Page 28 of Lover Forbidden (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #23)

As the wind whipped around and the cold was a pickpocket with deft hands, Lyric waited in the alley next to Bathe, right by the emergency exit.

No way any lessers would come near such a busy place.

After all, there was only one rule in the war between the vampires and the Lessening Society: Leave humans out of it.

The lower the profile, the better, especially in these modern times with all the surveillance downtown.

Looking to her left, she trained her eyes along the darkened alley.

The lane ran all the way through to the far side at the rear of the club, and the glow of Jefferson Street traffic back there and the hot spots that lit up that thoroughfare were enough to make shadows out of all the pedestrians looking for fun and games.

Meanwhile, in the other direction, she glanced out to what she’d come to think of as Dev’s and her intersection. Everything had started there—

“Allhan!” As she blurted the name, she started fumbling to get her cell. “Oh, crap. I forgot about you—”

One by one, three males re-formed around her in a semi-circle: Her twin brother was the first to arrive. Then L.W., and finally Shuli. None of them were in clubbing clothes, not that L.W. ever downshifted from the togs of war.

“Thank Lassiter,” she said under her breath as she shoved the phone back into its zippered pocket.

Jumping forward, she hugged her brother. “Thank you so much for coming—and you guys as well.”

“Like we wouldn’t.” Rhamp set her back with a grim curse. “Now, what the fuck is going on? You saw a lesser ? Around here?”

As the males started glaring into the shadows, she shook her head. “No, it’s a couple of blocks away. More like a quarter of a mile, actually. I was… well, I smelled one—”

“What are you doing out here alone?” Rhamp demanded. “Does anybody know you’re here?”

“Well, you do now.” She waved away his questions. “Not important. I want you guys—can you just go… listen, I’m just asking you to—”

“Kill it,” L.W. said. As if they were talking about a cockroach she’d found under the sink.

“Yes.” Her throat closed up as she remembered the stench—or maybe that was her fear for Dev taking over. “I mean, I can’t do that—”

“No—”

“—you—”

“—can’t!”

The guys all said the same thing at once.

Which was kind of galling. There were females who fought in the war.

Payne and Xhex, and Paradise and Novo, were every bit as deadly as the Brothers, and then there were the human women who had been turned by the Omega’s son into slayers.

But now was not the time to squabble about gender equality in the proverbial workplace.

“I can take you right over to the building. Let’s go—”

Rhamp caught her arm as she turned away toward Market. “You’re going to tell us the address and we’ll take it from there. You go home.”

She glanced at the other two. L.W. had a gun already out, and he was withdrawing a dagger from his chest holster. Next to him, Shuli had both hands at his hips, resting on the butts of the pair of autoloaders belted around his waist.

“What’s the addy,” Rhamp prompted. “And you’re absolutely not coming with us, so we can fuck around here and argue about common sense, or we can get to work—which was why you called us.”

Cursing under her breath, she muttered, “It’s on Twenty-third and Lincoln. The redbrick, seven-story apartment building. I smelled the thing as I was leaving, like the slayer was in the basement? You’ll see the open staircase as soon as you go into the lobby.”

“What the hell were you doing over there?” her brother asked.

Lyric did her level best to keep her voice, well, level. “Visiting a friend.”

“What friend.” That frown got even deeper. “Are you seeing somebody?”

Linking her arms over her chest, she narrowed her eyes at her twin. “None of your business.”

“It sure as hell is when you call me for help with a fucking slayer.”

Next to her brother, L.W. arched a brow. Shuli, on the other hand, looked away sharply like he didn’t want anything to do with the heat.

“Go home,” Rhamp gritted. “And don’t talk to the dads about this. Maybe you got the scent wrong. There’s so many humans in this part of town, we don’t find them here.”

“I know what I smelled.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Rhamp was muttering to himself as he closed his eyes and dematerialized. As L.W. took off as well, she reached out and snagged Shuli’s arm.

“Hey, did you mean to call me about forty-five minutes ago?”

There wasn’t even a pause. The guy shook his head and stepped back. “Butt dial. Sorry.”

Qhuinn went back to the Brotherhood’s training center an hour after he’d had First Meal out at his in-laws’ house with Blay.

His partner on the schedule for the night was Rhage, and the pair of them re-formed on the plowed lane that dropped down to the steel doors of the facility’s parking garage.

As they descended, they lifted a wave at the security cameras set into the concrete side wall.

Off to the right, there was a much smaller steel entry for pedestrians, and the instant they were in range, the dead bolts were sprung—thank you, V.

After that, they were in a narrow cement hallway that was a mini version of the center’s interior main artery.

As always, cameras lined the ceiling, and so did little pinholes that could be triggered to release a flush of neurotoxins.

Qhuinn wasn’t a pussy, but he was always glad when he got out of the murder-tube.

“You okay, my brother?” Rhage asked from the rear.

“Oh, yeah, just fine.” Considering he was still going to fucking lose his mind between what almost happened to the younger Lyric, and what was definitely happening to the elder Lyric.

They came up to the second door and waited for the thunk! sound of the bolt being thrown. And waited. And… waited.

Qhuinn looked up to the camera over the entry and waved his hand.

As a waft of grape floated over his shoulder, he glanced behind himself. Rhage had put a Tootsie Pop in his mouth and was in the process of tucking the wadded purple wrapper into his leathers.

“You’re not okay,” the brother said around the lollipop. “You know, my Mary always maintains that talking helps—”

“Why aren’t they opening this for us?” Qhuinn glanced up at the perfectly spaced pattern of holes directly above their heads. “It shouldn’t take this long.”

Had communications been cut? A power outage at Four Toys—and then the emergency generators didn’t come on? Was something wrong—

What if someone tripped and fell on the button that discharged the neurotoxin? What if—

He reached forward and pumped the handle. Got nowhere. Shifted his weight back and forth, raised his arm, and peeled back the leather sleeve of his fighting jacket—except, come on, he didn’t have a watch to look at.

Back with the stupid fucking holes—

“Oh, my God,” Rhage said, pointing at him with his lollipop. “You’ve got that thing, don’t you.”

An overactive adrenal system? Yeah, sure. Who didn’t after all these decades in the war—

“Trypophobia.”

Qhuinn refocused on the brother. “What.”

“Fear of holes.” Rhage nodded up at the ceiling.

“I mean, you know that there is no way V or any of his people would trigger any of the defensive systems on us. But you keep looking up there like you’re expecting something bad to happen, and you do it every time I’ve been in here with you. Like all the way back to the install—”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He trained his stare resolutely on the steel door.

This lasted a nanosecond and his peepers were back at the pinholes.

“Don’t feel bad,” Rhage remarked. “I got arachibutyrophobia.”

Qhuinn had to glance at the guy again. “That something Doc Jane needs to give you a penicillin shot for?”

Rhage laughed in an easy and relaxed kind of way—which Qhuinn frickin’ envied. “No, that’s fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth. Mary and I been working on it. I choked on a PB and J a couple of months ago and that’s when it started—”

Clunk.

As the lock released, Qhuinn hit that bar like he was giving the damn thing chest compressions in a hospital code.

The relief that came with stepping through into the parking area, with all its space in every direction, was like breathing clean air after you’d held your breath from a bad smell.

And as for the irrational fears shit? He didn’t know from whatever Peter-Pan-ophobia Rhage was going on about, but if he had to diagnose one for himself, he’d say it was garden variety claustro and fuck all the holes—

“Really,” he muttered at his choice of words.

“Huh?” Rhage tilted his head like a big, beautiful dog. “Or you talking to yourself?”

They came up to the main entrance into the training center, and sure, now the lock turned immediately again.

“You gotta trust me when I tell you, you don’t want to know.” He opened things and glanced down the wide corridor to where Xcor and Tohr were standing. “And no, it doesn’t have to do with food, peanut butter or otherwise.”

“Roger that,” Hollywood said amicably.

Passing by the lineup of classrooms, they stopped when they got to the patient rooms. Tohr was on his phone, texting something, but Xcor stepped up with the greeting.

“Dad—”

“Dad—”

He and Xcor clapped palms and then shoulders, and then Rhage joined in the hello’ing. As those two stepped back, Qhuinn nodded at the red can of high-test Coke in Xcor’s hand.

“That kind of night already?”

“You know it.”

The leader of the Band of Bastards was dressed for war, but he had to smother a yawn.

Which was a surprise. The stocky male was strong as a bull, and on a typical night, he was the first to get out into the field to hunt.

Not this evening. He seemed drained and distracted—and that was proof that he was worried about the Lyric(s) situation, too.

It had always been the way, the four of them concerned about the young and all the things that affected them.