Lover Unveiled (Black Dagger Brotherhood 19)

Another blink. And then, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”

“Wrong answer,” Mae gritted. “That’s the wrong fucking answer.”

The Commodore Building, Luxury Living at Its Finest™

Downtown Caldwell

Balthazar, son of Hanst, had shoes that were soft as lamb’s ears on his feet. His skintight clothes were black. His head and most of his face were covered with a skull cap. His hands were gloved.

Not that vampires had to worry about leaving fingerprints.

As he lived up to all the silent, creeping myths about his species—or at least the ones the humans made up—he was a shadow among shadows, whispering through the high-ceiling’d rooms of the largest condo in the Commodore, cataloguing all manner of goodies that were on display in dimmed light.

The fucking triplex was like a museum. For someone who watched a lot of AHS.

Coming around another corner, and entering yet another small room with a theme to its objects, he stopped short. “What the . . .”

Like the other capsules he’d ghosted through, this one was filled with glass shelves. It was what was on them that was a surprise—and considering he had sauntered through an entire room full of Victorian surgical instruments, that was saying something.

Oh, and then there’d been the bat skeletons.

“You went and bought a bunch of rocks,” he murmured. “Really. Like you didn’t have anything better to do with your money.”

Through the darkness, Balz drifted over the fancy parquet floor to something that looked like a loaf of pumpernickel bread that had been overproved. The thing was egg-shaped with a semi-solid core, its outside limits full of holes, the whole production set up on some kind of Lucite stand. A little nameplate that was brushed gold read: Willamette Fragment, 1902.

Each of the hunks seemed to be named for a place: Lübeck, 1916. Kitkiöjärvi, 1906. Poughkeepsie, 1968.

None of it made any sense—

Dover, 1833.

Balz frowned. And then, before he could do any conscious math on the date and place, the past slammed into him: Instantly, he was sucked away from the luxurious, weird condo, teleported by memory back to the Old Country . . . where he and the Band of Bastards had been living on their own in the forests, scrounging for food, for weapons, for lesser kills. Ah, those rough and exciting earlier years. They’d been the very opposite of where they were now, aligned with the Black Dagger Brotherhood and the First Family, crashing in a great gray mansion on top of a mountain, safe, sound, protected.

He missed some parts of the good ol’ nights. He wouldn’t change a thing about the present, though.

But yeah, back in March of 1833, in the Old Country, the bastards had been just rousing from the shallow cave they’d taken refuge in to avoid the sun during the day. Suddenly, overhead, a brilliant flash of light appeared to streak across the entire night sky, burning bright as a star and growing larger by the heartbeat, its tail a streamer of sparkling jewels.

They’d raced back into the cave and crouched down, arms over skulls to protect heads and faces.

Balz had thought that maybe the world was coming to an end, the Scribe Virgin finished with pussyfooting around with the species—or perhaps the Omega had discovered a new weapon against the vampires.

The explosion had been close by, the sound of the impact earsplitting, the ground quaking, stone particles falling on their shoulders as the structural integrity of the cave was challenged. After that . . . several minutes of waiting. And then they’d filed out and sniffed the air.

Iron. Burning iron.

They’d followed the metallic stench through the trees . . . to find a smoking burn pit with a small rock in the center. Like an odd, mystical bird-creature had laid a toxic egg.

Balz came back to the present and looked around again.

These were meteorites. All of these craggy chunks of God-only-knew-what had traveled through space and landed with fanfare on the earth. Only to be corralled here by a collector with a lot of money and an arguably clinical case of OCD.

“Fill your boots,” Balz muttered as he continued through.

It had taken him a couple of weeks to scope out this target—said research and stalking the anticipatory foreplay before the felonious orgasm. Husband was a hedge fund manager—which to Balz conjured up images of a man in a suit safeguarding $27.94 in bush trimmers. Wife was a former model—which meant she was still hot, just not photographed professionally now that she had a ring on it. Unsurprisingly, there was a nineteen-year age difference between the two, and given the life spans of humans, that wasn’t going to matter so much now when it was a case of late fifties vs. late thirties. Ten years from now? Twenty?

Hard to imagine that wife with the good bone structure and the superior posterior was going to find dentures and a walker worth rolling over for.