On Midnight Wings (7 page)

Living, breathing GPS, Von had called her. Maybe, but Heather sensed only a general direction, nothing specific like ‘left turn in two point five miles.’ She had a feeling another analogy was more accurate—she was a compass and Dante true north.

All she needed to do was start walking.

But the cold prickling along Heather’s spine warned her that she needed to hurry. A timer set to an unknown hour was ticking away the minutes. A deadline with an unspecified but looming date was breathing down her neck.

Words Dante had said only two nights ago returned to her. Stark, whispered words she was determined to prove wrong—a lie.

I feel like I’m running out of time,
catin.

No,
cher
, no. I refuse to lose you.

But if she remained sitting on her butt in Strickland gambling that Von had received her last transmission, that
was
exactly
what would happen, she would lose Dante. Lose the man—nightkind/Fallen/
creawdwr
—she’d chosen to stand beside, come Gehenna, Molotov cocktails, government assassins, or even her own damn father.

I feel like I’m running out of time,
catin.

<
Stay with me, Baptiste,
> Heather sent to him. <
Stay here-and-now. Show me just how pigheaded you truly are
.>

This time her sending vanished instead of bouncing back unheard, but Heather had no idea whether that meant Dante had actually received it or if his pain and nightmares had simply devoured it.

It didn’t matter. She would keep trying. Just like he had in the club. As she’d seen through her sister’s eyes in the images Von had poured into her mind.

Dante half slides, half falls to his knees on the Oriental carpet in front of their room, his black-painted nails scraping furrows along the threshold on his way down.
“J’su ici, catin,”
he whispers, his words Sleep-slurred.
“Je t’entends.”

I’m here. I hear you.

Heather had believed it impossible to reach Dante while Sleep embraced him, but when James Wallace had sauntered into the club she’d hammered a warning against his shields anyway. And he’d heard her. He’d fought his way free from Sleep’s talons for her. Stubborn will. Quiet strength. Fierce.

She would do no less for him.

Prying her fingers loose from the windowsill, Heather turned away from the tempered glass and the lowering sun and shadowed grounds beyond it, and headed back to the bed. Hours and hours of forced sedatives and emotional stress had taken their toll. She wouldn’t be any good to anyone, let alone herself and Dante, if she keeled over from exhaustion.

Heather kicked off her slippers and slipped beneath the bed’s flowered comforter. She’d rest for a little bit, then eat. Despite having no appetite, she needed to refuel, to build up her strength. She had no idea how far “east” might turn out to be.

As she draped an arm over her eyes, a dark and terrifying scenario popped into her mind. Crackled ice through her veins. Suppose Shadow Branch operatives had been watching the club and, witnessing James Wallace’s little snatch, murder, and burn routine, had decided to take advantage of what must have seemed like the perfect opportunity.

A black ops version of a Powerball win.

And what if the SB discovered that Dante was much more than a True Blood? Discovered he was also a
creawdwr
? That he could not only Make and Unmake anyone and anything, but open gates to other worlds as well?

With just one whispered word, the SB could trigger Dante’s programming and twist him, force him, into becoming—

An image flickered to life in the darkness behind Heather’s eyes, an image infused with Dante’s scent of burning leaves and November frost; a recurring vision of a possible future, of a destiny embraced.

Tendrils of Dante’s black hair lift into the air as though breeze-caught. Gold light stars out from his kohl-rimmed eyes. He looks up as song—not his own—rings through the air. The night burns, the sky on fire from horizon to horizon.

—the Great Destroyer.

Heather still didn’t know which path her vision revealed—Dante as never-ending Road fighting to save the mortal world and everyone in it or as Great Destroyer leading the Fallen to war—but it wouldn’t matter if Dante didn’t survive what James Wallace had done to him. And Dante’s survival was all that mattered. The rest could wait.

<
Stay with me, Baptiste.
>

But that sending also vanished, a single rain drop into a vast, black lake. Despite the cold fear knotted around her heart, exhaustion could no longer be denied. Sleep swept over Heather in a relentless tide, claiming her as she sent to Dante one more time.

<
Stay,
cher
. Please.
>

P
ORTLAND
, O
REGON

FBI W
EST
C
OAST
F
ORENSICS
L
AB

L
UCIEN, DECKED OUT IN
a black Prada suit and a scarlet silk tie, offered the receptionist a warm smile before swiveling and short-circuiting the security camera with a tiny arc of electric blue fire flicked from his fingertip, the movement too swift for human eyes. The sharp scent of ozone cut into the air.

“May I help you, sir?” the receptionist asked cheerfully.

“Yes, you certainly may.”

Crossing to her desk, Lucien leaned over it and, before she had time to do more than widen her brown eyes in alarm, he touched two fingers to the center of her forehead. Blue light glowed cool against her skin.

“Sleep,” Lucien commanded in a low voice.

The receptionist’s eyes fluttered shut. She slumped into her chair, head lolling against her shoulder. A soft sigh escaped her lips. Lucien removed his fingers from her forehead, then straightened, his gaze on the door that she and her desk had guarded.

Etched in delicate gold letters on its frosted upper panel:
Special Agent-in-Charge Oscar Heyne
. James Wallace’s direct supervisor, the person who had needed to approve his leave of
absence, and the person most likely to know exactly where to find Wallace and the daughter he’d drugged and kidnapped.

And the very man Lucien sought.

After Annie’s attempts to call her father had ended in voice-mail messages, Lucien had gently interrogated the guilt-and bourbon-numbed young mortal about her father, his habits, and his role in the FBI. Then Lucien had taken to the sky, winging for Portland.

As Lucien grasped the door handle, a conversation he’d had with Heather not even a week ago played through his memory.

I’m not with the Bureau anymore. According to the FBI, I’m a much-valued agent, but one now lost to paranoid delusions, due to a hereditary mental illness, and in desperate need of treatment.

Are you expected to survive said treatment?

I’m sure it’ll end in a tragic suicide.

And Dante?

Snipped as the final loose end linking the Bureau to Bad Seed.

Perhaps Wallace had been doing the Bureau’s dirty work when he’d shot Dante.

With a flip of the handle, Lucien opened the door and stepped inside. Heyne’s office was modest, full of clean lines and masculine leather furniture and framed forest scenes. The desk was neat, the chair behind it unoccupied. On the west wall hung a six-by-six foot painting of forested hills wreathed in ragged mist.

Oscar Heyne stood in front of that primal and lonely scene, gun in hand.

As he studied the silent FBI agent, Lucien skimmed one hand along the back of a leather chair parked in front of Heyne’s desk. The buttery aroma of sunblock filled the room. Beneath that, he detected another familiar, but surprising, scent.

SAC Heyne wasn’t mortal. He was nightkind.

And using stay-awake pills like those Merri Goodnight had given Von.

Slim and of average height, Heyne’s skin was a shade lighter than his dark coffee eyes, his short-cropped hair flecked with gray. Given the lack of lines in Heyne’s face, Lucien suspected the gray came courtesy of Clairol in an attempt to mimic the passage of time.

“I admit, I didn’t expect a vampire,” Lucien commented. “I must applaud the FBI’s efforts at diversity.”

“Who are you?” Heyne looked Lucien over, speculative gaze drinking in and weighing details. “Suit’s too expensive, too fine for government wear, so I think I can safely eliminate you from the SB rank and file.” His nostrils flared. “
What
are you? You’re not mortal, not vampire—”

“No, I’m not,” Lucien agreed, unknotting and removing his tie. He draped it over the back of the chair. “Who I am doesn’t matter. As for what, perhaps it’d be best if I demonstrated. Save us a little time in pooh-poohing, denials, and demands for proof.”

Heyne arched one eyebrow. “Color me intrigued,” he said in a dry baritone, keeping the gun—what looked like a standard-issue Glock—aimed at heart level.

“You might as well put that away, it won’t do a bit of good.”

“I think I’ll keep it.”

Lucien shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

“If this is a stripper-gram, supernatural or otherwise,” Heyne said as Lucien continued to undress, “I’m all out of cash.”

“It’s not. And keep your wallet in your pants.”

Once his suit jacket and shirt had joined the tie on the back of the chair, he flexed his shoulders and unfurled his wings, fanning the smoky incense scent of wing musk and deep, dark earth into the air.

Heyne’s gun dropped from his hand to thud against the carpet. His eyes widened in mingled disbelief and fascination. “Fallen,” he whispered.

Blue flames arced around Lucien’s body, electrifying the air, and glowing as reflections from picture frames, the polished
leather, and in Heyne’s eyes. Lucien’s hair, tied back in a ponytail, snaked into the air on the currents of Fallen power.

“What do you want?” Heyne asked with surprising calm.

“Information,” Lucien said. “And I’ll ask each question once and once only.”

“And if I refuse to answer?”

“You have a choice: pain free or not. To be honest, I hope you choose
not
. It’s been a long time since I’ve delivered a bit of Old Testament–style wrath.”

Heyne’s face turned the color of ashes. “Ask, then. If I know, I’ll tell you.”

“Does James Wallace know that he was the Bureau’s Trojan horse?”

Heyne scooped up the Glock, but by the time he fired a split second later, Lucien was already on him, wrenching the gun from his fingers and enfolding the vampire within his smooth black wings.

Lucien smiled. “Old Testament it is, then.”

B
ATON
R
OUGE

D
OUCET
-B
AINBRIDGE
S
ANITARIUM

“D
ANTE
? D
ANTE-ANGEL
? Y
OU 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.