So he was dead? he thought. This was Dhunhd?
As he glanced around at the harsh emptiness, he thought of Erika Saunders, the homicide detective he had met by chance and remembered like she was his destiny.
This is worth it, if she’s safe now.
Even if he had to spend eternity fighting off the demon.
Lightning flashed again, bathing Devina in red, the shadows thrown by her features, her body, moving even as she did not, little pockets of her defenders flaring in case they were needed. And when the storm’s crimson show faded, she was untouched once again, a lie in virginal white.
“I can see you anytime I want,” she drawled. “And I will be with you, anytime I want.”
She didn’t so much get up as materialize into a standing position, and gone was the white wedding gown. She was in black now, with a blouse that was low-cut enough to show her dot of a belly button as well as the swells of her breasts.
Devina stepped into him, pushing herself against his chest. “Anytime.”
Lifting his hands, he cupped either side of her cleavage and pushed things together. As he stared down at her assets, he watched the rain flow off the top of his head and well up in the basin of flesh.
When there was enough pooled there, he lowered his head. The demon let out a moan, as if she were expecting him to caress and pleasure her. Instead, he drank from what had gathered.
He was going to need all his strength to blow this bitch out of the water.
“Fucking vampires,” she muttered. “Can’t you just have a steak.”
* * *
Inside a garage that had a cathedral ceiling, more floor space than a tennis court, and no windows, Erika stood next to the tall man with the goatee. They were at the back of the RV unit, which had been parked butt in to a concrete wall that was painted matte black. The rest of the well-lit interior was steel plating, everything reinforced with beams and rivets to the point where she would have called it a bunker if it had been wartime.
She glanced at Goatee and decided he fit in perfectly with the hard-core facility. So did the others. In fact all of these men dressed and acted as if they were at war. With what, though. Those shadows? That… woman?
Was there a secret arm of the U.S. government that fought against the things that she’d seen with her own two eyes and still didn’t believe? As she contemplated the possibilities, the fact that she was so calm meant she was probably in shock—as in the clinical kind that involved your blood pressure and your heart rate.
Meanwhile, Goatee was enjoying another smoke, and not with any kind of frenzy. He was slow and steady on the chain of hand-rolleds he kept taking out of his leather jacket. As he went through each length, he reminded her of someone waiting in line, just hanging out in neutral because of a delay he refused to be frustrated by. And even though normally she hated the smell of cigarettes, whatever he was exhaling was not offensive in the slightest. It was kind of nice, actually—although she couldn’t say the same about his company. If his affect were an aftershave, it would have been called Le Disapproval.
Then again, maybe he just had resting bitch face.
“You remind me of my grandfather,” she said as her eyes made yet another circle around the garage’s spit-and-polish interior.
Over on the left, there was a little grouping of mismatched, frat house furniture, the armchairs and folding card table both out of place with the high-tech RV and all the reinforcements and completely in keeping with the idea that these men cooled their jets here.
“Do I,” the guy said.
His response wasn’t phrased as a question, and she wasn’t surprised that he didn’t seem to care one way or the other about her granddad or whether she filled him in on the particulars of any resemblance between one Archibald Saunders （deceased） and himself. The lack of interest struck her as refreshing. Too many people had been way too frickin’ curious about her for way too long.
“He smoked a pipe. It was fragrant, like whatever is rolled up in those things.”
“Turkish tobacco is the best.”
“Hmm. Go figure.”
How long had they been out here? It was hard to know. She’d been given an examination and then provided fluids by mouth—otherwise known as a high-test Coke served in its ice-cold red can—and when it had become obvious that she could stand on her own and was fairly steady, Goatee had escorted her out the back of the surgical unit. A moment later, someone she hadn’t been able to catch a glimpse of had entered the garage through a side door and gotten in the vehicle’s front passenger side.