Concrete Savior (8 page)

“
S
omething’s wrong about this.”

Eran was standing at the mirror in the bathroom, and he looked back at her reflection as he stoically tried to work the ends of his tie into something presentable. “What?”

She rattled the newspaper at him. “This.” She pointed at the most prominent article on the front page. “If it was any bigger, it would bite you on the nose.”

“Read it to me,” he said. “I have a court appearance this morning and it’s one of those days where this stupid thing won’t cooperate.”

A corner of Brynna’s mouth lifted in amusement as she saw him yank the tie apart, then start over. “All right.”

Chicago—After having his life saved in the subway last Friday, yesterday afternoon Glenn Klinger, a custodian at the Swenson Plastics Plant, shot and killed eleven people in the management offices at his workplace. Among the dead are Carter Swenson, the owner of the company, as well as the entirety of the administrative staff, including all the plant salesmen and the human resources and office staff. Also shot and killed was Klinger’s ex-wife, Lenore Cusack. She and Klinger had divorced four months ago and she had married William Cusack, the marketing manager at the plant. Cusack’s relatives say she was expecting their first child in six months.

A coworker who asked that he not be identified said that the divorce and remarriage of Lenore Klinger Cusack was “like an ugly little Peyton Place.” He went on to say that William Cusack took exceptional delight in tormenting Klinger, talking behind his back, spreading rumors, and making demands that were “clearly designed to rub Klinger’s nose in the fact that [Cusack] had stolen his wife and that Klinger was powerless to do anything about it. He made Klinger miserable every single day.”

Others, however, were unaware of the conflict between Cusack and Klinger. “I don’t understand why someone would do this,” said a tearful Kiki Swenson, daughter of the owner. In addition to her father, her boyfriend, Ralph Atzbach, was also killed in the shooting spree. “I don’t even know who this man was.”

Glenn Klinger had worked at the plant for more than seventeen years. He and his former wife had met in high school and been married for nearly two decades before she divorced him.

“I already heard about it at the station, but it
is
pretty freaky,” Eran agreed when Brynna had finished reading. “Most of the time people who get a second chance at life, like this guy, go through a kind of revelation phase. They look at where they are in life and find a whole new appreciation for it. Or if they don’t like it, they take steps to change it.” He paused for a moment, staring thoughtfully at his still-crooked tie. “Which, if you think about it, is exactly what Klinger did.”

“No kidding,” Brynna said.

“Although it’s a little out of the ordinary, I’m not sure it falls under the we-have-to-check-this-out category. It’s just one guy—”

“That’s exactly it,” Brynna interrupted. “One guy. But not the one you think.” She stepped closer, using her finger to direct his gaze farther down the page. “Check out the next article,” she said, and began to read again.

Chicago—A young man pulled another man from a burning car on the Kennedy Expressway this morning. The victim, Jack Gaynor, was on his way home from an overnight work shift when his car overheated in traffic and developed a problem with the carburetor that caused the engine to ignite. His seat belt became jammed and he could not free himself, but he was savedy a nearby motorist who cut Gaynor’s seat belt with a pocketknife, then dragged him out of the vehicle. Gaynor was taken to Cook County Hospital and treated for second-degree burns, where he is in stable condition and is expected to be released in two to three days.

His rescuer left the scene without giving his name to authorities, but a teenager in a school bus two lanes over started videotaping the fire on her iPod and ultimately captured the entire rescue. “It was awesome,” said Chrissy Hopkins, the sophomore who filmed the incident. “He was so
on
it, like Spider-Man or something. The car started on fire and he was right there.” By the time she got to school, she had already uploaded the video to YouTube, and by the time of this edition, it had received several thousand viewings. The rescuer’s identity, however, remains unknown.

Eran had stopped and was frowning slightly as she finished up. “Same man?”

Brynna lifted one shoulder. “I can’t say for sure, but if I had to guess . . . yeah. I think it is.”

“I think I’ll check into that video after I get out of court,” he said as he carefully tucked the end of the tie into the loop he’d created. But when he pulled on it, Brynna saw that it was all out of whack, with the wider end halfway up his shirt and the narrow end hanging well below his belt.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” she said, and pushed his hands away. “Let me do that for you before you destroy it entirely. I’ve seen you in a suit dozens of times, but you’re acting like this is the first time you’ve ever had to wear one of these things.”

“I’ve never had to do it with you watching me.”

“Nice try, but you were already fighting with it when I walked in.” She flipped up the collar of his shirt and looped the tie around it, then quickly adjusted the ends to the proper length. “Basic black, huh?”

“It works. Covers everything from funerals to weddings.”

She didn’t reply as she finished off the knot, then carefully tightened everything down. “There.”

“Thanks,” he said, and before she could step back, Eran’s warm hand covered hers and pressed it against his chest. She froze for a moment as he held it there, then htiized she could feel his heartbeat beneath her palm, strong, steady, and just a bit on the accelerating side. Suddenly she could smell him, and the familiar scent to which she’d believed she’d become accustomed threatened to overwhelm her. It surrounded her and went into her mouth and her nose, saturating her senses with a lot more desire and strength than she expected. Too late she realized that she should have never gotten this close to him. Now her heart was racing, too, and both of them were breathing far too deeply as they unconsciously leaned toward each other.

“No,” she managed. His mouth was so close, almost touching hers. “This isn’t good, Eran—”

His other hand slipped behind her neck and pulled her head forward just enough to lightly press their lips together. “Let me love you, Brynna. Like before. It’s okay.”

“It’s
not
,” she said, but her protest was weak. He tasted so
good
. “I’m too . . .
addictive
. You can’t deal with that.”

She wasn’t sure when exactly it had happened, but he was holding her now, and she was holding him. “I can,” he said. “I will. And if you’re the worst thing I’m ever addicted to, I just don’t think that’s too bad.”

She tried to reply, but her words and her thoughts ended up jumbled together inside her head, all mixed up with an overload of physical sensation and mental yearnings. How human she had become in only two months—not so long ago she could have easily let her true demon self move in and take over, allow it to gorge itself on everything about Eran Redmond, right down to consuming his very soul. But that side of herself was gone forever, or least she hoped so; now, as she felt herself surrendering to the hunger she felt for this very human man, she found that what she wanted was different from before, more organic and, what shocked her the most,
psychological
. Gone was her desire to see his human body die and to devour everything about him and see him suffer for eons to pay for the transgression of lust. There was no evil in what he felt for her, no darkness. Everything that emanated from his core to her was lightness and, God help them both—

Love.

Their breaths mingled as the gentle pressure Eran was putting against her mouth increased to a kiss that made Brynna’s head swim. He picked her up easily and carried her out of the bathroom, but they only made it as far as the couch; where his hands slid across her skin and felt like fire and water at the same time, a magnificent mix of the impossible. She had sworn this would never happen again after that first time in July back at her old apartment, that they would never have sex a second time.

But this was more than just sex, more than just that first copulation. This was a
joining
, the connecting of two people both physically and mentally, like reaching deep inside her mind and heart and patching a hole she hadn’t known existed. Was it love? Could it be? Was she even
capable
of that? Maybe. Whatever this was, this unnameable feeling saturating everything about her, it was undeniably something she had been missing over the entirety of her existence, the truth of what one person could feel for another. As much time as she had spent with him, as much as she had given up for him, Lucifer had never even come close to completing her like this human, fragile man. Brynna had spent thousands of years as Astarte and been considered the Queen of Hell itself . . .

But never before had she felt so utterly under the spell of someone else.

MAYBE IN THE ROMANCE
books the man and woman could stay in bed for hours, talking roses and hearts and futures. In Eran’s world, however, there was a minor inconvenience called the Chicago Police Department and the Criminal Division of the Circuit Court of Cook County. In his current mindset, somewhere between bliss and near-exhaustion, he would have happily dozed away most of the morning . . . except that his cell phone went off at precisely nine o’clock.

The ringing brought him back to the here and now with a very unpleasant jolt. He and Brynna were still tangled together on the couch, and he sat up so quickly that he nearly dumped her onto the floor—only a grab at the couch throw that was wound around them kept her from landing butt-first between the couch proper and the coffee table.

“Oh
shit
,” he said as he tugged himself free and scrambled for the phone. “What time is it?”

“What?” Brynna squinted at him, then looked toward the window as though she could tell time simply by judging the daylight. Not much help there since he had the privacy blinds pulled. “I don’t know.”

He dashed out of the living room and snatched his cell phone off the kitchen table at the same time his gaze searched for the clock above the sink. No good—it had been destroyed in Brynna’s clean-up of their Hunter situation and he hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet. “Hello?”