On Midnight Wings

And he also knew that the moment he walked through those black-tinted glass doors, there would be no turning back.

James brushed road dust from his slacks, noting the four tiny bloodstained punctures marring the fabric. The wound beneath throbbed.

A fork. A goddamned fork. Clever girl, his daughter.

But a daughter now lost to him forever.

The image of Heather aiming his own damned gun at his forehead was burned into his brain. He hadn’t seen one iota of bluff in her blue eyes, only grim determination.

She would’ve pulled the trigger without blinking.

James’s anger was a glacier encasing his heart. Deep down, he suspected he was grieving. Heather, his Heather, had died the moment she’d met Dante Prejean-Baptiste. Yes, the godforsaken bloodsucker had saved her life when she’d been shot in D.C., but at what price?

Heather had returned to Seattle a different woman and had chosen a vampire over her own father, throwing away everything she’d ever worked for—including her humanity.

James remembered a twelve-year-old Heather throwing her arms around him and hugging him after she’d learned of her mother’s death. She’d held on with a quiet desperation, her face buried against his chest. Given her lack of tears at the time, he’d had the strangest feeling that this was a loss she could live with. Her words had proved him right.

It’s just us now, pumpkin, he’d said. You, me, Kevin, and Annie.

Daddy, that’s all it’s ever been.

James felt a pang of sorrow, of regret. He blinked burning eyes.

She’s gone. My Heather. Gone.

And the FBI, the Bureau he’d devoted his life to, had played a hand in that heart-hollowing loss. They had betrayed him also. His SAC had promised he would be allowed to get Heather the treatment she so desperately needed to free her of Baptiste’s deadly influence, so she could be restored to them all—a daughter to James, a skilled and talented agent to the Bureau.

They’d lied.

The Bureau had used him to track Heather. Without their plan to move her, he never would’ve signed her out of the facility. Never would’ve lost her on a dark and lonely Texas highway. Never would’ve watched her aim a gun at his face.

The Bureau had stolen Heather’s single chance at redemption. They were as responsible for her death—for he had buried her in his heart—as Baptiste was.

Straightening his jacket, James drew himself erect, crossed the sidewalk to those black-tinted doors, pushed them open, and strode inside.

One good betrayal deserved another.

“I need to see your superior,” James said to the young man in the black-framed hipster glasses sitting behind the front desk. “Tell them that James William Wallace is here.”

He would give the SB everything. Including the woman who had once been his daughter.

GEHENNA

WITH THE MORNINGSTAR AND Hekate on either side of him, Lucien strode down the Royal Aerie’s main corridor, past the line of blue-bladed shovels branching from the marble walls on other side, mute evidence of Dante’s inability to control his power.

Mute evidence of his brutal, but hidden, childhood, as well.

A bitter truth burrowed into Lucien’s heart. Until Dante was whole, his past exhumed, examined, and integrated, he would never be able to control the creu tân.

I had hoped to spare him those memories. A desperate hope, and impossible.

In New Orleans, the sun was rising. Dante, wherever he was, would be Sleeping now. A fact for which Lucien was grateful. Once the Morningstar led him to Dante, he planned to take his son back to Jack’s house, where Hekate could heal Dante of any lingering damage from James Wallace’s special rounds.

As for Dante’s mind . . .

Lucien looked over at Hekate. She walked at his left with chin held high, lamplight gilding her moon-silver tresses. What she had told him as they’d flown from the cliff side circled through his mind, each word a bead on a rosary, a prayer of hope.

It’s possible I might be able to shore up your son’s mind. Wall up his past, hide it from him, until he can stabilize.

For how long?

Not long, it’ll be only temporary. But it’ll give you the time to help him learn about his past, to accept it.

And if he doesn’t?

Then his psyche won’t survive when the wall comes down again.

Grim hope, but hope, nonetheless.

An unwelcome entourage in the form of Gabriel and the remainder of the Celestial Seven followed Lucien and his companions in tense silence down the Aerie’s main corridor to Dante’s gate, the fast-paced clatter of sandals and boot soles loud against marble.