Before Sahvage had a proper thought, his dagger hand shot forward and grabbed the front of the doctor’s scrubs. Pulling the human right up close, he bared his fangs.
But instead of screeching, calling for help, or shoving back, the guy just rolled his eyes. “Jesus, you people need to fucking chill. Relax, dickhead. And spare me the ‘if you touch her, Ima kill you.’ I’ve heard it a million times, and not once has anything that’s six seven and clocking in at three hundred pounds had to put my face through a plate glass window.”
Sahvage’s eyebrows popped. “I didn’t think humans could read minds.”
“Wow, you went there with the glass? Really?” Dr. Manello punched Sahvage’s chest and got himself free. “Out. Now. If you care about this female at all, you’ll let me do my job. I’m not fucking around with your bonding anymore—”
“Oh, no, no—you got it all wrong.” Sahvage put his palms up. “I haven’t bonded with her.”
“So I’m smelling cologne you just decided to put on in the middle of a crisis?” The doctor tapped the side of his nose. “Niffer, niffer, dumbass. In case you’ve missed it.”
On that note, the human planted a fairly good-sized set of payback palms on Sahvage’s torso and gave things a big old push.
As Sahvage tap-danced out into the sitting area, the Brothers went with him and the bedroom door was shut.
Whereupon he just stood there. Like, well, a dumbass.
“You know,” Tohrment remarked as he parked it on the sofa in the sitting area, “I’m not sure what I’m most surprised about. The fact that your coffin was full of flour, the hi-how’re-ya out of the blue, the pull-a-female-through-a-steel-door . . . or this.”
“What’s this,” Sahvage muttered as he turned around.
“The bonding.”
“I haven’t bonded with her, for fuck’s sake.”
The fact that he had to physically restrain himself from stamping his boot was something that he resolutely refused to dwell on.
Meanwhile, over on an armchair, the Brother Butch cocked an eyebrow. And didn’t say a goddamn thing.
Which made it worse, of course.
As minutes stretched into three hundred years of waiting, Sahvage paced up and back. A couple of times.
Then he stopped. “So you know where the Book is?”
Butch looked at Tohrment. Who shook his head.
“We have a couple of people working on leads.” Tohrment crossed his arms over his daggers. “But make no mistake, we will find it.”
Sahvage thought about the summoning spell. And kept his goddamn mouth shut.
“When we get its location,” Tohrment continued, “we’re going to need you to help us get it. And before you try to bullshit us again that you’re nothing special, you just pulled a female out of some kind of alternate reality through a steel door. We need you, warlock. Without your powers, we’re not going to get to goal.”
Sahvage narrowed his eyes. “Answer me this: What are you going to do with the Book when you get it?”
“Put it in a very safe place.”
“You’re going to destroy it?”
“It’s going to be in a very safe place.”
Sahvage thought about the brunette. And what that bitch had done to Mae.
Then he cursed to himself as he remembered what his Mae wanted the Book for. But maybe everything that had just happened had changed her mind—not that he knew the details of abduction yet. He sure as shit was going to find out everything as soon as she was able to tell him about it, though.
Because now there were two things on his extermination list.
“I’m staying here with Mae,” Sahvage said. “You get a bead on the Book, the Reverend has my number.”
“So you will help us.”
Sahvage stared right into the navy blue eyes of the fighter who had once been his brother in all but blood—and lied through his fucking fangs.
“Absolutely I will.”
• • •
As Erika stepped off the Commodore building’s main elevator, a couple of floors above where she’d been called into that scene with the murdered and desecrated couple, she was glad that short-staffing issues had kicked in once again.
Striding down, she did not miss her sleep. Her empty apartment. Her planned couple of hours off. She was firing on all cylinders.
The uniform by the door nodded to her and opened the way in. As she passed through, she nodded back at him.
“They’re in with all the books,” he said.
The direction was great—except for the fact that it presumed she knew anything about the layout of the rooms inside. But considering all of the balls in the air at the moment? The mystery of the body’s location was the simplest one she had to solve. Besides, all she did was follow the conversation. Soft. With some weeping thrown in for tragic measure.
According to Special Agent Delorean, the wife found the husband after he’d gone to investigate a tripped alarm. And the corpse was . . . right up Erika’s alley.