Unless he killed her. Then it was not so lucky at all.
And she should probably care a little bit more about the danger she was in, being alone with a man like him.
“So you don’t deny you were there in that trailer?” she said. “With the watches?”
“I have to go—”
As he started to move away, she jerked him back with a yank on his leather jacket. “You stole from me. From my mind. I want what’s mine back—I don’t know how you did it, and I don’t care about that. Give me my memories.”
Strong as he was, it was no problem to disengage from her and get to his feet. Staring down at her, his face was remote. “I don’t want you involved in any of this.”
“It’s too fucking late for that, isn’t it.”
“Exactly what kind of danger do you think I’m in.”
“Stop deflecting—”
“What kind of danger!” His words were harsh and loud, and they echoed around the barren, dirty room and the body that lay on the mattress beside them. “How do you know.”
Erika looked at Connie’s remains and her heart ached. There was always death in Caldwell, but tonight the Grim Reaper seemed to be everywhere. And the idea this man, with his criminalities, was in trouble was not a news flash. The problem was… the danger was not from his life on the street. It was from that shadow from her nightmare. She just knew it.
“My dream changed,” she answered roughly. “I fell asleep at my desk tonight, and I know I had it again… but something was different. Different in a bad way. If you give me back my memories, I’ll probably be able to tell you.”
She couldn’t believe what she was saying. She couldn’t believe any of this.
Because it was as if there were two parts of Caldwell, the obvious and the hidden, and these moments with him now were causing her to straddle a divide she sensed she wasn’t even supposed to know about.
“You can’t save me.” He shook his head as he spoke, his eyes seeming to drink every detail of her in. “And this whole fucking mess is a rabbit hole you shouldn’t go down.”
Erika thought back to when she’d woken up at her desk in a free fall to the floor. There had been two dreams, the recurring one at the triplex, and a new one that had scared her… where had she been in the nightmare? Where had she…
“Down my stairs,” she blurted. “I was at my house. The lights were all off. I was going down my stairs to my front door. I looked into the mirror there—a shadow. It was a shadow that came after me—and it was a shadow that came out of you.”
The rush of clarity ushered in a return of the headache, but she didn’t care. It was a relief to be able to remember something, anything—even as the hairs on the back of her neck stood up and a shiver went through her body. And it was weird. Getting chased in a nightmare by some kind of darkness was pretty standard spooky-subconscious crap, yet she knew down deep that whatever it had been…
Was real.
She pegged the suspect in the eye with a hard stare. “You don’t want me to save you? Fine. Just don’t leave me in a position where I can’t protect myself. That thing is in my house.”
* * *
Note to self: Shit can always get more complicated.
As Balz stood over his detective—not that she was his—he knew he shouldn’t be where he was. Vampires and humans did not mix—more to the point, they shouldn’t mix. But after he’d gotten into the brain of that asshole down by the bridge, there was no way he was going to let some poor woman bleed out if he could help it.
And the dealer had left the woman alive.
The moment Balz had come in through the front door of the apartment, he had followed the copper scent here to the bedroom—and as soon as it was obvious things were too late, he’d intended to leave immediately.
Something had made that impossible.
Guess his destiny had known his detective was going to show up.
And now here he was, in even deeper.
“Fuck.” Balz looked around the squalid room. “Mother… fucker.”
When his eyeballs provided him with absolutely no quick-fixes whatsoever—but like, what, this sad scene was a Kmart for solutions?—he refocused on Erika. She was staring at the body, the stillness in her a clear indication she was going through so many mentals. A lot of which were his fault.
“I never believed in the list,” she said absently, as if she were talking to herself. “Never did… but I think I do now.”
“What list.”
It was a long minute before she glanced back at him, and again, he had the sense she was speaking her private thoughts out loud: “Everyone who joins homicide, sooner or later, sees the list.” Her eyes traveled up and down his body, like she was recording every detail about him. Just as he’d done to her. “It’s not merely cold case files, it’s totally unexplained cold cases, and they go back a hundred years or more. Bodies with black blood in their veins that later disappear from the morgue. Autopsies that show physical anomalies that no coroner has documented before. Remote sites where ritual murder has clearly taken place, but there are no human or animal remains. Missing persons reports and homicide cases that are ‘solved,’ except no one can figure out exactly how or why.”