At least he didn’t feel like he had stolen something from her anymore.
He’d always been a thief with principles.
As he turned on his bare feet and looked across the expanse of the garage, the echoing, empty black space seemed like a good goddamn metaphor for his lonely life. Although of course, he still had one waaaay too loyal parasite he had to get rid of.
Across the bay, the two mismatched Archie Bunker armchairs he and Erika had been sitting in provided him with all kinds of misplaced heartache, proof that the mind-emotion conspiracy could elevate even a pair of uglies like that to a scene of tragic beauty.
The last place he would ever sit with her was like a Mount Rushmore memento mori to their never-could-be love.
Maybe he could steal the chairs.
Replace the chairs with something better, he amended.
Yeah, and where the fuck was he going to put them.
And yes, he’d used the term “love”—
Bang, bang, bang.
Not gunshots. Someone knocking on the side door with the heel of their fist.
Looking over his shoulder, he narrowed his eyes. He hadn’t barricaded the thing, just set the copper lock back into place.
The demon Devina never knocked. The Brothers and others had the access code. No other vampires knew where this place was.
So this was a human who was way fucking lost.
Bang, bang, bang—
“Wrong address,” he muttered.
Given that V had kitted out the place with all kinds of security, no doubt there were exterior cameras with feeds, but with no cell phone and no idea how to access them, he couldn’t check and see exactly what had gotten misdirected and ended up on the garage’s transom. And like he cared? No offense, but if some guy was willing to just stand out there in the cold—
Bang, bang.
“Motherfucker.”
Marching his half-naked ass over to the gun show, he took a forty millimeter off its mounting, and he was not surprised as he checked the clip to find things fully loaded. Naturally, it would be better to let the Homo sapiens on the doorstep do his or her own math on the no-answer door under those knuckles, but Balz had to get a game plan started on the shitty state of his life, and he sure as hell was not going to go through those depressing mental gymnastics to the tune of a bad amateur of “Boom Clap.”
Yes, he’d watched The Fault in Our Stars. So sue him.
“Fucking rats without tails—”
As he did a simulcast of ripping open the garage’s door and pointing the muzzle at the average face-height of a human male, he—
“Don’t shoot!”
In some kind of reality-bending trick, it appeared as though Erika Saunders was the one who’d been imitating Charli XCX. And as she popped her hands high, she could barely take a breath.
Her body was shaking violently, her eyelids peeled back in fear, her face sheened with sweat from her absolute terror.
“P-p-p-please,” she stammered. “L-l-let me in.”
“How are you here,” he said as he pulled her inside. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
She looked around the empty bay as if she expected to be pumped full of lead, stabbed, mauled, and decapitated all at once.
“Y-y-you’re in d-danger.” She swallowed compulsively and hugged herself. “C-c-can’t leave you in d-d-danger.”
For a split second, Balz could only stare at her in numb disbelief. Courtesy of that implant he’d put into her memory banks, she was literally overriding her own survival reflex… just to try to save him, a degenerate thief of a vampire.
He didn’t even try to stop himself.
As he unlocked the manipulation in her mind, he pulled her against him and wrapped his arms around her, sharing the warmth of his body in hopes that he could calm the shivers that quaked her.
I love you, he thought at her. Even though it made no sense.
And as those three words permeated his awareness, he realized, with the way he’d hugged her, that the loaded forty millimeter in his dagger hand… was pointed right into his own face.
Fucking perfect.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Nothing happened.
Nothing fucking happened.
Devina was not the most patient of demons. Like, not at all. And as she stared through the portal of the ruined Birkin, and was able to see her dearly goddamn beloved, the male of her dreams lying there like a slab of very-high-grade meat on that bedding platform, she hated waiting. Especially as she waited some more. And… waited even longer.
Pinning a frozen smile on her face, she looked over at the Book with what she hoped was a patient expression. Even though she was thinking fondly of turning the old fart into a stake-mounted tiki torch.