Heather listened to the coffee as it trickled into the carafe. So what was Jordan’s plan? S is mine. One certainty iced her thoughts: No matter what, Jordan meant to possess Dante. Forever. And from Seattle to New York, graveyards sheltered the remains of all those Jordan had possessed in the past.
Where was he going? Where was he taking Dante? S is mine. Who had those words been aimed at? Ronin? The cops?
As the rich, roasted smell of fresh coffee filled the kitchen, the final piece of the puzzle locked into place.
Johanna Moore. The words had been meant for Johanna Moore.
Jordan intended to confront her with Dante—S—at his side and under his control.
Heart racing, Heather rushed to De Noir and grabbed the folder’s edge. “I think I know where they’re going,” she said.
***
JOHANNA RETURNED TO THE hearth with a cup of brandied eggnog and sat down. Burning wood snapped, releasing the smell of pine into the room. Sipping at her eggnog, she flipped open her cell and speed-dialed Gifford again. His continued silence worried her.
On the third ring the call was answered, but Johanna didn’t recognize the voice saying, “Hello? Hello? This is Detective Fiske. Hello?”
“Doctor Johanna Moore, FBI. How is it that you have Agent Gifford’s phone, Detective?”
“I’m sorry, Doctor Moore, but Agent Gifford is dead.”
The black, empty night seeped into Johanna, stilled her heart. “How?”
“We’re still not clear on the particulars. We have several bodies at the scene,” Fiske said. “Why was your man here?”
“Surveillance.” The fire snapped the scent of pumpkin and cinnamon into the air. “Are the other dead identified? Perhaps our suspect is among them.”
“Special Agent Craig Stearns and one of ours, Detective Trent Collins.” Emotion laced Fiske’s voice.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Detective,” Johanna said. “Please keep me posted.”
“Who were your people watching?”
“Thomas Ronin.”
“House was rented under that name. I’ll call you if I have any other questions.”
“Fine, Detective. Thank you.” Johanna ended the call.
She gazed at the fire, the dancing flames calming her, ordering her thoughts. She walked from the living room to her office and stepped behind her desk. She glanced at the GPS receiver. No signal. Like E, S was now offline. Were they together? Was Ronin with them?
Johanna walked to the window and pushed aside the curtain. Touching the pane of glass between her and the winter sky, she closed her eyes. She wished for snow.
Stearns and Wallace had cost her a good man, one she’d miss for years to come. What had happened in New Orleans?
Opening her eyes, Johanna turned from the window. She needed to find her beautiful True Blood child before Ronin corrupted him, twisted him. And if her père de sang was bringing E and S home?
Then she’d need strength. Johanna pulled on her coat and tugged gloves over her hands—a habit left over from her mortal life. She walked out into the night, her breath a pale plume in the air, and hunted.
***
DUCKING FROM THE COLD, damp wind, Heather pressed her face against Von’s leather-jacketed back as the nomad gunned his Harley up the interstate toward Louis Armstrong International. She kept her arms wrapped tight around the nomad’s waist, grateful for the gloves and helmet Simone had lent her. The wind blew through Von’s hair, whipping its length from side to side.
Von steered the bike through traffic, swooping in, out, and between cars and semis with heart-stopping speed. The night blurred past, streaked with red and silver.
After Trey ferreted out Johanna Moore’s address on the net, Heather had booked a seat on the next flight to D.C. She was gambling on the chance that Elroy Jordan was heading “home” to Moore, but it felt right.
De Noir had refused a seat on the plane, said: I’ll get there my own way.
She wondered if he winged overhead even now, hair and lashes white with frost.
Trey had also discovered a purchase made by a C. K. Cross a few days earlier. A white Chevy van with customized windows and some interior alterations. The dealership had provided the temporary license plate number, but Heather hadn’t passed the number on to the police. If Jordan was pulled over by cops, more people would die. Like Collins.
And Dante…Heather couldn’t be sure of his reaction. She remembered the nightmare scene captured on the CD, remembered the cold fury on Dante’s face as he’d murdered the Prejeans.
Dante sits cross-legged in a corner of the dining room, flipping through a music mag—Metal Scene, maybe—headphones in his ears. In his own world, but tensed, coiled, ready for hell in a moment’s notice.
Dante removes his headphones when any of the other four foster kids in the house approach him, speaking Cajun with a couple, English with another; a quick, tilted smile. One teen, about the same age, maybe thirteen or fourteen, sits beside Dante for a time, putting his head on Dante’s shoulder. Dante loops an arm around the boy and they sit on the floor together, looking at the mag.
Then, a heartbeat later, hell yawns open. Adelaide “Mama” Prejean smacks a blonde girl setting the table, telling her she’s “doing it ass-backwards.” Cecil “Papa” Prejean, with an irritated grunt, backhands the girl and knocks her to the floor.
Dante rises so fast, even the camera can’t capture his movement. The other boy sitting on the floor holds the fluttering mag, mouth open. Dante punches Mama Prejean, knocking her three feet across the room. He leaps on her, taking her to the floor. He pounds her head against the hardwood until the skull splits, blood and brains splashing across the grain, across Dante’s hands.
Dante swivels, stands, and moves again. He pins a stunned Papa Prejean against the wall and tears into his throat with his fingernails, ripping it wide open. Blood sprays onto Dante’s ecstatic face. He licks it from his lips, his fingers.
Once Papa Prejean’s done spurting, Dante lets go and the body slumps to the floor. Dante gathers the other kids and tells them they need to get out. He searches the bodies for credit spikes, cash, anything of value. Ransacks Mama Prejean’s purse. He divvies everything up between the other four kids, keeping nothing for himself.
Once the others have gone, Dante sprinkles lighter fluid from the barbecue throughout the house, then fetches gasoline from the garage. Pours it over the bodies. He lights a match. Whoomf! He lingers a moment before leaving the Prejean house for the last time.
Dante watches the blaze from the street. Caught in the flickering shadows, his beautiful bloodstained face is rapt.
Heather remembered Dante standing in front of the anarchy symbol, saying: Freedom is the result of rage.
He’d won freedom for only four that night. Project Bad Seed had picked him up, then proceeded to fragment and bury his memory. Again. Wound him up, then turned him loose.
Dante had survived the streets. But would he survive his past?
Von swung the bike onto an exit ramp, downshifted. “Almost there,” he shouted.
Stearns had called Dante a monster; but the real monsters were the people behind Project Bad Seed—Dr. Johanna Moore and Dr. Robert Wells. No wonder Moore had been so knowledgeable at the Academy, her profiles eerily accurate. She’d helped create the killers the Bureau profiled.
Had Bad Seed failed or succeeded with Dante? The murder of the Prejeans disturbed Heather, but knowing the torture he’d endured at their hands and at the hands of fifty-nine other pairs of foster parents—the worst Louisiana had to offer—understandable. Although she’d always believed there were no excuses for murder, there were reasons.
And in this case—a boy pushed to the brink and beyond—all she saw were shades of gray, even though she’d been trained to see only black and white; the law was either upheld or the law was broken. Simple. But was it?
Could Dante have just run away? Abandoning the other kids to their fate? If the project had been successful, Da
nte would’ve thought only of himself and used the others to his own gain. Never would have put himself in harm’s way for a little girl. Never would have wept for her. Never would have walked alone into a slaughterhouse for a friend, willing to sacrifice himself.
I have a promise to keep.
But if the project had failed, he never would have murdered.
The bright lights of the airport glimmered ahead in the cold air. Heather looked over Von’s shoulder as he opened the bike up again. Her thoughts shifted back to her conversation with Collins. Five bodies in a tavern. A fire. Arson. LaRousse and Davis, dead.
In fact, they’d been out to Prejean’s with an arrest warrant….
Shit spins out of control.
Bad blood between Dante and LaRousse.
Heather’s muscles knotted. Her thoughts led her to a path she didn’t want to walk. What if Jay’s death and Dante’s inability to protect him, his failure to keep him alive, had triggered the same impulses that’d followed Chloe’s death? What if the project had succeeded, and Ronin had spun the right stressors into action?
What if Dante had been at the tavern? What if he’d taken his first step on the serial-killing trail? A trail he planned to keep walking?
Heather tightened her arms around Von’s middle. For once, she hoped her intuition was wrong, her instincts false.
He murdered the Prejeans and torched their house.
Von eased up on the throttle and downshifted as he steered the Harley into the departure/arrivals lane. The bike rumbled, the sound rolling back like thunder from the buildings. A few people glanced up, startled by the noise. Von eased the Harley up against the curb, then lowered the kickstand.
Heather swung off the bike. She unstrapped the helmet and handed it to the nomad. Von’s windblown hair fell into place, gleamed like dark silk beneath the lights.
“I’ll come with you,” Von said, lifting his shades to the top of his head. “You need a bodyguard, darlin’, and I’m willing.”
Heather looked into the nomad’s green eyes. The crescent moon tattoo glittered like ice in the light.
“De Noir’s gonna be there. But thanks.”
“Nothing against Lucien, but your safety ain’t gonna be his prime concern.”
Heather lifted an eyebrow. “And it would be with you?”
“For Dante, man,” Von said. “I know he cares about you.”
Heather swallowed. “He matters to me, too,” she said. “But dawn’s coming. You’ll be Sleeping soon.”
“Look, every time I doze off, just punch me. Hard.”
“I’ve got enough to worry about without hauling your sleepy ass around D.C.,” Heather said with a quick smile. “Thanks again, but I’ve been taking care of myself most of my life. I know what I’m doing.”
Von flashed a wicked grin. “No doubt, darlin’. No doubt at all.” He lowered his shades, settled them back into place.
“And we need someone here in case I’m wrong about Jordan.”
“But you know you ain’t,” Von said, nudging the kickstand up and twisting the throttle. The Harley’s rumble revved into a roar. “Good flight,” he said. “And even better hunting. Bring him back, darlin’.” Kicking the bike into gear, the nomad gunned it into the through lane.
Heather walked into the terminal, purse looped over her shoulder. Von’s words circled through her mind—I know he cares about you. And she knew in that moment that Dante needed a voice—one that would deliver justice for his lost years and stolen, brutalized childhood, and for his murdered and discarded mother.
Dante’s life had never been his own.
Dante had spoken when he’d killed the Prejeans; spoken to the monsters hiding in the shadows, watching and recording. Had Dante been a voice for Chloe?
And had Dante spoken again in the tavern, dazed, heartbroken, and lost to the past; spoken for Jay? Had he followed programming implanted by Moore? Or simply given in to his own dark nature?
Heather strode to the security desk to pick up a law enforcement permit for her .38. Pulling her badge from her pocket, she handed it to the bored guard.
Dante’s mind had been damaged, but his heart was strong, compassionate. Having laid beside him, wrapped in his arms, Heather knew Dante could never be like Elroy Jordan, killing for pleasure, for power.
Oh? And when he fed? When he hunted for blood?
How about when he tore open Cecil Prejean’s throat?
Would she have to speak for his victims? Could she speak for his victims?
Heather felt hollow inside, riddled with doubt. She’d tumbled head over heels for a guy who wasn’t even human, and a killer. Yet, how could he be expected to answer for actions he couldn’t even remember? She’d deal with that soon enough.
After she found him; after she saved him.
***
AS E STEERED THE VAN through Georgia, his gaze kept sliding up to the rearview mirror, sneaking peeks at the unconscious bloodsucker—drugged and handcuffed. A shiv still poked up from his belly. An electric tingle shot through E at the sight. He rubbed himself through his jeans. Soon, he promised himself.
When Dante’d started screaming while he read to him from his file, E’d stared, more than a little freaked. The handcuffs had clinked and clunked and the van had rocked and shuddered until E’d been scared that Dante’d pull it apart. That was when he’d dropped the file and grabbed another syringe, filling it to the max with bloodsucker dope and jabbing it into Dante’s neck.
Then Dante’d started laughing.
Dante laughs, the sound of it—low and dark and uncontained, broken somehow. Finally, E laughs with him, because it is pretty funny, accidentally offing the person you’re trying to protect…hilarious! Hysterical, even, and this thought sends E into another round of doubled-over-tears-in-the-eyes laughter.
Dante’s eyes close, tears sliding from the corners, as the drugs go to work. Laughed himself to tears too, E thinks, enjoying their camaraderie. His Bad Seed bro lapses into silence.
A blaring horn snapped E to the present. Headlights loomed in the rearview mirror. Busy eyeing Dante, E’d slowed to an old-lady dawdle in the fast lane. Although his first instinct was to slam on the brakes, then shiv the tailgating bastard, E slid the van into the slow lane. Last thing he wanted was the law on his tail.
The tailgating bastard blew past and E gritted his teeth as the bastard leaned on the horn one more time. E memorized the license number for future reference. He grinned. His gaze flicked back to the rear view, to Dante.
Read to me.
Those words from Dante’s bloodstained lips had sent shivers down E’s spine. Still did. E squirmed in the driver’s seat, restless, aching. Hungry. Dawn was a couple of hours away and Dante’d Sleep with a capital S for the rest of the day. E’d catch a few winks then. Maybe a bite to eat.
And his Bad Seed bro? Would he need a bite, too? Could be fun, rounding up a tasty meal for Dante.
E squirmed. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t wait anymore.
He pulled the van into the next rest stop, parking as far from the other cars and semis as possible. He shut off the engine. Keyed it to AC and popped in Inferno’s latest CD. Punched up the volume to mask the screams. The music pounded and shredded while Dante’s sexy voice growled and whispered:
You try to kiss away my feelings / you need to change me / want to suck me dry…
E crawled into the back, yanking the curtain closed behind him. His broken wrist throbbed, but that didn’t matter. He’d down some pills when he was done with Dante.
E knelt beside the air bed and brushed the hair back from Dante’s face. His gaze lingered on the blood smeared under his nose and across his lips.
“Like an angel,” E whispered, but the angel he pictured had black feathered wings and dark fuck-me eyes.
I only trust my rage / you mean nothing / maybe you never did / and that scares me…
Wrapping his fingers around the handle of the shiv in Dante’s belly, he pulled it out. Blood oozed onto
the bloodsucker’s white skin. He slipped his hand under Dante’s T-shirt, sliding it along his fevered, blood-sticky chest. The wounds in his chest were almost healed.
Golden fire filled E, set his body alight. His heart galloped, shaking his body with the intensity of its rhythm. He trailed his hand down across Dante’s flat belly, past his unbuckled belt and into his unfastened jeans. The god indulged himself in another round of exploration.
Breathing fast, E pulled his hand out of Dante’s jeans. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again golden cords connected him to his Bad Seed bro at the forehead, belly button and crotch.
E picked up Navarro’s book of poetry and, sitting back on his heels, read to Dante.
I feel her there
in the dark
waiting to feed
upon my dreams
her tail, iridescent, coils
holds me prisoner
she sucks my breath
drinks me in
I burn beneath her
within her
a dying star
THE TASTE OF HONEY, sweet and thick, touched E’s tongue. He closed the bloodstained book and set it on the floor. Knee-walking to the air bed, he straddled Dante. He leaned over and pressed his lips against Dante’s. “I’m your god. I control every breath you take.”
Dante’s eyes opened, pupils dilated, ringed with brown.
“Name the one you love.”
“It ain’t you,” Dante whispered, words drug-thick.
A flick of his wrist and a shiv dropped into E’s right hand. He drew in a deep breath, savoring the smell of blood. Underneath, he caught a whiff of something sweeter. He frowned. A familiar scent. Leaning in, he sniffed Dante’s throat. Pushed up his T-shirt. Smelled his chest. Blood and the faint scent of…lilac.
E’s thoughts whirled back to the bloodsucker’s house and the sofa he’d awakened on after plowing into the Big Guy. Whirled back to the woman nestled in the chair across from the sofa, tendrils of red hair across her lovely sleeping face. Whirled back to standing over her, shivs in hand, a benevolent god before a supplicant. Whirled back to bending over her and drinking in her scent. Warm and sweet—lilac. Like the scent that clung to Dante.