Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(36)

Erika thought back to when she’d woken up at her desk in a free fall to the floor. There had been two dreams, the recurring one at the triplex, and a new one that had scared her… where had she been in the nightmare? Where had she…

“Down my stairs,” she blurted. “I was at my house. The lights were all off. I was going down my stairs to my front door. I looked into the mirror there—a shadow. It was a shadow that came after me—and it was a shadow that came out of you.”

The rush of clarity ushered in a return of the headache, but she didn’t care. It was a relief to be able to remember something, anything—even as the hairs on the back of her neck stood up and a shiver went through her body. And it was weird. Getting chased in a nightmare by some kind of darkness was pretty standard spooky-subconscious crap, yet she knew down deep that whatever it had been…

Was real.

She pegged the suspect in the eye with a hard stare. “You don’t want me to save you? Fine. Just don’t leave me in a position where I can’t protect myself. That thing is in my house.”



* * *



Note to self: Shit can always get more complicated.

As Balz stood over his detective—not that she was his—he knew he shouldn’t be where he was. Vampires and humans did not mix—more to the point, they shouldn’t mix. But after he’d gotten into the brain of that asshole down by the bridge, there was no way he was going to let some poor woman bleed out if he could help it.

And the dealer had left the woman alive.

The moment Balz had come in through the front door of the apartment, he had followed the copper scent here to the bedroom—and as soon as it was obvious things were too late, he’d intended to leave immediately.

Something had made that impossible.

Guess his destiny had known his detective was going to show up.

And now here he was, in even deeper.

“Fuck.” Balz looked around the squalid room. “Mother… fucker.”

When his eyeballs provided him with absolutely no quick-fixes whatsoever—but like, what, this sad scene was a Kmart for solutions?—he refocused on Erika. She was staring at the body, the stillness in her a clear indication she was going through so many mentals. A lot of which were his fault.

“I never believed in the list,” she said absently, as if she were talking to herself. “Never did… but I think I do now.”

“What list.”

It was a long minute before she glanced back at him, and again, he had the sense she was speaking her private thoughts out loud: “Everyone who joins homicide, sooner or later, sees the list.” Her eyes traveled up and down his body, like she was recording every detail about him. Just as he’d done to her. “It’s not merely cold case files, it’s totally unexplained cold cases, and they go back a hundred years or more. Bodies with black blood in their veins that later disappear from the morgue. Autopsies that show physical anomalies that no coroner has documented before. Remote sites where ritual murder has clearly taken place, but there are no human or animal remains. Missing persons reports and homicide cases that are ‘solved,’ except no one can figure out exactly how or why.”

There was a pause. “Then there are murder victims who were skinned alive or had organs removed without any instrument markings on their bodies… victims like Herbert Cambourg, whose watches you turned in to that dead black market dealer. Cambourg’s torso had been split up the middle.” She shook her head and looked back at the dead human woman. “But something tells me you know this.”

When he didn’t respond, she smiled in a hard way. “Do you have any idea how many detectives get MRIs because they have persistent headaches and are convinced they have a brain tumor? But it’s never that. And there’s nothing wrong with my mind, is there.”

Balz took a deep breath. “No, I’m afraid there isn’t.”

“I can’t believe I’m talking like this.”

“You can trust me.”

She laughed in a harsh rush. “Spare me that line, okay? Especially when we’re both next to a woman you probably killed.”

“She was dead when I got here.” When Erika went to counter that, he cut in, “Your forensics guys will prove it wasn’t me.”

“Will they?” Her eyes returned to his, and they narrowed. “Or are you just going to make me and everyone else in the department believe that? How the hell do you manipulate people’s minds? It’s some Scooby-Doo stuff, for sure.”

“I love that cartoon,” he said remotely.

“Me, too.” She rubbed her forehead and seemed to exhale in defeat. “Except the monsters aren’t real in Cabot Cove. I’m beginning to believe they’re real in Caldwell, though.”

“Cabot Cove is Murder, She Wrote.”

“Oh, sorry,” she murmured with exhaustion. “I didn’t mean to Jessica Fletcher this situation.”

“?’S okay. I like that show as well.”

She took a deep breath and seemed to be unaware of what she was saying, her words coming out in a jumble. “I binge-watched the first five seasons in February when I had the flu. I don’t like it from then on because of the other detectives that got brought in.”

“Agreed. Plus the computer instead of the typewriter in the opening, toward the end of the series.”