On Midnight Wings

7 BENEATH A CURVED SHADOW BATON ROUGE DOUCET-BAINBRIDGE SANITARIUM

“DANTE? DANTE-ANGEL? YOU NEED to wake up before they come back.”

A child’s voice—Chloe?—patted against Dante’s consciousness just like the fingers against his face. Her words sounded worried, a frowning downward turn of tone that suggested she was dealing with something she didn’t quite understand.

He tasted blood at the back of his throat—his own. Smelled it, thick and copper bright. Pain throbbed at his temples, prickled deep in his chest. Hunger scraped through him with razor-edged claws, leaving him hollowed, empty.

A woman’s voice whispered through his memory, the words as casual as a shrug, You won’t save her, you know. You’ll fail.

And from deeper within: Again.

Dante’s eyes flew open. Black specks pinpricked his vision. The brilliant overheads spiked jagged shards of light through his pupils and into his brain and, wincing, he lifted a hand to shield his eyes.

“Goody! You’re awake!”

He blinked until the specks vanished and Chloe’s freckled face, framed by long tendrils of red hair, swam into focus above him. Given his perspective, Dante realized that he had to be lying on the floor, the eight-year old kneeling beside him.

“What’s wrong, princess? You okay?” Dante asked. His words sounded slurred—even to himself, as fuzzy as the thoughts shuffling through his aching head. And he didn’t feel like he was waking up at twilight, hungry and alert; he felt more like he did at dawn, just before Sleep rushed over him in a cool, dark wave and yanked him under.

Worse, he felt shaky and weak, like he’d hadn’t fed in days.

Another voice whispered: This is all wrong. You need to wake your ass up.

“I’m okay, but you’re bleeding again, Dante-angel,” Chloe announced, touching her nose, then her ears to demonstrate from where. “I don’t think the doctor fixed your owies right.”

Fixed my owies? Dante rubbed a hand gingerly along his chest and felt an aching tenderness under his T-shirt on the left side, near the pec. Right at heart level. A bullet, maybe, or—an image wavered behind Dante’s eyes like a raindrop-dimpled pond.

A blond man in a tan trench coat aims a big-ass gun, his finger already squeezing the trigger. Behind his glasses, his glittering eyes are cold and implacable, a guillotine’s falling blade. . . . Pain smoothed the pond, erasing the image, and leaving him wondering what the hell he’d just been thinking about.

Dante coughed, tasted blood. That’s right. Something bad had happened. He just fucking didn’t know what. He sucked in a breath of air and felt it drown in the wet, heavy depths of his lungs. A completely new and messed-up sensation.

“Awesome,” he muttered, pushing himself up into a sitting position, then onto his knees. The room gave a couple of lazy twirls around him, then pirouetted to a slow stop. That, he reflected, could only be a good thing. Unlike how he felt.

Waking up from Sleep with his head aching as though an elephant had used it as a trampoline—heavy emphasis on the tramp—wasn’t all that unusual, unfortunately, but drowning in his own blood most definitely was.

Whether he’d been shot, stabbed, staked, or skewered with a cocktail umbrella, he should’ve healed. The disturbing fact that he hadn’t, that he couldn’t even remember how he’d gotten hurt in the first place, let alone where he was, coiled like a rattlesnake in his mind—waiting with venomous fangs.

“Doctor? T’es sûr, princess? I don’t remember a doctor,” Dante said, another blood-kissed cough punctuating his words. Behind the blood, he tasted something else at the back of his throat—amber-thick, woody, and ice-cold—something he couldn’t name. But whatever it was, it left him feeling uneasy. “Hell, I don’t even remember yesterday. Is this a hospital or—”

His words jammed up in his throat as he stared at the steel hook bolted into the white-tiled ceiling. Light slid like hot grease along its wicked curve. Not a hospital, no.

Dante felt the floor shift beneath him. Cold dread twisted through his gut.

You can do this hard or easy, kid.

Welcome back, S. We’ve missed you.

His vision blurred once again while memories flipped back and forth as though someone in his head couldn’t choose between two favorite channels.

Flip: Himself as a punk-ass kid in a Muse tee, jeans, and duct-taped sneakers bolting from Papa Prejean’s ramshackle foster home of fucked-up delights, Chloe tucked tight against his side and squeaking with surprise . . .

Flip: Himself as a smart-ass adult in leather and buckle-strapped mesh fighting beside a tall man with a crescent moon tattoo beneath his right eye and a red-haired woman with twilight eyes, who smells of sage and rain-fresh lilacs, a woman of heart and steel, a woman who tells him, Stay with me, Baptiste. Stay here-and-now—

Flip: The newborn evening races past punk-ass kid Dante in a cool, rain-wet blur as he moves, his fingers practically welded around Chloe’s wrist, determined that she’ll never have to pay a visit to Papa and Mama Prejean’s shadow-eaten basement/pimp crib. Never have to learn the things he has in its depths . . .

Flip: Hands, warm and callused, grasp smart-ass adult Dante’s shoulders and steady him. A calm male voice, one achingly familiar, says, Gotcha, little brother—

Flip: Punk-ass kid Dante pulls a small ninja-type metal star from his throat, its points blood-slicked. It tumbles from his fingers. Chloe yells at him to run, tugs on his arm. He tries, but his feet refuse to move. His thoughts ice over as well. The night whirls around him, a streak of pale clouds and glimmering stars and skeletal branches . . .

Hadn’t he awakened in a room just like this one? Or was this the first time?

Pain wheeled through Dante’s mind, stole his breath. Shivved his heart.

Wrong. This is all wrong. Wake the fuck up.

Bad news: he was pretty damned sure he was wide awake. Dante tried to grab hold of the broken memories and the voices that had followed, but everything faded, disappearing back into the aching ball of cotton that was currently his brain. Gone. He felt the warm ooze of blood from his nose, felt it pool in his ears.

“Fuck.” He blinked. Rubbed at his temples. What had he been thinking about?

Feeding.

Hunger scraped. Clawed. Shook him like a baby in the remorseless hands of a jonesing tweaker. Blood pulsed hot and berry-sweet right next to him. He smelled it beneath Chloe’s skin. Heard it—a fast-paced shush-shush, rhythmic and primal and seductive. Sweat sprang up along his hairline.

You can’t save her.

Yeah? Fucking watch me.

Dante kicked and stomped his hunger back into the hollowed-out depths within, funneling every bit of strength he still held into the effort. And prayed like hell it would stay there until he could get Chloe out of—wherever the hell they were.

“Dante-angel?”

“Chloe.” He swallowed hard before continuing. A cold sweat slicked his skin. “Where are we?” Lifting the hem of his T-shirt, he wiped at his face. Smearing the blood, more than cleaning it, he suspected. “Did Papa take us someplace? Did that fucking asshole hurt you?”

Chloe sucked in a sharp breath. “My mommy says never to use bad words even if they might be the best words for the situation.” Her carrot-colored brows knitted together, perplexed, as she admitted, “But I don’t know what that means. Not exactly.”

Dante frowned. “Your mommy? Since when, princess? You never knew her . . .”

Chloe pressed a finger against her lips, then shook her head, her hair swinging against her back. Someone’s listening. Moving in front of him, she looped her arms around his neck. Dante looked past her to the camera tucked into a corner near the ceiling.

Motherfuckers wanna watch, huh?

Dante pulled Chloe closer, slipping his arms around her as he held his left hand up behind her back for prime camera view. Extended the middle finger and turned it slowly so it could be admired from every angle—a not-so-still life masterpiece of fuck-youitude.

“What are you doing?” Chloe whispered.

“Perking up someone’s boring day.”

Dante hugged her tight, his arms crinkling the black paper wings—those were new, yeah?—taped to the back of the Winnie-the-Pooh sweater he’d swiped for her from Walgreens. She radiated a banked-coal heat and smelled of strawberries and baby shampoo and waxy crayons. He shivered as his chilled body drank in her warmth.

Why am I so goddamned cold? I’ve always burned hot—hotter than other nightkind.

Wait. Nightkind? What the hell?

Dante felt Chloe’s fingers tuck a lock of his hair behind his ear, then her breath warmed the ear’s icy shell as she whispered into it. “I got a secret to tell you . . . again. My name isn’t Chloe, it’s Violet, remember? You were pretty sick when I told you yesterday after you came back from the operating room.”

Operating room?

Dante pulled back just enough so he could look at her, his heart drumming a drunken Motorhead solo against his ribs. “No. I don’t remember. Where’s Orem, p’tite?” he asked, scanning the concrete for her plushie orca, and ignoring the desperate edge to his voice. “Did you drop him?”

“I never had an Orem,” she said, voice a solemn, but patient whisper. “I’m not Chloe. I’m Violet. You saved me when I died and floated away from my mommy. You changed me with blue fire—made me look like this.”

Electricity prickles through him. Crackles along his fingers. His song sweeps up from his heart, a dark and intricate aria, dancing in time to the blue flames flickering around his hands . . .

The memory fragment vanished, winking out like a match beneath a pair of pursed lips. Dante blinked. What the hell had he been thinking? Remembering?

“My name is Violet.”

A deep unease uncoiled within Dante. He searched her eyes for any sign of a prank in their blue depths, but saw only truth. He also noticed what he didn’t see, hadn’t heard—Chloe’s bright smile, her giggles when he swore. And that scared the holy loving shit out of him. Tore a hole through the middle of him. A hole that threatened to swallow him whole.

You won’t save her, you know. You’ll fail.

“Bullshit,” Dante whispered, and wasn’t entirely sure if he was answering the voice in his head or the little girl in his arms. He swallowed back the blood rising in his throat, stealing his oxygen, then coughed. If she wasn’t Chloe, then where was—

She lies on the concrete floor, staring up at the hook, her blue eyes as wide and empty as a doll’s. The blood from her slashed throat stains her hair a deep red.

As her life, already cooling, soaks in through the knees of his jeans, Dante stares at his blood-sticky hands, his fingers, his sharp, sharp nails. He struggles to breathe.

A woman laughs, the sound low and throaty and pleased: That’s my boy.

“No.” One simple blood-soaked word, repeated over and over in a strained voice, a voice thick with guilt and grief and denial, and only the raw ache in Dante’s throat told him that the voice belonged to him.

The copper and tart-berry smell of her blood still hung heavy in the air, saturated his every breath. Glistened on his nails. Hunger glided like a gator to the surface. Ravenous. His heart slammed against his ribs. “No. No. No.”

“Are you okay, Dante-angel?”

He didn’t know how to answer that, didn’t know if he even could. But he knew what he had to do. He let go of Chl—Violet, gently pulling her arms free from around his neck, then shoving her away.

Her blood spills hot and fragrant and crimson over his fingers . . .

“Are you mad at me?” Violet asked in a small voice. “I know I can’t be your princess, but I made wings so I could be your angel.”

Dante started to reach for her, to hug her tight, but stopped himself at the last second. His hands knotted into fists at his sides, sharp nails biting into his palms. “No, p’tite, no. That ain’t it, not at all. This ain’t your fault. But you gotta keep the fuck away from me,” he said, his voice low and husky and more than a little desperate—even to his own ears. “You gotta keep yourself out of reach.”

“But why?” Violet stood under the hook and Dante wanted to yank her from beneath its curved shadow. But he couldn’t trust himself to let go again.

“Cuz you ain’t safe with me, p’tite. Now get away.” Dante scowled as he flapped his hands in a dismissive, move-your-ass-already motion. “Vite-vite.”

But despite the hurt darkening her blue gaze, hurt that Dante regretted, no matter how necessary, Violet refused to move, the stubborn tilt of her jaw declaring loud and clear: You’re being a butthead, so I’ll be a butthead right back. So there.

Fine. So he’d move instead.

Coughing, the sound harsh and liquid, Dante staggered up to his feet. He managed—just—to keep his balance as the room did one dizzying Tilt-A-Whirl spin and dip, before steadying beneath his boots. But before he could take step numèro un, his vision suddenly fractured like ice beneath too much weight and split into jagged halves. His breath caught rough in his throat.

He saw both Chloes at the same time: Chloe dead on the floor, snow-angeled in a thickening pool of her own blood. Chloe standing several feet away from him, still regarding him with complete trust, despite the confusion darkening her eyes.

The room took another Tilt-A-Whirl spin and Dante stumbled. He closed his eyes, jaw tight. His head felt full of broken glass, his heart full of ash. Images of Chloe dipped and fluttered through his mind like fast-winging night birds.

—Chloe happily brushes his long black hair, then pulls it into a ponytail while she teaches him—the boy who can’t go out into the daylight—how to read and write.

—He awakens at twilight to find Chloe curled up and napping against his side, Orem tucked between them. And for that moment, they are just a boy and the chosen little sister he protects, instead of a monster cuffed to his bed to keep him from murdering his child-pimping foster parents in their sleep, and a little girl who doesn’t know any better.

—He stands in front of Chloe, hissing, as the door swings open. Three men in black suits—bad fucking men like Papa Prejean, like all the groping assholes who walk down the basement steps—spread out in the white padded room.

When Dante opened his eyes again, he saw only Chloe standing in front of him with her paper wings colored black; the other Chloe had vanished from the concrete floor. A wary hope unfolded within him. Maybe it hadn’t happened yet. Maybe he could make sure it never did. Could make sure he kept his promises.

I won’t let anyone hurt you, princess.

Himself included.

Dragging in another wet breath of air, Dante snatched up the discarded handcuffs from the floor and ratcheted one steel bracelet shut around his right wrist, leaving the other cuff open and dangling. He wiped automatically at the blood trickling hot from his nose, smearing dark color across his pale skin.

He was aware of Vi—Chloe’s gaze, her watchful silence, as he prowled the padded room, searching for something solid to latch the other cuff around. He was running out of time. Black spots pixilated the air. His vision was graying at the edges.

But his hunger remained, all razor teeth, unhinged jaws, and endless gullet.

And Chloe’s fast and steady heart was a pulsing dinner bell, one that reverberated through all the spaces hunger had hollowed out within him. A hunger that even unconsciousness might not stop. Dante couldn’t—wouldn’t—pass out until he’d made goddamned sure she was beyond his reach.

Of course, the motherfuckers who had locked him in here with Chloe had intended otherwise. Bastards. Dante regarded the camera spying on them, a pale spider motionless in the corner. He tilted his head, wondering.

What would happen if the camera no longer worked? If they could no longer see?

Let’s fucking find out.

Dante peeled off his Mad Edgar tee, handcuffs clanking together as he pulled them through the armhole. Then he tossed the black cotton blindfold over the camera. The movement cost him, stabbing splinters of frost and fire deep into his lungs. He coughed, deep and harsh, blood bubbling up in his throat. Pain throbbed at his temples, behind his eyes.

“Won’t that make them mad?” Chloe asked.

Dante nodded, then touched a finger to his lips, then to one ear, tilted his head toward the now-blind eye and mouthed, Let ’em wonder. Chewing her lower lip, Chloe glanced at the T-shirt draped camera before returning her attention to him. She mouthed, Okay.

Vision wavering, Dante stumbled, but managed—barely—to keep his balance. Paper wings rustled. Sneakers scraped against concrete, and he knew that Chloe was hurrying over to help him. He threw out his arm, palm extended, and shot her a dark scowl.

Chloe stopped short with a frustrated sigh that sounded decades older than the both of them put together. Dante flapped another vite-vite hand at her. Not waiting on her, he turned around, steadying himself with a hand to the wall, and made his careful way to the thick gotta-keep-the-monsters-inside door—and the steel handle welded to its surface.

He hoped it would be strong enough.

Even though Chloe turned and went to the opposite side of the room, the hypnotic rush of the blood through her veins plucked at Dante, as did her scent—strawberries and soap—and the flush of her freckled skin.

Her blood spills hot and fragrant and crimson over his fingers . . .

Throat tight, eyes burning, Dante refused the image and kept moving.

Hunger kept insisting that he was going the wrong way, that he needed to turn his ass around and follow his nose to the appetizer now sitting glumly in the far corner with her arms wrapped around her purple corduroy–clad legs.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Ain’t listening. And we ain’t feasting until some curious asshole opens that door and saunters inside.

Laughter, dark and knowing, sounded from the depths below. Jaw tight, Dante blocked it out, stubbornly adhering to his ain’t listening declaration.

Just as Dante reached the door, the room took a gleeful, stomach-dropping plunge, before spinning around him again with wild Tilt-A-Whirl abandon. Stumbling, he slammed against the door shoulder-first, before falling to his knees on the concrete. A high-pitched humming filled his ears. Darkness oozed like oil across his sight.

“Pas encore,” he said, his voice a barely audible growl, “pas fucking encore.”

Fumbling the open cuff around the door’s steel handle, he snapped it shut with a shaking hand. The cuff tunked as he sat back on his heels. Then he sagged against the door, his captive right arm bent at the elbow and stretched up alongside him. Dante shivered, the door’s steel like ice against the bare skin of his shoulder and side.

“Dante-angel?” A worry-thick whisper.

Dante’s vision was tunneling down, swallowed by deepening shadows, as he focused on Chloe. He held a finger against his lips, reminding her. She mirrored his motion, a finger to her own lips, freckles and dismay stark upon her face. He tried to offer her a reassuring smile, but given her unaltered expression, he had a feeling he hadn’t pulled it off.

Behind her, he saw the cheerful red balloon she’d drawn on the padded wall. A small stick figure with black wings held the balloon’s string.

You saved me when I died and floated away from my mommy.

Creawdwr . . .

The word and its meaning itched at the back of his mind; hidden beneath miles of cotton, an itch he couldn’t reach. Dante dragged in another gurgling breath of air, then coughed, lungs spasming. Choking. A heavy weight crushed down on him as though the sky had fallen on his chest, bringing the moon with it. He couldn’t breathe.

But he could drown. Could suffocate on his own blood. Even sitting up. Sinking into cold and darkness and high-pitched humming, Dante fought to suck in one more breath.

And failed.