On Midnight Wings

Send it below or fucking use it.

Problem was, below was full to the brim and hands crawling with wasps were locked around his ankles, fingers digging in to yank him down again.

Underneath the kicking and hammering and muffled yells, he heard someone singing—hey, that’s one of my songs—voice husky and low and simmering with a barely contained rage. A voice he recognized.

“I am what you made me / no matter where you hide / where you run / I will find you / I am what you made me / nothing can stop me / I have nothing left to lose / I’m coming for you . . .”

Purcell.

The SB and the FBI.

The psychotic assholes locked behind those doors.

The motherfucking world.

They have it coming in fucking spades, yeah?

Letting the song trail away, unfinished, Dante whispered, “Oui, for true.”

Then let’s give it to them.

Dante opened his eyes and his heart jumped into his throat. He was no longer leaning against the wall. Instead, he stood in the wide-open doorway of an inmate’s room, his blood-grimed fingertips resting on the door’s keypad. He hadn’t realized that he’d even moved, let alone keyed open the door.

“Shit,” he breathed, jerking his hand away from the keypad.

Light from the corridor spilled into the room, revealing someone curled on the stark and narrow bed in the white-padded room’s center. Someone with golden curls spiraling to her straitjacketed waist. The mattress creaked as she struggled to sit up. She looked at Dante, blinking in the light, her pale face uncertain, her brown eyes drug-dilated.

Dante’s breath caught in his throat, his stunned heart pulsing hard and fast.

Fire scorches her lungs. Blackens her skin. Devours her with relentless teeth.

“Simone?” he whispered.

“What did you say? Who . . . who are you?” she asked in a tremulous voice, a voice deeper than her own had ever been. Somehow masculine. But that was okay. She was alive. And that was all that mattered.

Wrong. This is all wrong. She burned. You felt her die. Wake the fuck up.

Maybe she didn’t. Maybe someone stole her before it was too late.

You fucking felt her die.

But Von’s words, spoken in the graveyard hush of St. Louis No. 3, filled Dante’s mind: A spoken thing or wished-hard thing takes a shape within the heart.

“Takes shape,” Dante continued aloud. “Becomes real.”

“Who are you?” Maybe-Simone asked again. “What was going on out there?”

Feeling light-headed, like the floor was dropping away from beneath his feet, Dante stepped into the room. A high-pitched buzzing filled his ears. The room wheeled, spinning like a merry-go-round caught in a Category 5 blow-down.

Dante snapped his eyes shut. Steadied himself with a hand to the padded wall and waited for the gut-wrenching dizziness to pass. Once it had and once the floor was motionless beneath his socked feet again, he opened his eyes.

And found himself standing in front of a tomb in the silent heart of St. Louis No. 3. But this St. Louis was whole and intact, not the shattered ruin he still needed to set right.

How did I get here?

Like stove-warmed taffy, reality and dreams stretched beyond their normal shapes and boundaries and merged. Took a new shape within his heart.

Shadows clung to the tomb’s moon-washed marble like black-leafed ivy. Beneath the sweet perfume of graveyard flowers and cherry blossoms, Dante caught a whiff of bones moldering behind old marble, of ice and cold stone and fallow hearts.

From within the tomb’s dank depths, something stirred. He heard the dusty grit of time, of ashes and bone, beneath sandal soles. Then: “I’ve missed you, cher.”

Dante’s breath caught rough at the sound of that voice—Cajun-musical and wistful, it pierced his heart like a knife.

Simone appeared in the tomb’s open mouth, darkness sluicing away from her like black water. She knelt upon the threshold in fire-crisped tank top and cut-offs, hair tumbling over her shoulders in long, golden spirals that framed her pale, soot-streaked face in luminous curls. Her magnolia scent was scorched and blackened, all sweetness seared away.

Dante took another step forward, then dropped to his knees on the stone walk in front of her. “Miss you too.” He started to reach for her hair, but before his fingers could so much as graze a silken strand, he stopped, then knotted his hands into fists atop his leather-clad thighs. He couldn’t trust himself.

Didn’t dare.

Down in the wasp-droning shattered depths, someone laughed.