Beneath the Skin

by Adrian Phoenix

  Relief curled through Merri. She had no idea exactly what Purcell’s buddy was, but she didn’t intend to hang around and find out. She’d do a little digging later.

  She moved.

  When she reached her room, Merri relocked the door, then fetched her laptop out of her bag. Plunking down onto the bed, she retrieved the flash drive from her pocket. She inserted it into one of the laptop’s USB ports and started scrolling through files.

  One titled Bad Seed caught her attention.

  What kinda TSP was Prejean a part of?

  HQ’s playing this one real close to the vest. All I was told was that it was a joint project—us and the feds—devoted to the study of sociopaths.

  In other words, their monster slipped its leash and they want us to fetch it.

  Monsters. Sociopaths. Bad Seed.

  Merri clicked open the file and began reading.

  MERRI CLOSED THE LAPTOP, fire smoldering in her heart, an unholy image from the Bad Seed file etched into her mind.

  In a blood-spattered straitjacket, Dante is suspended upside-down from a huge hook in the ceiling, chains wrapped around his ankles. He hangs above the bodies of those he’skilled—including the body of his princess, his Winnie-thePooh-loving Chloe.

  ADIC Johanna Moore enters the room—its walls a Jackson Pollock–worthy masterpiece in high-velocity blood spray—and bends over Chloe’s body. With a touch of her fingers, Moore pushes the child’s eyelids open. Makes sure Chloe’s empty gaze remains fixed on Dante.

  Setting the laptop aside on the bed, Merri rose to her feet. Her muscles felt hand-cranked-wire tight. A True Blood. Not an “enhanced” vampire. But a True Blood wrenched away from his mother at birth.

  And the things done to him from that moment to this …

  A muscle flexed in Merri’s jaw. It looked like all the minds behind Bad Seed were the true sociopaths.

  Oh, let’s not forget Purcell. He’d participated in Bad Seed as Wells’s errand boy. Seemed to delight in all the nasty things done—especially to Dante.

  Merri lit up a Djarum Black and paced the small room while she smoked it, Prissy-Ass Purcell’s words still ringing in her ears.

  Fucking little psycho.

  She needed to let Emmett know what she’d learned. Given Dante Prejean’s programming and where he’d ended up—the Wells compound—she wondered if he’d been deliberately triggered and used to murder Rodriguez.

  A sense of unease rippled through Merri as though she’d jumped into a lake and found the water too cold and too deep and too dark. Found herself sinking while a leviathan rose beneath her, jaws open.

  Talk to Em. Get some perspective. See if you can make sense of this shit.

  Merri walked into the bathroom and tossed her cigarette in the toilet. As she turned around, the room dipped and twirled. Black spots speckled her vision. She reached for the wall to steady herself, but missed. Her flailing hand grabbed at empty air.

  She fell, crashing onto her side across the bathroom threshold, her damn-near lacquered ponytail lashing her cheek. Sleep poured into her like a waterfall, tumbling her consciousness away in a roaring rush of unstoppable black.

  20

  A SHALLOW GRAVE

  ON I-84 EAST

  March 25–26

  THE SUV’S TIRES HUMMED along the interstate, a steady, hypnotic sound. With Dante doped and Sleeping, his head cushioned in her lap, her fingers stroking his hair, Heather decided to close her eyes. Just for a moment. She rested her head against the window. And dreamed.

  OCTOBER AND THE AIR is crisp. But she’s not cold, she’s on fire and alive and flying. Heather’s birthday is coming up. She’ll be twelve. Twelve going on forty. She sees too much and maybe not enough.

  Have I lost her?

  I’ll make her birthday special, bake her a chocolate cake with butter-cream frosting. I’ll decorate the house with red, blue, and yellow balloons and string a HAPPY BIRTHDAY banner across the dining room archway.

  Shannon stumbles, her heel catching on the asphalt’s ragged edge. She giggles. Good thing she isn’t driving. Point in her favor. She licks the tip of a finger and strokes an imaginary line in the air. Sliding off her shoe, she peers at the heel.

  Headlights pierce the night. Shannon sticks out her shoe instead of her thumb, cocking her weight onto one hip and smiling. The headlights glow, twin moons filling her vision and dazzling her sight.

  The car pulls over, tires crunching on gravel, the muffler streaming a plume of exhaust and the heady smell of gasoline in the air. The engine purrs.

  Headlight-blinded, she wobbles as she tries to put her shoe back on. She hops backward before sprawling on her ass. She throws back her head and laughs. Good thing she isn’t walking the line for a cop. Another point in her favor. She draws another imaginary line in the air.

  Slipping off her other shoe, damned heels playing havoc with her balance, well, that and all the booze, Shannon climbs to her feet, stumbling only a little. She’s brushing the dirt off her rear end when the driver’s door opens.

  A man slips out of the purring car, and something gleams in his hand.

  “Need help, Shannon?” he asks.

  Shannon shades her eyes from the headlight dazzle with the edge of her hand. Recognizing the tall figure with its tousled dark hair and tight smile, she mutters, “Crap.”

  Her good humor, her joie de vivre—as her drinking buddies at the Driftwood Bar and Lounge call it—evaporates. “Whatcha doing out here, Craig? Jim send you?”

  “Jim? Only if you’re on the Most Wanted list, Shan.” Craig chuckles, but Shannon thinks she hears a bitter note in his laughter and wonders if something’s come between her husband and his best friend. “Been helping a buddy work on his car. Just on my way home.”

  “That why you’re holding a hammer?”

  Craig looks down as if he just realized that he is, indeed, carrying a hammer. His fingers white-knuckle around the handle. Lifting his gaze back to Shannon’s, he says quietly, “Get in the car. I’ll take you home.”

  Shannon shakes her head. Her husband’s friend and coworker seems strung tighter than a tennis racquet, for whatever reason. Maybe he needs a drink. She swallows back the giggles bubbling against her lips.

  “Thanks anyway.”

  Craig sighs. “You aren’t going to let me give you a ride, are you?”

  “Bingo!” Shannon says. “Give the man a prize. No, I’m not going with you. No matter what you say, I know Jim sent you. I’ll just go back to the Driftwood and call a cab.”

  Shoes in hand, Shannon manages an about-face and keeps her balance. Score. She draws another imaginary point in the air. She feels her joie de vivre catching a second wind. She steps onto the smooth road to spare her bare feet bruises from pebbles.

  “Tell Jim he can go to hell. And you can go right with him.”

  “I have a feeling you’re going first.”

  Behind her, Shannon hears a familiar sound. A sound that freezes her in midstride like a blast of frigid Arctic air: the ka-chunk of a round being chambered.

  “Just get in the goddamned car, Shannon.”

  HEATHER TRIED TO FORCE her eyes open, tried to wake herself up, but couldn’t. It felt like unseen and heavy hands held her in place. Paralyzed her. The dream shifted. The lonely highway housing an idling car, two people—her long-ago murdered mother and her recently KIA mentor in the FBI—aimed on destroying themselves, and a tavern gleaming with warm light … all of it pinwheeled away, the images getting smaller and smaller until they vanished altogether.

  Something tugged at Heather, tried to yank her down into the dark. She gasped as pain scratched and clawed behind her eyelids. An inner borealis, streamers of undulating light—red, violet, blue, and green—accompanied the pain.

  The unseen hands pressing down on her disappeared.

  And something else hooked her and dragged her into darkness.

  NIGHT-SHADOWED CYPRESS and twisted old oaks surround two men standing behind a rust-pocke
d old Chevy, eyeing the contents of the trunk they’ve opened. One man holds a shovel.

  “A shame you killed dem, for true,” one says.

  “Dammit, I tole you it was an accident. Now shut the hell up about it, you.”

  “Why we burying dem? Next blowdown will wash dem bodies right outta the ground. We should feed ’em to the gators.”

  “Tais-toi, fool. Just dig.”

  The high-pitched and rhythmic scrubbing-against-thewashboard song of katydids fills the hot, humid night with natural music as the men—both of equal height, but one heavier than the other, and both in jeans and sweat-stained T-shirts—pull the bodies out of the trunk one by one and dump them onto the sawgrass.

  Teenagers. Hands cuffed behind their backs.

  One has black hair and pale, pale skin that seems to gleam in the moonlight. Blood glistens at his temple. Heath-er’s heart hammers against her ribs. Dante. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. This isn’t in the Bad Seed files—at least not the ones she’s viewed.

  One of the men kneels and pushes Dante’s hair back from his face. “I don’t tink dis one’s dead, Cecil.”

  “ ’Course the boy ain’t dead, you fool. He’s the best moneymaker I got or ever had, for true. I just held him under in the tub until he sucked some water into his lungs, then I pulled him out. Mighta knocked a few things off-a his skull too for good measure.”

  “Den why the hell we drag his ass down here?”

  A smile curves Papa Cecil’s lips, sharp as an icepick and twice as heartless. “Boy needs a lesson. Boy always needs a lesson.”

  Papa and his friend take turns digging a hole in the moist ground, tossing shovelfuls of sawgrass and dirt into air thick with the smells of moss and rotting wood and brackish water.

  Once Papa judges the hole deep enough, he wipes sweat off his forehead with a bandana from his back pocket. “Fetch him,” he pants, pointing at Dante.

  “But he ain’t dead.”

  “Fetch him anyway and toss him in the goddamned grave.”

  Papa’s buddy sighs, then drags Dante to the edge of the impromptu grave. After glancing at Papa one more time, he rolls Dante into the hole.

  “Now fetch the dead one,” Papa says. “And drop him in too. Den start shoveling the dirt back in.”

  Dizziness twists through Heather. Nausea wrenches at her stomach. She spins, the cypress and old oaks whipping around her, the star-flecked sky wheeling above. She tumbles into the open grave.

  She falls in slow motion. And even though the grave is only five feet deep, she falls forever and ever. Dante lies sprawled at the grave’s bottom. Water seeps up from beneath him, turning the dirt into dark and stinking mud.

  Just before Heather slams into Dante, his eyes open.

  “Où suis-je?” he whispers.

  THE BEAUTIFUL SLEEPING REDHEAD’S eyes flew open. Panic rimmed her twilight blue gaze. Sweat beaded her forehead. “You’re with me,” she whispered, answering Dante’s question.

  “And who are you?” Even as Dante voiced the words, even as he reached up to protect her from the shovelfuls of dark, damp dirt flying into the hole—ain’t a hole, it’s a grave—he realized he knew her. He just didn’t know when.

  “Heather,” he breathed. Her sweet evening scent—sage and rain-wet lilacs—curled around him, filled his lungs.

  A smile flickered across her lips. She nodded. “Here, Baptiste.”

  Shovelfuls of dirt cascaded down on them, peppered her hair. Mud and swampy water sucked at Dante, soaked through his T-shirt and jeans. Electricity crackled along his fingers, pooled in his hands. Wasps droned. Voices murmured and capered and insisted.

  Boy always needs a lesson.

  Dante-angel, run, run, run!

  You’ll fail, you know.

  “Roll over,” Dante said, “and let me up. I ain’t gonna let fucking Papa bury us.”

  Heather cupped a warm hand against his face. “You’re not in that grave, Baptiste. That happened a long time ago,” she said. “You’re here on the road to New Orleans with me. I won’t let you fall. I won’t let you go.”

  A high tide of white silence rolled through Dante, sluicing away the droning wasps and the poison they needled into his veins; drowned the goddamned voices. Everything stopped. The world spun white and silent around him—except for the North Star pull of Heather’s voice.

  “STAY HERE AND NOW, Baptiste,” Heather said. “Stay here with us.”

  Fear twisted icy knots through her guts. She stared at Dante’s glowing hands, Violet’s transformation beneath those same hands playing behind her eyes.

  Black hair ripples into red tresses, golden skin lightens to freckled and fair, life-sparked blue replaces empty jade green eyes.

  A transformation Heather believed he hadn’t intended. But lost to his past, he was also losing control over his Fallen magic.

  So you trust him?

  With my life.

  Bending her head, Heather whispered into Dante’s hoop-rimmed ear, “I’ll never leave you behind, Baptiste, so you do the same for me. Come back.”

  Dante’s tension-taut body quivered for a moment, then he unclenched his blue-fire engulfed fists. Closing his eyes, he visibly forced himself to relax muscle by muscle. Blue flames danced along the rings on his fingers and thumbs. Gleamed along the thighs of his leather pants.

  “Holy hell, am I seeing blue in the rearview? Need help, doll?”

  “Shit!” Annie cried. “Toss him out before he touches anyone!”

  “Pull over in case I need to move real fast. Don’t wanna do that at eighty plus.”

  “You got it.”

  The SUV slowed as Von eased up on the gas and steered the vehicle into the emergency lane, blinkers flashing.

  Heather brushed the backs of her fingers against Dante’s pale cheek. His thick, black eyelashes deepened the blue smudges under his eyes. “I’m here,” she said.

  “Moi aussi,” he said.

  Heather’s breath caught in her throat as Dante’s song, a beautiful and haunting aria, arced between them, heart-to-heart, crystalline and strong. It strummed across the deep-threaded strings composing her soul; a wild song, burning and passionate and tender.

  Fire blazed through Heather’s veins, torched her heart.

  Dante opened his eyes. Gold flecked his deep brown irises, but his hands no longer glowed. He touched fevered fingers to Heather’s face and traced a molten path along her jawline to her throat.

  “Je t’aime,” he whispered.

  “T’es sûr de sa?” she said, her voice husky. “ ’Cause I love you back.”

  A smile tilted Dante’s lips. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dante lifted up on one elbow as she brought her face down, his hot hand sliding around to the back of her neck. He kissed her long and deep, his lips burning against hers; kissed her breath away. Tasting amaretto on her tongue, her lips, Heather deepened the kiss, her fingers twisting in his silky hair. Heated flutters rippled through her belly.

  When the kiss ended several breathless minutes later, Dante traced a finger along Heather’s lips. He searched her eyes, his own unguarded. His pale, beautiful face was quiet, thoughtful.

  “As lost as I get, I will find you, Heather. Always.”

  “You’d better,” she whispered, throat tight.

  Dante pulled her down into another long kiss.

  21

  ON MY WAY TO HELL

  OUTSIDE BOISE, ID

  ROLLING RICK’S TRUCK STOP

  March 26

  “SHIT.” Heather stared at the headline of the newspaper showcased in the vending machine in front of Rolling Rick’s Stick-to-Your-Ribs Eats.

  TRAGIC MENTAL ILLNESS CLAIMS FBI STAR PROFILER.

  So Rutgers had made good on her threat. And hadn’t wasted any time doing so either. Only three, no, four days had passed since their meeting in the Seattle field office.

  Heather shivered in the predawn chill. She dug in her jeans pockets for change, but came up empty. �
��Shit.”

  The low thunder of idling truck engines rolled through the night and diesel fumes fogged the air, pungent and heady. Even so, she still caught a whiff of frosted earth and burning leaves as Dante stepped up beside her.

  “What’s wrong, catin?”

  Heather pointed at the vending machine. “More CYA by the Bureau. This time it’s aimed at me. You got any change?”

  Dante patted his pants pockets, then shook his head. “Nope.”

  Stepping past Heather, he wrapped his fingers around the vending machine’s pull-handle and yanked. The door snapped off with a metallic pop. Dante fished out a copy of the Idaho Statesman. He propped the broken door beside the vending machine.

  “You didn’t need to do that,” Heather protested. “We could’ve scrounged up some money.”

  Dante shrugged one shoulder. His brows slanted down as he scanned the article. “Motherfuckers,” he muttered, handing the newspaper to Heather. “The assholes are also calling you despondent and delusional and in treatment at an undisclosed location.”

  “Sure. First they’ll discredit me,” Heather said. “Then see if that’s enough.”

  The meeting she’d attended in Rodriguez’s office along with her father, SA James William Wallace, and a webcast-projected ADIC Rutgers replayed through her mind:

  Mental illness has claimed two members of your family so far, your mother and your sister, I believe.

  That’s false, ma’am. My wife was an alcoholic—

  Bipolar. Mom was bipolar. Annie too.

  It’ll be made clear that you are the third member of the family to become ill. We’ll express our regret at seeing one of our finest brought low by ill health. We’ll also let it be known that we wouldn’t hold you responsible for any delusional comments you might make.

  Meaning: just in case you decide to turn into a whistleblower about Bad Seed and the FBI’s involvement, we’ll make sure no one listens to you.

  Heather glanced at the paper, then folded it and tucked it under her arm. Should make interesting breakfast reading, as long as “interesting” meant blowing out a few blood vessels in the brain with a warp-speed rise in blood pressure.