On Midnight Wings

I suppose. Which reminds me, Silver-boy, what’s your real name, anyway?

What was that? Couldn’t hear you. You’re breaking up . . .

“Do you know if Silver has heard anything from De Noir yet?”

“Nothing so far,” Annie replied. “We figure he’s still at Fallen Central. But don’t worry, as soon as the big guy makes contact, we’ll make sure he knows right where you are.”

“Thanks,” Heather said. “Keep safe, okay? I’ll call as soon as I can.”

“I wish you’d fucking wait for De Noir, but I know you won’t,” Annie said. “So you keep fucking safe too, hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” Heather replied, her throat suddenly tight. Ending the call, she switched off the cell and slid it into her pocket.

Don’t need it going off at an inopportune moment.

Tucking the Taser into the front of her jeans beneath her sweater, she grabbed the Glock, then got out of the car. Pain stabbed up from her ankle, a white-hot blade. She bit her lower lip, waiting it out. She felt pretty sure that it wasn’t broken but badly sprained and in desperate need of ibuprofen, elevation, and an ice pack.

Heather sighed. Yeah, in a perfect world—which this definitely isn’t.

Once the pain had returned to a dull throb, she closed the Nissan’s door quietly and studied the sanitarium parking lot and entrance.

Wait. Was that graffiti painted on the doors and windows?

Heather frowned. How had the taggers even managed to shake their cans of paint before security swarmed over them and shoved said cans up their artistic urban asses, let alone practically tag the entire building? And something about the graffiti seemed familiar, something itching at the back of her weary mind.

Her gaze skipped from the dark paint to the eerily silent parking lot. Beneath the pinkish glow of the lot’s lights, condensation misted the windshields.

These cars have been here all night.

Heather didn’t see a single car in the lot that looked like it had been driven in recently. Maybe the night shift hadn’t handed the reins over to the morning crew yet. Maybe, for all she knew, they worked in forty-eight-hour shifts.

Maybe, but she didn’t think so. Something felt off, wrong.

With the Glock held down at her side, Heather walked down the street toward the parking lot in a deliberately casual stride—or as casual as a limp could be, anyway, breathing in cool air smelling of dew and distant roses, just a local out walking her insomnia in the predawn.

Stopping at the parking lot’s mouth, Heather got her first good look at the symbols painted on the front doors and windows and her heart gave one hard, startled kick before resuming its regular rhythm—but at a much faster pace.

Now she knew why the symbols seemed familiar; they reminded her of the mark the Morningstar had seared into the pale skin of Dante’s chest, his promise to return to Gehenna.

Not graffiti. Fallen sigils. Elohim glyphs—and etched in blood, not paint.

Fear burned cold along Heather’s spine. She didn’t know what the sigils were for or why they’d been placed, but she knew what they meant.

She wasn’t the first to find Dante.

While Dante was injured and doped and lost to an ever-shifting past and present, one of the Fallen (and she desperately hoped it was only one) was with him right at this very moment.

“Shit,” Heather breathed. “Shit, shit, shit.”

She had no idea how the Fallen had found Dante, let alone learned of his disappearance, but the thing that truly troubled her—even more than the how, was the why. Why were the Fallen keeping him here? Why hadn’t they taken him back to Gehenna the moment they’d found him?

A dark possibility unfolded within her mind. Maybe Dante was being kept here, because whoever ran this sanitarium—FBI, SB, a combination of both—whoever had grabbed Dante in the first place, had simply been following directions.

Fallen directions.

Maybe someone had been incapable of accepting Dante’s refusal to be a good little creawdwr and kiss Celestial ass and thought a few well-taught lessons would improve his attitude.

Maybe.

And where were the mortals who worked inside the sanitarium? Enchanted and sleeping on the floor? Dead? Vanished in a puff of angelic smoke?

Only one way to find out.

Ignoring her ankle’s protest, Heather hurried over to the first parked car and crouched down beside it. She scanned the building, looking for movement, any indication that she had been noticed, but nothing disturbed the lot’s thick blanket of silence, a silence like the first deep snowfall of winter.

Nothing moved. Nothing slow enough for her to see, anyway.

Heather straightened from her crouch, moved to the next car, then waited again. Still nothing. Just as she was about to make her limping run to the next vehicle, a car pulled into the parking lot, a forest-green Lexus.