Page 68 of Lover Forbidden
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.
Whateverwas 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 backuplessers.
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 thelessers.
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 oflessersbroke 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—andalready 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 thelesserbehind 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.
