“Right here, man.”
Dante forced himself up onto his elbows—or tried to, anyway. The seizure had left him drained, every muscle wrung dry despite all the blood—gallons and gallons, fucking buckets—he and/or S had sucked down. He felt hollowed out, like he had nothing left. He fell back onto the tiled floor, bathed in a cold sweat. Black pinpricks poked holes in his vision. He swallowed hard.
“Shit,” he muttered, voice hoarse. “More fucking awesomeness.”
“Here. Hold on.” Leather creaked as an arm slipped around Dante’s shoulders and gently helped ease him into a sitting position. “Better?”
“Yeah. Merci, beaucoup.” Blinking away more black pinpricks, Dante found himself looking into Von’s gleaming green eyes and felt an intense surge of relief. Something flickered at the back of his memory—a tall, winged figure. “Is Lucien here too? I thought . . .”
“Nah, just me, man.”
Dante reached up and cupped Von’s face between hands that seemed a little less than steady, dammit—be honest, a lot less—and pulled him in for a quick, grateful kiss. “Fuck, am I happy to see you, mon ami,” he said, releasing him. “Did you find Heather too? How the hell did you find—”
Boy needs a lesson. Boy always needs a lesson.
Reality began to wheel. The corridor started to drop away. Dante squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated with everything he had on remaining in the here-and-now, fought to grab onto it with both hands. But the here-and-now was fucking slippery as hell.
Dante-angel, run, run, run!
No escape for you, sweetie.
Welcome home, S. Welcome back.
Set things to rights, cher. Make them pay in blood and—
A hand grasped Dante’s shoulder, the palm hot against his skin, and shook him gently. “Wherever you think you are, little brother, you ain’t there. Hear me? You. Ain’t. There.”
Dante seized that urgent voice and held on for all he was worth. He opened his eyes. He was still in the corridor, Von kneeling beside him.
“You okay?” Von asked, dark brows slanted down in a worried V.
Dante nodded. “For right now, yeah. What were we talking about?”
“About how I stumbled across your ass.” Von grinned. “I found a suit in the know and yanked the info—along with pretty much everything else—out of his mind. Probably needing a diaper change right about now. But”—his grin vanished as he looked Dante over, fire igniting in the green depths of his eyes—“I think the motherfucker got off easy. Looks like you’ve been through hell and then some. I’m betting you gave back as good as you got.”
“Not even close. The fucker won’t stay dead.”
“Which fucker?” Von asked, throwing a puzzled glance down the corridor. “They all look pretty damned dead to me.”
Pain pulsed at Dante’s temples. His memory blanked. “Fuck. Je sais pas,” he admitted. “Don’t remember.”
Von returned his attention to Dante. “Then I was right,” he said. His expression of grim resignation left Dante uneasy.
“Right? About?”
“Sending Lucien to intercept Heather, to keep her away from you. Away from what you still need to do.”
Nightmarish images swirled behind Dante’s eyes, crimson and violent.
His finger squeezes the trigger. Her head rocks forward with the first bullet, then snaps back with the second, tendrils of red hair whipping through the air. . . .
“Then he’d better hurry,” Dante said through a throat gone tight. Deep within his mind, his heart, he felt a hereherehere tug, one that felt stronger with each passing second. “Cuz she’s real fucking close. And that means—”
Run from me, catin. Je t’en prie.
“She’s in danger,” Von finished. “I know, little brother. If she finds you. But Lucien will stop her, don’t worry. He’ll keep her safe. Right now, Sleep is on the way and we’ve got a few things to discuss before we go under.”
Dante nodded. “That bit about what I still need to do, yeah?”
“Yup.” With a sigh, Von rose to his feet.. “You can’t let any of these fuckers—FBI, SB, nightkind, Fallen—get away with this shit. I know I told you in no uncertain terms that you needed to learn how to control your gifts and your past before taking action against anyone, but that was before.”
Dante stood, steadying himself with a hand against the wall when the corridor did a slow twirl. “Before what?” he asked, the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach suggesting he might not want or like the answer.
“Before you started to go nutso, little brother,” Von replied, voice husky. “Take a look around. Time’s almost up. Do you even remember doing any of this?”
Dante did as Von suggested and looked, really looked. Men and women in medical scrubs were included amongst the black-suited bodies sprawled and fetal-ball-curled on the floor. And the bloody footprints leading from one room to the next told him everything he needed to know. Whatever this building might’ve been once, it was now a morgue. The air alone, reeking of blood and of flesh just beginning to decompose, told him that.
Although Dante knew he was responsible for each body on the fucking floor, he didn’t remember killing a single one.
“No,” he admitted reluctantly. “I don’t.”
Trust me, bro. We had fucking fun.
Tais-toi, you sonuvabitch.
Laughter. Faites-moi.
“Soon you won’t know any of us, not even Heather,” Von said, the words low and level. “Time’s almost up, man.”
Dante slumped against the wall, feeling gut-punched and breathless. He heard only truth in his friend’s words. Trailing both hands through his hair, he whispered, “Fuck.”
“You need to set things right while you still have some sanity left. Make these motherfuckers pay—for Simone, for Gina and Jay, for Chloe, hell, for you too—before it’s too late. All you need is the courage to walk the path you were born to walk. With a friend at your side.”
Make them pay so I can be warm again.
Make the world burn, mon cher ami, mon ange, and set me free.
Set things to rights, cher.
Dante rubbed his temples with the tips of his fingers, trying to focus past the noise and the never-ending ache. Trying to resist Sleep’s narcotic embrace.
Promises he’d made to the living whispered against the demands of the lost.
As lost as I get, I will find you, Heather. Always.
I ain’t leaving you there in that place, ma p’tite ange. I will come for you.
Found you, mon cher ami, mon père, and I ain’t losing you again.
You’ll always have a clan in me, Von, mon ami, in us. You’ll never ride solo.
“I can buy you some time, sanity-wise.” Von said in quiet, earnest tones. “But you’re gonna need to close off your bond with Heather first, especially if you want to keep her safe. Once you’ve done that, then you learn to ride that madness of yours like a bucking bronco. Make it do what you want. Use it to set things right.”
“No. Heather—”
“Will be safe,” Von cut in, “if you close the bond. You can’t risk cutting it, not with the shape you’re in, but if you seal it at your end, you’ll keep her free from mental harm—plus she won’t be able to home in on you anymore. Then Lucien won’t have a problem keeping her away.”
Heather’s voice whispered through Dante’s memory, a conversation held in the honeysuckle-and rose-perfumed courtyard as he’d struggled with Trey’s loss at his own blue-flamed hands and what that meant for everyone he loved.
I’m not leaving you. You can’t make me. You don’t have the right.
Too dangerous, catin. Ain’t risking you.
That’s my decision, not yours. I choose you, Baptiste, and everything that comes with you.
Dante felt a smile flicker across his lips. “Then you don’t know my pigheaded woman. Lucien will hafta tie her down. She won’t stop.”
“Maybe not. But with the bond sealed, she wo
n’t be able to find you.”
Dante wasn’t so sure about that. Not only was Heather a damned good detective, something beyond their bond linked them—and always had—something intrinsic and soul deep. One way or another, she would find him.
Just as he would find her.
His finger squeezes the trigger. Heather falls and falls and falls.
Icy fingers closed around Dante’s heart.
“I know your concentration is a little fucked right now, so let me help you close the bond.”
It might not stop Heather in the end, but if he could slow her down . . .
Run from me, catin. Je t’en prie.
Dante nodded. “Oui. Yeah. Let’s do it.”
The nomad wasted no time in crossing the corridor. He stopped in front of Dante and brushed the backs of his fingers against Dante’s temples. A smile ghosted across his lips, a smile Dante returned in kind. Von started speaking, but a high-pitched humming filled Dante’s ears, drowning out Von’s words.
Dante sensed the past opening up beneath him, a bottomless lake he treaded, fighting to keep his head above its dark waters. He wanted desperately to remain in this moment, to believe in it.
This is Von, goddammit . . .
You sure about that?
A determined frown furrowed Von’s brow and, for a split second, it seemed like his form rippled. A warped reflection in a funhouse mirror.
See? I told you. Fi’ de garce is doing it again. Fucker won’t stay dead.
Yeah? Well, then we’ll kill him as many times as it takes.
Dante stabbed his fingers into Von’s chest—ain’t Von. Just motherfucking Papa in a Von-suit—his fingers tearing through leather and black pearl-buttoned shirt, ribs and heated flesh. Wrapped around the pulsing heart.
Papa/Von’s mouth opened in a soundless gasp. He looked down. “Little brother—”
“No, fuck you, you don’t get to say that to me. Only Von can. And you fucking ain’t Von.” Dante yanked Papa’s heart from the bloodied hole in his chest and tossed it down the corridor.
Papa dropped to the floor with a heavy, boneless thud, his Von-suit rippling away to reveal not Papa but a big dude with short red hair and empty eyes.
Dante tilted his head, studied the newest body on the tiles. “Huh.”
Another suit. Papa’s like those fucking Russian nesting dolls. One skin suit after another, but I don’t know this one.
Sleep washed over Dante in a numbing, narcotic tide and he stumbled back a step, shaking it off—or trying to, anyway—like a dog from a leash. He had one crucial thing to do yet before Sleep claimed him, one crucial thing to protect his woman of heart and steel.
Before he forgot who she was.
Papa in his now heartless skin suit had been both right and wrong. Closing the bond wouldn’t stop Heather, but severing it would.
Don’t chase her away. Lure her in. We’ll play. It’ll be fun, je te promets.
Before he forgot why it mattered.
A cold sweat beaded Dante’s forehead. Knotting his hands into fists, he fought Sleep’s relentless surge with everything he had—scared to his fucking bones it wouldn’t be enough. Darkness pinpricked his vision. He sent to Heather, not knowing if it would reach her or not. Then he imagined slicing through the bond tethering them together with a red-hot knife. Both ends whipped away like fallen power lines.
The northward tug vanished. And the blue-white star of Heather’s presence, anchor and beacon both, and still buried beneath miles of dark glass, went with it. Pain pierced Dante’s heart. His breath caught rough and raw in his throat. Fiery sparks snapped in the darkness behind his eyes. His mind sizzled, a bonfire of agony. Electricity thrummed down his spine as the severed bond jump-started another seizure. His muscles locked.
Now she’s safe.
Dante closed his stinging eyes in relief, lashes wet against his skin, as the seizure continued to kick his ass. He felt himself hit the floor beside Papa’s body. Felt his skull bounce off the tile. The sparks became a super nova.
Sleep wrapped Dante up in thick, narcotic chains, shoved him under. He sank like an anchor into the subterranean depths of the past. Reality wheeled and wheeled and wheeled.
—He hides Boo underneath the stained mattress when he hears his foster daddy’s heavy footsteps tromping on down the hallway. The plushie turtle doesn’t seem to mind being squashed flat. Boo understands. Better squashed than all burned up, for true.
—Hidden in the shed behind Papa’s house, breathing in the aromas of gasoline and old motor oil and skin fragrant with soap and sweat, he and Jeannette and Mark take turns kissing each other, feeling each other up, exploring with eager hands and heated mouths. Neither one minds the touch of his fangs.
—Carved into the insides of Gina’s pale thighs, the anarchy symbol. Smeared in her own blood on the wall above her body: WAKE UP S.
Make them pay. Burn the world. Make them pay. Burn the world.
In his dreams, Dante walked the path he’d been born to walk.
And it was dark.
CRAWLING UP THE LONG concrete steps to the sanitarium entrance, Heather stared, dazed, at the door. The lock plate appeared scorched, melted. She fumbled the door open with a drunk’s palsied hands.
The pain in her head was a white-hot sledgehammer and it just wouldn’t stop. It kept pounding and pounding and pounding. She felt the hot trickle of blood from her nose. Tasted it at the back of her throat.
Grabbing onto the cold metal of the threshold, she hauled herself into the red-lit corridor, panting. The door slammed shut behind her. Lacking the strength to sit up, she rested her cheek against the floor’s cool tile.
Despair rolled through her, dark and thick, endless.
The bond was gone. Her North Star had winked out.
And she was scared to her core that it’s loss meant Dante had died. The only thing giving her hope that he still breathed was the abrupt sending she’d received just before the internal GPS went dark.
Catin. Pardonne-moi.
Three words, there and gone in a split second; words she refused to accept.
“Not letting you go, Baptiste,” Heather whispered in a voice that sounded broken and raw even to herself, each word a hot coal searing her throat. “Not giving up. If you want to say you’re sorry, if you want me to forgive you, then you’re going to have to ask me face to face.”
She closed her burning eyes and prayed with everything she had that when she found Dante, he would be able to do just that.
Heather felt one more sledgehammer blow, white-hot pain—
—then nothing.
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.
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