Page 31 of Lover Forbidden (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #23)

Up on the roof, Lyric stared across at Dev—and pulled the kind of blank that there was no recovering from: No thoughts in her head, body frozen, breath exhaling in a rush. She couldn’t have looked guiltier if she’d jimmied the lock of his apartment and waltzed right in.

The fact she’d shown up back here—on the roof no less—after her no-one-night-stands speech made her look like a deluded stalker.

And it wasn’t like she could defend herself with the ol’ you-have-an-infestation-of-the-undead-in-your-building yarn.

“What’s going on here?” Dev walked over to where she stood at the ledge. “What are you doing?”

He’d changed out of his running tights—into loose sweatpants that added bulk to his lower body—but he’d kept his windbreaker on, the folds flapping in the wind. Had he bothered to put a shirt on?

Like that was any of her business…

“Are you okay?” he asked with a frown. As if he were thinking they might be entering 911 land.

“My scarf,” she blurted.

He glanced around. Then both his eyebrows lifted. “I’m sorry? Your scarf is up here?”

“Um, no. Sorry.” She starting doing jazz hands for some reason, so she shoved her fists into her parka’s pockets. “I think I left my scarf in your apartment. I don’t have your number, I couldn’t get in through the front door, and I thought—”

“How did you get up here?”

She looked over her shoulder—

Directly below, her brother, L.W., and Shuli filed out of the basement door the white-haired figure had left from. And their weapons were out, the guns glinting subtly.

Instantly, her eyes panic-scanned the parking lot—and landed on a car whose brake lights came on. Next, steam petered out of its tailpipe.

Shit.

Whipping her head back around, she tried to remember what Dev had asked her?

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a pair of curved metal arms swooping over the ledge. “Fire escape.”

Feeling like an utter ass, she pointed at them and then headed in that direction.

“I thought maybe I could get down into the building and… find your apartment. My grandmother made that scarf.” Which was not a lie.

“It’s… priceless to me, and I was all flustered.

I get it, I look like a total lunatic here, but I didn’t know what else to do and I wasn’t thinking clearly—but I need that scarf back. And I’m really sorry.”

There was a pause. Then he said, “I found it on my dresser. I was wondering how to get it back to you.”

“Oh, thank you—”

As she all but lunged toward the door he’d come out of, he caught her arm. “You mind if I have a smoke first—”

Pop! Pop! Pop-pop!

The gunfire was muffled, but unmistakable if you knew what it was, and Lyric found herself bracing as if she were the target.

As Dev’s head ripped around to the sound, she wanted to curse.

Courtesy of her adrenaline load, she couldn’t concentrate enough to get into his mind and manipulate his thoughts.

Except then he just remarked, “That’s close by.”

And went back to where she’d been standing, like he wanted a bird’s-eye view of the action.

Lyric shuffled her body in front of his. “Let’s go inside. It’s not safe here—”

“Whoever it is, they’re not shooting at us.” He took out a pack of Camels. “They can’t even see us if we can’t see them—”

When he went to step around her, she waltzed with him, trading places again. “Stray bullets kill. You don’t have to be in the shootout to get hurt.”

Dev put his hands on her arms, picked her up so her feet dangled, and set her out of his way. “I’m going to go see what’s happening. In case I need to call the police—”

“Oh, please don’t do that,” she whispered.

As he leaned over the ledge, she racked her brain about what to say to get him inside. What if there were more slayers in the building, what if—

The metal-on-metal crunch of a vehicle hitting something immovable echoed up to them.

Below in the parking lot, the car that had been started had reversed out of its spot and shot backwards with a good dose of velocity—and then its brakes either hadn’t grabbed or hadn’t been pumped: The shitty Toyota was butted into the receiving dock of the office building that faced out on the far side of the block.

Three figures were closing in on the vehicle, their arms out straight, guns trained on whoever was behind the wheel.

Whatever was behind it.

And that was when she caught sight of what was coming down the alley from the east side: Another knot of figures—at least two of which had hair so white the stuff glowed even in the darkness.

The lot of slayers was traveling fast, like they’d been called to the scene, and as her brother and his friends didn’t look in that direction, she knew that they were upwind of the flank of backup lessers .

Without thinking, Lyric put two fingers from each hand into her mouth, pressed her tongue into them, and blew as hard as she could.

The whistle rang out, loud and clear over all the city’s night noises.

It was the warning signal she and her brother had always used as young, when they were getting into trouble and one of them was playing scout—

Instantly, her brother looked up toward the roof, and she didn’t need to worry about whether she’d have to point at the threat and pray he saw her.

The route his eyes traveled to get to her intersected the approach of the lessers .

Rhamp started shooting, the discharges suppressed when it came to sound, the flashes from the end of that muzzle dampened as well.

Instantly, L.W. trained his own gun in that direction as he backed up his friend, but Shuli stayed locked on the Toyota.

He advanced on the driver’s side door and emptied what had to be an entire magazine into the car, safety glass shattering, the bursts of illumination highlighting the deployed front airbags that had exploded out of the dashboard—

The stray bullet came out of nowhere on a ricochet, pinging off the ledge right next to her.

“Get down!”

Dev tackled her off to the side, but somehow managed to roll them over in midair so that they landed with him on the bottom. As she hit his chest, all his breath exploded out of his lungs on a curse.

Which pretty much said it all, didn’t it.

Down at the parking lot level, Shuli swapped out his magazine for a new one and turned his attention away from the Toyota so he could join in the fun and games with the new additions to the party: Somehow, Rhamp had sensed that backups were coming down the cross street, and thank fuck for his instincts.

Otherwise, they would have been ambushed.

Pulling his own trigger, he cursed as the flank of lessers broke ranks and scattered into shadows, corners, and doorways.

This was bad, this was fucking bad. They were engaging the enemy and discharging guns in full view of every fucking tenant with a rear-facing apartment—and already there were only about a dozen drapes getting pulled back, the outlines of all kinds of humans with all sorts of cell phones poking their heads into their windows to see what the commotion was about.

As he himself ducked for cover behind the car he’d shot up, Rhamp and L.W. joined him around on the driver’s side—

The moaning was loud enough for them to hear, soft enough so nobody else could.

Popping his head up over the door, Shuli punched the safety glass out and got a gander at the lesser behind the wheel.

The bastard was leaking like a sieve, black blood dripping all over the place, but as with the night before, it was far from “dead”—

Annnnnnnnd that was when an entire church choir of cop sirens started to ring out, all of which were close by—way too close by.

“Stab the lesser ,” Rhamp snapped. “We gotta disappear him before we—”

“Fuck that,” L.W. cut in. “I’m taking him with us—”

“Fuck you . Are you out of your mind—”

“He might have information—”

The robocop cars were approaching from all directions, the speed of their response frustratingly efficient going by how the noise was ramping up.

But hey, at least it cut off the conversation about taking a hostage for interrogation—something Shuli was not about to let happen with all the eyeballs around them.

Whipping out one of his steel daggers, he leaned into the car, and got a quick close-up of the leaking mess that was already trying to escape by crawling for the passenger-side door.

Trading grips on his hilt because of the angle, he called on all the strength in his left arm to get that fucking blade into the sternum—

Happy Fourth of July in January.

The burst of light was bright enough to blind him, but the complication was the burst of energy. He caught the whoof! of incineration right against his chest, and it was powerful enough to blow him out of the car. His landing was a flat-on-the-back kind, his breath knocked from his lungs—

Just as the robocops arrived on scene.

Funny , he thought. He couldn’t hear the sirens anymore. The ringing in his ears was so—

“You’re injured,” someone said from all the way across the city. Or maybe the whole ass state of New York.

Were they talking to him?

“We gotta move him.” L.W. bent over him, and patted around like he was trying to find Shuli’s torso. “ Now .”

Wasn’t his chest still attached?

“I’m fine,” he mumbled as he forced himself to his feet. “Let’s go—”

Rhamp shook his head. “Lyric’s here. I can’t leave without her—”

“This is the Caldwell Police Department,” a calm, robotic voice chimed in. “Please drop your weapons and put your hands over your heads. Any further gunfire will put you at risk of lethal counteractions. Please drop your weapons and—”

As all kinds of robocops exited their vehicles, Shuli struggled to make his mouth work. “Lyric’s at home, she went—”

“She whistled.” Rhamp nodded toward the roof. “Up there. The tipoff signal was hers.”