“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.
“Sweetheart,” she said in an aw-shucks tone. “Something is not working here.”
The Book fluffled itself. Fluffled again.
Bringing the Birkin-window with her, she knew that she was leaving footprints that steamed in her wake, little curls of anger rising up from the floor. Nothing she could do about that, though. Maybe the Book wouldn’t notice.
“Yes?” She forced her eyebrows to raise in pleasant inquiry. “You were about to say?”
More fluttering, while the Book remained open to the same place.
Devina tried not to roll her eyes. “But I already read it thrice, just as it said. Although of course, I would love to read the spell again.”
Her eyes trained loosely on the words, the ink indelible on the page and yet capable of shimmering as the lettering registered: Blah, blah, blah, regard as you would be regarded, blah, blah, the object of your desire, blah, eternity, blah, blah, blah, other lovers, world revolves around the perfect pair…
She got to the end and wanted to scream, Well, get on with it, then! All she could think of, all she gave a shit about, was getting that male whatever-the-hell-he-was out of the viewing pane and into her lair. At which point, she was going to fuck him and then—
“What.” Devina gritted her molars. “I mean, do you think I’m missing something here?”
In response, the text shined up at her so brightly she had to blink the glare away. And then, as her vision adjusted, she followed along a sequence of highlighted words. But if the Book thought this was helping her read, it was wrong. The exercise of focus was like hopscotching for her, her eyes jumping from one block of letters to the next, leaving what had just been looked at behind.
When she got to the end of the spell, she put her hands on her hips while the Birkin floated in thin air right next to her. “And?”
The text flared again.
“Look.” She blew an exhale up at bangs that did not cover her forehead. “I did what you told me to do. I stared at what I love most in my collection, and I like what you showed me in return. He’ll do just fine. So, I don’t mean to be an impatient bitch”—no, she actually was an impatient bitch; there wasn’t any oops-maybe-I’m-coming-across-wrong about it—“but let’s move this along.”
The pages in the Book stood straight out of the binding, like it had been called to attention. Then they flopped back into place as if the thing had given up trying to talk to her.
“Thank you.” Then she leaned in and put her hand on her heart. “And I mean that sincerely—”
There was an explosion of light out of the windowpane of the Birkin, the beam a column of pure energy expressed as illumination. It was so powerful, Devina even stumbled back, the purse now a portal between dimensions, not anything made by Hermès.