Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(106)

She still was out of sequence.

For chrissakes, the fact that she was sleeping with a vampire was actually right up her outlier alley, wasn’t it. Everybody else was engaged, married, married with babies, or married with children. She was seeing Dracula.

“Stop it,” she muttered as she got back into the middle lane.

Balthazar was so much more than that. He had accepted her scars. He hadn’t judged her darkest secret, the thing that stung her right to her soul. He had cherished her and held her, and when they’d fallen asleep together for a half hour, he had kept a gun right under their sofa in case he had to protect her.

She’d never felt like all parts of her were accepted before. Right as they were. And the irony was real.

All it had taken… was a member of another species.

As her downtown exit arrived, she cut in front of a Mustang and descended the ramp that dumped her out on the edge of the business district. The route she had to take to get to the Bloody Bookshoppe was inefficient, but that was the way of one-ways. Pulling up in front of the little store, she stared at the door and remembered stepping through it… into another world.

Police tape, as familiar to her as her own face, crisscrossed the inset stoop, and there was a seal on the jamb.

The sight of it made her wonder what they did when they “cleaned up a scene,” as Balthazar had put it. Did they lift evidence if it linked them or suggested their presence? Or just get rid of the metaphysical stuff? They’d certainly removed anything that proved she’d been there.

The temptation to go in was nearly overwhelming. Instead, she continued on. She’d agreed to leave the silver Honda in the area and bring the key back to Balthazar. He’d told her they’d handle getting the vehicle back to that garage—

Erika braked and checked her rearview mirror. Glanced around. Then twisted in her seat so she could get a second look at the lineup of cars that were parallel parked on both sides of the one-way. Crap, she’d gone by her unmarked.

As she set about making another box formation with the one-ways, she made herself concentrate. Maybe she was mistaken about where she’d left her car.

A second trip around got her the same result.

Absolutely no unmarked.

Where the hell was her car?



* * *



Back at Erika’s townhouse, Balz was taking a shower in her bedroom upstairs. As he stood under the warm spray and ran her bar of Dove soap over his body, he really didn’t like the idea that she was out in the brilliant light of day, traveling over roads that were chock-full of distracted, idiot drivers, heading back to where Devina had killed an old man and pretended to be him.

He particularly hated that last part.

On that note, where the hell was the demon, he wondered as he reached for her shampoo. He’d fallen asleep after they’d made love again, and still no demon in his dreams. That was twice that that bitch hadn’t shown up—

Balz froze with his hands on his head and something made by Paul Mitchell palmed in his hair. As the water continued to wash over him and the shampoo dripped into his eyes, he heard a voice in his head. Lassiter’s voice.

True love is going to save you.

Like an absolute piker, Balz’s hands dropped to his sides and he stared at the tile of Erika’s shower stall.

“I love her. I really do.”

When the sting from the shampoo got irritating, he turned around and faced the spray. Rinsing his hair, he felt a cosmic shift inside himself. The Book didn’t matter. That was why Lassiter had told him to let it go when he and Sahvage had been playing tug-o’-war with the ugly, nasty-ass thing.

Erika was his savior. Not anything in that old tome.

She was his solution.

Hanging his head, he thought about all the don’t-know-why’s of destiny. He hadn’t had a clue about why the demon had chosen him or exactly how she’d gotten into his soul at the moment he’d been electrocuted in that snowstorm. And now, he didn’t know why he was so lucky to have crossed paths with a human who’d changed the course of his life.

He should have felt empowered and lucky.

Instead, he felt just as out of control as before; he only happened to like the current outcome better.

That was life, though. For all the choices consciously made, there were forces at work under the ground of daily and nightly existence, deep aquifers of fate that drove an existence that fluctuated in and out of happiness, sorrow, boredom, fear, up above.

Yet he was grateful.

How could he not be? Except maybe he had more Syphon in him than he wanted to admit. He’d rather be in control.

Cutting the water, he stepped out and used the still-damp towel Erika had run over her body on his own. As her scent rose up to his nose, his libido raised the hand it had. He wasn’t going to do anything about his perma-rection right now, though. He scrubbed his hair dry, smoothed it down with his hands, and threw the sweat suit, as he’d come to think of it, back on.

Out in the shallow hall, he peeked through the open door of the guest bedroom. Erika had pulled all of the shades on the first and second floor, but the ones in there weren’t blackouts and he reared back as if slapped. Closing the space up, even though he was going downstairs, he descended to the kitchen and hit the fridge looking for food.

Condiments. Lots of condiments.

Like she never cooked and only ordered in.