“Please…”
Later, she could wonder why she was so determined to rescue a suspect. Then again, he had come in here to help her.
Abruptly, the glow returned. An outline of light appeared around the man with the long blond-and-black hair, and its magical warmth reverberated outward from him, engulfing her, calming her, healing her pain and easing the burn in her lungs.
The man came forward and knelt down beside her—and that was when she recognized the sensation on her face, her body: Sunshine. She felt as though she were lying out on a towel, at the Million Dollar Beach at the base of Lake George, the late August sun shining down on her, getting into her bones as a breeze coming from the water kept her from overheating.
Rays of heavenly grace.
Is this Jesus? Erika wondered.
No, came an answer in her mind.
A hand extended toward her, and she had a thought that he was out of luck if he wanted to help her to her feet. As much as his presence seemed to magically improve how she felt, she was empty of energy, incapable of moving.
“I can’t…” Except then Erika frowned.
In the seat of his palm, a ball of light formed and hovered. And while she tried to comprehend what she was looking at, the man reached out and brushed her face. His touch was not sexual in any way, but it traveled through her bones, registering all over her as warmth.
As kindness and compassion.
Gently, he took her limp hand and turned it over. Placing the orb in her palm, he rose up to his full height again.
Erika gazed upon the energy source with wonder and awe. Then she lifted her heavy head and met his oddly colored eyes.
The man nodded over to the suspect.
After that, he took a step back and disappeared just as the brunette had: One moment he was there, the next… he was just gone.
With a moan, Erika held the ball of energy up to where he had been, like it was something that could bring him back. Then she refocused on the suspect.
He had disappeared. It was too late.
And what was she holding anyway?
That rumination was momentary. Even as she questioned what she was doing, she rolled over onto her stomach and started to drag herself over to the man she had been searching for, the man who, as with Keri Cambourg, had been in her dreams.
The man who had sacrificed himself to save her.
Snippets of what had been said between him and the brunette floated around her mind. None of it made any sense and she didn’t even attempt to sort things out. Trying to pull herself over the concrete with only one hand and her feet to push was all she could handle at the moment.
When she got to the man, she was breathing hard and getting dizzy. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do—
No, she did.
Erika pushed her palm with the glow under his throat, where the injury was. As she felt the warmth of his blood, she closed her eyes.
“Please… don’t die,” she prayed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The “what” was less important than the “why.”
That was what one of the TED Talks had said. Or maybe it had been a book? YouTube video? Certainly an Insta post from that CarpeDaDayum account.
As Lassiter stood outside the Bloody Bookshoppe, he looked up at the sky and breathed in deep. When all he could smell was frying food from across the street, and then a bunch of uninspiring clouds drifted across the face of a wan moon, he put his hands in the pockets of his Mark Rober sweatpants and started walking.
He didn’t know where he was going until he got there.
And then when the destination presented itself, his location struck him as inevitable.
Maybe all that should be in some human’s book. If he’d learned anything over the last couple of days of relentless self-improvement, it was that Homo sapiens could elevate almost any banal statement of the obvious to a self-referential mood-cue for profundity.
He’d read that in an article, too.
Tilting his head back, he read the sign over the entrance of the club: Dandelion. The place was painted a spring green, from the roofline down to the sidewalk, and the trippy music that atmosphere’d out of its block-long expanse was all syntho stuff, not a conventional instrument anywhere near the beats.
“Are you coming or are you going?”
At the stiff demand, Lassiter glanced to the front door. A bearded human male with a man-bun and some swallow tattoos was looking like bouncing anything out of the establishment that weighed over a hundred and twenty pounds was going to be a problem. Maybe he was banking on his librarian-like stare of disapproval to corral the drunken and disorderly.
Yeah, good luck with that, buddy.
Although maybe the guy was just cranky about his uniform. In keeping with the weed theme, the powers that were had made him wear a bright green t-shirt and brown pants. He looked like he had on a bad Halloween costume and was going as sod.