“Which is nothing,” Emmett growled. He jumped to his feet and started pacing. “Mark doesn’t know what’s going on. Doesn’t know I ain’t coming home any time soon. Doesn’t know I’d like him to pack the kids up and go stay with my folks for a while.”
“Em, no. If Mark suddenly ups and takes off, the SB will know you’re in contact with him. He’ll be safer if he knows nothing. Your house landline will be tapped and his cell phone will be monitored.” Merri shook her head. “No contact. Let the SB think we’ve gone completely underground.”
“Shit, I don’t know if I can do that. Leave him and the kids high and dry with no idea what’s happened. Or what danger they might be in.”
“Mark’s in no danger,” Merri said, watching her partner figure-eight the room. “They’ll just keep surveillance on him and the kids and wait for you to make contact.”
Emmett stopped pacing. He looked at Merri. “And what happens when they get tired of waiting?”
“We’ll worry about that when and if.”
Emmett shook his head and folded his arms over his chest. “Not good enough, Merri. Not by half. You don’t have a partner or kids. You don’t know—”
Merri moved, blurring off the bed and onto her booted feet. She poked a finger into Emmett’s chest, cutting off his words. He looked down at her from his lordly six-three, face startled.
“How the hell would you know, Thibodaux?” she demanded, voice harsh. “I was mortal once. A slave, remember? Nothing belonged to us.” Resurrected wails echoed through her memory, cries she thought she’d buried two centuries ago.
Mama! Mama! Mama! MAAAAMAAAA . . . !
Hold on, baby. Mama’s comin’. Give me my child! Master, please!
Throat so tight, she could barely breathe, Merri gave Emmett’s chest another hard jab. He staggered back a step. “You have no motherfucking idea what I’ve been forced to give up. You think you’re the only one? You can just go to hell, Emmett Thibodaux.”
“Aw, Christ.” Emmett’s strong arms wrapped around Merri and folded her into a tight embrace. His heart pulsed hard and fast beneath her cheek. She breathed in his sharp anise-over-ice scent. “I’m an idiot, Merri,” he murmured.
“No argument here.”
“I’m truly sorry—”
“Forget it,” Merri replied, stepping back and tilting her head back to meet her partner’s shadowed gaze. “What you need to remember is that your family will be in very real danger if you contact them in any way. Trust me on that.”
Emmett released his breath in a long, slow exhale, then nodded. “I’ve trusted you every step of the way, I ain’t about to quit now.” His hands slid up from their embrace to squeeze her shoulders once before releasing her. “New Orleans, huh? So we’re gonna visit the bad mofo on his own turf?”
“The bad and beautiful mofo.”
A smile flickered across Emmett’s lips. “Truth, sistah.”
Merri tilted her head and listened as a car pulled into the motel’s drive, tires splashing through rain puddles on the blacktop, then parked; listened to its door creak open. “Wyatt’s here,” she said, a bare second ahead of the quiet knock on the door.
Emmett whipped his Colt from its holster, his karate-trained instincts sharp as a razor-edged switchblade, his finger curled around the trigger. “Let’s be positive,” he murmured.
On the other side of the door, Merri heard the strong, slow rhythm of a vampire heart, felt his banked and controlled energy. Striding to the door, she unchained and unlocked it, then eased it open.
“Hey,” Wyatt greeted, his eyes gleaming with streetlight. A smile curved his lips, giving his handsome face with its hazel eyes and coffee-brown curls a look of mischief. “Got a care package for y’all.”
“Hey back, and thanks.”
“Got something special just for you too, sugar,” Wyatt drawled, his voice all smooth Savannah charm.
Merri drew in a deep breath of rain-chilled air laced with the sharp snap of spearmint, the latter Wyatt’s scent, and allowed her hunger to unwind in anticipation. “Bagged?” she asked.
Wyatt’s mischievous smile deepened, dimpled his cheeks. “Nah. Volunteer.”
“I’ll be right out,” Merri said.
“All right.” Glancing past her and into the room, Wyatt nodded, then added an amiable, “Emmett.”
“Wyatt. Easy drive?” Emmett lowered his Colt.
“Yup. All my drives been easy since I gave up riding.”
Emmett cocked an eyebrow. “Only horses, I hope.”
Wyatt laughed. “Hell, yeah. Only horses.” Chuckling, he turned and walked back to the car, a rain-glistening SUV.
Merri swiveled around to face her partner. “I’ll be back in a few,” she said. She glanced at the grease-spotted bag sitting beside his laptop. The bag was still rolled shut. She frowned. “It doesn’t look like you ever touched your Quarter Pounder and fries.”
“Nope,” Emmett said, reholstering his gun, then slouching into the metal folding chair again. He looked at the laptop. “Kinda lost my appetite.”
“I told you to eat before you looked at the Bad Seed flash drive, Em.”
“You did,” Emmett said. “Wish to hell I’d listened.” He trailed both hands through his hair. “You believe in karma, Merri?”
“To some extent, yeah. But I’ve lived long enough to know that some people never get what they have coming—good or bad.”
“I’ve been wondering if losing those memories was a little bit of karma.”
Merri shook her head. “You never wiped anyone’s memory, so how could it be?”
“I’m responsible for people getting their minds scrubbed.”
“No, we are. Everything we’ve done, we’ve done together. And that means any karma earned would hit us both,” Merri said. “What happened to you wasn’t karma, it was betrayal.”
Emmett looked unconvinced, but he waved her out the door. “Go on with your bad self. I’m good. Maybe I’ll see if I can get a little shut-eye before we hit the road.”
“Good. You could use it, partner,” Merri said, slipping outside. But as she turned to pull the door shut, she saw Emmett awaken his laptop monitor and click open the Bad Seed file again.
Shaking her head, Merri quietly shut the door.
10
AIN’T STAYING
GEHENNA,
THE ROYAL AERIE
The Night of March 27–28
THE TRUMPET BLAST FADED, rumbling across the horizon like long-rolling thunder.
Fear traced an icy hand down Heather’s spine. Bible stories full of lion-faced angels, flaming swords, pillars of salt, and random fiery destruction wheeled through her memory, along with the image of the small serpentine creatures that had fluttered around Dante, De Noir, and the Morningstar in the sulfur-reeking pit, the soft orange glow of embers twinkling from scales and their impossible and delicate dragonfly wings.
Gehenna. Fallen angels. Little winged pit-demons.
A strange and beautiful place. A world both alien and Sunday-school familiar.
Heart pounding, Heather stared into a night sky that looked scraped thin, a threadbare black curtain pocked with pale stars. Even the undulating aurora borealis at its center seemed dimmed, its colors mere ghosts of blue, purple, and green.
After enduring thousands of years without an infusion of energy from a creawdwr, Gehenna is fading away. Without you . . . Gehenna will vanish.
Even though she wondered how such a thing could be possible, she sensed the truth behind the Morningstar’s words. Gehenna felt somehow off to her, an orange just beginning to go soft underneath the skin.
Heather’s fingers white-knuckled around the Browning’s grip. After a wait spanning millennia, the Fallen finally had a new Maker—Dante. Whether he liked it or not. Whether he wanted it or not. And the last thing he needed was someone else determined to control him, manipulate him, use him. Someone else to deny him the right to live his own life.
Another trumpet blast
pealed through the night. A massive wheel of light appeared in the sky above them, blotting out the aurora borealis’s vivid bands of color and bleaching the night with spinning spokes of brilliant white radiance.
Icy tendrils of fear twisted through Heather’s insides. Her pulse pounded hard through her veins. What is that? Squinting against the blazing light display, she shaded her eyes with the edge of her hand.
The Morningstar muttered something under his breath in a musical language Heather didn’t understand, a language she’d heard spoken by the Fallen who’d stood beside her at the pit’s mouth, then he added, “Show-offs.”
“Is that them?” she asked, dropping her gaze from the blazing sky. “The Seven?”
“Yes, but not all of them,” De Noir answered, his voice coming from behind her.
“Two seem to be absent, and I know at least one was turned to stone down in Damascus,” the Morningstar said, shading his face with the edge of one white wing.
“Lilith,” De Noir murmured.
The Morningstar nodded. “Yes.”
A memory sparked in Heather’s mind.
“Liar,” Dante whispers. “Lucien warned me . . .”
A rope of blue fire snakes around the black-haired woman. Her wings curve forward and she closes her eyes, her hands clenched in her lap. Caught within glimmering blue coils, she morphs from flesh to stone, her long hair a white curtain framing her bowed head.
The Morningstar sauntered to the ivy and jasmine-draped balustrade, pretending it wasn’t a retreat, but Heather saw how he kept glancing at Dante’s blue-lit hands and knew better. Not that she blamed him. But she also knew that distance alone didn’t equal safety.
Blue rays spike into the fleeing Fallen, one by one. And turn them to stone.
“Christ.” Dante fumbled a pair of blood-flecked and battered sunglasses free from his metal-studded belt, sliding them on over his eyes. “What the fuck is that?”
“Think of it as the Seven’s version of a stretch limo—all dazzle and bling,” the Morningstar replied. “Uriel’s work. And a display no doubt meant to impress our new creawdwr.”
“Yeah, ain’t feelin’ it.” Dante’s left hand blurred through a mock jack-off session.
But despite his dry tone, Heather heard strain beneath Dante’s drawled words.
Blue flames crackled around Dante’s hands. Tension and pain drew his gorgeous features tight. Sweat glistened on his forehead and blood still trickled from his nose, stark against his white skin.
Von’s words whispered through Heather’s memory.
I think he’s had all he can take, doll. Heart and mind. If I knew a way to hide him from the world until he could regain his balance, until he had the chance to face his past on his own terms and reconcile himself to it . . .
But chance and time were working against them. Again.
Glancing across the light-and-shadow-striped terrace to the arched entry leading back inside the Royal Aerie, Heather mentally measured the distance. The fallen angels gathered on the terrace had silently melted away from Dante and his glowing hands like winter frost in the path of a rolling red-embered coal, their handsome faces wary, leaving the way clear.
Heather touched Dante’s shoulder, careful to avoid his flame-swallowed hands and their cool, transforming fire. “Your gate. I think we can still make it.”
“Did you say his gate?” De Noir questioned.
“Your son created a gate of his own,” the Morningstar said.
Considering that Dante had literally punched his way into another world, transforming a tomb into a flame-embered doorway, and destroying a cemetery with a shock wave of blue light in the process—a fact she still struggled to wrap her mind around—Heather felt that created a gate was one hell of an inadequate description.
“I severed our bond to keep you safe, to keep you out of Fallen hands,” De Noir said slowly, staring at his son. Despair lined his face. “But I drew you straight to Gehenna instead. A gate of his own . . .”
“I had to find you,” Dante said softly. “Whatever it took.” His shaded gaze shifted to the arched entry. “You and Lucien get the hell outta here, catin, and head home. I’ll catch up. Tell Von—”
Anger prickled cold and hollow in the pit of Heather’s belly. “Screw that. I don’t know about De Noir, but I’m going to be standing right here beside you. You ditched me earlier tonight in that fight with Mauvais’s nightkind. You’re not doing it again.”
“I didn’t ditch you, dammit. I wanted to keep you outta their fucking hands.”
“You could’ve followed me over that cemetery gate.”
“Aw, shit,” Dante muttered, trailing both hands in frustration through his hair. Tiny flames skipped along his black tresses like blue fireflies in the wake of his pale fingers. “Now? We’re going to fucking discuss this now?”
Heather sucked in a deep breath and looked up. The incandescent wheel circled ever closer, strobing the terrace and its occupants with alternating bands of dark-side-of-the-moon shadow and blinding light.
“No, we’re not. Not now,” Heather admitted, voice tight. “But get this through your head—I’m not leaving your side.”
“And you call me pigheaded?”
“By all that’s holy, are you both mad?” De Noir growled, voice a deep rumble. He stepped in front of Dante, a furious light burning in his black eyes, his wings flexing. “You can’t stay. They will chain you up—heart, mind, and soul. I’ll carry you out if I have to. Both of you!”
Heather liked that idea. She had no objections to De Noir tossing Dante over his brawny shoulder and carting him out of Gehenna—if necessary. But . . .
She noticed that the wounds in each of De Noir’s pectoral muscles were only half-healed—pink and raw and ringed with dried blood—despite his Fallen regenerative abilities, and he looked drained, almost nightkind-pale. She had a feeling his flight from the pit to the terrace had used up all of his strength and that he’d be lucky if he could walk himself out of Gehenna.
“I ain’t running, Lucien. Ain’t hiding. And you still ain’t got no say in my . . .” Dante’s words trailed off as if he’d suddenly lost his train of thought.
Pain stabbed into Heather’s mind, a red-hot splinter burning through the filter of Dante’s exhausted, weakening shields. She caught a glimpse of a steel hook hanging from the ceiling of a blood-splashed room. Her heart constricted.
I know this. I saw it on the Bad Seed disk.
The room where Chloe had died. Where Moore had ordered Dante—twelve or thirteen years old and savage with grief—strapped into a nightkind-proof straitjacket and hoisted up by his chain-wrapped ankles to hang upside-down above the little girl’s body.
White light strobed at the edges of Heather’s vision, then vanished, taking the pain and nightmarish peek into Dante’s past along with it. She stumbled forward a step and sucked in a deep breath of ozone-charged air.
“Fuck,” Dante whispered. He touched shaking fingers to his left temple. “Focus, goddammit. Focus.”
Dread dropped like a cold brick into Heather’s belly. How could he focus past pain that intense? How could he even keep on his feet? He was hurting and exhausted—on all levels.
“Stay now, Baptiste. Stay with me.” She grabbed him by both biceps, the muscles hard as steel under her fingers. Fevered heat baked through his cotton and mesh sleeves and into her palms. “Stay here.”
A shudder traveled the length of Dante’s body, his muscles knotting, his breath catching in his throat. “J’su ici, chйrie,” he said, voice ragged.
Rotating light from the wheel above strobed incandescent along the lenses of Dante’s sunglasses. The thunderstorm smell of ozone crackled through the air. Heather’s scalp prickled as her hair started to lift.
Time was running out.
“Your control is slipping, child. You can’t stay,” De Noir said, dark brows knitted together. “Where’s your gate?”
Dante nodded at the arched doorway. “Inside. But I ain
’t—”
“He’s right, you know,” Heather said, releasing her hold on Dante’s arms. “You’re in no shape to face anyone down, let alone a bunch of ambitious Fallen determined to bind you.”
A wry smile tilted Dante’s lips. “Von said the same thing.”
“Smart man, that nomad,” Heather said. “You should listen to him. Look, I get why you want to face them, I do, but you’re exhausted. This isn’t the time to make a stand. There’s no shame in retreating long enough to regain your strength, your focus—”
The searing white light disappeared. The lenses of Dante’s shades went dark.
Heather blinked rapidly in the sudden darkness, trying to clear her vision of the white, orange, and black retinal ghosts haunting it. Behind her, she heard a rush of wings, the soft slide of silk against flesh, the scuff of sandals upon marble.
“Shit,” she sighed. “They’re here, aren’t they?”
“Yup.” Dante wiped blood from his nose with a swipe of his mesh sleeve as he eyed the Seven over her shoulder. “Definitely not a Christian rock band.”
“Whatever you do, don’t give the Morningstar one gram of trust,” De Noir said, voice pitched just above a whisper. “And don’t let any of them mark you with their blood.” He pulled his healing body erect, rolled back his tight-muscled shoulders. His hair rippled between his wings like a banner of black silk.
“Je t’entends.”
Mark you with their blood. A chill traced the length of Heather’s spine as she recalled what the Morningstar had said in the cemetery about De Noir. Gabriel used a blood-spell to bind him to Gehenna’s fate.
Dante slid his shades to the top of his head. He looked at Heather from beneath his black lashes, his dilated pupils rimmed with molten-gold. Blue light and dark emotion flickered in their depths. Shadows bruised the skin beneath them. “Let’s do this and go home, catin.”
“Sounds good to me.” Heather tightened her grip on the Browning. “It’s almost our bedtime, anyway,” she added with a full-of-promise wink.
Dante laughed, and some of the tension drained from his face and shoulders, just as Heather had hoped. “Then we’d better hurry.”