When she got to the man, she was breathing hard and getting dizzy. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do—
No, she did.
Erika pushed her palm with the glow under his throat, where the injury was. As she felt the warmth of his blood, she closed her eyes.
“Please… don’t die,” she prayed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The “what” was less important than the “why.”
That was what one of the TED Talks had said. Or maybe it had been a book? YouTube video? Certainly an Insta post from that CarpeDaDayum account.
As Lassiter stood outside the Bloody Bookshoppe, he looked up at the sky and breathed in deep. When all he could smell was frying food from across the street, and then a bunch of uninspiring clouds drifted across the face of a wan moon, he put his hands in the pockets of his Mark Rober sweatpants and started walking.
He didn’t know where he was going until he got there.
And then when the destination presented itself, his location struck him as inevitable.
Maybe all that should be in some human’s book. If he’d learned anything over the last couple of days of relentless self-improvement, it was that Homo sapiens could elevate almost any banal statement of the obvious to a self-referential mood-cue for profundity.
He’d read that in an article, too.
Tilting his head back, he read the sign over the entrance of the club: Dandelion. The place was painted a spring green, from the roofline down to the sidewalk, and the trippy music that atmosphere’d out of its block-long expanse was all syntho stuff, not a conventional instrument anywhere near the beats.
“Are you coming or are you going?”
At the stiff demand, Lassiter glanced to the front door. A bearded human male with a man-bun and some swallow tattoos was looking like bouncing anything out of the establishment that weighed over a hundred and twenty pounds was going to be a problem. Maybe he was banking on his librarian-like stare of disapproval to corral the drunken and disorderly.
Yeah, good luck with that, buddy.
Although maybe the guy was just cranky about his uniform. In keeping with the weed theme, the powers that were had made him wear a bright green t-shirt and brown pants. He looked like he had on a bad Halloween costume and was going as sod.
“Hello.” He waved a hand in Lassiter’s face. “Anybody in there. You can’t loiter here. You’ll fuck my wait line.”
A quick glance to the left, and either Lassiter was missing a lineup of humans, or this green-and-brown goaltender of absolutely nothing was flexing for shits and giggles.
“There’s a female inside,” Lassiter heard himself explain, “that I want to see, but I shouldn’t. Nothing good’s going to come out of it. I should leave her alone.”
Man Bun did a double take for show, like he thought the world was an Instagram story. “Do I look like your therapist? What are you doing. Or am I calling for backup.”
“Who am I bothering out here?” Lassiter indicated his feet. “This is public property, right? Maintained by the city, not you.”
The guy stepped right up and jutted his chin out, in a move that he clearly thought would work for him. Too bad there was a big rate limiter to all that aggression: The guy worked at a club named after a weed and was wearing brown pants.
As Lassiter remembered with fondness the opening scene of the first Deadpool movie, Man Bun arched every brow he had and then some.
“Are we having a problem?”
Lassiter shook his head. “No.”
“Then move along or get in line.”
Shifting his eyes over the guy’s shoulder, Lassiter took note that there were no windows to look in, and he tried to imagine what Rahvyn was doing inside. Who she was with. Whether she was dancing.
None of this was his business. But he couldn’t help himself, and the fact that he had his ass in a crack over a female who should, and had to, remain a stranger, made him move quickly from mild annoyance to downright pissed off when it came to the human in front of him.
“—calling the cops. Right now—”
Lassiter locked eyes with the guy… and suddenly, shit wasn’t funny for either one of them. The human stopped in mid-sentence with his mouth open, and although it was probably because something was showing in Lassiter’s face that was terrifying, the fallen angel side of things wasn’t going to worry about it.
He’d suddenly had it with everything and everybody, from Balz and Devina’s drama, to that human woman back at the bookshop, to this hipster right here, with his little seat of influence that he was determined to wield over a sonofabitch who was in love with someone he—