“No!” Lyric screamed.
Before she could think better of it, she jumped up and threw herself in front of the slayer, just as she heard the gun go off. There was some shouting after that, but she was suddenly cold and numb so it was impossible to detangle who was yelling.
Except she heard the enemy’s laughter.
That was the last thing she was aware of as she fell to the floor for a second time—
No, that wasn’t the last thing.
L.W. suddenly went flying across the room, the heir to the throne airborne and then some. As he crashed into the little table she and Dev had eaten at in another lifetime, chairs went on a scatter and Dev was suddenly right with her, his face in front of hers. His mouth was moving, those odd, all-wrong eyes he’d taken such pains to hide from her welling with tears.
In that moment, she split in half, one side remembering all the things they’d said and done together… the other thinking of how many innocent vampires had been taken down by slayers, how many nights she and hermahmenhad worried about the males in their lives out on the streets hunting, how many horrors had happened over countless centuries.
An ancient, bloody feud defining her life.
She thought back to the beginning of everything with Dev, thepair of them outside at the construction site, his jacket around her shoulders, his hard hat in her hands—when he’d told her he hated hismahmenand that she was dead. And then she recalled what he’d just said, that he wasn’t his parents, that he had lived away from them and their evil doings…
But even if all that was true, none of it could matter.
History and her loyalty to her King made him forbidden.
Abruptly, there was a bright light, a smell of something burning—
The slayer. Stabbed by a kitchen knife if she recognized the handle correctly. Sent back to its maker by Dev.
To his… father.
“Lyric,” he said as he came back to her. “Stay with me… stay—”
Pulling up her loose sweater with a trembling hand, she looked down at the red stain blooming on the white turtleneck she had on underneath. The deadly wound was right in the center of her chest, the bullet meant for the heir to the throne finding her heart instead.
“Fuck you! This is about her!” Dev snarled over his shoulder.
Her eyes drifted over to whoever he was talking to. L.W. was growling like a guard dog, his tremendous fangs on full display, and yet he seemed to be frozen where he was, held in place by invisible restraints.
She opened her mouth to speak, and both males instantly silenced.
It took her two attempts to get the message out.
And she spoke to L.W. first.
“Get me home,” she told him roughly. Then she looked at Dev. “If I live… through this… I don’t want to ever see you again.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Talk about a tits-up parade of bad shit going down. After Shuli disappeared the old lady with the food back into her apartment on a quick mental smudge, he jumped over to help Rhamp, who was ramming his whole body into a door that L.W. had just busted open, but which had, miraculously, reconstructed itself like it was brand-fucking-new. On the third try, Rhamp managed to break the fucking thing apart again and—
A nightmare.
That’s what it was.
L.W. was up against the wall, splayed out like da Vinci’sVitruviansketch, while a man—male? what the fuck was it—was kneeling next to Lyric like he was losing his whole life as he tried to keep her conscious. With her sweater wedged up to her neck, the alarming chest wound she’d sustained was bleeding at a fast rate—and of course, like all the tragedies Shuli’d ever had to witness, there was also the burning stench of a slayer having been sent home, as well as a discharged bullet casing on the wood floor.
Tunnel vision. Everything just collapsed for him into a pinprick of sight, and even though he wanted to fucking lose it, he brought up his phone so that the screen was right in the tube of vision he had.
He sent out the emergency call along with his location—
Meanwhile, Rhamp threw his big body forward, shoving everything out of the way to get to his sister—and somehow, that snapped some kind of magic spell that was in the air. As L.W. dropped off that wall and landed on his feet, the heir to the throne lost no fucking time. He went right for the boyfriend, picking up the guy, swinging him around, and throwing him down by the bed like he intended to drive him into the center of the fucking earth. Then L.W. mounted his prey, grabbed on to that throat, and started squeezing the ever-living shit out of the bastard.
