Beneath the Skin

8 IN THE SECOND BED

OUTSIDE DAMASCUS, OR

THE HAPPY BEAVER MOTEL

March 25

THE BULLET SLAMMED INTO the Morningstar’s chest, the silence he’d woven around himself swallowing the gun’s retort. He staggered back a step. Pain, hot and pulsing, spiked out from the wound beneath his collarbone.

The dark-haired woman crumpled to the floor, her fall silent, but the Morningstar felt the thudding vibration through the soles of his sandals. Her hair fanned over her face.

The other female, the lovely redhead who’d held the creawdwr in her arms on the hill as she’d drugged him, slumped over onto the bed, her pistol tumbling onto the blankets just beyond the reach of her fingers.

Blood trickled along the Morningstar’s skin down to his belly. His body ejected the bullet fragments as the wound healed. The pain faded. His illusion no longer needed, he unthreaded it, then turned and closed the door.

Sound rushed in like water through a broken dam. Gulls cried outside. A toilet flushed in another room, water gurgling through the pipes. And in this room he heard the music of breathing and intertwined heart rhythms—the slow and steady drumbeats of vampire hearts and the mortals’ dancing patter.

Mingled odors layered the air—lilac and wet clothes, wild mint and adrenaline, burning leaves and motor oil. But a faint, sour-milk odor lurked underneath—mildew, mortal taint.

The Morningstar swiveled around and scanned the room. In the first bed, the redhead and the female mortal with the blue/purple/black twilight-shaded hair, in the second bed …

The Morningstar stepped over the dark-haired woman’s body, pausing long enough to kick her gun out of reach, then walked over to the second bed. Two figures slept, blankets covering their heads. He bent, grasped the comforter’s edge, and pulled it down.

The Morningstar’s breath caught in his throat.

Dante’s beauty gleamed in the gloom like moonlight on a winter-iced lake.

Pale, pale skin. Thick, black lashes almost hiding the blue shadows smudged beneath his eyes. Luscious lips. Hair as black as a starless night. Five silver hoops rimmed each ear, glinting in the darkness as though fire-burnished. But blood trickled from Dante’s nose and from one ear.

The severed bond had injured Dante.

The Morningstar stared, pulse pounding. The creawdwr’s scent—crisp autumn leaves and frost, the smell of his blood—

A mixed-blood Maker. True Blood—Fola Fior—and Elohim.

The Morningstar’s thoughts scattered at the impossibility.

“Freeze, motherfucker!”

The Morningstar blinked. Speaking of impossibilities … He lifted his head. The woman with the multicolored hair knelt on the bed in a T-shirt and flannel pants beside the unconscious redhead, gun clasped in both white-knuckled hands.

“Whatever you did to my sister and what’s-her-name, fix it. Now!”

“You shouldn’t be awake,” the Morningstar said, tilting his head. Even if she’d been asleep when he’d uttered his command, the spell should’ve bound her and kept her still.

“Fix it,” she repeated, voice strained. “Now!”

The Morningstar straightened, weaving another illusion around him. He drew in breath to craft another Word, but something hard thwipped into his arm, near the shoulder. Pain burned along his nerves down to his fingers.

He glanced at the blood-oozing wound. He’d been shot. Again. He blew air out his nostrils, irritated. Simple reflex on the mortal’s part? Or did she still see him? He shifted his gaze to the woman.

“Freeze means don’t move, asshole,” she said. The gun shook in her hands.

The Morningstar’s wings snapped out behind him like a sail catching the wind, the tips nearly scraping the walls and ceiling of the small room.

“Fuck,” the mortal whispered.

Ah. She could still see him. Blind to his illusions and deaf to his Word. Interesting. Who was this pretty little mortal with the twilight-colored hair?

Before the woman had time to blink, the Morningstar folded his wings behind him and vaulted the bed, landing in front of her. He wrenched the gun from her hands. She gasped in pain. He tossed the gun across the room and it hit the wall with a dull thud. Seizing her by the biceps, he yanked her off the bed.

The Morningstar allowed his illusion—useless, apparently, where she was concerned—to scatter like a pile of windblown leaves. The woman kicked and twisted and squirmed, and he found himself holding her at arm’s length as if she were a hooded and spitting cobra.

She barbed the air with a string of prickly and creative invective. He tried to picture some of the combinations she suggested—cocksucking motherfucker, for one—and felt his imagination couldn’t do her verbal creativity justice.

“Behave,” he said, barely resisting the urge to shake her until her brain pulped inside her skull. “Or I’ll never allow the others to awaken.”

“Motherfucker,” the woman spat, but she quit fighting. Her muscles quivered underneath his fingers, taut and ready to go again. Musky adrenaline and rancid fear seeped from her skin, mingling with the sweet scent of coconut in her hair.

The Morningstar lowered her to the floor, but kept his fingers locked around her arms. “I admire your devotion to the Maker,” he said.

The woman’s brow furrowed. “The Maker? What the hell’s— Oh. You mean Gorgeous-But-Deadly, am I right? Dante?” She met his gaze, her sky blue eyes almost eclipsed by their pupils. “Take him,” she whispered. “Just take him and go.”