“Beautiful… female… mine…” he croaked.
“Yes, yes—”
When she tried to kiss him, he hissed because he hurt all over—and he didn’t care about the pain. “Kiss me anyway…”
Her lips were soft against his own, and then he was exhausted—but stayed where he was, a balloon tethered to life by her presence. As long as she was with him, he knew where he was supposed to be; wherever she was, was his place.
“I love you, too,” she whispered.
At the end of the day, even though he had so many questions still, and so many blank spaces that needed filling in… that was all he needed to know, wasn’t it.
The rest was history.
EPILOGUE
Three nights later…
Not all spring nights were warm. Some of them were downright cold, and as Balz stepped out of the Brotherhood mansion’s vestibule, the difference in temperature from the balmy foyer and the chilly great outdoors was enough to make him zip his leather jacket up over his steel daggers.
As he looked across the courtyard to the glowing lights of the Pit, his sight of the smaller caretakers’ house was partially obstructed by the fountain. The great basin, with its central marble statue that spit water all over the place, was still winterized. Good thing. It was below freezing tonight.
Before he took off, he glanced back at the great manse. All of the diamond-paned windows were glowing, and with his keen ears, he could hear both the laughter of Last Meal as families lingered over dessert as well as the talk that was starting up in the billiards room as Brothers and fighters gathered around the pool tables.
It was all still home to him, this raucous, imposing life here, everything revolving around the First Family.
He was going to miss living with them, he thought as he walked down the steps.
He did not look back again.
Taking out his phone, he checked to see if the text he’d sent had been answered. When he saw that it hadn’t, he put his cell back in an outside pocket.
Everyone was looking for Lassiter.
But Balz had a feeling he knew where the angel was. Closing his eyes, he took a deep, steadying breath… and dematerialized off the mountain. When he re-formed, the terrain was the same, though he was a good ten miles away, on the slope of a different Adirondack peak.
The hidden den he had squatted in, and which Fritz, butler extraordinaire, had more properly kitted out, was tucked behind a waterfall of boulders, the kind of thing that unless you were a bear looking to hibernate, you wouldn’t know was there.
Not that anybody, even a bear, was out and about on this north-facing elevation—and fucking hell, if he’d thought that things were icy in front of the mansion, here he was in Siberia.
“It’s me,” he called out as he went around to a juncture between a rock the size of an SUV and another hunk of granite that would have given a king-sized mattress a run for the money for surface area. “And I know you’re in here.”
The wind pushed his words into the cave as he ducked down, bending his body in half to fight through a crevice. On the far side of the squeeze, candlelight, buttery yellow and very still, called him forward to an open area nearly big enough to be considered a living room.
He found the angel everyone was looking for sitting back on the pallet bed that had been kitted out with monogrammed duvets and feather pillows. Next to the male was a sterling silver candelabra on an inlaid French bombé chest, a propane stove, and enough camping supplies and nonperishable food to keep anybody going for a year.
It was like Versailles meets Bear Grylls.
“Seventy-two hours,” Balz said gruffly. “They’ve been searching for you for three nights now.”
The angel didn’t look up; he just sat where he was, poised as if he were on the verge of getting to his feet, his elbows on his knees, his shoulders tilted forward, his long blond-and-black hair hanging in his face.
A sense of foreboding shimmied down Balz’s spine. Or maybe it was more like clawed its descent.
“What did you do,” Balz whispered.
When there was no response, he approached the angel, easing down onto his haunches, both his ankles cracking.
More loudly, he repeated, “I know the demon left Erika, but I don’t know why.”
Lassiter took a deep breath. “How are you feeling now?”
“Fine. It’s just me in my skin.”
“And what about Erika?”
Balz frowned. “She’s fine, too.”
“Good.”
“V and Butch think they saved her, but they didn’t, did they. You did.”
It was hard to say exactly when Balz had made the connection. Difficult, too, to ascertain the precise combination of clues that led him to the truth that the male in front of him was not currently speaking of. But he knew he was right. And he knew he was looking at someone who had been where he himself had been, that frozen face and too-still body something he had seen in the mirror.