Beneath the Skin

  Raw-edged grief squeezes Dante’s heart and his breath catches in his throat.

  Lucien. I abandoned him.

  But then the name slides away, and Dante can’t catch it, can’t bring it back, can’t even remember the feel of it upon his tongue. But the grief, barbed and prickling, remains.

  “Make a key,” Dante whispers and closes his eyes.

  He visualizes the key Papa uses to unlock the cuffs from his wrists when he wakes up at twilight. Visualizes cramming key and cuffs down Papa’s throat.

  Forget Papa and focus. Make that key, get outta here, and find Perry.

  Wait. I’m dreaming, yeah? I can’t find Perry. He’s long gone.

  But Dante knows that’s not right. He still feels Perry’s weight against him, the heat of his body, still hears the gurgle choked from his throat.

  “Make a key, little brother. I know you can do it.”

  Music ignites within Dante, blazes within his haunted heart, and soars burning into the night, an aria composed of fire. Something snaps and buzzes around Dante’s captive hands.

  A click. Then the cuffs fall away, thudding onto the ground.

  “There ya go,” Von says, clapping him on the shoulder. “I’ve never heard music like that before—ever. Fuck, Dante, it’s … beautiful ain’t enough or right. Maybe celestial … ? But you gotta stop your song so you can stop the magic.”

  Dante opens his eyes and swings his hands around. Blue fire flickers and dances around them. He stares, a sense of déjà vu rippling through him, warring with the sense of soon-to-be sweeping across his mind.

  “You gotta let the song go,” Von says quietly.

  Dante shivers, then without even thinking about what he’s doing, he stabs his flaming fingers into the moist earth beneath the sawgrass. The song raging inside of him dims down to embers, then vanishes.

  Von stands and moves in front of Dante, grasps his arms around the biceps. Helps him up onto his feet.

  “Merci.” Dante offers Von a tilted smile. He rubs his bruised and bloodied wrists. His healing wrists.

  Von circles him, his face thoughtful despite the mischief winking in his eyes. “So this is you as a teenager, huh, little brother? Grimy little bastard, ain’tcha?”

  “Hold on, got mud in my eyes,” Dante says, rubbing the middle fingers of each hand beside his eyes.

  Von laughs. “A grimy little bastard and a smart-ass. Yeah, that’s my boy.” He circles to a halt in front of Dante. “You’re gonna grow a few inches taller and put on more muscle, and you’re gonna strop a keen edge on that attitude.” He rests a hand against Dante’s muddy T-shirt, above his heart. “And this? Your heart, your compassion, and strength—that never stops growing, little brother. No matter what, your heart’s true.”

  Pain coils through Dante’s mind like a snake across water, trapping the words he was about to say in his throat. He squeezes his eyes shut. Voices whisper up from the wasp-riddled depths within.

  Little fucking psycho.

  Threeintooneholytrinity …

  Boy needs a lesson. Boy always needs a lesson.

  Dante’s eyes fly open. Papa stands in front of him, sweat beading his fucking whiskered, double-chinned face and staining the pits of his T-shirt. And he’s swinging a shovel like a baseball bat, mud-grimed blade up in the air and aimed at Dante’s head.

  Dante moves.

  He wrenches the shovel from Papa’s grasp and whips it around in a whistling arc aimed for Papa’s balding head.

  Turnabout is a bitch, yeah?

  In the split second before the shovel connects with Papa’s shocked face—guess who that grave’s for now, fi’ de garce?—another face overlays it, like a flickering frame in a film reel stuttering up and down.

  Dante catches a glimpse of a dark-haired and green-eyed guy, a crescent moon inked beneath his right eye, someone familiar, someone he loves—mon cher ami—but the shovel whistling through the humid night air is beyond all recall.

  The shovel smacks into the Papa/Von flickering face, slamming his head to the side, and toppling him into the sawgrass. The shock of the contact shudders up Dante’s arms to his shoulders. The shovel drops from his nerveless fingers.

  Dante falls to his knees in the blood-wet grass, whispering, “No.”

  CRUISING THE SUV at a steady seventy-eight miles per hour on I-84 East, just outside of Brigham City, Utah, Heather straightened in her seat as the skin prickled along the back of her neck.

  Had she just heard something from the back of the SUV? She touched the car-stereo mute control on the steering wheel and listened.

  “Hey,” Annie protested. “What’re you doing?”

  “Shhh.”

  From the other side of the blackout curtains, Heather heard thrashing sounds. Her blood turned to ice. She steered the SUV into the emergency lane.

  “What’s going on?” Annie asked. “Is it another seizure?”

  Drumming sounds joined the sleeping-bag thrashing noise. “Yes, dammit.” Heather slowed the SUV to a stop, turned off the engine, and switched on the hazard lights.

  She grabbed the black zippered bag out from under her seat. Heart drumming in time with the rapid and violent rhythm behind her, she plucked a prefilled syringe free from the bag. She turned, preparing to slide between the blackout curtain panels and into the back. She hesitated. It’d be too dark for her to see.

  Hold on, Baptiste. Just hold on.

  Glancing at Annie, Heather said, “Get me a flashlight from the glove box.”

  Without a word, Annie yanked the glove box open and slapped a small flashlight into Heather’s palm. “Need anything else?” she asked.

  Heather shook her head, turned on the flashlight, and ever so carefully parted the blackout curtains just enough so she could slip through. A bar of bright morning sunshine slanted through the gap and slid across one of the sleeping bags—Von’s.

  Heather’s heart jumped into her throat. Had Dante and Von switched places when they’d bedded down? Because otherwise the thrashing and twisting bag held the nomad, not Dante.

  Heather closed the curtain and the bar of light and the dust motes it’d illuminated vanished. Flashlight in one hand, syringe in the other, Heather crawled over to the violently whipping sleeping bag and knelt beside it. She tugged down the zipper, unlaced the hood, and yanked it open.

  Von. Convulsing. Blood smeared across his face. His movements too violent, too fast, for her to jab him with the syringe.

  “Shit!”

  Heather considered sitting on him to hold him still, but figured he’d just buck her off. But maybe two bodies would be enough to hold him long enough to get the needle into a vein—anywhere.

  “Annie, I need your help.”

  “Really? You sure?”

  “Yes! Get your butt back here.”

  Another bar of light sliced across Von’s sleeping bag, then vanished. Annie crawled between the bags and joined Heather.

  “Fuck. Is that Von? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, but we need to sit on him, see if we can hold him still long enough to get the morphine into him.”

  “Are you fucking kidding?”

  “No. Now on a count of three, we sit on him or lay across him, whatever, but we get on him. Got it?”

  “Yeah,” Annie sighed. She scooted closer to the convulsing nomad.

  “One. Two. Three.”

  Heather flung herself across Von’s torso, syringe poised between her fingers. She felt Annie land on him too, pinning down his legs—at least momentarily. He twisted and arched and Heather grabbed a handful of sleeping bag to anchor herself. Then she jabbed the needle into the side of his throat and thumbed the plunger.

  Within a few moments, his convulsions stopped cold as if a plug had been yanked. But, unlike Dante, Von didn’t wake, doped and dreamy, before sliding back into morphine’s grip. He remained unconscious.

  “Can I get up now?” Annie groaned. “I took a knee to the chesticles.”

  “Ye
ah, you can. Thanks for the help.”

  Heather pushed herself up and off of Von. She swung the flashlight around until it rested on the bags of supplies they’d picked up at Walmart. She scooted over to the bags and dug through them for the face-cleaning wipes Annie had tossed into the cart.

  “Why’s Von having a seizure? Ain’t that Dante’s thing? I mean, is this some vampire plague or something?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Heather said, crawling back to Von’s sleeping bag. “Wish I did. Could you get us back on the road? We’ll draw the wrong kind of attention if we stay here too long with our hazard lights on.”

  “Hey, you say that like the wrong kind of attention is a bad thing,” Annie said. “But sure, I’ll get us going again.” She crawled to the front and slipped through the curtains, another ray of light appearing, then vanishing.

  Heather opened the wipes, pulled one out, and started cleaning the blood smeared across Von’s face. The source seemed to be his nose. Her pulse pounded through her veins.

  What the hell happened?

  She turned Von’s head to the side. Blood pooled in the cup of his ear. Her heart went cold. Just like Dante, when his bond to Lucien had been severed. Fear pricked along her spine.

  Swiveling around on her knees, Heather unlaced Dante’s hood and pushed it away from his face. Blood trickled from his nose too. She stared at the tears glimmering on his dark lashes.

  Another memory?

  Brushing back Dante’s silky hair, Heather checked his ears for blood and found none. But heat radiated from him in scented waves—burning leaves and deep, dark earth. Sweat popped up along her hairline.

  Too hot. He’s burning up.

  Heather unzipped his sleeping bag, peeling the tight material away from him. She wondered if she should try to pull his shirt off, but decided opening the bag was risk enough in case of unexpected sunshine.

  She shifted back around to Von. She touched his face. Sleep-cool. She placed her hand on his white wife-beater, fingers above his heart, and held her breath. After several long moments, she felt a strong beat against her palm. She closed her eyes in relief.

  Yanking another face-wipe free from its box, she carefully cleaned up the blood from his ears, then wiped away more blood from his nose. Von’s face seemed empty somehow, lax in a way it normally wasn’t when he Slept.

  And that scared her. Because it reminded her of how brain-damaged and comatose crime victims looked in the hospital. Missing, somehow.

  Had he been attacked in his Sleep? But who could …

  Her breath caught in her throat. She flipped her flashlight back over to Dante. Sliding the light along his tight-muscled length, she paused at his hands—clenched into white-knuckled fists. Her heart picked up speed.

  Tears on his lashes. Fists clenched and ready to fight.

  Just like when he lost Chloe.

  A single heartbreaking thought chiseled itself into her mind.

  Dante hurt Von and hurt him bad.

  Heather remembered tumbling from the dream about her mother and into Dante’s dark memory/dream, falling into that shallow grave on top of him.

  Tumbled into or pulled into—she wasn’t sure which, and when she’d asked Dante about it, he’d looked troubled and unsure too.

  Maybe because the morphine knocked my shields down and we were both dreaming, but it ain’t normal, catin. It worries the shit outta me. Maybe you shouldn’t sleep too close to me until I get a handle on this.

  What if something similar had happened to Von? And it went bad?

  Von’s words haunted her memory: I’m really worried about him, doll. The images I got from him … his reality keeps shifting between now and then. He’s fighting damned hard to keep himself here and now and with us. But …

  But … what if Dante lost his fight and his link to Von sucked the nomad into his shifting reality? Heather thought of Von’s too-still face. Thought of the tears wetting Dante’s lashes.

  Feeling sick, Heather closed her eyes. Bad Seed was still stripping away everyone Dante cared about, one by one, and still finding ways to trick him into doing it himself.

  I think he’s had as much as he can take, doll. Heart and mind.

  Losing Von would probably break Dante.

  She refused to lose Dante, refused to let him slip away. She also refused to let either of them lose Von. Heather opened her eyes and switched off her flashlight. Crawling to Dante, she stretched out beside his fevered body and pressed close.

  Not knowing if it would help, not knowing if anything could, she whispered into his ear, “Let me in, Baptiste.”

  25

  THE GREATER GOOD

  ALEXANDRIA, VA

  SHADOW BRANCH HQ

  March 26

  “SOD UNDERWOOD WOULD LIKE to debrief you as soon as you’ve finished lunch,” FA Cooper said, a warm smile on her lips and in her whiskey-brown eyes.

  Emmett finished chewing the last bite of his BLT— crispy, applewood-smoked bacon, but way too much mayo—and swallowed. “I thought that was scheduled for this evening when my partner’s available.”

  Purcell’s auburn-haired assistant nodded. “It was, but I think the SOD has a bit of unexpected free time in her schedule this afternoon. Shall I tell her you’ll meet her in the interview room in fifteen?”

  “Roger that,” Emmett said, plucking a paper napkin from the metal dispenser on the table and wiping his fingers. “I’ll finish my coffee and head down. Which level?”

  “Four. Room 425. I’ll let Underwood know you’re on the way.” Flashing another warm smile, Cooper turned and walked away, her curve-hugging gray skirt accenting her hip-swinging stride.

  I think she’s flirting with me.

  Amused, Emmett wadded up his napkin and tossed it onto the table. He picked up his cup and finished his cooling no-frills-just-black java. Rising to his feet, he sauntered from the people-pocked cafeteria. He’d stop by his room, take a look in the mirror and make sure lettuce hadn’t stealthed up between his teeth and boogers weren’t dangling from his nostrils before greeting the SOD.

  Another first.

  According to the field-grunt grapevine, SOD Celeste Underwood was hard, but fair—a ballbuster only when deserved, needed, or required—and distant. Word through the grapevine also said that over the course of the last couple of years, Underwood had become even more distant.

  Ever since the cold-blooded murder of her son, Stephen Underwood.

  Emmett couldn’t blame her for that. If anything happened to one of his kids … He shook away the thought, refusing to finish it.

  Enough to turn anyone to stone.

  After Emmett checked his reflection for potential sources of embarrassment, he raked a comb over his hair and brushed his suit for crumbs, then left his room. He slipped a note scrawled on a torn piece of yellow legal paper underneath his Sleeping partner’s door.

  He paused, touching his fingertips to her door. He wished he could talk to her, bounce a few thoughts around before heading in for debriefing. But it would have to wait until evening.

  “Sleep tight,” he murmured, dropping his hand.

  Emmett turned and strode to the elevators. Stepped inside and punched the glowing button marked four. Despite a decent night’s sleep, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off-kilter.

  Really? Fallen angels trapped inside stone and a cave where none existed before, and you have a feeling something’s a teensy little bit off-kilter?

  As his grandma would’ve said: Get your ass over here, boy, so I can knock some sense into that thick skull of yours.

  Emmett chuckled. Grandma had never appreciated a flair for the obvious. But his amusement faded as he recalled how he used to feel when his grandmother had read to him from the book of Revelation—all goosebumps and dread.

  He felt that now.

  The elevator stopped. The doors slid apart, and Emmett stepped out into a corridor busy with agents hurrying along on various tasks. He joined the corridor
flow, branching free when the frosted panel etched INTERVIEW STATION 425 popped into view.

  Straightening the knot in his slim black tie, Emmett opened the door and walked inside. Three people—a black woman Emmett identified as SOD Underwood, Purcell, and another white male Emmett didn’t recognize—sat in chairs on one side of a long, rectangular table, manila folders and Styrofoam cups of water or tea or coffee positioned in front of each pair of folded hands.

  “Ah, Field Agent Thibodaux,” said SOD Underwood. “So glad you could join us on such short notice. I appreciate it. By doing your debriefing now, I’ll save time this evening.”

  “Not a problem, ma’am.” Emmett walked around to the opposite side of the table and sat down in front of the single Styrofoam cup resting at his end. A quick peek confirmed water.

  “You know my assistant, Field Agent Purcell,” Under-wood said. “On my left is Field Interrogator Díon.”

  Emmett nodded in acknowledgment.

  Purcell inclined his head in return, his face calm and composed, unlike last night. FI Díon—broad shouldered, light brown hair, interesting violet eyes, maybe mid- to late-forties—offered Emmett a smile.

  Emmett felt himself relax underneath the warmth of Díon’s smile. He picked up his cup of water and took a sip.

  “Shall we get started, gentlemen?” Underwood asked. After receiving their murmured assents, she leaned forward against the table and said, “Start with when you and your partner, FA Goodnight, arrived at the foot of the Wells’s driveway.”

  Emmett led them through their discovery of Sheridan, the circle of white statues ringing the brand-new cave, of the headless body inside the guest cottage, and the long trip to Alexandria escorting the wounded and silent Sheridan. All standard. All routine.

  He kept all of Merri’s observations to himself.

  I hear their hearts, Em. I hear their goddamned hearts.

  “Thank you, Agent Thibodaux,” Underwood said, a quick smile gracing her lips. “I think we’re just about done here. I believe Díon has a few wrap-up questions, then you can go.”

  “Sounds good,” Emmett replied.

  Díon picked up the folder on the table in front of him, flipped through it, then stood up. As he walked around the table to Emmett’s side, Emmett figured the FI to be close to his height, give or take. Tall man.