On Midnight Wings

Papa in his now heartless skin suit had been both right and wrong. Closing the bond wouldn’t stop Heather, but severing it would.

Don’t chase her away. Lure her in. We’ll play. It’ll be fun, je te promets.

Before he forgot why it mattered.

A cold sweat beaded Dante’s forehead. Knotting his hands into fists, he fought Sleep’s relentless surge with everything he had—scared to his fucking bones it wouldn’t be enough. Darkness pinpricked his vision. He sent to Heather, not knowing if it would reach her or not. Then he imagined slicing through the bond tethering them together with a red-hot knife. Both ends whipped away like fallen power lines.

The northward tug vanished. And the blue-white star of Heather’s presence, anchor and beacon both, and still buried beneath miles of dark glass, went with it. Pain pierced Dante’s heart. His breath caught rough and raw in his throat. Fiery sparks snapped in the darkness behind his eyes. His mind sizzled, a bonfire of agony. Electricity thrummed down his spine as the severed bond jump-started another seizure. His muscles locked.

Now she’s safe.

Dante closed his stinging eyes in relief, lashes wet against his skin, as the seizure continued to kick his ass. He felt himself hit the floor beside Papa’s body. Felt his skull bounce off the tile. The sparks became a super nova.

Sleep wrapped Dante up in thick, narcotic chains, shoved him under. He sank like an anchor into the subterranean depths of the past. Reality wheeled and wheeled and wheeled.

—He hides Boo underneath the stained mattress when he hears his foster daddy’s heavy footsteps tromping on down the hallway. The plushie turtle doesn’t seem to mind being squashed flat. Boo understands. Better squashed than all burned up, for true.

—Hidden in the shed behind Papa’s house, breathing in the aromas of gasoline and old motor oil and skin fragrant with soap and sweat, he and Jeannette and Mark take turns kissing each other, feeling each other up, exploring with eager hands and heated mouths. Neither one minds the touch of his fangs.

—Carved into the insides of Gina’s pale thighs, the anarchy symbol. Smeared in her own blood on the wall above her body: WAKE UP S.

Make them pay. Burn the world. Make them pay. Burn the world.

In his dreams, Dante walked the path he’d been born to walk.

And it was dark.

CRAWLING UP THE LONG concrete steps to the sanitarium entrance, Heather stared, dazed, at the door. The lock plate appeared scorched, melted. She fumbled the door open with a drunk’s palsied hands.

The pain in her head was a white-hot sledgehammer and it just wouldn’t stop. It kept pounding and pounding and pounding. She felt the hot trickle of blood from her nose. Tasted it at the back of her throat.

Grabbing onto the cold metal of the threshold, she hauled herself into the red-lit corridor, panting. The door slammed shut behind her. Lacking the strength to sit up, she rested her cheek against the floor’s cool tile.

Despair rolled through her, dark and thick, endless.

The bond was gone. Her North Star had winked out.

And she was scared to her core that it’s loss meant Dante had died. The only thing giving her hope that he still breathed was the abrupt sending she’d received just before the internal GPS went dark.

Catin. Pardonne-moi.

Three words, there and gone in a split second; words she refused to accept.

“Not letting you go, Baptiste,” Heather whispered in a voice that sounded broken and raw even to herself, each word a hot coal searing her throat. “Not giving up. If you want to say you’re sorry, if you want me to forgive you, then you’re going to have to ask me face to face.”

She closed her burning eyes and prayed with everything she had that when she found Dante, he would be able to do just that.

Heather felt one more sledgehammer blow, white-hot pain—

—then nothing.

42 THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END INTERSTATE 55 NORTH

ANNIE STEERED THE VAN down I-10, the tires humming along the blacktop, C.C. Adcock’s sexy swamp-rock/bluesy voice curling from the iPod Jack had docked into the van’s system, singing about a woman who just doesn’t know how to be good to her hard-working man.