Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(41)

“Thank God, we can go to the club,” Shuli said under his breath. “We’ll come back at the end of the night.”

“Club?” Rahvyn looked at Shuli. “As in a private organization you belong to?”

“It’s a place to go where there’s music and dancing.”

The male made a show of tucking yet another silk shirt into the waistband of his pressed slacks. Shuli had two uniforms: the Izod-polo-and-khaki-shorts look, which he wore to work or when he was kicking around his parents’ mansion, or this smooth, sexy, urban stuff that some of the guys on-site last night had called Bradtastic. Whatever that meant—

“May I come with you?”

Wait, what? “Ah…” Nate tried to picture Rahvyn in the same space with a shitload of drunken, drugged-up humans. “I’m not sure whether it’s your scene or not.”

Translation: That is definitely not your scene.

With a sharp pivot, Shuli turned his back to Rahvyn and bugged out his eyeballs, all what-are-you-doing-my-guy.

Nate pushed him aside. “It can be kind of rowdy. You know, loud. ’Cuz there’ll be a lot of people there—and they won’t always be like us, if you get what I mean.”

“I am not afraid of humans.” She folded the paper and put it on the coffee table; then got to her feet. “And I should like to get out and see a little of the world. I am feeling trapped here.”

Clapping his palms together, Shuli looked like he would have spiked a football if he’d had one. “Great, let’s go. I have my car.”

As the male headed for the exit, Nate rubbed his jaw, a ball of not-a-great-idea churning in his gut.

“Shall we?” Rahvyn said.

“I’ll take care of you,” he mumbled. “Don’t worry.”

“Oh, I am not worried about my safety.” She smiled at him shyly. “But I appreciate your concern.”

Well… if that didn’t make a male feel ten feet taller, he thought as he went into the kitchen and put the plans on the table.

But this was still not a great idea.

“So where is this ‘club,’?” Rahvyn asked as he returned to the living room.

“Downtown, and Shuli does have his Tesla tonight.” Because it was hard to pick up humans with only thin air as transport. “Unless you’d like to dematerialize?”

“Tesla? You mean that electric car I have seen on the television? I have never been in one before.”

“They’re the best,” Shuli announced from over by the door. “You’re not going to believe how smooth they are. You’ll never go back.”

“I have never been in any car, actually.”

As Shuli looked surprised, Nate felt the same way. And yet when he’d gotten free of that lab he’d been held in, cars had been a revelation for him as well. God, he really wanted to know her full backstory—and feared it, too.

“Would you like to ride in one tonight?” Nate asked. “It’s your choice.”

Rahvyn leaned a little closer to him so she could see through a window out to the driveway—and she smelled so amazing, all clean laundry, soap, and shampoo. He wished he knew the brands she used, but it would be way stalkerish to ask, and way too pathetic to buy the stuff just to have it in his own home—

As her hair slipped off her shoulder, he wanted to touch the white fall of waves. Run his fingers through the strands. Feel it… on his naked chest…

“Yes, please, I would like to ride in it,” Rahvyn said. “As long as you shall be with me.”



* * *



Darkness was a vampire’s freedom.

As Balz dematerialized away from his mountain hideaway and headed for Trade Street, he was in a rush, and not just because he had the afterburn of what felt like a kilo of cocaine still racing through his veins. It turned out, if you did enough blow, that whole thirty-to-forty-minute buzz routine skated into a perpetual high. Of course, your bonus prize was a scrambled brain and a body that might as well have been hooked up to a car battery for all the spasms and twitching.

Frankly, it was a miracle he could concentrate well enough to ghost out. Then again, saving Erika’s life was one fuck of a motivator.

When he re-formed, it was downtown, and as he checked the address he was looking for on his phone, a pedestrian walked right into him. Rearing back, he went for one of his daggers—

“Oh, sorry, mate,” the guy said in a British accent. “Wasn’t watching where I was going.”

The human held up his own phone by way of explanation, and then went back to texting and walking.

“Fuck,” Balz muttered as he looked down at his shitkickers.

In all his distraction, he’d re-formed in the middle of the sidewalk, no more than six feet away from a streetlight. So, yeah, if Mr. Downton Abbey had been paying attention, the poor bastard would have gotten one helluva hi-how’re-ya.

“Fucking concentrate.”

It was a multi-f-bomb kind of night.

The block he was on was two down from where he’d intended to be, so he got his hoof-it on, striding over the concrete pavers, kicking a crumpled McDonald’s bag out of his way, checking behind himself. Across the street. And in the dark windows of the rundown shops he was going by.

Not a great part of town, he thought. But when he’d Googled what he’d been looking for, this was the only one that came up.