Something, rather.
“Fuck you,” she snarled. “You’re going to keep the bargain with me or you’re going to learn the real meaning of print-is-dead, you useless, motherfucking, ungrateful, piece of shit, ass-biting, no good…”
She kept up with the ranting, hitting her stride and throwing in some Urban Dictionary just to get the vernacular going, the vile syllables tearing out of her blood red lips, her anger resplendent, her body humming with rage. She was so pissed off, the air around her warped and racks of clothes and bureaus all around her rattled. As the perfume bottle shattered in her hand, the sting of the alcohol sizzled into the cuts, the resulting wetness part blood, part fragrance, not that she gave a crap—
Not that the Book gave a shit.
At some point, the pragmatic disinterest of the tome registered, and what do you know. All that advice about not giving drama more air to feed off of was right. The frustration eating Devina alive gradually drained out of her veins, and all that was left was the hollow realization that for all her glorious temper tantrum, she remained alone in a space crowded with things.
As her voice dried up and she stood there panting, the dripping from her hand was like a snare drum as it hit the concrete floor.
“You’re going to give me what I want,” she said weakly.
More snoring was the only response she got. Then again, the damn thing knew that everything she said was just a threat.
Gripping the cover with both her hands, she yanked at it and got nowhere: Even when she threw her caboose out and pulled with everything she was worth, the thing remained stuck to the concrete column. She gave up when sweat bloomed across her forehead and her décolleté.
She was not going to cry in front of the fucking Book.
That was not going to be part of this shit show.
Not tonight.
“Fine, I don’t have to sit around and be ignored by you,” she said in what was absolutely not a Fatal Attraction voice. “I can leave here. You, on the other hand, are going nowhere fast without any legs. Enjoy your night.”
Fluffing her hair, she pivoted and stalked over to the door. As she got to the reinforced steel panel, she passed right through the seam in the space/time continuum that insulated her private quarters from all kinds of things that went bump in the night and lame in the day.
As she re-formed on the sidewalks of downtown Caldwell, she sealed up the cuts in her palm and smoothed the contours of the bustier. The night was laid out before her, all twinkling lights and possibilities for distraction, the clubs open and full, humans everywhere, in their cars, in their homes, in their party places.
She’d find something to amuse herself with.
No… really. She would.
As a soul-sucking wave of I-don’t-wanna nearly swamped her, she was reminded of another thing the therapist had shared with her: Unfortunately, everywhere she went… there she was. So she took with her her jealousy over Balthazar, and her frustration with the Book, and, worst of all, the dogging, nagging fear that, for however powerful and immortal she was, she might possibly be alone for the rest of her unnatural life.
Which would mean that she really was as awful and unlovable as she suspected she was.
For all the busyness of this city, for all the things that she owned and cherished, for all her strength and resolve… true love was as ever nowhere to be found for her.
CHAPTER FOUR
As it turned out… no, Erika couldn’t handle it.
Sitting at her desk in the Bull Pen, a.k.a. the Caldwell Police Department’s homicide division, she was having a hard time believing that she had left a murder scene. Voluntarily. And not because she had somewhere she desperately needed to go.
Like an emergency room for an arterial bleed.
Trey had been right with all his warnings, and she knew she should be grateful that he’d tried to look out for her. Instead, she was annoyed with everything. It felt like a theater light was trained on her fragile parts, and everybody, from the patrol officers who’d stepped out of her way as she’d run for the bathroom to the CSI people she’d mumbled to as she’d left the house to Trey who’d seemed like he was thinking of following her back to headquarters, was seeing way too much of her behind-the-scenes.
That was the problem with being the only survivor of a family massacre that had been so awful, it had been national news, so gruesome that there had been renewed coverage on its ten-year anniversary, so true-crime-discussion worthy it had its own hashtag. With something as high profile as the #SaundersTragedy on your existential résumé, you wore that proverbial name tag for the rest of your life, particularly if you’d insisted on living in the town where it had happened and decided to become a homicide detective.