their fight against those shadows, against that demon.

Refocusing on her laptop, she knew it was just a matter of time before she was wiped clean, so she went into Microsoft Word and opened a new document. She hadn’t been an English major, not even close, so as she put her fingers on the keys, she was not going to try to write Shakespeare.