On Midnight Wings

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.