Etched in Bone

by Adrian Phoenix

  The former Bureau ADIC wore a belted tan trench and black slacks and stood a pear-shaped five-six or five-seven, compared to his six-one. Dark brown curls threaded through with gray cupped her angular face. He knew she was in her fifties, but beneath the oak’s shadows, she looked younger. She met his regard with calm brown eyes.

  Gillespie had never met Rutgers, had only spoken to her over the phone during times when SB and FBI interests intersected. Like with motherfucking Bad Seed. And with the mysterious events outside Damascus at the Wells/Lyons compound.

  A dark cave stretches across the ground where the main house had once stood, a cave ringed with a Stonehenge of white stone angels. And sitting quietly in the SB’s watchful custody, the FBI agent Rutgers sent to tail Prejean and Wallace, his sanity on permanent vacation.

  Mysterious events and Dante Prejean seemed to go hand-in-hand, like a high school couple going steady.

  Returning his attention to the cemetery, Gillespie lifted the binoculars to his eyes and trained them on the area he’d last seen Prejean and Wallace. He spotted them still beside the crypt, but now the bloodsucker stood with both blue-flames-flickering palms against its white stone, Wallace right behind him—and it looked like she had looped a hand through the back of his belt.

  Prejean drew back his left fist. Then punched it into the crypt.

  Gillespie frowned. What the hell—Before he could finish his thought, a blinding flash of blue light exploded from the cemetery. Sudden pressure jabbed his ears, then he felt the air sucked from his lungs.

  Whoomph!

  A heated rush of air slammed into him, lifting him off his feet and hurling him like a Frisbee—a flesh and bone Frisbee—across the sidewalk and against a parked car. Blue stars flickered through his vision as his head cracked into a fender. He bit his tongue. The old nickel taste of blood filled his mouth.

  Gillespie tumbled into the street, landing face-first on the pavement. More flickering stars. Another mouthful of old nickels. Curling into a ball to protect himself as debris tinked and clunked to the ground beside him, Gillespie folded his arms over his head.

  The ground quaked and shuddered beneath him for a moment, then went still once more. But he knew what he’d felt had been the aftereffects of an explosive shock wave and not an earthquake. He smelled ozone thick in the air, but no smoke. Through the painful ringing in his ears he heard car alarms beeping and whooping, heard stones crashing against concrete and pavement, heard the clang of iron, heard the high-pressure gush of a broken water main and the panicked shouts of people.

  “Holy Jesus, did you see that?”

  “An explosion in the cemetery!”

  “Dear Lord, oh, it’s the end of days—a ring of fire!”

  “Someone call 911! Call the shittin’ bomb squad!”

  A hand gripped Gillespie’s shoulder. Lowering his arms, he looked up into Monica Rutgers’s ashen face. Her dark curls were disheveled, her expression grim and making her look every one of her fifty-plus years.

  “Jesus Christ,” she muttered. “Are you all right?”

  Good question. Gillespie pushed against the pavement and eased himself into a sitting position. Pain rang his skull like a noontime bell. Nausea twisted through his guts. He felt a cold sweat pop up on his forehead.

  “I’ll live,” he said. Then he chuckled as he realized he’d swallowed his gum.

  Rutgers shook her head. Her lips stretched into a thin line. Her expression told him that he looked as bad as he felt. He grasped the hand she offered and allowed her to help him up to his feet.

  He stared at the wreckage surrounding him, pulse racing, mouth dry. Shattered glass was everywhere—in the street, on the sidewalk, strewn like sharp and glittering confetti on cars, grass, in bushes. Water from a broken hydrant geysered into the night, a pale starward stream. His Nissan rested on its side on the sidewalk beside a now tattered-looking rose bush.

  Then he looked across the cemetery. Its walls and gate had been smashed into blue-flickering ruin.

  “Jesus,” he breathed. “What the hell happened?”

  “Damned if I know,” Rutgers replied. “But I intend to find out.”

  She hurried back to the sidewalk and Gillespie followed, fumbling in his jacket pocket for his glasses. He realized the binoculars no longer dangled from around his neck. His fingers skimmed across his glasses and he was surprised, but happy, to find them in one piece. Pulling them free, he slid them on.

  Gillespie stepped up onto the cracked sidewalk and felt ice flow through his veins. Throughout the cemetery, tombs, crypts, and statues had been cut in half, their contents spilling onto the ruptured stone paths; the sliced-off tops of cypresses and oaks had tumbled onto chunks of broken stone and masonry, their leaves aglow with blue flames.

  Uneasiness snaked through Gillespie as he recalled his last sight of Prejean.

  Blue fire swallows the bloodsucker’s hands. Prejean draws back his left fist. Then punches it into the crypt.

  Blue flames. Just like those devouring the leaves and sparking along the ruptured tombs.

  Dear God. Had Prejean caused the explosion? Gillespie’s thoughts flipped back to what he’d seen on the security cam disk he’d stolen in Damascus.

  The energy surrounding Prejean shafts into Johanna Moore’s body from dozens of different points. Explodes from her eyes. From her nostrils. Her screaming mouth. She separates into strands, wet and glistening. Prejean’s energy unthreads Moore. Pulls apart every single element of her flesh.

  Johanna Moore spills to the tiled floor, her scream ending in a gurgle.

  If Prejean could unmake a woman, then he could also make a cave like the one that had mysteriously appeared in Damascus. Could surround its raw edge with a Stonehenge of white stone angels—smooth-winged angels that he’d bet anything had once been flesh—while something deep within the cave’s dark and glistening guts sang holy, holy, holy.

  Jesus Christ. Listen to yourself. You’ve finally pickled your brain. No way Prejean’s responsible for all that. Not possible. Can’t be possible.

  That final conversation with Wallace replayed through his aching mind, intensifying the dread knotting up his belly.

  They’re lying to you. Ask about Bad Seed.

  I know about Bad Seed. I know what Dante Prejean is.

  I doubt that.

  Three simple words containing depths beyond Gillespie’s imagining.

  Pain pulsed through Gillespie’s head, throbbed at the back of his skull. He looked around for his rifle and found it, tarp-free, in the gutter. He scooped it up, then started running along the cracked concrete path, heading for the spot he’d last seen Prejean and Wallace through the binoculars.

  “Hold up,” Rutgers panted, winded already after too many years behind a desk. “Where are we headed?”

  “To where I last saw Prejean.” Gillespie stumbled to a stop in front of a ruined white tomb. He could make out the name carved into the shattered marble—BARONNE. A wisp of pale smoke curled from behind the tomb’s remains. He stepped over chunks of masonry and looked. What he saw catapulted his heart into his throat.

  A large hole, molten-rimmed and glowing yellow-orange, swallowed up most of the tomb’s only intact wall.

  But that wasn’t what scraped fear through Gillespie’s mind and across his heart. On the other side of the embered hole, he didn’t see what he expected to see—a tomb’s dusty interior. Instead, hallways stretched away from the hole, with sky blue marble floors and ridged marble columns that reached into pale night skies.

  Pale night skies full of rustling wings.

  “Dear God. What is that?” Rutgers’s voice was stunned, disbelieving.

  A faint whiff of smoky incense wafted from the hole. “Do you feel like stepping inside and finding out?” Gillespie asked.

  “Are you out of your goddamned mind?”

  “Not yet,” Gillespie replied. He nodded at the smoldering portal. “But I feel zero hour rapidly approaching.”

  “Chri
st, what the hell am I looking at—a dimensional doorway?” Rutgers asked. “What could cause that? Create it?”

  Remembering pale hands swallowed by blue flames, Gillespie said, “Not what, but who.”

  Gillespie felt Rutgers’s gaze bulls-eye in on the side of his head.

  “Are you saying that Prejean did this?” she questioned, voice flat. “Now I know you’re out of your goddamned mind. The bastard’s a True Blood vampire and a programmed sociopath, but—”

  Programmed? News to Gillespie. “That’s not all he is,” he said. “What do you know about his father?”

  “Nothing. Prejean’s mother never said word one about who fathered her baby.”

  “And you never wondered about that?”

  “Didn’t seem important.”

  “I’ve got something that’ll change your mind about that,” Gillespie said. “Something you need to see.”

  “And that would be?” Rutgers asked.

  Gillespie shook his head. “Later.”

  “Fair enough. So—Prejean and Wallace—do you think they’re inside whatever or wherever the hell that is?”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “Christ.” Face grim, dirt-smudged, Rutgers reached inside her trench and pulled out a gun. Looked like a standard issue Glock.

  “If you’re thinking of going in, you’re going alone,” Gillespie said. His throat felt parched, prickling with a deep thirst for the flannel-blanket comfort floating inside a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “Me, I’m going for a drink.”

  In the distance, sirens wailed, oracles of disaster.

  “I just might join you,” Rutgers murmured as she eyed the ember-rimmed hole. She reholstered her Glock. “The first responders will be here soon. I don’t want to explain my presence.”

  Gillespie nodded. “Same here. Plus, there’s a few things we need to discuss before we take any action.”

  “We, is it?” Rutgers looked at Gillespie. “How bitter a pill was it when Underwood ordered you to let Prejean walk away after the debacle in Damascus?”

  “Very.”

  “I’ll bet.” Rutgers swiveled around, then hurried back the way they’d come, dodging piles of rubble with surprising grace for a desk jockey.

  Gillespie followed her to the glass-glinting street, his fingers sweating against the rifle’s stock. A less thirsty part of him insisted that he remain in the cemetery, waiting out of sight for the monster to return—

  Monster? How about bloodsucking bastard god?

  —and put an end to Prejean the second he stepped out of the tomb and back into their world. Trouble was, Gillespie was no longer sure he knew how to do that.

  Or if anyone could.

  4

  A DARK AND RESTLESS SEA

  GEHENNA,

  THE PIT OF SHEOL

  Night of March 27–28

  FURY PULSED THROUGH DANTE like blood.

  The Morningstar’s bone-white wings fanned through hot air thick with heat and smoke and the stench of rotten eggs as they descended into the stinking pit. Heat baked against Dante’s skin, sucked at his breath. His mesh-sleeved arm wound tighter around the Morningstar’s neck.

  Lucien hung in the depths of the ember-shadowed pit, thick curves of barbed steel impaling both shoulders, blood smearing his skin. The orange light from the glowing coals glinted in the bands clipping Lucien’s smooth black wings together.

  The Fallen pricks had tossed Lucien onto hooks like a side of beef. Had fucking tortured him as punishment for a crime thousands of years cold, according to the Morningstar.

  Dante didn’t know if Lucien was guilty of the murder or not and, in truth, he didn’t give a rat’s ass. All he cared about was getting Lucien off those hooks and out of the pit.

  “Une main lave l’autre, for true,” Dante said, picturing Gabriel hook-impaled, his swagger and smirk gone all to hell like fresh air in the pit.

  “Is that French?” the Morningstar asked, tucking Dante even closer against his side. “Your accent is unusual.”

  “Nope. Cajun.”

  “Ah, ancient and corrupted French, then.”

  “Oh, hey, an unwanted and incorrect opinion. You know where you can cram that opinion, yeah? Not to mention how far, how hard, and how often?”

  “I suspect I do, yes. Think I’ll let the suggestion slide.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.” Dry amusement buoyed the fallen angel’s voice.

  Dante snorted. “Oui sûr.”

  Dante wished he could’ve gone to Sheol on his own to fetch Lucien from its smoldering guts, but his own newborn wings, still wet with blood and untested, were useless until he learned how to use them. If he wanted to learn. So, no matter how much it had grated against his instincts, he’d accepted the Morning-star’s help.

  Besides, the sooner he reached Lucien and got the three of them—Heather, Lucien, and himself—out of Gehenna, the better.

  A tsunami of rapturous wybrcathl crashed into Dante’s mind, battering his shields and unraveling his thoughts as the Fallen resumed greeting him—en masse—a warbling choir composed of what sounded and felt like thousands of voices. White light flickered at the edges of his vision.

  Welcome home, young Maker!

  Holy, holy, holy!

  Take your place upon the Chaos Seat. We shall love you. Instruct you. Guide you.

  You shall breathe new life into Gehenna.

  Dante tightened his shields, shored them up with fresh mental steel, but exhaustion sucked at his strength, his focus. He resisted the urge to unleash his song in a furious back-the-fuck-off-and-let-me-breathe response, worried that he’d lose control of his power and accidentally hurt Heather or even Lucien.

  His muscles knotted and his wings fluttered in automatic response. Molten pain blazed along his back, twitching liquid fire from nerve to nerve. Sucking in a breath, he held himself still, jaw clenched, until the pain faded.

 

  Dante tilted his head and looked up. Heather knelt at the mouth of the pit above, her lovely, heart-shaped face illuminated by the pit’s fiery glow, her expression composed. But through their bond, he felt her concern, cool and coiled, nudging against his shields. She pushed her breeze-caught red hair out of her eyes with one hand, a big-ass Browning locked in the fingers of the other.

 

 

  Dante hadn’t liked leaving her above and alone, not one fucking bit; no matter how capable Heather was, no matter how deadly an aim, she remained a vulnerable mortal in a world of winged and taloned Fallen. But the Morningstar had refused to bring her with them into the pit.

  If your father should be too weak to fly, I can’t carry all three of you out.

  “She’d better be safe up there,” Dante warned, voice low.

  “She is,” the Morningstar replied. “As companion and bond-mate to the Maker, no one would dream of harming her.”

  “That dick Gabriel would. He seems to have a major stick up his ass where mortals are concerned.”

  The Morningstar laughed, genuine amusement deepening the musical timbre of his voice. “You’ve such an eloquent way with words.”

  “Nice to be appreciated, and fuck you.”

  “By the way, please be careful with your wings,” the Morningstar said. “The tips and edges are sharp as blades, and you just smacked me a moment ago. You could’ve drawn blood.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Gotcha.” Dante lifted his hand, then extended his middle finger, displaying it with exaggerated care from all sides.

  The Morningstar arched a pale eyebrow. “Obviously, you take instruction well.”

  “Tais toi, you.”

  Catching a flash of white from the corner of his eye, Dante twisted around for a better look. Shock iced his blood as he realized Lucien wasn’t the only one being punished.

  Ghostly twists of smoke curled against the thin moonlight shafting into the pit, revealing another figure hangi
ng across from Lucien. She dangled on her own pair of hooks, blood staining the front of her gold and black gown. Coils of winter-pale hair looped to her shoulders alongside her pain-etched face. Her creamy white wings had also been banded shut. Despite the pain etching her face, she watched their descent, her violet eyes bright with wonder.

  “Creawdwr,” she whispered, her gaze caressing Dante’s face.

  “Who’s she?” Dante asked. “And why the hell is she on hooks too?”

  “She is Hekate . . . my daughter,” the Morningstar replied, voice grim. “I didn’t know Gabriel had sentenced her to Sheol for trying to help your father escape until we stepped through your gate. Then I heard her.”

  “Sounds like bullshit to me,” Dante said. “You’re linked to her as her dad, yeah? You woulda heard her, felt her, anywhere.”

  “She shielded her pain and refused to call to me. She knew I had more important concerns.” The Morningstar gave Dante a pointed look.

  “Think again. I ain’t your concern. Never was. Never will be.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” the Morningstar said. “As Maker, you’re everyone’s concern—whether you like it or not. All I want is to help you along whatever path you choose to walk.”

  “All you want. Uh-huh. Yeah. Right.”

  Lucien’s warning remained clear in Dante’s mind: I hid you from others—powerful others who would use you without mercy. Dante had a feeling the Morningstar, despite all his friendly help and so-called guidance, fell smack into the middle of the “use you without mercy” category.

  “Stubborn and cynical,” the Morningstar muttered. “Truly, a winning combination.”

  Before Dante could bite off a proper retort, a rapid burring sound caught his attention and drew his gaze to the dark tunnels stretching off in both directions from within the pit’s guts.

  Several creatures with serpentine bodies—maybe three feet plus change in length—and feathered, lizardlike heads flew out from the mouths of the tunnels, carried on multiple, hummingbird-quick wings. They flitted around the pit in agitated circles, their burring wings stirring up the rotten-egg stench. Red and orange ember-light glinted from their scaled hides.