Woman’s voice (pure frost): Never presume to tell me what S would or wouldn’t do. Your job is to ensure that the orders Doctor Wells and I give are carried out in every detail. I suggest you stick to it.
Man’s voice (stiff): Ma’am.
Heels click-clickety-click across tile. A door thunks shut. A breath is released in a low hiss.
As though he hears the sound, S lifts his head and stares directly into the camera. Slashes of feral-red cut through his dark brown irises, and a searing blend of fury, grief, and guilt torches his gaze. Black tendrils of hair frame his breathtaking face. His Cupid’s bow lips curl into a mocking smile. He lifts a middle finger, then points it at the camera and carefully mouths: You’re next.
Man’s voice: Yeah, we’ll see, you little fucking psycho. We’ll just see.
9
ON THE RECEIVING END
HUNTSVILLE, AL,
THE LUCKY STAR MOTEL
The Night of March 27–28
SHADOW BRANCH FIELD AGENT Merri Goodnight keyed open the door and stepped into the motel room, cool air laden with the scent of rain and the spiced perfume of the clove cigarette she’d just smoked swirling in behind her.
She halted, her gaze caught by the image paused on her partner’s laptop—a teenaged Dante Baptiste in wet, blood-spattered scrubs promising violence with a scorching twist of a smile and a flipped-up middle finger.
A boy coiled and knotted with guilt, with a grief he didn’t dare voice or show—if he even knew how. A boy who Slept with a dead little girl’s plushie orca hidden beneath his pillow.
A shattered boy fighting to hold himself together.
“Goddamn, Em, are you looking at those files again?” Merri questioned. She eyed her partner’s tensed shoulders, his tight jaw. Listened to his hard pounding heart. Smelled anger peppering his anise and fresh ice scent. “Not so sure that’s healthy.”
“Truth, sistah,” Emmett Thibodaux replied, clicking the file closed and swiveling around in the rickety metal folding chair to face her. He rubbed his hands wearily over his beard-shadowed face. “What they did to him . . .” He shook his head.
“Truth, brothah. From the moment he was born.” Merri closed the door, twisting the deadbolt into place with a solid tunk, then rattling the chain into its slot. “The first time I viewed those files, I wanted to find the bastards behind the project and tear them apart, even if it meant I ended up heart-shot, staked, and burned. It would’ve been worth it. And not just because Baptiste is a True Blood, but because—”
“He was a kid,” Emmett finished quietly as she turned back around. “How can they justify a program like Bad Seed? Twisting children into sociopaths just to study them?”
“They did a helluva lot more than that,” Merri said, resting her black suede-jacketed back against the door. “They programmed Baptiste, so maybe they programmed others too.”
“And used them. Shit. Yeah. Roger that, partner.”
“And as for your question? There’s a way to justify almost anything, Em. Hell, you and me? We’ve both played parts in some dark and dirty cover-ups. It was our motherfucking job—even if we didn’t always like it.”
“True dat,” Emmett drawled, his Louisiana roots curling through his voice. “Cleaning up the messes other agencies created, making sure the truth—harmful truth—was hidden, altered, or erased in the country’s best interests. The minds of witnesses wiped. Lives destroyed. A necessary evil. So I kept telling myself, anyway.” He trailed a hand through his short, ginger-spice hair. “I’ve had more than a few sleepless nights thinking about the things I’d done and why. But you’re right; I always found ways to justify everything I did for the SB.”
“Funny how being on the receiving end changes your perspective,” Merri said.
“Don’t it just?”
“And Purcell . . . No wonder that asshole claimed to know so much about Baptiste. The motherfucker helped torture him.”
Seeing the perplexed frown on Emmett’s face, Merri felt twin stabs of guilt and sympathy.
Another wiped memory.
Emmett’s reddish brows knitted together. “Don’t remember that particular conversation,” he muttered. “Not even a goddamned tickle. Am I missing anything important—aside from the fact that Purcell is a sadistic sonuvabitch?”
“Nope. Sounds like you’ve got the key point.”
With a low sigh of frustration, Emmett nodded. “Okay then.” He relaxed against the back of his rust-pocked chair, stretched his long legs out in front of him, and crossed his ankles, one square-toed Dingo boot sliding over the other. Like a man checking for his wallet, he absently patted the Colt parked in the leather shoulder holster strapped over his white button-down shirt with its currently rolled-up sleeves.
Merri had always thought he looked like a pre-squint, pre-scowl Clint Eastwood in his rugged and handsome prime—all hard angles, cabled muscle, and lethal calm—with eyes the deep blue of a sunlit summer iris.
But right now Emmett looked exhausted. Neither of them had slept in the thirty-one hours since they’d fled HQ. Of course, given that Merri had stay-awake pills thrumming through her bloodstream, disrupting her natural rhythms but keeping Sleep at bay, she was in better shape than Emmett.
For now. She’d eventually pay a price for the motherfucking pills and the lost Sleep. But she was in better shape than Emmett in another way—her memory was intact.
Merri’s throat tightened. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like to learn that some of your memories had been stripped from your mind. That they’d been replaced with lies. And you couldn’t tell the difference.
Even now.
She remembered reading the note Emmett had slid under the door of her room in the SB’s visiting agents quarters—a tradition between them whenever they were on the road.
HAHAHA! By the time you wake up, I’ll already be debriefed and lounging in my spacious luxury room! You snooze, you lose!!
Expecting only a routine debriefing, Merri hadn’t given much thought to the fact that Emmett had been called in early, ahead of his Sleeping partner. She’d had other things on her mind—dark, disturbing, unholy things.
Before heading off for her own debriefing, Merri had gone to her partner’s room for an unauthorized chat about her theft of the files she’d downloaded from Prissy-Ass Purcell’s computer, files that revealed Dante Prejean/Baptiste’s true nature and his forced participation in the nightmare known as Project Bad Seed.
But Emmett no longer had any knowledge of Dante Prejean/Baptiste.
The motherfuckers had plucked the knowledge from his mind.
They’ve wiped your memory, Em. They’ve fucking wiped your memory.
No, that can’t be. Why would they? No, no.
I’m next. Part of the reason why is on that flash drive. Maybe what we discovered at the compound is another part of why.
The compound? Shit! What compound? What did we discover?
If that’s gone too, then I’m fucking right.
Merri had realized that not only had Emmett’s memories of Damascus and Baptiste been stolen, they’d been replaced with artificial memories like fairy changelings tucked into the cradle of his recall. Merri had also learned that the details of their original assignment, the one that had placed them on the road to Damascus—the brutal murder of FBI SAC Alberto Rodriguez by Dante Baptiste—had been altered in Emmett’s mind as well.
Deciding to bail on her own debriefing/mind-wiping session, she and Emmett had slipped unnoticed from HQ and escaped from Alexandria.
They’d blasted bat-outta-hell-style down I-81 South, looking for a cheap, skanky-ass motel that accepted cash and didn’t require ID, scrambling to get their stunned minds working long enough to formulate a now-what? plan. Then they’d stumbled across the sleazy broken-neon wonders of The Lucky Star Motel. Refuge by the hour.
“There’s something that’s been bothering me,” Emmett said, his voice reeling Merri up from her mental wallowing and dark reflections.
“Bugging the shit outta me, actually.”
Merri snorted and shook her head, her ponytail swinging against her shoulders. “Betrayal. Conspiracies. Memory-tampering. Imminent death. And something’s bothering you?” A smile tugged at her lips. “So spill, brothah. Give it to me.”
“All right. Here’s the million dollar question,” Emmett said. “How do we know our memories haven’t been wiped before? After each assignment?”
Those words hung like smoke in still air, goosing Merri’s pulse and icing her bones. A damned good question. “Well, goddamn.”
She stared at Emmett for a long moment, chewing on her lower lip, considering. Was it possible? Would her mиre de sang, Galiana, be able to detect alterations in her mind? She’d have to find out.
Finally, she shook her head. “I guess we don’t know.”
“Ain’t that all kinds of yippee-hooray?” Emmett grumbled, more Louisiana creeping into his voice. “Appreciate the reassurance, Goodnight.”
Merri managed a wink. “Don’t mention it, Thibodaux. Just doing my part.”
“I guess the question now is, what do we do about it?”
“We keep alive and out of reach.” Merri pushed away from the door and crossed to the twin bed farthest away from the window. She plopped down onto the worn quilt, her nose wrinkling at the funky-ass stink of spilled whiskey, sweat, semen, and—what was that stale tomato tang?—ketchup assaulting her nostrils. “Whoo!” she breathed.
The Lucky Star Motel apparently didn’t figure their Rooms-by-the-Hour-and-Half-Hour! guests would have much need for clean bedding—or furniture, for that matter—given the poor excuse of a chair that Emmett’s long, lean-muscled body was draped over.
“Stay alive. Check. Keep out of reach. Check,” Emmett drawled. “What’s our next move, sistah? Go underground? How do we stay off a grid that spans the entire goddamned country?”
“We don’t,” Merri said. “They’re going to find us sooner or later. But maybe we can take control of where and when. I say we find Dante Baptiste.”
Emmett straightened in his chair. “Why the hell would we do that?”
“They wiped him and Damascus from your mind for a reason. We’re going to find out why.”
Understanding glittered in Emmett’s iris-blue eyes. “The fallen angel Stonehenge you told me about and the cave they ringed.”
Merri nodded. Images flashed through her mind, images that the SB had strip-mined from Emmett’s memory, images she now carried for them both.
A cave’s dark mouth stretches across the ground, an opening into the earth’s heart . . . Gleaming white statues of winged beings in various postures ring the cave . . . And something moves down in the darkness, something pale and thick, humping along the stone like a gigantic slug, singing, Holy, holy, holy. . .
Blue sparks flicker like fireflies over the white stone, skip along the butter-smooth wings . . . From within the white stone a heart flutters, the sound slowing . . .
Not statues.
Merri senses power in each stone figure, power that tingles against her gloved fingertips. She remembers tales of Fallen magic, whispers of angelic battles.
Her mиre de sang’s voice whispered through her memory: I have a suspicion that events beyond the scope of mortals or even vampires might be unfolding.
“Baptiste was there, Em,” Merri said. “He saw what happened, him and Heather Wallace both. We can find out what they know. What they witnessed. Galiana thinks something big might be coming down, a war among the Fallen maybe.”
“Sounds lovely. Christ. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that fallen angels exist,” Emmett said, scrubbing a hand over his face.
“You managed to wrap your jambalaya-stewed mind around vampires just fine. After I proved the point with a very fine ass-kicking.”
“That’s йtouffйe-simmered, and I knew there was a reason I kept you around.”
“Because I keep your backwater mind propped open?”
A smile quirked up one corner of Emmett’s mouth. “That’d be it.”
“Thing is, we need to find Baptiste,” Merri said, leaning back on the bed and resting on her elbows. “Maybe he headed home to New Orleans, maybe not. Galiana’s looking into it.”
Emmett opened his mouth, but whatever he was about to say was preempted by sudden rhythmic thuds shaking the wall, accompanied by a woman’s bored and toneless moans—“Yeah, that’s it. Uh-huh. Oh. Oh. Oh.”—and enthusiastic male grunts.
Again. One of the hazards of refuge by the hour.
Emmett glanced at his watch. “I’m gonna bet twenty this one’s done and snoozing in five minutes.”
“I’ve got your twenty. Three minutes, then out the door.”
Three minutes later, the steady thumping slowed, then stopped. Two minutes after that a faint snore buzzed through the wall.
A triumphant grin parted Emmett’s lips. “Given that we need our cash, I’ll take an IOU.”
“Generous. Just add it to my tab.”
“Roger that.” Emmett’s expression sobered. “Okay, before I was so noisily interrupted, I was gonna say, even if we find Baptiste, what’s to stop him from just flat-out killing us?” He jerked his head at the laptop resting on the ink-graffitied desk. “You saw what Bad Seed did to him, what he was twisted into. Hell, we even studied his handiwork in Seattle.”
Rodriguez stares up at the glass-domed ceiling light with half-lidded, milky eyes. His throat looks shredded, savaged . . .
“I’ve got a feeling that what we saw in Seattle was a case of Baptiste being used, his programming triggered,” Merri said. “Someone wanted Rodriguez dead, and they used Baptiste to do it.”
“Could be, yeah. And that someone could still be controlling Baptiste.”
“True,” Merri sighed. “That’s what we’ll have to figure out when we find him.”
“Like I said, what’s to stop him from flat-out killing us?”
“We’ve got something he’s going to want,” Merri replied. “You saw what those motherfuckers did to his memory.”
Emmett nodded, face grim. “Bastards tore it apart—more than once.”
“We can give him his past. Contained in a flash drive.”
“Would you be doing this if he wasn’t a True Blood?” Emmett asked quietly.
Merri sat back up, planted her elbows on her knees, and rested her chin in the cup of her hands. She met her partner’s steady gaze. “I’d like to think so,” she replied, “but I don’t know. His being a True Blood is a major factor for me. So is the fact that he was just a baby, a toddler, a child handed over to fuckedup people with fucked-to-shit agendas—just to see what would happen.”
“I hear you. I think of my kids and . . .” A muscle jumped in Emmett’s jaw. “But Baptiste isn’t a kid anymore, he’s twenty-three. He’s a killer. He’s proven that time and again. Bad Seed succeeded with him.”
“Did they? I’m not so sure. He protected the other kids in his foster homes, he loved—” She stopped talking, lifted her head, and held up a just-a-second hand as her mиre de sang’s welcome sending brushed across her thoughts.
Galiana al-Qibtiyah greeted.
Galiana admitted.
Merri frowned.
sk—>
A mental snort resonated through Merri’s mind.
Galiana’s thoughts stilled, a mental sigh.
Galiana sent.
Merri felt a smile curve her lips.
For a second, Merri felt Galiana’s cool, satin-smooth arms wrapped around her, smelled her clean sweet oranges and almonds scent, then the sensations wisped away as her mиre de sang withdrew, their conversation finished.
“Baptiste is in New Orleans,” Merri said, shifting her attention outward and meeting Emmett’s gaze once more. “A car and essentials will be here soon.”
“How is Galiana, anyway?” Emmett asked. “Must be nice to speak to your family, let them know that you’re okay and where you are.”
Merri felt a double pinch of guilt and sympathy. “Look, if I couldn’t send to Galiana, she wouldn’t know any more than Mark does.”