Beneath the Skin (18 page)

Johanna reaches for his hair like she plans to curl her finger around a lock or maybe tuck it behind his ear, but Dante jerks his head out of reach.

A rueful expression flickers across her face. Her hand drops to her side. "I've seen how they've enjoyed you, too."

"How'd you see?"

Johanna touches a finger to her lips, then says, "My secret." She walks to the door, stopping in front of its little window and nods at someone on the other side. She returns her attention to Dante. "You're entering adolescence and I don't know what the process is like for someone like you. Should be fascinating to observe."

For someone like you.

Dante holds her gaze, but keeps his sky-high pile of questions close to his heart and unasked. "Yeah? Then observe this." He lifts a hand and flips her off. "Oh look, even more fascinating stuff to observe," he adds, extending the middle finger of his other hand.

An amused smile twitches across Johanna's peach-glossed lips. She pauses, her hand on the door's latch, a thoughtful expression on her pale face. "You won't save her, you know." She glances over her shoulder at Chloe. "You'll fail."

Her words, so casual and certain, ice Dante's heart. She might as well be saying,
It's a full moon tonight.
You won't save her, you know.
The sky is clear.
You'll fail.

He expects his breath to plume the air when he says, "I won't fail," but it doesn't. The room temperature hasn't changed. The cold and ice are inside of him. He meets her gaze. "I. Won't. Fail," he repeats.

Another amused smile curves Johanna's lips. Then the door clicks open and she slips through without another word. The door
ka-chunks
shut again. LOCKED scrolls in red across the LED screen.

Dante joins Chloe against the wall, sits down beside her, and wraps an arm around her shoulder. Hugs her close. He listens to the fast flutter of her heart, smells strawberries and soap and baby shampoo.

The need to protect her stokes the fire burning at his core. Inside, the ice melts, but one sliver pierces Dante to the heart. In trying to save Chloe from Papa's belt, he's managed to fuck things up instead and land her into even hotter water. He doesn't care what it takes, he'll do everything he can--fight, kill, die--to get her out again, and free.

"You and me, princess," Dante says. "Forever and ever."

"You okay, Dante-angel?"

"Oui,
sorta. Orem found that magic word yet?"

"No, but we're trying."

"C'est bon,
princess. Keep trying. I'll try too."

You'll fail.

Johanna's promise locks up Dante's heart in chains even colder and harder than Rain Bonnet's diamond-bright links:
No escape for you, sweetie.
He doesn't care if Rain Bonnet's words prove true as long as Johanna's prove false.

"Let's work on multiplication tables," Dante says. "You got any new ones to teach me?"

"Yup. The eights. We learned that one today," Chloe says, her fingers stroking Orem's plushie head over and over. "But first you need to practice what you've already learned, Dante-angel. Orem too."

"Sounds good to me and Orem both."

"What's six times two?"

"Twelve."

"Six times three?"

"Eighteen."

Just as Chloe reaches eight times eight, an electronic chirp sounds from the door. A green light reading OPEN scrolls across the little LED screen.

Dante's heart skips a beat. So soon? He stands, pulling Chloe up with him. He backs her into a corner. "Get down," he whispers. "I won't let them have you."

" 'Kay." Fear peppers her scent.

As Chloe crouches, Orem clutched to her chest, Dante stands in front of her. The door swings open and Dante hisses. Three men in black suits
--
bad fucking men like Wells, like Papa Prejean, like all the groping assholes who walk down the basement steps
--
spread out in the white padded room.

Hunger/want/need burns through Dante and their pounding hearts draw him. Their sweaty, hopped-up smell dizzies him. All three rush him and Dante drops low, spinning, slashing with his nails. Blood spurts hot across his face. Someone gurgles. Someone else gets behind him. Dante
moves.
Punching, kicking, biting. Whirls.

The blood smell coils through him; he's lost to it. He drops to his knees and sinks his teeth into warm flesh. Blood pumps into his mouth, sweeter than licorice, headier than sneaked whiskey, and he can't get enough. He drinks until nothing's left.

On his knees, Dante looks around. All three badass men sprawl on the bloodied floor. He swivels, wiping his mouth and reaching for Chloe. But she's no longer in the corner. His hand freezes at his mouth.

Chloe lies on the concrete floor, snow-angeled in a pool of blood. So pale even her freckles look faded, rubbed-away. Blue eyes wide and as empty as a doll's. Her hair halos her head on the concrete in tendrils wet with blood from her slashed throat.

Orem rests on the concrete just beyond the reach of her fingers and Chloe's blood stains the plushie orca's white-furred patches maroon.

Dante looks down at his blood-sticky hands, his fingers. The blood caked beneath his sharp, sharp nails doesn't belong to the badass men alone. And the blood he sucked down, so hungry and fucking delirious? His heart thumps hard and fast; breaking. He can't finish the thought. The gut-churning,
throat-burning, gonna-turn-inside-out feeling knots him up again.

Dante crawls to Chloe, her warm blood soaking in through the knees of his jeans and mingling with the blood already smeared on his hands.

Gathering her into his arms, Dante hugs Chloe tight against him, buries his face in her hair. But he only smells blood, rich and coppery. He's lost her strawberry and soap scent. He closes his burning eyes, struggles to breathe through a throat so tight it hurts.

Chloe, his princess, his little sister, his heart.

Forever and ever.

On his knees, Dante rocks back and forth, Chloe in his arms. He whispers nonsense words into her hair, seeking the right one, the magic one, that'll drum life and rhythm back into her silent heart or turn back time.

He's still rocking and whispering when they finally come for him.

13
NOTHING CONVENIENT

WASHINGTON, D.C.
March 25

"YOU'RE LATE," CELESTE UNDERWOOD said as her assistant slid into the seat across from her at her booth in Applebee's. "I hope you have a good excuse."

"Sorry, ma'am," SB Field Agent Richard Purcell said. Rain beaded the shoulders of his black trenchcoat and glistened in his honey-blond hair. "Traffic sucked." He set his sleek, black briefcase beside him on the orange vinyl seat.

"So does that excuse," Celeste said, dipping a chunk of grilled chicken into the small bowl of cayenne-spiced lime juice beside her plate.

Purcell met her gaze, sympathy in his eyes. "I heard the news," he said quietly. Almost too quietly, given the noise level in the restaurant--clattering plates, the high-decibel buzz of dozens of conversations accented with short bursts of laughter and children's shrieks--and the precise reason Celeste had chosen the restaurant for their discussion. No need for audio jammers. "My sympathies."

"The bitch got off. Self-defense. The jury actually bought her story." Celeste pushed her folded-up newspaper across the table to Purcell. He flipped it open and scanned the headline that had burned itself into her retinas:

VALERIE UNDERWOOD ACQUITTED IN MURDER-FOR-HIRE CASE; MOTHER OF TWO WEEPS AS VERDICT READ, THANKS JURY.

Celeste chewed her bite of lime-and-chili grilled chicken, but she didn't enjoy it. She swallowed hard, forcing the chicken down.

"Convenient that the man Valerie hired to kill your son hanged himself in his cell," Purcell said. "With shoelaces he wasn't even supposed to have."

Celeste laid her fork carefully on her plate. "Also handy that he left a note stating that he'd implicated Valerie in Stephen's murder as payback for rebuffing his advances. Painted her as the virtuous wife."

"Very handy," Purcell agreed. "And your custody suit?"

"Quashed. Null and void." She pushed her plate away, no longer hungry. She picked up her wineglass. "Valerie sent me an e-mail this morning saying I'd never see the girls again. Those girls are all I have left of Stephen. And she knows that."

"I'm truly sorry, ma'am. What can I do to help?"

A waitress stopped at the table and took Purcell's order for a grilled cheese sandwich and an iced tea with lemon.

Celeste took a sip of wine, a house zinfandel, good, but not too sweet. "You were there when Wells and Moore were programming Prejean. Fragmenting his memories."

"Yes, ma'am. For most of it, anyway."

"So you know how Prejean's programming works? How to activate it?"

A knowing light sparked in Purcell's eyes. "Yes, ma'am, I do. Once you have the little fucking psycho in hand, we can flip the switch and put him to work."

"And switch him off again? Permanently?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Celeste nodded, then took another sip of wine. "Good. I've never been fond of vampires." She doubted that her so-called daughter-in-law would find anything convenient or handy about Prejean when he showed up on her doorstep or climbed in through her window.

No, not at all.

14
WHITE SILENCE

OUTSIDE DAMASCUS, OR
THE HAPPY BEAVER MOTEL
March 25

THE SMELL OF BLOOD haunting his nostrils, and loss haunting his heart, Dante opened his eyes. Darkness, warm and close. Blankets, maybe a fucking hood. Voices, low and urgent. He had to move before they tried to wrestle him into a straitjacket and hang him from that gleaming hook.

Before they tried to take Chloe from him.

Dante rolled out from under the blankets and off the bed, tumbling across the carpet on one bare shoulder before jumping to his feet. Bare feet. Rough carpet, not blood-slick concrete.

"What the fuck?" A female voice. Not that
chienne
Johanna's, but familiar.

Light dazzled his vision. Hammered the spike piercing his skull and left eye a notch deeper. His vision bisected, a mirror cracked in two, the halves no longer quite matching up.

Padded, blood-sprayed walls, the word OPEN scrolling in green across the door's security panel.
/A strange room, warm light spilling from a lamp on top of a bureau beside a vinyl easy chair, a wide-eyed chick with blue/black/purple hair staring at him, her hands clutching the chair's arms.

A chill touched Dante's spine.
Who's she?

In both halves, he smelled blood, pungent and coppery--Chloe's blood.

Diamond-edged chains twisted tighter and tighter around Dante's heart. He shaded his eyes with one trembling hand as he backed up against a wall. His muscles coiled, ready to fight, to take every single one of the moth-erfuckers down.

They'd hafta kill him before he'd let them anywhere near his princess.

Wasps buzzed and vibrated beneath his skin. Stingered venom into his muscles and veins. Slicked poison along the sharp-edged wheel of his thoughts.

But Dante-angel, I'm already dead.

"They ain't taking you," Dante whispered back.

Promise?

Promise. Cross my heart.

Blood trickled hot from his nose. He tasted it, ripe red grapes and copper, at the back of his throat, on his lips.

The door swings open and three wary-eyed men in black suits step into the blood-spattered room, guns in hand. One carries a white straitjacket.
/ A guy--no, a nomad--wearing only blue boxers stepped around a bed and faced Dante, his hands raised palm out, a gentling motion. The crescent moon tattoo beneath the nomad's right eye glittered silver in the light like ice beneath a new moon.

Pain pulsed at Dante's temples. He had a feeling he should know what the tattoo meant, should also know the nightkind nomad wearing it inked into his skin.

"You can do this hard or easy, kid."
/"Hey, little brother."

Dante's heart drummed hard and fast, thundered in his ears. His thoughts scattered in all directions like a hurled deck of cards, slippery with pain.

He struggled for balance in the fractured, tilting world he straddled as his reality flipped between blood-wet concrete and hushed carpet. Dizziness pirouetted the room around him. Wasps buzzed. He closed his eyes and touched a hand to the wall at his back. Steadied himself.

Focus, dammit. Send the pain below. Or they're gonna take her away and you'll never, ever, see her again.

And in that split second Dante no longer knew if he was thinking about Chloe or someone else, someone--

Dante heard a single footstep, a slow slide of bare foot over carpet or maybe--with all the noise in his head, it was hard to be sure--the sole of a shoe treading across blood-smeared concrete.

"You ain't taking her," Dante said.

"Looks like the kid's selected the hard option, gentlemen. Fire at will."
/ "Dante, man, it's okay. You're in a motel and you're safe. Everyone's safe."

Dante opened his eyes.

The douche bags in suits lift and aim their goddamned guns.

Dante
moved.

He tackled the closest douche bag, rode him down to the floor. The fucker's breath exploded from his lungs in a startled
whoof
when they slammed onto the concrete, Dante on top. Someone screamed and the shrill sound, like long nails lacquered and sharp, scraped furrows through his mind. He sucked in a pained breath.