“Don’t worry about that. Come inside—”
He glanced down the mansion’s flank at the angel. “How did you know to call me just now?”
Tap.
Lassiter wasn’t looking at him anymore. He was focused on something up above and to the left, in the sky. “I need you to come inside. Right now.”
Tap. Tap.
“Well, I need you to tell me what’s going on—”
“Balthazar, trust me. You have to get inside—”
Tap, tap, tap, tap, taptap—
All at once, there was sound from everywhere overhead and Balz instinctively ducked and covered his head as he went into a crouch.
Birds. Taking flight in a rush.
Against the backdrop of stars, hundreds of not-nocturnal birds flushed from the forest, the desperate, fleeing wings of the sparrows, blue jays, and cardinals carrying them off in all kinds of directions, their delicate little bodies blocking the distant haze of galaxies in a discordant, flickering pattern.
For a split second, Balz thought of the bat skeletons.
And then all he knew was pure terror.
Giving in to the sudden burst of fear, he broke into a run—and somehow, he knew not to try any of the other doors of the house. Somehow, he knew that Lassiter was at the only portal he could use, the fallen angel his only hope, his salvation from a fate worse than death.
Although he knew not who or what his pursuer was.
Balz’s lungs screamed for oxygen and his legs pumped faster than they ever had in his whole life. And as he closed in on where the angel was leaning out of the mansion, Lassiter started yelling at him to move, move, move—
The second Balz was in range, the angel reached out and dragged him inside, slamming the door and bracing his body against it as Balz tripped and yard-saled across the library’s Persian rug.
Taptaptaptaptap—
As a barrage of that sound radiated through the room, through the whole mansion, Balz flipped over onto his back and crab-walked even farther away from the noise. The something that had wanted to claim him was hitting the glass of that French door, the noise a magnification of that which had called him to that room at the triplex, to the book.
Only louder. More demanding.
Petulant, as if it resented being denied.
“What the fuck is going on here,” Balz demanded.
But the angel didn’t seem to hear him. Lassiter had closed his oddly colored eyes and was straining against the closed door, his huge body braced and vibrating with power, his blond-and-black hair falling down over his flexed chest and arms.
Like he was the only thing keeping whatever it was out of the mansion.
“She’s back,” Balz heard himself whisper with defeat.
As the sun began to rise over Caldwell, the demon Devina turned off her Viking stove and moved the All-Clad frying pan aside to the counter. The plate she’d decided to use was square and white, and the two meat pieces she put on it with a pair of stainless steel tongs were cooked to perfection: Just a little salt and pepper. A splash of extra virgin olive oil to coat the pan and help with the crisping.
Simple stuff, prepared well. So much better than a gourmet meal that took a twelve-minute narration and a French dictionary to decipher.
Picking up her glass of wine, she took her food over to her table, and she chose the seat that faced out from the kitchen area so she could look at all the things she owned. Her private space, her lair, if you will, was a vast open area in the basement of one of downtown’s older office buildings. Technically, it was one of a dozen or so storage facilities more typically used for—snooze—collections of corporate files and records, a perk for the businesses that took up whole floors of the upper levels.
Hers was different, and not just because she could camouflage it and its precious contents at will. Instead of stupid paperwork and useless hard drives or whatever the fuck was in those other ones, hers was filled with beauty.
Picking up her fork and knife—Christofle, sterling—she cut into the meat and put a piece in her mouth.
Crap. It was chewy. Proof positive that how good something looked was no true measure of its worth.
As she swallowed with a grimace, she picked up her sauvignon blanc and took a healthy draw on the razor lip of the crystal glass. Most other people would have gone with a red, but that was too heavy for her—and God, she hated what she was eating. It was like taking medicine, something that was nasty going down, but which had therapeutic benefits.
Or at least it had better have benefits. Otherwise, she was wasting her time.
To distract herself from the familiar, bitchy malaise setting up shop in her internal monologue, she looked with pride at all the haute couture she had collected over the decades. Some was original, from the seventies, eighties, and nineties. Some she’d snagged more recently from high-end vintage shops. And some was brand-new, from Fifth Avenue, Rodeo Drive, Worth Avenue.