Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(26)

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.