On Midnight Wings

42 THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END INTERSTATE 55 NORTH

ANNIE STEERED THE VAN down I-10, the tires humming along the blacktop, C.C. Adcock’s sexy swamp-rock/bluesy voice curling from the iPod Jack had docked into the van’s system, singing about a woman who just doesn’t know how to be good to her hard-working man.

Maybe that hard-working man needed to learn how to load a dishwasher or cook a three-course meal or fold up a basketful of clean laundry if he wanted his woman to remain thrilled about being his woman.

Just saying, y’know. A word to the wise—don’t be a self-entitled douchebag.

Beyond the windshield, dawn stretched fingers of rose, peach, and orange into the brightening sky, a color combination that made Annie think of raspberry sorbet and orange sherbet—a thought she quickly regretted as her stomach knotted. Nausea rolled through her in a throat-burning acid wave. Cold sweat beaded on her forehead.

One minute I’m devouring anything that doesn’t fucking scurry away fast enough, the next I never want to hear, see, smell, or think about food again. Ever.

“Pregnancy sucks,” Annie muttered through clenched teeth.

“Sorry to hear that, sugar. Peach?” Jack asked, offering her a juicy slice from the tip of his pocket knife.

Annie shook her head, swallowed hard, then fumbled at the window control button. Cool air smelling faintly of exhaust and wild grass wet with dew poured inside as the window hummed down.

The nausea gradually subsided and Annie breathed a little easier. She glanced at Jack. The drummer sat slouched in the passenger seat, one booted foot up on the dash, contentedly thumbing peach slices into his mouth. The aroma, sweet and sunny, did nothing to improve her mood or her nausea.

“If I puke, I plan to puke on you,” Annie announced darkly. “Repeatedly.”

“Hey, now. No need for vomiting, targeted or otherwise.”

“Says you,” Annie muttered.

“Hey, podna,” Emmett called from the back, “I’ll take more of that jerky, if you have any left.”

As Jack handed what remained of the bag of jerky back to Emmett, Annie found herself wishing Silver and Merri had left both men behind at Jack’s sister’s house when they’d dropped off Eerie along with a bag of tuna-flavored kibble, wishing that she was driving in non-food scented, blissful, silence.

They’re mortal, Annie. And Jack is a part of our family. He’s my responsibility, just like Thibodaux is Merri’s. We need to keep our family safe.

But who was keeping her sister safe? She was mortal too. And alone.

I wish you would wait . . .

I can’t.

Tension thrummed through Annie’s body, whitened her knuckles against the steering wheel. She wanted to get to Memphis as quickly as possible, find Von, grab him, then haul ass to join Heather in Baton Rouge, even though in her heart of hearts, she knew that whatever was going to happen would have happened and been long done by the time she arrived. Hell, probably before she even hit Memphis.

A quick glance at the speedometer hovering at 80 mph had Annie easing her foot just slightly off the gas pedal.

Christ! Slow down. The last thing you need is a fucking ticket.

Another thing she didn’t need was having to explain why the people in the back refused to wake up and fetch their identification. And she sure as shit didn’t want to screw up her chance to make things right.

Annie’s foot dropped down on the accelerator again, her lips compressed into a thin white line. The van surged ahead, a stallion under spurs.

PINE BLUFF, ARKANSAS

CATERINA’S HEAD WAS TURNED to one side on the pillow, eyes closed, her hair a spill of dark coffee across the white satin case. Giovanni studied her as Sleep crept into his veins, deeply troubled by her unhealthy pallor, by the shadows bruising the skin beneath her dark lashes, by the far from peaceful expression on her face.

“Keep her sedated until I awake,” Giovanni instructed. “I think the dose we gave her should keep her under until twilight, but”—he shrugged one shoulder—“she’s strong-willed.”

“Of course, signor,” Sondra murmured. A mortal friend of the Cercle de Druide, she kept a day-house, a vampire bed-and-dinner, for members traveling in the area.

Giovanni double-checked Caterina’s restraints, making sure she was safe and secure and couldn’t escape while he Slept. Finally satisfied that she wouldn’t be able to work her way free, despite her training and deadly skills, he sighed and raked a hand through his hair, leaving it in disarray.

Caterina’s mind had been tampered with, of that Giovanni had no doubt. Detecting the alterations within her unshielded mind had been easy enough.

From the moment Renata had first carried Caterina into their home, the toddler’s chubby arms wrapped around her graceful neck—Look, Vanni mio, we have been given a gift—he’d quickly grown to understand Caterina’s mind, comprehending how she thought and dreamed and schemed, this little mortal, our little mortal, dancing among vampires.

She’d been an annoying nuisance, at first, sì, one he’d resented—no denying it. But over time, and almost without his knowing when or how, Caterina had transformed from nuisance to family, his soeur de coeur—a true sister of the heart.

And whoever had tampered with her had damaged her, perhaps permanently.

Giovanni’s jaw tightened, his gaze never wavering from his sister’s pale, vulnerable face.

“Qualcuno pagherà, Caterina mia,” he vowed. “Qualcuno pagherà a cara prezzo.”

Someone would most definitely pay.

Questions remained: Who? Why? Could the damage be healed, the tampering undone? He wished he could contact Renata, but given that it was early afternoon in Rome, his mère de sang still Slept, safe and secure behind cool marble walls.

Sleep surged through his veins, narcotic and inescapable. His eyelids drooped. A hand lightly touched his arm.

“This way, signor,” Sondra urged, slacks whispering as she stepped into the doorway.

Giovanni allowed the redhead with a matronly shelf of bosom to lead him to the room next to Caterina’s, then thanked her for her hospitality. Once she’d left the room, shutting the door behind her, he stripped down to his boxer briefs before collapsing drunkenly onto the pale rose silk sheets.

He sank into the fathomless waters of Sleep like an iceberg-gouged ship, chased into the dark by a single, chilling thought: Where had Loki flown off to in such a rush?

THE FRENCH QUARTER

IN A SMALL POWER boat on the Mississippi, Edmond gently swaddled his master’s burned body in fresh water-soaked blankets, covering him from now-bald head to blackened and curled toes.

Swallowing hard against the meaty stench of seared flesh, Edmond sat down beside Mauvais, then uttered one terse word: “Go.”

Phaedra opened the throttle and steered the boat away from the flame-engulfed Winter Rose. With a hollow heart, Edmond watched as the fire department geysered water on the blazing riverboat from several high-powered hoses.

With a sharp, splintering crack that boomed into the night like ancient cannon fire, the Winter Rose snapped in half. One half, still burning, slipped—foot by foot—into the inky waters. Distant voices shouted. Blue and red and white lights strobed through the graying night.

The majordomo blinked stinging eyes. The smoke, of course. The gritty ashes.

He didn’t know how the fire had started—not for certain, but given its swiftness, the reek of kerosene, and the death of the apprenti he’d left in charge of refueling and relighting the lanterns, he believed an accident with one of the lanterns must’ve occurred.

But hadn’t he also caught a faint whiff of ozone as he’d pelted up from belowdecks at his master’s agonized screams?

You got an angry loa on dis here boat . . .

Edmond had no idea how long it would take his master to heal from his devastating injuries or how much blood would be required during the process, but Mauvais would have all he needed and more.

The Winter Rose may be gone, but the majority of my master’s household has survived the fire. At least I can give him that good news.

Pale tendrils of peach and hyacinth curled across the brightening horizon. Gaze still on the burning, foundering Winter Rose, Edmond said, “Faster.”

“No shit,” Phaedra muttered, pushing the speedboat as hard as it could go.

Racing the dawn.

DALLAS, TEXAS

JAMES WALLACE WATCHED AS the big rig and its friendly driver pulled away from the curb with a deep, concrete-vibrating rumble, exhaust belching black smoke stinking of scorched oil into the air.

The driver had talked nonstop all the way into Dallas, but James had thought the one-sided conversation a very small price to pay, considering he could still be standing on the highway with his thumb out.

Once the truck had merged—more like bulldozed—into traffic, disappearing from sight, James turned around and studied the building across the sidewalk from him, his requested stop.

VISION CONSULTING

International Accounting & Financial Planning

James had no doubt that talented accountants did indeed work at Vision Consulting. An effective front needed to be a functioning one. But, thanks to interagency contacts carefully cultivated throughout his long career with the FBI, he knew Vision Consulting for what it truly was—a hidden division of the Shadow Branch.

And he also knew that the moment he walked through those black-tinted glass doors, there would be no turning back.

James brushed road dust from his slacks, noting the four tiny bloodstained punctures marring the fabric. The wound beneath throbbed.

A fork. A goddamned fork. Clever girl, his daughter.

But a daughter now lost to him forever.

The image of Heather aiming his own damned gun at his forehead was burned into his brain. He hadn’t seen one iota of bluff in her blue eyes, only grim determination.

She would’ve pulled the trigger without blinking.

James’s anger was a glacier encasing his heart. Deep down, he suspected he was grieving. Heather, his Heather, had died the moment she’d met Dante Prejean-Baptiste. Yes, the godforsaken bloodsucker had saved her life when she’d been shot in D.C., but at what price?

Heather had returned to Seattle a different woman and had chosen a vampire over her own father, throwing away everything she’d ever worked for—including her humanity.

James remembered a twelve-year-old Heather throwing her arms around him and hugging him after she’d learned of her mother’s death. She’d held on with a quiet desperation, her face buried against his chest. Given her lack of tears at the time, he’d had the strangest feeling that this was a loss she could live with. Her words had proved him right.

It’s just us now, pumpkin, he’d said. You, me, Kevin, and Annie.

Daddy, that’s all it’s ever been.

James felt a pang of sorrow, of regret. He blinked burning eyes.

She’s gone. My Heather. Gone.

And the FBI, the Bureau he’d devoted his life to, had played a hand in that heart-hollowing loss. They had betrayed him also. His SAC had promised he would be allowed to get Heather the treatment she so desperately needed to free her of Baptiste’s deadly influence, so she could be restored to them all—a daughter to James, a skilled and talented agent to the Bureau.

They’d lied.

The Bureau had used him to track Heather. Without their plan to move her, he never would’ve signed her out of the facility. Never would’ve lost her on a dark and lonely Texas highway. Never would’ve watched her aim a gun at his face.

The Bureau had stolen Heather’s single chance at redemption. They were as responsible for her death—for he had buried her in his heart—as Baptiste was.

Straightening his jacket, James drew himself erect, crossed the sidewalk to those black-tinted doors, pushed them open, and strode inside.

One good betrayal deserved another.

“I need to see your superior,” James said to the young man in the black-framed hipster glasses sitting behind the front desk. “Tell them that James William Wallace is here.”

He would give the SB everything. Including the woman who had once been his daughter.

GEHENNA

WITH THE MORNINGSTAR AND Hekate on either side of him, Lucien strode down the Royal Aerie’s main corridor, past the line of blue-bladed shovels branching from the marble walls on other side, mute evidence of Dante’s inability to control his power.

Mute evidence of his brutal, but hidden, childhood, as well.

A bitter truth burrowed into Lucien’s heart. Until Dante was whole, his past exhumed, examined, and integrated, he would never be able to control the creu tân.

I had hoped to spare him those memories. A desperate hope, and impossible.

In New Orleans, the sun was rising. Dante, wherever he was, would be Sleeping now. A fact for which Lucien was grateful. Once the Morningstar led him to Dante, he planned to take his son back to Jack’s house, where Hekate could heal Dante of any lingering damage from James Wallace’s special rounds.

As for Dante’s mind . . .

Lucien looked over at Hekate. She walked at his left with chin held high, lamplight gilding her moon-silver tresses. What she had told him as they’d flown from the cliff side circled through his mind, each word a bead on a rosary, a prayer of hope.

It’s possible I might be able to shore up your son’s mind. Wall up his past, hide it from him, until he can stabilize.

For how long?

Not long, it’ll be only temporary. But it’ll give you the time to help him learn about his past, to accept it.

And if he doesn’t?

Then his psyche won’t survive when the wall comes down again.

Grim hope, but hope, nonetheless.

An unwelcome entourage in the form of Gabriel and the remainder of the Celestial Seven followed Lucien and his companions in tense silence down the Aerie’s main corridor to Dante’s gate, the fast-paced clatter of sandals and boot soles loud against marble.

From within the Aerie’s depths, cries and wails and anxious chalkydri flutings filled the sandalwood-and-hyacinth-scented air, a Greek chorus of despair. The skygates had vanished. What part of their world would unravel next? Where was the creawdwr?

Good question, Lucien thought grimly. One I hope to answer very soon.

“Tell your son that his human bondmate is welcome also,” Astarte said as they reached the gate Dante had created, literally punched his way in from one world to the next. “I have servants preparing chambers for them both.”

“I’ll let him know,” Lucien replied, pausing in front of the smooth-edged hole marring the corridor’s south wall.

“Perhaps an honor guard—”

The Morningstar laughed. “By all means—if you want Dante to refuse. Have you forgotten his disdain for authority?” His gaze settled on Gabriel. “I imagine you haven’t—brother.”

Gabriel folded his arms over his bare chest and leveled a cool, green gaze on the Morningstar. Lamp light glinted from the braided silver torc curled around his throat. “No, I haven’t, indeed.”

“We don’t wish to antagonize the boy,” Uriel said to Lucien. “All we ask is that you impress the urgency of the situation upon him.”

“Of course,” Lucien said, promising nothing.

Dante’s well-being came first, as far as he was concerned. Even at the expense of Gehenna’s existence.

Gabriel stepped forward, his unbound hair—a rich, warm caramel—brushing against his narrow hips and the scarlet kilt belted over them. “How can we trust you?” he asked. His gaze skipped from Lucien, to Hekate, to the Morningstar. “Any of you?”

Lucien met and held his gaze. “What choice do you have?”

Without waiting for an answer, Lucien ducked through the gate, folded wing tips scraping the top rim, and stepped into the creawdwr-shattered cemetery. St. Louis No. 3 should’ve smelled of dewed grass and young cherry blossoms, of the dawn. Should’ve, yes. If it were dawn.

But it wasn’t.

Instead the sun was hanging over the western horizon and the warm, late afternoon air vibrated with the rush of heavy traffic on the street beyond the cemetery’s broken walls. The faint, sun-warmed fragrance of cherry blossoms wasn’t enough to mask the odor of decay and old death released from tombs that Dante had unintentionally cracked open like eggs with his power.

Fear spiked through Lucien.

Time was stalling in Gehenna, unraveling like its skygates.

The Morningstar’s grim voice echoed Lucien’s realization, “It’s worse than we thought.”

“It is,” Lucien agreed, turning to see Hekate and her father standing beside him amongst the crumbled crypts and broken cypress and oak trees that gave mute testimony to a creawdwr’s power and a son’s desperate determination.

Found you, mon cher ami, mon père, and I ain’t losing you again.

Unfurling his white wings, the Morningstar took to the sky. The lowering sun chiseled radiant diamond dazzles from his wings as he soared ever upward. Lucien followed, Hekate at his left wing.

Now I will find you, mon cher fils. And no one will ever take you again.

Not even if it meant the end of Gehenna.

ROME, ITALY

RENATA ALESSA CORTINI STIRRED on her bed, suddenly restless beneath her cool linen sheets. Even locked in Sleep’s iron grip, she knew she was no longer dreaming; she was Witnessing, her inner vision unfurling images that chilled her to the bone, quick flashes of nightmare, glimpses into that-which-may-be.

In a hallway gleaming with faint red light, a fallen angel with black wings and short, ginger locks lounges upon a throne composed of dead and stiffening bodies . . .

The night burns, the sky on fire from horizon to horizon . . .

Dante Baptiste uncoils from a bloodied tile floor, his pale, breathtaking face smeared with blood, his eyes dark wells of madness, loss, and simmering rage . . .

A tattoo of a running black wolf inked beneath a desperate green eye . . .

Pale blue flames explode out from around the Great Destroyer’s lean body in transforming tongues of cool fire. His kohl-rimmed eyes open as his song rakes the burning night . . .

A sign emblazoned with the words: Doucet-Bainbridge Sanitarium; Fallen sigils painted in blood upon glass . . .

A woman’s voice: I’m here, I’m here. Stay with me, cher. She is all that stands between the creawdwr and the end of the world, all that stands between the Great Destroyer and the never-ending Road . . .

A hand wreathed in sapphire flames, blue light glinting from the rings encircling thumbs and fingers, touches the rough surface of a parking lot. A frost-rimmed hole opens beneath that burning hand, an emptiness, a void that devours the parking lot, then spreads . . .

I have promises to keep, Dante whispers, blood trickling from one nostril. Then he puts out the world’s light.

Darkness and screams filled Renata’s mind, followed by utter silence. Her pulse thundered in her ears, keeping time with her frantic heart.

She had never felt so cold.

Something had befallen Dante Baptiste, of that she had no doubt. She was less sure if he’d been seized by mortals or the Elohim or both. And, whether on purpose or accidentally, whoever had Dante would twist him into the Great Destroyer.

He is ours, not theirs. They cannot have him. This beautiful and deadly young creawdwr belongs to the vampire race; he is ours to train and guide and love.

But what frightened Renata even more than the very real possibility of Dante becoming the Great Destroyer was the fact that Dante’s mortal bondmate might hold the key to the world’s continued existence, along with everything and everyone it contained.

A fragile mortal with a butterfly’s lifespan.

Heather Wallace needs to be safeguarded at all costs. If she dies, so do we all.

Renata needed to get to New Orleans. She needed to contact Giovanni and Caterina, find out what they knew. Much needed to be set into motion and immediately. Yet no matter how aware she was, Sleep still held her body a prisoner until dusk.

But only her body.

By feeding small amounts of her blood every night to her personal domestica, she could awaken the girl with a touch of her mind through their temporary blood bond and issue orders to be carried out.

Renata did so now.

She sent to the girl curled sleeping in a cot at the foot of her bed, brushing her dreams aside like cobwebs and touching her drowsing consciousness.

<Flavia, awaken.>

Through her inner eye, Renata saw the girl stir, her dark brown eyes opening wide, all trace of sleepiness gone. Flavia raised up on her elbows, ebony locks tumbling past her slim shoulders, and gave her attention to her mistress’s Slumbering form.

“Signora?”

Renata began telling her of all the things that needed to be done or set into motion before she rose with the twilight. When she finished, Flavia threw back her quilt and rose quickly from her cot. And set about her mistress’s work.