In the Blood

22 NOT MEANT FOR ME

Seattle, WA

March 23

SUDDEN SCRATCHING AT THE window in the front room along with an inquisitive chirp from Eerie caught Heather’s attention. She looked up from her laptop. “You hunting moths, kitty boy?” Another thought flared in her mind: Nighttime. Dante. First thing tomorrow evening.

She pushed back from the table and rose to her feet, reaching for her purse and the .38 tucked inside in case it wasn’t Dante crawling in through her fricking window again.

The window slid open, pale hands grasping the edge, then Heather saw a black-clad leg edged from ankle to hip with vinyl straps and buckles swing over the window sill, and into the room, quickly followed by the rest of Dante. A hood hid his face, but not the lambent gleam of his eyes.

“Hey,” he said as he straightened, pushing his hood back. A smile tilted his lips.

The sight of him caught at her heart. As always. Heather’s muscles unknotted. “I could’ve shot you, you know. Why the hell don’t you use the front door?”

Dante shrugged. Turning, his leather jacket creaking, he slid the window shut. He fingered the broken hasp. “I bought stuff to fix this.”

“Do you even know how to use a screwdriver?”

Dante snorted. “How hard can it be? Slide A into B, twist. Could be fun.”

“Sounds sexy, but where’s the kiss?”

Dante puckered his lips and blew her a kiss. “Good enough?”

Heather glanced over her shoulder. “You missed, Cupid. But Eerie’s purring.”

Dante laughed. He nodded at the computer. “You find anything out? Like where to find…him?”

Heather shook her head. “Not yet. All of his Bureau records have levels of security like I’ve never seen. The last known address was in Maryland and it’s five years old. I’ve tracked him to the West Coast, then he vanishes. I’m still looking, though. But I’ve made a few other interesting discoveries.”

“Yeah?”

Heather hesitated. “You get into this with me, you’ll be in the crosshairs, Dante. More than you are now.”

“Doesn’t matter. You were there for me, Heather. I’m here for you.”

Heather held Dante’s gaze. “It was my job.”

“Nuh-uh. You’d been called back. Case closed. You stayed, alone, and without backup, to help me.”

And she’d failed him. More than once. “I didn’t do a very good job of it either.”

“Yeah, you did,” Dante said. He crossed the floor in quick strides and joined her at the table. He cupped her face between his hands, fevered hands, and she looked into his dark eyes, drawn into their unguarded depths. “You risked everything for me. You never gave up.”

“Neither did you.” Heather grasped his right hand and pressed it against her chest over her healed heart. Something chimed within her, triggered by his touch, and resonated from the palm of his hand to her heart and back, ringing between them like struck crystal, pure and clear and true.

Her breath caught in her throat, and for a moment, she thought she saw black wings arching up from Dante’s back and sweeping around her.

Wonder lit Dante’s eyes. “Listen,” he said, lowering his face to hers.

Pulse racing, Heather tilted her face up and he kissed her, his lips as fevered as his hands, his kiss hungry and a little rough. As the kiss deepened, Heather thought she heard a song—wild and dark—its complicated melody weaving in and around the crystalline hand-to-heart refrain dancing between them. The song arced electricity through her heart, her mind, and sparked fire in her blood.

She hears a rush of wings.

All too soon, Dante ended the kiss and took a step back, his hands sliding away from her breast, from her face, and curling into fists. The song vanished. His jaw tightened.

“What’s wrong?” Heather asked.

He shook his head, then trailed a hand through his hair. “How’s Annie?”

Bewildered by his abrupt physical and conversational shift, Heather shrugged. “She’s okay for the moment. She walked up to the market to get a pack of smokes.”

“C’est bon.” Dante nodded at the table. “So what’d you find?”

“Pull up a chair,” Heather said. “I’ll show you.”

Dante shrugged off his leather jacket, then the hoodie beneath it, and hung both over the back of a chair. He wore a long-sleeved mesh shirt under his black tee. White letters on the chest read BLOW ME. In his usual manner, he swung the chair around, and then straddled it. He folded his arms along the chair’s back.

Heather pulled her chair around so she could sit beside him. She awakened the laptop with a quick tap to the keypad. A file appeared on the monitor and she clicked it open. A photo flashed onto the screen.

“SAC Alexander Lyons,” Heather said. “Portland office. He’s the one who accompanied me to my mom’s death site. Spotless record, amazing test scores, exemplary field work. He transferred to Portland from D.C. about five years ago.”

“Why?”

“An illness in the family. His mother had cancer, I believe.”

“So how come he was asked to keep an eye on you, instead of someone lower in the food chain?”

“Good question,” Heather said. “Near as I can find out, Rodriguez in Seattle gave him the assignment…oh, excuse me, the request to ensure my safety. And that’s another interesting thing.”

“Interesting how?”

Heather minimized Lyons’s file and clicked open another. She scrolled through text for a few moments until she found the section she was looking for and highlighted it. “Read it,” she said softly.

“‘William Ricardo Rodriguez, whose reign of terror as the Boxcar Strangler ended ten years ago when he was captured by federal authorities, died in prison while serving out multiple life sentences. He was killed by another inmate during a dispute. Rodriguez’s father, FBI agent Alberto Rodriguez, had been instrumental in his capture.’” Dante quit reading and gave a long, low whistle. “Holy fucking hell.”

Heather nodded. “Can you imagine? Not only is your son a serial killer, but you bring him in. Yet as amazing and tragic as that is, it’s not the interesting part.”

“Yeah?”

Heather held Dante’s gaze for a long silent moment, then she said. “The next part might be hard, maybe impossible, for you to read. I’ll—”

Sudden understanding lit Dante’s eyes. “No, I’ll read it,” he said, voice low. “You take over if I…” He twirled a hand in the air.

“Okay.”

Dante returned his attention to the monitor. “‘Years earlier, SA Rodriguez filed a malpractice lawsuit against Dr. Robert…’” Dante’s voice trailed off. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “Hold on. Let me try again.”

Heather reached over and squeezed Dante’s arm. “You don’t have to.”

“Yeah, I kinda do.” Dante opened his eyes and looked at the monitor again. “‘Filed a malpractice lawsuit against Dr. Robert…’” His voice trailed off again and he blinked several times. He glanced at Heather, his pupils dilated. “What was I saying?”

Heather stared at him, her fingers tightening on his arm. Cold panic crackled through her veins. “You were reading, do you remember?”

Sweat glistened at Dante’s hairline, at his temples. “An FBI agent…”

“Look at me, Dante, not the monitor.”

“Yeah, d’accord.” Dante’s dark eyes fixed on Heather, focused.

“An FBI agent, Rodriguez,” she said. “He filed a malpractice lawsuit against the man you can’t remember because that man had treated Rodriguez’s son for an antisocial disorder.”

“And the son became the Boxcar Strangler,” Dante said. He pushed his hair back with both hands. His pale face was thoughtful, but pain glimmered in his eyes. “You wanna bet Rodriguez’s son was part of Bad Seed?”

“It’s a sure bet,” Heather said. “Which would explain why Rodriguez asked an SAC like Lyons to accompany me. Anything or anyone connected to Bad Seed, like me and like you, Rodriguez would want to keep tabs on. And he’d want people he trusted to keep him informed, people with skill. He must trust Lyons.”

She shifted in her chair and cupped her palm against Dante’s face. “You okay? I shouldn’t have let you read—”

“Nuh-uh, don’t even go there. My choice.”

“I’m going to make some coffee,” Heather said, sliding her hand from his face and standing. “I’d offer you something stronger, but with Annie around, I’d rather not.”

“Je comprend, catin.”

Eerie bunted Dante’s chair with his head, mewed. Dante picked him up and placed him in his lap.

“He’s really taken to you,” Heather said, walking into the kitchen. “I expected animals to be wary of nightkind, predator to predator, but so far, Eerie’s proved me wrong on that account.”

“Nah, I’ve never had problems with animals,” Dante said. “Some nightkind do, but only the dickheads, y’know? I think it’s because we’re a part of the natural world.”

Interesting thought. Vampires a part of the natural order. Heather spooned coffee into the filter, poured water into the coffee maker, and switched it on. Returning to the table, she sat down again.

Eerie was curled in Dante’s lap, purring, eyes closed while Dante scratched under his chin with his left hand. He held a photo in his other hand. Heather took a quick glance—it was a photo of Shannon and James sitting on a floral-patterned sofa just before they married, before she’d been born.

Shannon had been captured in the act of planting a kiss on James’s cheek, her hands with their purple-lacquered nails clutching his jeans-clad thigh. Her long red hair, teased into a retro-nineties stripper-chic bouffant, framed her face. A grin parted James’s lips, and behind his glasses his eyes were closed. A lock of honey-blond hair had tumbled across his forehead. They both looked so young. Happy.

If Heather asked her father, would he even remember one laughing minute from twenty-plus years ago? Laughing moments slipped away, transient, light as a summer breeze; but tragedy was etched into hearts and souls, indelible, a lightning strike altering lives in a split second…

Your mother isn’t coming home.…forever.

“You look a lot like her,” Dante murmured, voice husky.

“Maybe a little,” Heather allowed. “Ever since she died, I’ve had dreams about her death, nightmares, I guess I mean.”

Dante nodded.

“The thing is, ever since D.C., the dreams have become more vivid and detailed, but they don’t feel like dreams. It feels like I’m seeing it all through her eyes. And last night, it was like I was Shannon Wallace.” Heather paused a moment, then said, “Is it because of you?”

Dante carefully placed the photo of her parents on the table, then met her gaze, his own troubled and thoughtful. “Could be, yeah. If it is, it wasn’t deliberate.”

“I know that,” Heather said softly. “I’m not trying to blame you. I’m just trying to understand it. Or maybe nearly dying triggered a latent ability.”

Dante nodded. “That’s possible too.”

It was, but she’d bet a year’s salary on Dante being the originator of the change within her. The real question, one that Dante couldn’t answer, was: Had he woven any other changes into her while saving her life?

“How about you? Have you learned anything about your mom?”

“I had Trey search for info on her,” Dante said. “We found nothing. Like she never existed. They not only killed her, they fucking erased all trace of her.”

“There’s gotta be something,” Heather said. “She lived in New Orleans. Someone had to know her. Worked with her. Something.” She caressed his arm, her fingers whispering across the mesh, feeling the heated skin and hard muscle beneath. “You might consider asking De Noir.” The muscles beneath Heather’s fingers tensed.

“No.” Dante’s gaze smoldered, his jaw tight.

“You look like her, you know,” Heather said softly. “A lot. She was a beautiful woman. Black hair, dark eyes, warm smile.”

Dante nodded and looked away. “Yeah, Lucien said so too.”

Heather wished De Noir hadn’t destroyed the Bad Seed CD documenting Dante’s birth and his hellish childhood. Wished she had a picture of Genevieve Baptiste she could give Dante, a memory he could look at whenever he wanted, and keep. Wells and Moore couldn’t have erased Genevieve’s existence. Not completely. She and Dante would just have to dig a little deeper, that was all.

The aroma of fresh coffee drifted into the room. Releasing Dante’s arm, Heather rose to her feet and went to the kitchen to pour coffee for both of them. When she turned around, Dante was walking into the kitchen and brushing cat fur from his velvet-and-vinyl pants.

“I can pour my own, y’know,” he said.

Heather handed him a mug. “Yeah, yours is so tough to remember. Black.”

He smiled. “Merci beaucoup.”

“I want to thank you for last night,” Heather said.

Dante looked at her, his pale face puzzled. “For what?”

“For picking up the mess, and for being so good to Annie, even when she was telling lies about you. I owe you an apology for that too.”

“No, you don’t,” Dante said. “You owe me nothing.”

“Yes, I do, Dante, I do,” Heather said. “I gave you shit over kissing my sister and I had no right—”

“Shhh.” Dante pressed his fingers against her lips. “Forget it.” Leaning in, he bent and replaced his fingers with his lips, a warm kiss, lingering. She laced her arms around his waist, his earthy and intimate scent teasing her nostrils. Heat kindled in her belly, stoked a fire she realized had never died.

Looking into her eyes, he said, “Annie’s home.”

Heather heard the front door open, then shut. “Gotta love nightkind hearing,” she murmured. Sliding her hands from his waist, she stepped past him and walked into the living room. Annie flounced onto the sofa and switched on the TV with the remote.

“Hey,” Heather said. “I was starting to worry about you.”

Annie rolled her eyes. “No need. I was good. I didn’t drink or buy anything illegal, I—” Her words ended abruptly, her gaze sliding past Heather. Her eyes widened.

Heather felt Dante step up beside her.

“Hey, Annie,” he said.

“Holy fuck,” Annie breathed. “It wasn’t the tequila and oxy. You really are that fucking gorgeous.”

“Thanks, but I’ve been told. Ain’t nothing I care about. Just so you know.”

“You’d care if you weren’t good-looking,” Annie declared, settling back into the sofa, a sardonic gleam in her eyes. “Then every compliment would melt your heart and make you fall in love with the person saying them.”

“Annie…” Heather sighed.

“Nah, she may be right,” Dante said. “But, tell me, Annie, you know this how?”

Annie lifted a hand and flipped him off. Dante pointed to the words on his shirt—BLOW ME—and lifted an eyebrow.

“Yeah?” Annie challenged. She pointed at her crotch. “You first.”

“Is this a new game?” Heather asked, pretending innocence. “How does it work? You point at body parts until someone misses and pokes an eye out?”

Annie stared at her for a moment, then said, “Y’know that might work as a drinking game.”

Dante looked at Heather and amusement gleamed in his eyes. He looked happy and untroubled, relaxed. She liked seeing him that way, and she liked that she was the cause of it. Liked it very much.

She realized that she knew so many dark and painful things about Dante’s life, more than he did, but she didn’t know any of the simple things about him like his favorite color or his favorite band or what he liked to read or what size shirt he wore. And his birthday was coming up in…oh…twenty-four days.

Dante walked over to the table and set his cup on its cluttered surface. “I should fix your window before I head over to Vespers,” he said, pulling tools and a lock kit from the pockets of his leather jacket. He headed to the window, Eerie hopping after him, then bent over the windowsill, twisting the screwdriver with precision.

Heather smiled. “So you do know how to use a screwdriver.”

“Great for jimmying locks.”

“Don’t make me arrest you.”

Dante laughed. “No ma’am. We’ve already been there, done that.”

“Yes, we have.”

A few minutes later, he’d installed the new lock. Eerie leaped onto the sill and mewed his approval. Grinning, Dante scratched the top of the cat’s orange head. “Couldn’t’ve done it without your supervision, minou,” he said. Glancing at Heather, he added, “He’s got a lotta grace for having only three legs.”

“He does,” Heather said. “The shelter I got him from said he’d been attacked by a dog. He survived somehow and it’s never really slowed him down.”

“Slow he ain’t, eh, minou?” Dante said, giving Eerie one last pat.

Dante plucked his hoodie and leather jacket free from the chair and tugged both on, chains jingling. He slid the screwdriver into his pocket. He pulled up his hood, shadowing his beautiful face. Heather understood why he hid his looks, but it made her a little sad that he felt it was necessary. She walked to the window with him.

“So what do you want for your birthday?” she asked.

“My birthday?” Dante’s voice was what the hell puzzled. His expression matched his voice. “What birthday?”

Heather stared at him. “Didn’t you ever have a birthday party growing up?”

“Nope, not that I remember. I just thought it was something not meant for me, y’know, like school and daylight.” His voice was even and matter-of-fact—no big deal.

Anger flashed through Heather, a full-on wildfire, scorching through her veins. Her heart pounded so hard, it seemed like her entire body shook with the force of it. Dante had no idea how old he was or when he was born. No one had told him. The bastards had stolen even that from him.

“Heather? You okay?” Dante’s dark brows were knitted together.

She drew in a deep breath. Calmed herself. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she replied. “Your birthday’s on April sixteenth.”

“Really? April sixteenth. How old will I be?”

“Twenty-four, Dante,” Heather said, chest aching. “You’ll be twenty-four.”

“Yeah?” A smile tilted his lips, lit his eyes. “Good to know.”

“You ever going to use the front door?” she asked as he slid the window open.

“Dunno.” Dante climbed out the window. “Maybe. See you at Vespers, chérie.”