Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood 20)

The instant she entered her lair, she could feel that something wasn’t right. Her eyes went immediately across to the Birkin display, but everything was where it was supposed to be, with the burned star on the top of her proverbial tree.

In the rest of the open space, her clothes were the same, the racks all orderly, nothing hanging cockeyed or anything.

The bedding platform was made.

The kitchen was neat. The furniture arranged as it had always been. Likewise, the tub and the towels and her sink were gleaming and static, just as she had left them.

But someone had been here, someone who shouldn’t have been. She could scent them… and they smelled like a meadow of wild flowers—

“Nooooooo!”

Devina whirled around to where the Book had been suspended in thin air. It was gone… and no trace of it was left behind, not the rancid stench, not a fragment of parchment, not a shadow of where it had once been. The whole lair was empty of the ugly, stinking thing.

It could not escape on its own, though. It needed a proxy to become mobile.

Who the fuck had been in her space—

At that moment, as if the universe were answering her demand, she sensed arrivals outside in the corridor. Many of them. A cadre’s worth of them.

Pivoting on her heel toward the door, she peered through the panel and what she saw got her attention, even though she was an immortal.

The Black Dagger Brotherhood and the Band of Bastards were just outside her lair, and they were fully armed and ready to fight.

“What the fuck,” she muttered. “I have to get dressed and do my goddamn hair.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

This is where she was,” Sahvage announced. “That last door.”

Even though the Brother had been their guide into the building, he stepped aside so that Balz could now lead the way down the long basement corridor. As the other males flanked in behind him, they paid honor to a bonded male’s right to ahvenge his female.

Protect his female.

To that end, a dozen more fighters than he expected had shown up in Erika’s living room—and they had come with supplies. He had been given a new pair of guns. And fresh leathers. And steel daggers in a holster. And the best backup any warrior could have asked for.

Except for his Erika, of course.

As they went along now, Sahvage said in his ear, “To get inside, my Mae had to open up some kind of access to the other dimension the demon keeps her shit in. I don’t think just busting down the door is gonna do it.”

“We’ll get in,” Balz countered in a grim voice. “She wants me, so if I’m here, she’ll come to me—if only because she’ll have to lord her possession of Erika over me—”

From out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash go by. It was so quick, so camouflaged, that if he hadn’t been expecting it, he might have ignored the visual disturbance or written it off as something that was immaterial—

The shadow popped up right in front of him, the ghostly, evil apparition taking substance and falling into a fighting stance.

Partytime.

Balz let out a battle cry and raised a dagger as well as one of his autoloaders. He would rather have gone hand to hand with the thing, but there was no time. So he aimed that fucking muzzle, and just as an “arm” extension of the entity snapped out and caught him in the chest, he started pumping off bullets.

The screeching was so loud, his ears rang, but like he gave a fuck—

As he heard a shout right behind him, he glanced over his shoulder.

It was an ambush.

Shadows were everywhere, an entire army of them, materializing in the corridor, pulling free of inset doorways, and the contours of pipes in the ceiling, and from the deep well of darkness that suddenly enveloped the stairwell they had descended—

The strike came to the side of his face, like a slap made up of a thousand bee stings. Blinded by pain, he jammed the muzzle of his forty forward, and as he felt resistance, he discharged more rounds, just let the autoloader autoload the fuck out of everything that was in the magazine.

The shadow in front of him was driven back, tripping, falling, in a way that allowed Balz to get closer to his goal, to that doorway Sahvage had pointed out. As his eyesight improved, he switched his dagger for his other gun and just kept forcing the retreat, the popping sounds of the bullets and the horrible screaming noise one hell of a concert.

And what do you know, it was in surround sound.

It was too dangerous to check behind himself again, but he knew that the Brothers and his fellow bastards were engaging as well. Except they were doing it with one hand tied behind their proverbial backs: They couldn’t use their guns because he would be downstream of any misses, and given how fluid the shadows were, there were a lot of lead slugs that didn’t hit their targets—