The Brother extended his dagger hand, and as they shook, Balz nearly cursed in relief. A moment later, V dematerialized into thin air, nothing remaining of him but the exhale of smoke that left his lips and drifted off.
Left to his own devices again, Balz smoked his cigarette down to his fingertips and enjoyed the view of the human woman, soaking in the planes and angles of her profile and the way her hair was so sensibly pulled back and her frown of concentration as she checked her phone as if she were expecting a text or a call.
There were probably no more than fifty yards between them, as the crow flew. And considering he could dematerialize through glass, even if it was perma-thamed—
Thermopaned, he corrected.
“What am I doing here,” he muttered. Other than increasing the likelihood of Devina finding the woman.
In which case, the Brotherhood wasn’t going to have to worry about what to do with that demon. Balz was going to drag her to Dhunhd his damned self.
Dropping the stub of the hand-rolled on the tin roof, he crushed the last little bit of the Turkish tobacco with the treads of his shitkicker. Then he stared at the woman in the window for a moment longer.
He could be by her side in the blink of an eye. He could calm her down by controlling her fight-or-flight response. He could insert into her brain things that were true about him: He wasn’t going to hurt her. He didn’t want to scare her. He only wanted to protect her.
“Yeah, and then what. You going to take her out to dinner?”
Well, there was that 24-hour diner that had the good pie…
Balz stayed a little longer, playing out a fantasy that involved the kind of insanity that he was embarrassed to admit to himself. He was no prince, and paying for some woman’s dinner and holding some doors open for her was not going to turn this thief into anything charming. Besides, he came with one hell of a caboose, at least until V figured out how to file eviction papers with the Department of Goodbye Demons.
But God, he hated to leave the woman. He really did. And it wasn’t all about the protection thing.
He just liked looking at her. She calmed him down, focused him, made him stop chasing the inanimate objects of other people.
Closing his eyes, he took a couple of deep breaths and willed himself to dematerialize to the closest bridge. When nothing happened, he tried again. And a third time.
Great. All this shit was turning him into a pedestrian.
With a mutter, he jump-of-shame’d it off the kiosk’s roof and landed on the pavement with a clap of his boots. After a jack-up of his leathers, he got to hoofing it—and chilled his bad mood by pointing out that at least she didn’t have to know he was skulking off like his Kia Soul had run out of gas.
Not that there was anything wrong with a Soul.
As he went along, passing by dark office buildings, restaurants that were closing up, and ghost town surface lots and parking garages, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d walked anywhere, except for when he was on rotation and patrolling the field.
On that note, he wasn’t sure when he was going to be back at work.
His real life seemed a thousand miles away. Maybe that was why the fifty yards between him and that woman had struck him as a painfully close divide he desperately wanted to cross.
After a number of blocks, he caught sight of the first of the bridges, the span lit up with multicolored lights, the four lanes lightly traveled on account of the late hour. As he closed in, he made quick work of the sidewalk, pulling a Saturday Night Fever without the platform shoes. Or John Travolta’s dance moves.
Also no Bee Gees soundtrack, although, yes, he would like to stay alive, thank you very much.
When he arrived at the bridge, he went around the base of an on-ramp and entered an underworld that had its own rules. The stink of the place instantly registered, the combination of river mud, burning trash, and human waste burrowing into his sinuses. He was too tired to sneeze as he checked out the shadowed, littered landscape for things that went bump in the night.
No threats anywhere, but that didn’t mean there was nobody around. A couple dozen humans in ragged clothes were shuffling between tents and cardboard pallets, and little groups of like individuals circled around trash can fires. Lit joints, cigarettes, and liquor bottles were out in the open; the meth and crack pipes were generally kept hidden.
Putting his hands in his pockets, he strode forward with a lowered head and eyes that tracked everything. The man he’d come to see was nearly a quarter mile away, stationed all the way across at the brick wall boundary created by the start of the warehouse district. On the approach, the dealer didn’t look Balz’s way, but his hand ducked inside his bomber jacket. With his hoodie up and the darkness surrounding him, he was a sentient shadow in gray clothes.