Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood 20)

Landed in something soggy.

As he planked himself on his palms and the tips of his shitkickers, a nose-ringing combination of soot, toxic chemicals, and wet dirt drilled into his sinuses. The stench was what orientated him: He was at the site of the house fire where Sahvage and Mae had both almost lost their lives.

With desperation and a good dose of numb stupidity, he looked around his shoulder at the ruins of what had been a nice little ranch house. The cremated remains of the structure were bathed in shades of gray and pale blue, the ash-coated fragments of beams and boards, Sheetrock and plywood, furniture and belongings, nothing that could ever be put back together and made usable again. The blaze had been so intense that there was even scorching over the property line, the fences and houses to the left, right, and rear all airbrushed with soot.

The neighbors were going to have a helluva Windex bill, but at least they had something still to clean.

Crab-walking over to a drier patch of toasted grass, he rose to his full height and brushed off his leathers. Given all the shit that was going on, worrying about whether he had ash on his knees was ridiculous. Then again, the list of things he could control was a short one, and in life, you had to take what you were given.

Sometimes this was only keeping your pants clean. And of course, what he really wanted was to keep them on when he was asleep.

“Fuck. Fuck.”

Balz glanced back at the charred maple he’d run into and deconstructed his nap time. After he’d stalked through the rubble and come up with nothing, he’d copped a squat at the base of the tree to consider all his no-go. That split-second time-out was all it had taken. Sleep had claimed him with such force and stealth, he couldn’t remember fighting the tackle of it, and that was all the demon needed. His lack of consciousness was Devina’s open door and she never failed to take advantage of the invitation he never offered.

He needed that goddamn Book of spells. If he wanted to lose the demon, he was going to have to find the thing and use it.

Reassessing the debris field, he wondered if he should walk it once more. Then again, why would anything with pages and a cover survive this kind of heat?

Because the Book wasn’t just a book. That was why.

And to think that at one point, he’d had the stinking, repulsive weight in his hands, felt that human-skin binding, held the heft of the parchment pages—and he’d let it go.

“Lassiter… you fucking asshole.”

The fallen angel had told him there was another way to get Devina evicted from his mental. So at the moment it had really counted, during that tug-o’-war with Sahvage, Balz had gone the Frozen route and let it go. But since then, he’d thought better of the angel’s solution. True love wasn’t going to save him—

An image of a human woman in a navy-blue suit barged in and pulled a chair up to his mind’s eye.

Abruptly, all he could see was her looking at him over the gun she was pointing at him. Her eyes had been sharp, her brows locked into a stop-right-there-asshole glare, her stance like something out of an action movie. Funny, he remembered every one of her particulars, and not just because he was a thief and she was a cop and never the twain shall meet. To say nothing of the species divide.

No, he remembered her like she was something he had been searching for in all the homes he’d ever broken into, and all the gems he’d taken, and all the money he’d stashed in his pockets.

“But you’re not saving me, woman,” he said to the moonlit night, the ashes around him, the shithole situation he was in.

True love didn’t exist, for one thing. That shit was just a Disney delusion, peddled to humans for profit. For another, the fallen angel might well have tossed the romance angle out because he’d just finished a Sandra Bullock marathon and While You Were Sleeping was on auto-loop in his poindexter brain.

One thing that was real fucking clear? Thanks to Lassiter’s piss-poor advice, Balz was now out of options, stalked in his sleep by a sex harpy, and half insane from lack of REM.

As he checked to see if his fly was still buttoned, a wave of nausea spiked and he was glad he hadn’t eaten anything. The feel of that demon straddling his hips, while she stared down at him with glittering black eyes full of jealous hatred—

How dare you, you bastard. And she’s just a human.

The demon’s voice came to him clear as a bell, and as the words translated into proper meaning, Balz felt the blood drain from his head. Glancing over to the tree again, he wondered if he was dubbing that jealousy in out of paranoia or whether it was something that had actually been said to him just now.