On Midnight Wings

50 WATER INTO GASOLINE

DANTE WALKED DOWN THE fifth-floor corridor in his stocking feet, idly trailing the fingers of his left hand along the wall as he followed the whispers to their source: last door on the left.

Yanking it open, he stepped into the padded room’s red-lit interior, attention fixed on the figure kneeling in one corner, facing in, hands clasped at chest level. Incense curled sweet and smoky into the air, but didn’t mask the smell of piss. Another figure, tall and winged, stood in one corner. Dante ignored him.

“Hey, Papa,” Dante said. “Comment ça va, you sonuvabitch?”

The soft, monotonous whispers stopped. The praying man swiveled around on his knees to face Dante, blood symbols flaking from his face. Dante grinned. Motherfucking Purcell—but he wore a priest’s purple satin stole over his charcoal gray suit. Something dangled from his hand, something Dante recognized from another time, another place—a rosary. He met Dante’s gaze with frightened olive green eyes.

“Don’t forget your lines,” the fallen angel in the corner admonished with a snap of his fingers. “Really. After all the drilling we did.”

Swallowing hard, Purcell said, “It’s time to bring forth your light.”

Dante stumbled back against the doorway as reality wheeled yet again. His vision splintered as a memory sheared up from below, a memory born here, in this place.

Facedown on a bare mattress, the smell of his own blood thick in his nostrils. The air’s cool breath paints searing pain across Dante’s back. His heart thunders in his ears.

“No one lights a lamp to cover it with a bowl or to put it under the bed,” a man’s low voice says, his words both instruction and prayer. “No, he puts it on a lampstand so that people may see the light when they come in.”

“Ain’t hiding an angel inside me, asshole,” Dante whispers for the millionth time. But Father Michael Moses—former Jesuit, current psycho—ain’t listening.

Another cut and fresh blood spills hot down Dante’s side, soaking into the mattress beneath him. He bites into his constantly healing lower lip. Black flecks whirl through his vision. He twists his wrists again and again, hoping that the cuffs have somehow weakened.

But they haven’t. And his strength is draining away along with his blood.

“For nothing is hidden but will be made clear, nothing secret but that it will be known and brought to light.” Warm breath touches the cup of Dante’s ear. “I see your light within. I shall bring it forth,” Moses promises. “As God commands.”

His fingers grasp the edges of Dante’s cut skin and yank, peeling it back to reveal the wings that aren’t there.

Dante screams . . .

REALITY WHEELED.

My turn.

S stood in the doorway, one pale, blood-smeared hand braced at either side. A thin trickle of blood trailed from one nostril. Pain pulsed behind his eyes. But it had nothing on the rage pulsing inside his heart. He studied the figure kneeling inside, stinking of fear and piss.

Michael Moses. Former Jesuit priest. Current penitent monster.

No, that’s Purcell. SB agent. Current maybe-penitent monster.

Who gives a fuck?

S stepped inside. Blue flames crackled to life around his hands, filling the room with an eldritch light. “I know you, motherfucker,” he said, his voice holding just a dash of dark wonder. “You ain’t Papa. But I know you.”

I know you. I remember.

“My gift to you,” the fallen angel said.

“And who the hell are you?”

“Loki, little creawdwr. And your gift is Moses and Purcell, Wells and Moore, Papa and Mama Prejean—anyone you wish him to be. He’s ground zero for your night of reckoning.” Loki stepped from the corner his tall, lean-muscled body clad in a suit tailored for the black wings folded behind him.

Tall as the Nightbringer. Short, red hair. Familiar.

Like one of those Russian nesting dolls.

Gotcha, Papa.

“And what do you get out of it?” S asked.

“The right to stand at your side,” Loki replied. “Not to bring forth light, but the darkness hidden within. I shall guide you on your path. I shall be a pillar of fire by night and a column of smoke by day.”

S felt a cynical smile tilt his lips. “As God commands, yeah?”

The fallen angel lifted nearly incandescent eyes to S’s. “The only God here is you. A dark and bloody God. An Old Testament God. A God for whom an eye for an eye should never be enough.”

S laughed, the sound dark and coiled and amused. He slanted a look at Purcell-Moses-Who-the-fuck-ever. “Guess that means I’m gonna need to see what’s under your skin.”

“I WAS AFRAID OF that,” Lucien said after Heather described what had happened when she’d tried to get Dante out of the sanitarium. He hefted the bucket—beheaded gas can, really, stolen from his donor’s car—of blood. “If this works, it’ll get us in and Dante out.”

“If it doesn’t work,” Heather said, “I’m going in, regardless. I won’t leave him alone.” With Loki. With himself. With his past. Cold fingers closed around her heart. With his madness.

Run.

I refuse to lose you, cher. If you fall, you won’t fall alone.

She watched as Lucien splashed the sigil on the outside of the door with half of the bucket’s contents, then moved to open the door and hold it when he gave her the nod. He tossed the remainder of the blood clotting in the bucket across the threshold, then threw the empty bucket aside to clatter against the sidewalk.

Slanting a quick glance at Hekate, Lucien stepped past the door and across the threshold in one long-legged stride. No convulsions. No sudden jack-knifing to the floor. No dead spider imitation. Excitement curled through Heather.

“It worked,” she said, knowing she was stating the obvious, but it was worth stating.

A smile brushed Lucien’s lips. “Indeed.”

“They are coming,” the Morningstar said, his gaze on the cloud-scudded sky. “I knew they wouldn’t wait. Not when we’ve been gone for so many hours.”

Heather heard a rush of wings—dozens, maybe hundreds—the sound filled the night. She joined Lucien inside the building. “How did they find us?” she asked.

Lucien’s expression iced over. “Gabriel most likely had us followed.”

“We’ll hold them,” Hekate said. “Go. Hurry.”

Closing the door, Heather raced up the stairs, Lucien right behind her.

“KILL ME FOR MY own actions, not for the actions of a sick priest bastard I was against from the get-go,” Purcell blurted—and S was pretty sure he was Purcell. So someone inside kept claiming. “Fight me man to man.”

“Like you did me? Trussed to a table?” S crouched down in front of Purcell. Drank in the adrenalized scent of his fear. “I think you said something about taking me apart and burning each piece until nothing but ash remained, then flushing those ashes down the goddamned toilet. Does that sound about right?”

Purcell gave a low groan. “Just kill me, you motherfucker. Get it over with.”

“Over that?” S laughed. “Hey, boys will be boys, yeah? We can take it. But little girls? That’s another fucking story.”

“You should know,” Purcell said, his tone the resigned register of a man on his way to visit the death chamber. But no lethal injection here. No. Nothing so clean. Welcome to Ol’ Sparky, motherfucker. “Right? You have first hand experience.”

She was eight years old and you slaughtered her. Just like you’ll slaughter Violet and Heather and anyone else who gets close to you. It’s what you do. It’s who you are.

“C’est vrai,” S said in a monotone. He reached up in a blur of movement and snapped Purcell’s neck. The SB agent toppled bonelessly to the floor. S rose to his feet, his heart a wasteland.

Loki applauded politely. “Beautifully done. Perhaps a bit too quickly, but with practice—”

“Practice makes perfect, yeah?” S asked, closing the distance between them.

“Definitely. And I’m the perfect tutor.” Loki grinned. “I will teach you everything you need to know and I’ll show you how to walk your true and proper path.”

“No need, Papa. I already am.”

Power crackled along S’s fingers. Reflected blue in Papa’s ever-widening eyes. The stormy scent of ozone filled the room. S felt his hair lifting into the air.

Papa dropped to his knees. “The Great Destroyer,” he breathed, eyes bright.

Kneeling in front of Papa, S cupped his child-pimping foster father’s false face between his flame-wreathed hands and kissed him hard on the lips. “For Chloe,” he whispered. Releasing him, S stood. And watched.

Blue flames spread throughout Papa’s body, glowing beneath the skin like sapphire embers. His Loki skin-suit dissolved, revealing the structures beneath—muscles, tendons, ligaments.

“Let’s see you hide now, you fi’ de garce. No more Russian nesting dolls.”

Papa screamed.

But not for long.

“BY ALL THAT’S HOLY,” Lucien whispered, staring at the flesh-and-bone throne situated in the middle of the third floor corridor. “Tell me that Dante didn’t—”

“No,” Heather assured him. “That’s Loki’s work, but he made it for Dante. For the Great Destroyer.”

“Then Loki’s gone mad.”

“I think stark raving mad would be more accurate.”

The fetid smell of decaying flesh, of spilled guts, festered in the air. A stench Heather could barely stomach even with her human sense of smell. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for Lucien or Dante.

Heather headed for the stairs, freezing in place when a wailing scream from several floors above sirened briefly into the air, then died. Her skin goose bumped.

I feel like I’m running out of time, catin.

No, cher. I refuse to lose you.

I fought my way here, coffee pot, Taser, and gun, and I refuse to be too late.

Lucien stared up at the shadowed ceiling, his face troubled. “Maybe you should stay here.”

Ignoring his suggestion, Heather raced up the stairs, following her heart and her blood link to the fifth floor—and to Dante. She knew Lucien followed, knew neither one of them might be safe. As she ran, she chambered a round in the SIG. She hoped she wouldn’t need to use it, but if she did, she knew she’d only have one chance and one chance only. She trusted Dante not to hurt her.

She couldn’t say the same of S.

HEATHER PADDED DOWN THE corridor, making sure to keep to the right-hand wall because inside the opposite wall, beneath the now-vibrating plaster, wasps droned. Four rifts marred the wall’s surface in long, lazy lines and in those black depths, wasps crawled, their metallic bodies glittering like moonstruck mica in the dim red emergency lighting.

Four rifts. As though left by trailing fingers.

Heather found it hard to breathe, fear was an anvil on her chest. Looking up at Lucien, she saw the same fear shadowing his face.

<Hold on, Baptiste. Hold on, damn you.>

They found Dante in the last room on the left, tossing the contents of a mop bucket onto a cot holding what looked like a larger-than-life-size anatomy dummy and onto a gray-suited body crumpled on the floor. The pungent aroma of gasoline soaked the air.

“Mop water into gasoline,” Lucien said quietly. “That’s a new one. And I think we’ve found Loki—or what remains of him.”

And that was when Heather realized that the thing lying on the cot wasn’t an anatomy dummy, that given the body’s size and the golden eyes—still aware, still watching—it had to be Loki.

You think I want to escape?

Heather guessed that question was now moot. And after what the bastard had done to her, ransacking her mind, rifling through her memories, let alone what he had most likely done to Dante as well, she almost wished she could light him up herself. Almost. And it saddened her to realize that not even two months ago, she never would’ve considered doing such a thing.

“Will it kill him?” she asked Lucien.

“No, he’s Elohim. But I’m sure he’ll wish it would.”

Heather shook her head. “I can’t let Dante do this.”

“Leave it alone. Loki brought this upon himself. He more than deserves it.”

She started forward, intending to stop Dante anyway, but Lucien stopped her instead with a steel-fingered and taloned grip to her shoulder.

“Leave it alone.”

“I don’t think that’s a good—”

Heather heard the slide of velvet across skin, then saw Dante’s wings arch up over his head. Gold light glimmered in his eyes as he turned to look at her with a stranger’s gaze. Blue flames flared to life around his hands.

A song blazed into the air unlike anything Heather had ever heard before. It set her blood on fire, angelic symbols burning behind her eyes. A savage and furious song.

A beautiful song.

A song of chaos.

Dante turned away and tossed a lighter onto the cot. WHOOMF! Fast-burning flames engulfed the cot and the golden-eyed figure upon it, then swept across the floor to swallow the gray-suited body. The nauseating stench of roasting flesh rose into the air.

“Now the fucker will stay dead,” Dante said, something close to bliss on his pale face as he watched the roaring flames devour the room’s padded walls.

Freed from Lucien’s hold, Heather backed into the corridor, away from the heat and the smoke, gun in hand. A streak of motion, pale flesh and black leather, the heady scent of burning leaves and November frost, then Dante was standing in front of her, close enough that she could feel his heat. Or lack of it. A dark smile tilted his lips.

<Baptiste, wake up. Haul your ass out of the abyss, cher. Wake up!>

“Hey, catin,” Dante—no, Heather corrected, not Dante, S—said, his voice smooth silk and bourbon. Black and blue flames snapped along his fingers. With one quick motion, he yanked the SIG from her hand, tossed it down the corridor, then shoved the muzzle of his own gun against her temple, his finger tight against the trigger. Her heart leapt into her throat.

“I’ve been dreaming about this,” he whispered.

Then Dante finally answered her in the only way he could.

REALITY WHEELED.

The corridor vanished in an explosion of white, icy light. S’s finger spasmed against the gun’s trigger, but all he heard was the distant click of an empty chamber. He fell, convulsing, as the seizure had its way with him.

Pretty damned funny, really.

He’d tossed away a loaded gun in favor of the empty one Dante had picked up earlier in the corridor.

Reality wheeled.

The night whirls around Dante, a streak of pale clouds and glimmering stars and skeletal branches. He no longer feels Chloe’s hand. He tries to shove her away, tries to tell her to run, but his voice and lips don’t work either—numb and far away. He falls, the rain-beaded grass rushing up to meet him.

No escape for you, sweetie.

Reality wheeled.

Fire scorches her lungs. Blackens her skin. Devours her with relentless teeth.

Welcome home, S. Welcome back.

Set things to rights, cher. Make them pay in blood and fire.

You won’t save her, you know.

The truth is never what you hope it will be.

Yeah, and it usually carries a motherfucking shiv.

Reality wheeled. And wheeled. And wheeled again.

Dante’s song raged unabated into the night. Set it ablaze.