Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood 20)

As V’s body weaved from reorientation, he felt tired to the point of death. “No offense,” he muttered, “I’ve wanted to forget most of our little chats. So yeah, keeping quiet on this one won’t be a problem.”

Walking away to the double doors, which had opened again, he stopped in the jambs and stared across the white marble courtyard at the fountain.

“Thanks, angel,” he murmured.

“You’re welcome, vampire.”

CHAPTER SIX

As it turned out, Balz didn’t make it down to the bridges where the friendly neighborhood drug dealers were. He’d planned to go do a deal for some powdered energy to keep himself awake, but a sidetrack happened—and no matter how much he’d tried to get to goal, he couldn’t seem to reroute.

Which, given that his measure of bright-idea was securing a controlled substance, really said something about where he was and what he was doing.

On the where-he-was front, he was sitting on the roof of the security kiosk in the Caldwell Police Department’s mostly empty administration parking lot. And as for what he was doing?

He was being pathetic. That’s what he was doing.

Stretching his lower body out of its cross-legged position, the metal roof under his ass had no give in it at all and he grunted as his weight transferred from cheek to cheek. The good news was that there was a chill in the April air so shit back there was numb as a box of rocks. Provided he didn’t move it.

After settling into a halfway comfortable lean-back, his eyes drifted up the flank of the building once again. The structure was low and long, and as adorned as a pizza box, the rows upon rows of windows inset into the brick without any kind of flourish. Ah, yes, municipal architecture from the sixties, when four corners and a roof that didn’t cave in were considered a stylistic trend.

Then again, that decade had coughed up macramé, bell bottoms, and lava lamps. So it could be worse.

There had to be a good seventy-five to eighty offices in the sizable expanse and almost all of them were dark. Not every one, though. On the second floor, over on the left, there was an entire bank of glowing glass rectangles.

And that was why he was here. He’d checked in on a lark… and found what he shouldn’t have been looking for.

The detective he should not be getting anywhere near—in person or mentally—was sitting at her desk and staring at her computer screen like it held the answers to every question she had ever had—or at the very least this month’s Powerball numbers. God, he would have given his eyeteeth to know what was holding her attention like that. Given her job, he had a feeling it was nothing good.

Saunders was her last name, Erika, her first. He’d learned both when he’d had to scrub her memories.

He’d learned a few other things about her, not that he’d been prying. She was unmated, or unmarried, as her people called it, and she lived alone. She also had no family, and he knew the terrible reason why, the horror… the tragedy.

God, he didn’t want her involved in all his shit with that demon.

“How can I protect you,” he said into the wind, “when you can’t even know me.”

As if she could hear him, Erika sat back in her chair and let her head fall free on her neck. With his keen eyesight, he could tell she was murmuring something to herself. Then she re-leveled things… and reached forward to her computer monitor. Brushing the screen, her fingertips lingered on whatever was on there.

Even though he could only see her profile, the yearning on her face was clear. Then she jerked as if she were snapping out of a trance.

Fuck, she had a lover.

Although Balz had never considered himself a ladies’ male, he’d been with enough females and women over the centuries to recognize that particular kind of distraction.

Well, he was just going to have to kill the guy. It was really that simple—

“You are not going to murder anybody,” he snapped. Except then he had to do some editing. “You’re not going to murder her man.”

Fine. Just a little castration. Snip, snip, over the shoulder—

“You’re not doing that either, idiot.”

With a wince, he realized that he was arguing with himself. Thank God no one was around to—

“Here, I made these for you.”

Balz shifted so quick, he nearly fell off the side of the kiosk—and talk about a hi-how’re-ya. Standing over him, tall as a tree, broad as a mountain, dressed in black leather, was the only male on the planet he had any interest in seeing.

Vishous.

“Thank fuck,” Balz muttered as he kept himself from broken-egging his butt chips on the pavement below. “Even though you snuck up on me like a ghost.”

“You want me to announce myself with a bullhorn while you’re camping out in front of the police?” The Brother lowered himself onto his haunches and extended his palm. “I heard you need more of these. And you mind telling me what you aren’t doing? I’m not going to comment on the idiot part.”