On Midnight Wings

  “Father!”

  Hekate landed on the cliff in a frantic flurry of wings. As she swiveled to face them, Lucien’s gut knotted at the panic and uncertainty he saw darkening her eyes and leaching color from her face. From above and all around, cries sounded through the rain-lashed night like frightened sea gulls. As Lucien listened, he closed his eyes, pulse pounding at his temples.

  “They’re gone,” the Morningstar said, voice stunned, a man learning his cancer is terminal. “The skygates have unraveled.”

  38

  WELCOME TO THE HORROR SHOW

  BATON ROUGE

  DOUCET-BAINBRIDGE SANITARIUM

  THE AIR REEKED OF blood and pissed-pants death.

  Blood glistened on the walls.

  Slicked the tile floor in long, dark smears.

  And on the alarm panel ripped from the wall beside the security desk—a bloody left handprint that Dante studied like a stark and mysterious paleolithic cave painting from where he lay sprawled on the floor. He lifted his bloodstained left hand. Compared.

  Probably mine.

  Lowering his hand, Dante wearily closed his eyes. His head pulsed with pain, a never-relenting, white-hot pressure as though his head was caught between tons of shifting rock. Trapped beneath the rubble of a cataclysmic internal earthquake, despite having escaped the shattered depths—for now, anyway—when a seizure had knocked S’s ass to the blood-smeared floor.

  Just taking a time-out. Catching my breath.

  Got a full schedule of killing ahead.

  A chill touched Dante soul-deep. He no longer knew if his thoughts were his alone or belonged to S. Figured it no longer mattered at this point. Words Lucien had said to him in the back of the Perv’s van popped into his aching head.

  S doesn’t exist. Only Dante. S is a part of you, child. The rage you deny, the pain you ignore. You are Dante Baptiste, son of Lucien and Genevieve. Not S. Not the child of monsters.

  Dante had a feeling the fucking FBI and SB—not to mention everyone cooling on the floor—would heartily disagree.

  Opening his eyes and wishing for a pair of shades, Dante squinted as light from the overheads needled into them. He rolled up onto his hands and knees. He needed to haul ass. Needed to find an exit, then Heather.

  Sure about that?

  Memory coughed up an ugly image.

  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.

  Dante shivered, suddenly cold, the nightmare image refusing to fade. Sweat beaded his forehead, dampened the hair at the nape of his neck. White light strobed furiously at the edges of his vision. He needed to warn Heather away. He couldn’t trust himself—and neither should she. Until he had himself—including the part of him that was S—under control, she wouldn’t be safe.

  No one would be.

  Hoping the blood he’d gulped down (Nah, make that S. Credit where credit’s due, yeah?) during the sanitarium slaughter had diluted the drugs in his system enough to keep his sending from bouncing around the inside of his skull like a rubber bullet, Dante reached for Heather through their bond.

  Catin, keep away. Run from me. Run as far—

  The floor tilted beneath his knees, interrupting his sending, and scattering black flecks across his graying field of vision. An intense spinning sensation pureed his thoughts. Blanked his mind. Pain needled his temples, blowback from the sending.

  “Boy, you need to get your ass down to the basement and now,” Papa said, his voice bayou bred and two-packs-of-Winstons-a-day gravelly. “Enough with dat school nonsense. Someone coming to see you. And trust me, he ain’t interested in whether or not you know yo’ ABCs.” The fi’ de garce’s raspy laughter ended in a cough. “Waste o’ time, anyway. Chloe should be doing her homework insteada teaching you dat bullshit.”

  Hands curling automatically into fists at the sound of Papa’s voice, Dante blinked until his vision cleared. For a moment, he thought he saw a gore-splashed corridor graffitied with a primitive and bloody handprint—then it was gone.

  A dream, maybe. A really fucked up dream. But no more fucked up than Papa Prejean and his motherfucking basement-prison bordello.

  “Fuck you,” Dante said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  He was kneeling beside Chloe’s bed, facing Papa who stood in the doorway in jeans and a fresh, white wifebeater bracketed by suspenders. Despite a liberal dosing of Florida Water, Dante still smelled Papa’s sweat underneath the cologne’s sweet orange, cloves, and lavender fragrance.

  Papa frowned, deep lines furrowing his forehead. “Dere you go, running dat foul mouth o’ yours again. Sounds like I should rinse it out with somet’ing stronger dan soap. Mebbe dat gasoline out in the garage’ll do the trick.”

  “Leave him alone,” Chloe said from behind Dante. He heard her heart beating hard and fast, speaking up despite her fear, and with each frantic, hummingbird beat, Dante heard the rhythm of her courage.

  Papa slanted a sour look at her over the top of Dante’s head. “Hush, you. Or I’ll put my hand upside your head.”

  Reaching back, Dante squeezed Chloe’s knee, then rose to his feet. The room wobbled, became a corridor dotted with crumpled bodies, a trail of bloodied bread crumbs underscored by a steady and muffled whomp-whomp-whomp and leading to—

  Chloe’s room. Papa in the doorway, a Winston smoldering between his fingers and curling pale smoke into the air to battle it out with sweat and Florida Water.

  Dante swayed on his feet, pain a sledgehammer pounding against the inside of his skull. “You’re gonna need more than handcuffs—”

  Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!

  The sound reverberated through Dante’s aching head. The booming heartbeat of a giant or the smack of furious fists into a punching bag or—

  The room wobbled again and Dante stumbled, thumping shoulder-first into the wall.

  —or the thud of feet kicking in desperation against a thick, steel door.

  Dante blinked. Chloe’s room vanished. A corridor replaced it, one full of bodies and blood and the stink of death and cordite. A paleolithic handprint. The SB sanitarium. He sucked in a breath, concentrated on remaining in the here-and-now.

  Guns were scattered across the tile. Medical staff in white-and mint-green scrubs lay entangled among the bodies of black-suited agents. Whether S’s work or his own, and pretty sure it didn’t fucking matter in the long run, Dante felt no regret. Not when he thought of little girls in Winnie-the-Pooh sweaters deliberately locked into rooms with wounded and starving nightkind.

  I’ve got promises to keep.

  Wiping blood from his nose with the back of his hand, Dante pushed himself away from the wall.

  From within their locked rooms, inmates pounded against the steel doors with fists and feet and anything not bolted to the concrete, their violent and desperate drumming an aural gauntlet that Dante passed as he staggered unsteadily down the corridor, looking for an exit sign and hoping against hope he found one before the past played python and swallowed him down its dark gullet again.

  I could unlock the doors.

  I could let them all go.

  I could play with them.

  Until Purcell returns.

  “No,” Dante whispered. “Ain’t stopping. I’m getting the hell out of here.” Pain pounded and drummed in his head, keeping time with all the thumping fists and feet.

  Wantitneeditkillitburnitburnburnburn . . .

  Darkness nibbling at his vision like a hungry mouse, Dante stumbled to a stop. He leaned against the wall and rubbed his temples with trembling fingers. He struggled to shut out the fucking noise, to dampen the pain. To think.

  Send it below or fucking use it.

  Problem was, below was full to the brim and hands crawling with wasps were locked around his ankles, fingers digging in to yank him down again.

  Underneath the kicking and hammering and muffled yells, he heard someone singing—hey, that?
??s one of my songs—voice husky and low and simmering with a barely contained rage. A voice he recognized.

  “I am what you made me / no matter where you hide / where you run / I will find you / I am what you made me / nothing can stop me / I have nothing left to lose / I’m coming for you . . .”

  Purcell.

  The SB and the FBI.

  The psychotic assholes locked behind those doors.

  The motherfucking world.

  They have it coming in fucking spades, yeah?

  Letting the song trail away, unfinished, Dante whispered, “Oui, for true.”

  Then let’s give it to them.

  Dante opened his eyes and his heart jumped into his throat. He was no longer leaning against the wall. Instead, he stood in the wide-open doorway of an inmate’s room, his blood-grimed fingertips resting on the door’s keypad. He hadn’t realized that he’d even moved, let alone keyed open the door.

  “Shit,” he breathed, jerking his hand away from the keypad.

  Light from the corridor spilled into the room, revealing someone curled on the stark and narrow bed in the white-padded room’s center. Someone with golden curls spiraling to her straitjacketed waist. The mattress creaked as she struggled to sit up. She looked at Dante, blinking in the light, her pale face uncertain, her brown eyes drug-dilated.

  Dante’s breath caught in his throat, his stunned heart pulsing hard and fast.

  Fire scorches her lungs. Blackens her skin. Devours her with relentless teeth.

  “Simone?” he whispered.

  “What did you say? Who . . . who are you?” she asked in a tremulous voice, a voice deeper than her own had ever been. Somehow masculine. But that was okay. She was alive. And that was all that mattered.

  Wrong. This is all wrong. She burned. You felt her die. Wake the fuck up.

  Maybe she didn’t. Maybe someone stole her before it was too late.

  You fucking felt her die.

  But Von’s words, spoken in the graveyard hush of St. Louis No. 3, filled Dante’s mind: A spoken thing or wished-hard thing takes a shape within the heart.

  “Takes shape,” Dante continued aloud. “Becomes real.”

  “Who are you?” Maybe-Simone asked again. “What was going on out there?”

  Feeling light-headed, like the floor was dropping away from beneath his feet, Dante stepped into the room. A high-pitched buzzing filled his ears. The room wheeled, spinning like a merry-go-round caught in a Category 5 blow-down.

  Dante snapped his eyes shut. Steadied himself with a hand to the padded wall and waited for the gut-wrenching dizziness to pass. Once it had and once the floor was motionless beneath his socked feet again, he opened his eyes.

  And found himself standing in front of a tomb in the silent heart of St. Louis No. 3. But this St. Louis was whole and intact, not the shattered ruin he still needed to set right.

  How did I get here?

  Like stove-warmed taffy, reality and dreams stretched beyond their normal shapes and boundaries and merged. Took a new shape within his heart.

  Shadows clung to the tomb’s moon-washed marble like black-leafed ivy. Beneath the sweet perfume of graveyard flowers and cherry blossoms, Dante caught a whiff of bones moldering behind old marble, of ice and cold stone and fallow hearts.

  From within the tomb’s dank depths, something stirred. He heard the dusty grit of time, of ashes and bone, beneath sandal soles. Then: “I’ve missed you, cher.”

  Dante’s breath caught rough at the sound of that voice—Cajun-musical and wistful, it pierced his heart like a knife.

  Simone appeared in the tomb’s open mouth, darkness sluicing away from her like black water. She knelt upon the threshold in fire-crisped tank top and cut-offs, hair tumbling over her shoulders in long, golden spirals that framed her pale, soot-streaked face in luminous curls. Her magnolia scent was scorched and blackened, all sweetness seared away.

  Dante took another step forward, then dropped to his knees on the stone walk in front of her. “Miss you too.” He started to reach for her hair, but before his fingers could so much as graze a silken strand, he stopped, then knotted his hands into fists atop his leather-clad thighs. He couldn’t trust himself.

  Didn’t dare.

  Down in the wasp-droning shattered depths, someone laughed.

  A cold finger pressed against his lips, hushing the words he’d been about to say—My fault, chère. I failed you and Trey both. You died because of my fucking mistakes.

  “I don’t want you taking blame or refusing comfort. I only want you to make them pay. Make them burn for me, Dante.”

  Shadows crept from the tomb’s arched mouth and slithered over Simone, stealing the light from her golden curls and veiling her face in inky darkness. Only her voice remained, a fierce but fading whisper.

  “Make every single bastard burn, make the world burn, mon cher ami, mon ange, and set me free.”

  Dante grabbed for Simone, his desperation—to keep her from the tomb’s icy darkness, to hold her safe—outweighing his self-distrust. His fingers closed tight around her arm. He yanked her free from the fetid shadows, free from fiery death, from the unalterable past.

  And back onto a bed in the sanitarium, once again buckled into a straitjacket.

  “How about getting me out of this thing, buddy?” she asked in a deep voice mysteriously empty of Cajun rhythm.

  But that was okay. She was alive. She’d never burned, never—

  Pain scraped across Dante’s thoughts. He sucked in a breath as a warning floated up from the droning, whispering depths.

  Ain’t Simone. That’s Papa in a Simone-suit playing possum.

  Dante’s heart kicked hard against his chest. He narrowed his eyes. Oui. Made sense. The masculine voice. The questions, all innocent and confused. He could see it now. Papa playing him for a motherfucking fool, just waiting to snap the cuffs around his wrists and trap him once more in the basement’s moldering darkness.

  Fucker won’t stay dead. How many times do I need to tear out his goddamned throat?

  Dante shook his head, laughing low, the padded walls soaking up the smoked whiskey and velvet music of his voice, exposing the cold, knowing tone underneath. “You must really think I’m an idiot.”

  “What? I don’t—”

  Dante laughed again. “Sure you do. ‘Boy needs a lesson,’ right? Ain’t those your words? ‘Boy always needs a lesson.’ ”

  Papa’s voice turned desperate, but Dante heard the slyness crouched beneath the words. “I don’t know who you’re looking for, but you’ve got the wrong—”

  Thick shadows drifted like dark smoke across the padded walls, transforming them into cold and dank concrete blocks. In the basement’s corner, the furnace rumbled to life, a comforting sound despite the furnace’s predatory, shadow-twisted posture.

  Welcome home, S. Welcome back, petit.

  “Yeah? I don’t think so.” Dante pinched Papa’s doughy chin between his fingers. Fury knotted the muscles in his chest. “And you know what? Fuck you.”

  Deep within the basement’s dark and water-stained heart, Dante set to work. And Papa screamed and screamed and screamed.

  THE PUNGENT SMELL OF blood, thick and wet and fresh, filled Dante’s nostrils. Blinking, he stared at the body sprawled upon the blood-soaked mattress—a man buckled into a straitjacket. A man he didn’t recognize. Blond hair lay across his openmouthed face in lank strands. Fear looped icy coils around Dante’s belly. He couldn’t remember who he thought he’d been killing.

  Something about playing possum in a Simone suit. Holy fucking Christ.

  A bloody hole cratered the dead-dead-dead inmate’s chest right at heart level. Pulse drumming at his temples, Dante looked down at his hand. At what he held tight between his blood-sticky fingers.

  Not the stuff of valentines, maybe, but kinda cool all the same, yeah?

  Tais-toi, you.

  The pale heart spilled from Dante’s hand, hitting the concrete floor with a soft, fleshy splat
. The high-pitched buzzing returned, erasing the silence. He rose to his feet slowly, wiped his hands against his leather pants.

  Plucking a heart from some deserving motherfucker’s chest was one thing—

  —and who says that cooling corpse on the bed wasn’t deserving? He was locked in here, after all. Might’ve been an SB experiment just like you. Me. Us.

  —but ripping it from some straitjacketed fi’ de garce? What if it had truly been Simone? Or Heather? How about Violet or Von?

  No one can ever be used against you if you’re willing to kill them yourself.

  Fuck you.

  The truth is never what you hope it will be.

  “Ain’t listening,” Dante muttered, even though he was—he couldn’t help it. He stumbled back out into the corridor, into air thick with the reek of death, of coppery blood and pungent piss. The silence soothed the ache in his head.

  Silence.

  He paused, taking in the flung-open doors on either side of the corridor, doors that had been closed and locked the last time he’d stood in the corridor, feeling cold to his soul—and listened.

  No thumping, no pounding, no steel-muffled shouts.

  No heartbeats but his own.

  Bloody footprints trailed from one flung-open door to the next. Remembering the heart he’d held in his hand, Dante didn’t need to look inside the rooms to know what he’d find.

  Had to be done. They were locked up just like you, yeah? For the same reasons.

  Little fucking psycho.

  Dante swallowed hard. He had to haul ass out of this fucking place, and he had to make sure he kept away from Heather and everyone else that he cared about.

  Smart move. But first we need to wait for that asshole Purcell.

  Dante shook his head. “No. I’ll deal with him some other time. Ain’t staying.” But he noticed his socked feet remained motionless. Noticed that his blood-grimed hands flexed restlessly at his sides. Noticed with a deepening sense of frustration and despair that his body seemed to have no intention whatsoever of searching for an exit.

  Welcome back, S. Welcome home.

  Ain’t finished here. Not by a long shot.

  For true, that. Maybe waiting wasn’t such a bad idea, after all. Give the drugs time to wear off. And once they had, he’d be able to reach Heather, Von, Lucien—everyone. But that realization snaked cold and uneasy around his heart.