“Maybe a little,” Heather allowed. “Ever since she died, I’ve had dreams about her death, nightmares, I guess I mean.”
Dante nodded.
“The thing is, ever since D.C., the dreams have become more vivid and detailed, but they don’t feel like dreams. It feels like I’m seeing it all through her eyes. And last night, it was like I was Shannon Wallace.” Heather paused a moment, then said, “Is it because of you?”
Dante carefully placed the photo of her parents on the table, then met her gaze, his own troubled and thoughtful. “Could be, yeah. If it is, it wasn’t deliberate.”
“I know that,” Heather said softly. “I’m not trying to blame you. I’m just trying to understand it. Or maybe nearly dying triggered a latent ability.”
Dante nodded. “That’s possible too.”
It was, but she’d bet a year’s salary on Dante being the originator of the change within her. The real question, one that Dante couldn’t answer, was: Had he woven any other changes into her while saving her life?
“How about you? Have you learned anything about your mom?”
“I had Trey search for info on her,” Dante said. “We found nothing. Like she never existed. They not only killed her, they fucking erased all trace of her.”
“There’s gotta be something,” Heather said. “She lived in New Orleans. Someone had to know her. Worked with her. Something.” She caressed his arm, her fingers whispering across the mesh, feeling the heated skin and hard muscle beneath. “You might consider asking De Noir.” The muscles beneath Heather’s fingers tensed.
“No.” Dante’s gaze smoldered, his jaw tight.
“You look like her, you know,” Heather said softly. “A lot. She was a beautiful woman. Black hair, dark eyes, warm smile.”
Dante nodded and looked away. “Yeah, Lucien said so too.”
Heather wished De Noir hadn’t destroyed the Bad Seed CD documenting Dante’s birth and his hellish childhood. Wished she had a picture of Genevieve Baptiste she could give Dante, a memory he could look at whenever he wanted, and keep. Wells and Moore couldn’t have erased Genevieve’s existence. Not completely. She and Dante would just have to dig a little deeper, that was all.
The aroma of fresh coffee drifted into the room. Releasing Dante’s arm, Heather rose to her feet and went to the kitchen to pour coffee for both of them. When she turned around, Dante was walking into the kitchen and brushing cat fur from his velvet-and-vinyl pants.
“I can pour my own, y’know,” he said.
Heather handed him a mug. “Yeah, yours is so tough to remember. Black.”
He smiled. “Merci beaucoup.”
“I want to thank you for last night,” Heather said.
Dante looked at her, his pale face puzzled. “For what?”
“For picking up the mess, and for being so good to Annie, even when she was telling lies about you. I owe you an apology for that too.”
“No, you don’t,” Dante said. “You owe me nothing.”
“Yes, I do, Dante, I do,” Heather said. “I gave you shit over kissing my sister and I had no right—”
“Shhh.” Dante pressed his fingers against her lips. “Forget it.” Leaning in, he bent and replaced his fingers with his lips, a warm kiss, lingering. She laced her arms around his waist, his earthy and intimate scent teasing her nostrils. Heat kindled in her belly, stoked a fire she realized had never died.
Looking into her eyes, he said, “Annie’s home.”
Heather heard the front door open, then shut. “Gotta love nightkind hearing,” she murmured. Sliding her hands from his waist, she stepped past him and walked into the living room. Annie flounced onto the sofa and switched on the TV with the remote.
“Hey,” Heather said. “I was starting to worry about you.”
Annie rolled her eyes. “No need. I was good. I didn’t drink or buy anything illegal, I—” Her words ended abruptly, her gaze sliding past Heather. Her eyes widened.
Heather felt Dante step up beside her.
“Hey, Annie,” he said.
“Holy fuck,” Annie breathed. “It wasn’t the tequila and oxy. You really are that fucking gorgeous.”
“Thanks, but I’ve been told. Ain’t nothing I care about. Just so you know.”
“You’d care if you weren’t good-looking,” Annie declared, settling back into the sofa, a sardonic gleam in her eyes. “Then every compliment would melt your heart and make you fall in love with the person saying them.”
“Annie…” Heather sighed.
“Nah, she may be right,” Dante said. “But, tell me, Annie, you know this how?”
Annie lifted a hand and flipped him off. Dante pointed to the words on his shirt—BLOW ME—and lifted an eyebrow.
“Yeah?” Annie challenged. She pointed at her crotch. “You first.”
“Is this a new game?” Heather asked, pretending innocence. “How does it work? You point at body parts until someone misses and pokes an eye out?”
Annie stared at her for a moment, then said, “Y’know that might work as a drinking game.”
Dante looked at Heather and amusement gleamed in his eyes. He looked happy and untroubled, relaxed. She liked seeing him that way, and she liked that she was the cause of it. Liked it very much.
She realized that she knew so many dark and painful things about Dante’s life, more than he did, but she didn’t know any of the simple things about him like his favorite color or his favorite band or what he liked to read or what size shirt he wore. And his birthday was coming up in…oh…twenty-four days.
Dante walked over to the table and set his cup on its cluttered surface. “I should fix your window before I head over to Vespers,” he said, pulling tools and a lock kit from the pockets of his leather jacket. He headed to the window, Eerie hopping after him, then bent over the windowsill, twisting the screwdriver with precision.
Heather smiled. “So you do know how to use a screwdriver.”
“Great for jimmying locks.”
“Don’t make me arrest you.”
Dante laughed. “No ma’am. We’ve already been there, done that.”
“Yes, we have.”
A few minutes later, he’d installed the new lock. Eerie leaped onto the sill and mewed his approval. Grinning, Dante scratched the top of the cat’s orange head. “Couldn’t’ve done it without your supervision, minou,” he said. Glancing at Heather, he added, “He’s got a lotta grace for having only three legs.”
“He does,” Heather said. “The shelter I got him from said he’d been attacked by a dog. He survived somehow and it’s never really slowed him down.”
“Slow he ain’t, eh, minou?” Dante said, giving Eerie one last pat.
Dante plucked his hoodie and leather jacket free from the chair and tugged both on, chains jingling. He slid the screwdriver into his pocket. He pulled up his hood, shadowing his beautiful face. Heather understood why he hid his looks, but it made her a little sad that he felt it was necessary. She walked to the window with him.
“So what do you want for your birthday?” she asked.
“My birthday?” Dante’s voice was what the hell puzzled. His expression matched his voice. “What birthday?”
Heather stared at him. “Didn’t you ever have a birthday party growing up?”
“Nope, not that I remember. I just thought it was something not meant for me, y’know, like school and daylight.” His voice was even and matter-of-fact—no big deal.
Anger flashed through Heather, a full-on wildfire, scorching through her veins. Her heart pounded so hard, it seemed like her entire body shook with the force of it. Dante had no idea how old he was or when he was born. No one had told him. The bastards had stolen even that from him.
“Heather? You okay?” Dante’s dark brows were knitted together.
She drew in a deep breath. Calmed herself. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she replied. “Your birthday’s on April sixteenth.”
“Really? April sixteenth. How old will I
be?”
“Twenty-four, Dante,” Heather said, chest aching. “You’ll be twenty-four.”
“Yeah?” A smile tilted his lips, lit his eyes. “Good to know.”
“You ever going to use the front door?” she asked as he slid the window open.
“Dunno.” Dante climbed out the window. “Maybe. See you at Vespers, chérie.”
23 TIGHTROPE
Damascus, OR
March 23
CATERINA PICKED THE LOCK, then eased the back door open. Slipping inside, she pressed her back to the wall. She scanned the room, a kitchen—refrigerator, butcher’s block, wall oven, and stove. Quiet, except for the hum of the refrigerator. The smells of chili, hot peppers, and cucumber spiced the air.
Caterina crossed the faux-brick tiled floor to the doorway. A hallway stretched in both directions and a glimmer of light spilled from a doorway to the right. To the left, she saw light from the room at the end of the hall.
Caterina paused, tightened her grip on her Glock. The refrigerator clicked off and the sudden silence shocked her senses, like an unexpected zap of static electricity.
She touched the com bud in her ear.
“Here,” Beck said.
“Keep sharp,” she sub-vocced.
She had no doubt that Athena Wells had somehow known she and Beck were on the hill, watching. Had no doubt Athena Wells had also shut off the alarm system.
Time to find out why.
Rolling the tension from her shoulders, Caterina stepped into the hall and listened. To the left, she caught a faint whisper, like a breeze rustling through the trees late at night: a female voice. A low groan, deep and male, cut intermittently through the whispers.
Staying against the wall, Caterina followed the whispers to the lit room at the end of the hall. As she drew closer, she heard the steady beep of medical machinery. Gloria Wells’s room, then. Now she could just make out the words whispered over and over: shewalksonatightropeshewalksonatightropeshewalksonatightropeshewal ksonatight—
The whispers suddenly stopped and fear knocked an icy fist against Caterina’s sternum. Tightrope? Drawing in a deep breath, she centered herself and pushed her fear aside. She whirled into the room. She went low and to the left, swinging the Glock up as she moved.
Caterina scoped the scene in milliseconds—two beds, only one occupied, one at either side of the room, medical equipment between, a chair, a man sprawled on the floor, a blonde in cords and a blood-spattered lab coat at the foot of one bed, a spear clutched like a walking stick in one hand, a gun or Taser in the other.
Caterina halted, gun aimed at the blonde, and straightened. “Athena Wells?”
She shook pale curls back from her face and said, “Once. I’m Hades now.”
Lying in the bed, a thin and wasted older woman watched Caterina, her eyes narcotics-glazed but lucid. IV lines threaded into the back of one bruised hand. “Help me,” Gloria Wells whispered. “My daughter’s insane.”
Understatement, Caterina thought.
She swung her gun around to the man on the floor, aimed. Taser prongs protruded from Dr. Robert Wells’s chest and his head lolled to one side. Foam flecked his lips. His eyelids fluttered and Caterina caught a glimpse of rolled-up white. He groaned deep in his throat. A faint odor of piss and singed flesh drifted up from the floor. She wondered how many times Athena Wells had zapped her father.
“She’s come to kill you,” Athena said to her father. “But I won’t let her.”
Athena was wrong about that, but Caterina saw no point in telling her so.
Caterina’s finger tightened against the trigger. But instead of pulling it, she heard herself say, “How did you know we were here?”
“I knew the tightrope walker was here.”
Athena’s words hung in the air, charged and potent. Caterina’s skin prickled. She kept her finger against the trigger. She nodded at Wells. “Why?”
“I’m warming him up for Dante.”
“Explain that.”
“Xander went to Seattle to get Dante and bring him home. We’re going to give Father to him.”
Renata’s furious words hissed through Caterina’s memory—Kill that one slowly, very slowly—searing the strangeness of this encounter into her mind.
Wells had tortured and twisted an innocent child, a True Blood child, and murdered his mother. If anyone deserved a chance to kill this man, it was Dante Baptiste. If she could give him that, she might earn his trust. Then she could take him to Rome and her mother. Caterina’s pulse quickened.
She shifted her gaze to Athena. “When will your brother be back?”
Athena’s sea-green eyes seemed almost translucent in the light. “As soon as he has Dante.”
“Please help me,” Gloria Wells whispered again, her words clicking from a dry throat. “My husband…”
“Is a monster,” Caterina said, lowering the Glock to her side. But maybe the monster’s wife was a victim also. She moved to the bed and handed Gloria a glass of water from the nightstand. Gratitude glinted in Gloria’s eyes. Slipping the straw between her lips, she drank.
If Lyons didn’t return with Dante Baptiste, Caterina could still kill Wells and fulfill this part of her assignment. She felt the tightrope quivering beneath her feet.
She tucked the Glock back into her shoulder holster. She stepped behind Wells. Bending, she hooked her arms around his shoulders. She glanced at Athena. “Grab his legs. Let’s get him on the bed.”
Without a word, Athena leaned her spear against her mother’s bed and slid to her feet. She ghosted over to the closet, her dirty, bare feet soundless on the carpet. Pulling the accordion-style door open, she rummaged through its contents. A moment later, she turned around, a girlish smile lighting her face. She held up leather restraints.
“He used to put these on me back in the days when I was still his daughter.”
“We’ll use them now,” Caterina said.
Draping the restraints over her shoulder, Athena crouched and grabbed her father’s ankles. Between the two of them, they managed to wrestle Wells’s slack body up off the floor and onto the second bed. A few moments more and he was restrained at wrists and ankles. Caterina wiped sweat from her forehead.
“Do you know if your father received a package from Nevada a week or so ago?”
Athena glanced at her father, a dark smile twisting her lips. “Yes,” she said and walked into the hall.
Caterina followed Athena, listening to the sound of her renewed whispers, down the hall to the faint pool of light and the room beyond, a well-appointed office decorated with spears, shields and breastplates—most likely Hellenic, given Wells’s interests in all things Greek.
Athena led her to the desk. She bent over the computer and tapped her fingers across a couple of keys and clicked open a file. She stepped back. “There.”
Caterina took Athena’s place at the desk and glanced at the monitor. Black wings arched behind the back of the man—man? No, Fallen—who held Dante in his arms.
“Do you remember Genevieve Baptiste? My son’s mother?” the fallen angel said.
Knees weak, Caterina sank into the chair, her heart pounding hard against her ribs, her thoughts whirling.
At long last, she learned what had become of Johanna Moore.
And why Jon Bronlee had stepped in front of a semi.
24 THINGS FALLING APART
Seattle, WA—Vespers
March 23
VESPERS REEKED OF SPILLED beer, clove cigarettes, and patchouli. Heather grabbed Annie’s hand and held it tight as she steered her away from the gleaming brass and mahogany bar and into the sweat-soaked crowd jammed up against the rail in front of the stage.
Dogspit had finished their set and Heather was sorry she’d missed them. Annie had taken forever to get ready, changing clothes at least three times and fussing with her hair, but that was her little sister.
The crowd buzzed and chattered as people waited for Inferno to hit the stage. Goth princesses in vel
vet and black lace and fishnet stood side by side with cyber-Goths in PVC and fetish wear; neo-punks in Mohawks spiked in purple and red shoved against muscular misfits in leather and latex, their black-dyed devil locks hanging over sullen faces; a handful of nomads in road-weathered leathers stood off to the side, the black bird-vee tattooed on their right cheeks marking their clan as Raven.
Male and female, the crowd fought for places along the rail, anchoring themselves in place with double-handed grips and feet braced against the struts.
Heather felt underdressed in her Skechers, black jeans, and purple fishnet shirt pulled over a purple bra. Or overdressed, depending on who you were looking at, she thought as she sidled past a woman crammed into a black leather bustier and leather hot pants, flesh spilling over at both ends.
“Have you been to an Inferno show before?” Annie shouted above the drunken buzz. The pungent smell of pot curled into the air.
“No, first time I’ve seen them perform.” Heather worked an elbow path through the crowd to a spot at the right of the stage, near the nomads, and behind the first phalanx wedged up against the rail. “Dante said he’d heard WMD,” she shouted. “Said he thought you guys were among the fucking best.”
“Yeah? Cool.” A pleased smiled curved Annie’s lips. With heavy kohl around her eyes, glittering purple shadow on her lids and smeared across her lips, she was a sexy club beauty in her tight, black GRAVEYARD tank, black and purple crinoline skirts, fishnet stockings, and latex-strapped boots.
The crowd stirred as someone—tall, lean, and mustached—strode out onto the stage and waved for the lights to be lowered. The crescent moon tattoo beneath his eye glittered like sun-struck mica under the lights.
“Hey, darlin’!” Von shouted, striding to the edge of the stage. He crouched. “Whatcha doing in the crowd? Dante has y’all signed up as VIPs.”
Heads at the rail craned around to see who he was speaking to. Attention riveted on Heather. People whispered to each other.
“Hey, Von,” Heather called to the nomad. “I wanted to see the crowd.”