“Prejean’s not your concern,” Underwood said, her gaze shifting back to Rutgers.
“He murdered one of my agents in cold blood.”
“Seems to me Prejean was merely the means your agents used to commit murder.” Underwood rose to her feet and smoothed the wrinkles from her slacks. “One SAC murdered. Another SAC and a much-lauded FBI hero implicated in that murder.” She looked at Rutgers from under her lashes. “Seems to me you need to tend to your own house.”
“Only because of Prejean.”
“We’ll deal with him,” Underwood said. “You tend to your agents.”
“Meaning Prejean will become just another shadow within the Shadow Branch? How appropriate.” A muscle tightened in Rutgers’s jaw. “I’d like Sheridan released ASAP and sent to the nearest hospital.”
“He will be as soon as we’ve finished with him.” Under-wood strolled to the door.
Rutgers pushed back her chair and stood. “I’ve already told you what his mission was. There’s absolutely no need—”
“Ah, but there is.” Underwood paused at the door, swiveled around, her warm and matronly facade back in place. “He needs to corroborate your statement. Needs to let us know where Lyons, Wallace, and Prejean disappeared to.”
Dread dropped cold pebbles into Rutgers’s belly. “Dis-appeared?”
“Something else that’s no longer your concern,” Under-wood replied. “I hope you don’t plan to sacrifice more good agents in your quest for petty revenge.”
“There’s the pot calling the kettle black.” Rutgers chuckled, the sound knotted and bitter. “How many people have died because of Bad Seed? Sacrificed in the name of curiosity?”
“Is that all you think the program was? A curiosity?” Underwood half turned as she grasped the doorknob. “By the way, I’ve informed your deputy director that we’ve severed all Bureau ties to Bad Seed. Bad Seed and its cleanup—and everything related to it—now belongs solely to the SB.”
The skin along Rutgers’s spine prickled. And everything related to it. “Sheridan had nothing to do with Bad Seed.”
“Wrong. You involved him.” Underwood opened the door and stepped over the threshold. “Now he’s ours. I suggest you start doing damage control.”
Rutgers stared at the Special Ops director, fury blurring her vision, scalding her cheeks. Just as she opened her mouth, Ellis’s voice cut in from her desk intercom.
“The deputy director is on the line, ma’am.”
Underwood offered a sympathetic smile. “Good luck, Monica.” Turning, she strode down the hallway in brisk, efficient strides.
“Ma’am?” Ellis’s intercom-tinny voice inquired.
“Yes,” Rutgers said, closing the door and her eyes. She rested her forehead against the cool frosted glass. “Finalize the press release about SA Heather Wallace, then send it to me.”
What was one more shitty lie in a whirling shit-blizzard of lies and half truths?
“Go ahead and put the deputy director through.” With a sigh, Rutgers opened her eyes and turned around.
The large-screen monitor on the north wall flickered to life. Deputy Director Phil Beckett’s angular face appeared, the deep blue, gold-edged FBI seal on the wall behind and just above him. Bannered beneath the emblem’s red stripes: Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity.
It represented the Bureau’s idealistic heart, a dream bold and golden and brimming with hope for each agent, each division.
A dream long lost.
“Monica?” The DD’s voice rumbled up from the comcon monitor. Far from pleased. It matched his tight-jawed expression.
“Here, sir.”
RUTGERS SANK INTO HER chair and rubbed her temples. Her conversation with Beckett had lasted only five minutes, five excruciating minutes. In her favor was the fact that the DD was unaware that she’d sent Sheridan to kill Prejean. Beckett believed that she’d provoked the SB by keeping a tail on Prejean. A tail who’d allowed himself to be caught.
Jesus, Monica, couldn’t you have at least sent a competent agent?
He’s one of my best. I suspect he was unlucky, not incompetent.
I’ll see what I can do to get your man released or at least get one of us admitted into his debriefing.
I appreciate that, Phil.
As far as you’re concerned, Bad Seed no longer exists. Stay the hell out of Underwood’s business. In fact, keep as far from the Shadow Branch as possible.
Believe me, I’d like nothing more.
If you even feel the urge to pull another stunt like this, just tender your resignation and do it as a private citizen because you’ll be done here.
Understood.
Rutgers’s pulse pounded in her aching temples. Nothing had been accomplished. Sheridan was still wounded and in SB hands. And, despite Beckett’s words, likely to remain that way. And she’d been assigned to do damage control. The old cover-your-ass tango.
Rising to her feet, Rutgers went to the beverage cart tucked in the corner, and brewed a cup of vanilla tea. When she returned to her desk, resting her plain lavender mug on a small cup warmer, she glanced at her monitor. The file she’d requested was waiting in her message queue.
Clicking it open, she reviewed the press release that would destroy SA Heather Wallace’s career. And as collateral damage? The career of her father, the renowned and respected FBI forensic expert, SA James William Wallace.
Dammit, I warned her.
As Rutgers read the words she’d composed just a week earlier, she wished that Heather Wallace had never met Dante Prejean or that she had failed to save Prejean from the psycho hunting him.
But most of all, she wished Heather Wallace had listened.
Wallace had been one of the Bureau’s best, her desire to serve the cause of justice undimmed and untarnished, despite six years of working in the criminal investigative division; despite six years of studying the bodies of the brutally murdered.
I want to be a voice for the dead, Wallace had stated on her admissions application. And for six years, she’d been exactly that—a voice for those who’d had their own stolen. For six years, she’d spoken for them: That’s the person who killed me.
Then she’d thrown everything away for a goddamned vampire.
Rutgers took a sip of tea, savoring the hint of vanilla creaminess flavoring the dark tea. Time to quit stalling.
As she punched the intercom, she realized it wasn’t tension knotting the muscles in her chest; it was sorrow. The lovely, intelligent, dedicated agent she’d known as Heather Wallace was dead. Had died the moment she’d first set eyes on Dante Prejean.
Rutgers knew in that moment that she’d ignore Beckett’s orders. That she’d never give up her quest to see beautiful, soul-stealing Dante Prejean dead.
“Ma’am?” Ellis asked.
“Send out the release. Everywhere—the usual drill. Then get me James Wallace at the West Coast lab on the line.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Rutgers owed it to Wallace to let him know what was coming down the pike, courtesy of his daughter. And let him know who to call if Heather should happen to contact him.
Rutgers’s gaze locked on the press release headline: TRAGIC MENTAL ILLNESS CLAIMS FBI STAR PROFILER.
8
IN THE SECOND BED
OUTSIDE DAMASCUS, OR
THE HAPPY BEAVER MOTEL
March 25
THE BULLET SLAMMED INTO the Morningstar’s chest, the silence he’d woven around himself swallowing the gun’s retort. He staggered back a step. Pain, hot and pulsing, spiked out from the wound beneath his collarbone.
The dark-haired woman crumpled to the floor, her fall silent, but the Morningstar felt the thudding vibration through the soles of his sandals. Her hair fanned over her face.
The other female, the lovely redhead who’d held the creawdwr in her arms on the hill as she’d drugged him, slumped over onto the bed, her pistol tumbling onto the blankets just beyond the reach of her fingers.
Bl
ood trickled along the Morningstar’s skin down to his belly. His body ejected the bullet fragments as the wound healed. The pain faded. His illusion no longer needed, he unthreaded it, then turned and closed the door.
Sound rushed in like water through a broken dam. Gulls cried outside. A toilet flushed in another room, water gurgling through the pipes. And in this room he heard the music of breathing and intertwined heart rhythms—the slow and steady drumbeats of vampire hearts and the mortals’ dancing patter.
Mingled odors layered the air—lilac and wet clothes, wild mint and adrenaline, burning leaves and motor oil. But a faint, sour-milk odor lurked underneath—mildew, mortal taint.
The Morningstar swiveled around and scanned the room. In the first bed, the redhead and the female mortal with the blue/purple/black twilight-shaded hair, in the second bed …
The Morningstar stepped over the dark-haired woman’s body, pausing long enough to kick her gun out of reach, then walked over to the second bed. Two figures slept, blankets covering their heads. He bent, grasped the comforter’s edge, and pulled it down.
The Morningstar’s breath caught in his throat.
Dante’s beauty gleamed in the gloom like moonlight on a winter-iced lake.
Pale, pale skin. Thick, black lashes almost hiding the blue shadows smudged beneath his eyes. Luscious lips. Hair as black as a starless night. Five silver hoops rimmed each ear, glinting in the darkness as though fire-burnished. But blood trickled from Dante’s nose and from one ear.
The severed bond had injured Dante.
The Morningstar stared, pulse pounding. The creawdwr’s scent—crisp autumn leaves and frost, the smell of his blood—
A mixed-blood Maker. True Blood—Fola Fior—and Elohim.
The Morningstar’s thoughts scattered at the impossibility.
“Freeze, motherfucker!”
The Morningstar blinked. Speaking of impossibilities … He lifted his head. The woman with the multicolored hair knelt on the bed in a T-shirt and flannel pants beside the unconscious redhead, gun clasped in both white-knuckled hands.
“Whatever you did to my sister and what’s-her-name, fix it. Now!”
“You shouldn’t be awake,” the Morningstar said, tilting his head. Even if she’d been asleep when he’d uttered his command, the spell should’ve bound her and kept her still.
“Fix it,” she repeated, voice strained. “Now!”
The Morningstar straightened, weaving another illusion around him. He drew in breath to craft another Word, but something hard thwipped into his arm, near the shoulder. Pain burned along his nerves down to his fingers.
He glanced at the blood-oozing wound. He’d been shot. Again. He blew air out his nostrils, irritated. Simple reflex on the mortal’s part? Or did she still see him? He shifted his gaze to the woman.
“Freeze means don’t move, asshole,” she said. The gun shook in her hands.
The Morningstar’s wings snapped out behind him like a sail catching the wind, the tips nearly scraping the walls and ceiling of the small room.
“Fuck,” the mortal whispered.
Ah. She could still see him. Blind to his illusions and deaf to his Word. Interesting. Who was this pretty little mortal with the twilight-colored hair?
Before the woman had time to blink, the Morningstar folded his wings behind him and vaulted the bed, landing in front of her. He wrenched the gun from her hands. She gasped in pain. He tossed the gun across the room and it hit the wall with a dull thud. Seizing her by the biceps, he yanked her off the bed.
The Morningstar allowed his illusion—useless, apparently, where she was concerned—to scatter like a pile of windblown leaves. The woman kicked and twisted and squirmed, and he found himself holding her at arm’s length as if she were a hooded and spitting cobra.
She barbed the air with a string of prickly and creative invective. He tried to picture some of the combinations she suggested—cocksucking motherfucker, for one—and felt his imagination couldn’t do her verbal creativity justice.
“Behave,” he said, barely resisting the urge to shake her until her brain pulped inside her skull. “Or I’ll never allow the others to awaken.”
“Motherfucker,” the woman spat, but she quit fighting. Her muscles quivered underneath his fingers, taut and ready to go again. Musky adrenaline and rancid fear seeped from her skin, mingling with the sweet scent of coconut in her hair.
The Morningstar lowered her to the floor, but kept his fingers locked around her arms. “I admire your devotion to the Maker,” he said.
The woman’s brow furrowed. “The Maker? What the hell’s— Oh. You mean Gorgeous-But-Deadly, am I right? Dante?” She met his gaze, her sky blue eyes almost eclipsed by their pupils. “Take him,” she whispered. “Just take him and go.”
9
BENEATH ANCIENT SKIES
ROME, ITALY
March 25
RENATA ALESSA CORTINI STEERED her Vespa along the narrow cobblestone streets, weaving almost without thought around pedestrians, tour buses festooned in bright colors and carnival lights, cars, scooter clusters, and compact delivery vans. Her black D&G sunglasses protected her eyes from headlight glare.
Giovanni’s hands rested on her hips, a light touch, and warm. He still hadn’t said anything. She wondered if he thought she was joking. In his place, she would’ve thought so, might’ve laughed, might’ve told him to stop wasting her time.
Might’ve asked for more stories and dreams and fancies.
He told such wonderful tales.
She did not.
In her heart of hearts, Renata loved fairy tales and mist-woven myths, had from the first night she’d curled warm and blood-fed in her blacksmith père de sang’s thick-muscled arms as he told her stories of magical True Bloods—the Fola Fior—and of the mysterious Elohim.
Stories she’d passed on to her little Caterina as bedtime tales.
Ah, but now her little love, her strong and practical daughter, her graceful death-dealing ballerina, had returned the favor and gifted Renata with words magic-dusted and glimmering with endless possibilities, words wrapped in sharp, crisp truth.
The Bloodline still holds, Mama, and a myth from the ancient past now walks the world. I’ve seen him.
Fallen and True Blood, cara mia? How is it we never knew of his existence?
Because monsters seized him the moment he was born and hid him among even more twisted monsters who fed upon his beauty and tried to shatter his spirit.
And did the monsters succeed?
No, I think they failed. I was given to him as a meal. He could’ve drained me, let me die. He didn’t—even though he was still hungry, still burning, still needing. He asked my name instead and left me to return to you. But he’s hurt, Mama, and damaged. And he’s being hunted.
Let me tend to that, cara mia. You tend to the things you do so well, mia ballerina scura. Serve Dante Baptiste heart and soul. Guide him true. Win his trust.
Renata glided the scooter between two white delivery vans with only inches to spare on either side. Their drivers, berating one another as incompetent, unworthy to even spit-shine the other’s boots, paused in their mutual insultathon long enough to give Renata an appreciative once-over.
“Ritorna, bella,” one of them called after her. “Una bella donna merita un uomo, non un ragazzo.”
“Ciò è allineare!” Giovanni shouted. “Sapere di c’è ne?”
Renata laughed. “You put yourself down too with that one.”
“Worth it.”
“Perhaps you are just a boy, and a silly boy at that.”
“I haven’t been a boy in centuries.” Giovanni’s fingers tightened on her hips.
“Perhaps.”
Giovanni sent.
Tourists in straw hats, fingering the cameras dangling around their necks like rosary beads, stared at her, shaded faces startled, whenever she buzzed past with a polite tap of her horn. Roma
ns never even looked up, stepping aside instinctively.
The warm evening air fluttered her hair, chiming through her silver and amber earrings, and lacing the delicious smells of herbed fish, roasted tomatoes, and garlic through her curls.
Renata lifted her shoulder in a half shrug.
Silence. Giovanni’s finger tapped lightly against Renata’s hip as he mulled over this latest bit of information. Careful, her fils de sang, each thought viewed from all sides and angles like a jeweler peering at an unpolished gem. She tamped down her impatience and let him think.
As she zipped her scooter into the tourist-thronged Piazza di Spagna, she eased off the throttle and guided it into a parking lot on the east end of the piazza. Parking between two smart cars, she switched off the engine.
“She is mortal, our Caterina,” Giovanni said, his lips close to her ear, his breath warm. “Perhaps she was tricked, an illusion woven into her mind.” His hands slid away from her hips. “If the boy really is True Blood, he might be capable of such a thing.”
“Might be, sì, but why would he bother?” Renata stepped off her scooter, smoothing the gauzy violet bohemian-style smock she wore belted at the waist over her black leggings. Her gaze fixed on Giovanni. “He’d been drugged and tortured for hours by deluded mortals hoping to use him.” Fury burned through her, hot and deadly, a summer sun at high noon. “He was exhausted.”
“And you know what it takes to exhaust a True Blood, sì?”
Renata stretched her five-two frame erect and lifted her chin. “Perhaps I do.”
Still lounging on her scooter, Giovanni regarded her with light-filled hazel eyes. His short, tousled, burgundy-dyed locks highlighted his handsome face with its long Roman nose. His lips curved into a wicked smile.
“Perhaps you do at that, bella.”