On Midnight Wings

Fixed my owies? Dante rubbed a hand gingerly along his chest and felt an aching tenderness under his T-shirt on the left side, near the pec. Right at heart level. A bullet, maybe, or—an image wavered behind Dante’s eyes like a raindrop-dimpled pond.

A blond man in a tan trench coat aims a big-ass gun, his finger already squeezing the trigger. Behind his glasses, his glittering eyes are cold and implacable, a guillotine’s falling blade. . . . Pain smoothed the pond, erasing the image, and leaving him wondering what the hell he’d just been thinking about.

Dante coughed, tasted blood. That’s right. Something bad had happened. He just fucking didn’t know what. He sucked in a breath of air and felt it drown in the wet, heavy depths of his lungs. A completely new and messed-up sensation.

“Awesome,” he muttered, pushing himself up into a sitting position, then onto his knees. The room gave a couple of lazy twirls around him, then pirouetted to a slow stop. That, he reflected, could only be a good thing. Unlike how he felt.

Waking up from Sleep with his head aching as though an elephant had used it as a trampoline—heavy emphasis on the tramp—wasn’t all that unusual, unfortunately, but drowning in his own blood most definitely was.

Whether he’d been shot, stabbed, staked, or skewered with a cocktail umbrella, he should’ve healed. The disturbing fact that he hadn’t, that he couldn’t even remember how he’d gotten hurt in the first place, let alone where he was, coiled like a rattlesnake in his mind—waiting with venomous fangs.

“Doctor? T’es sûr, princess? I don’t remember a doctor,” Dante said, another blood-kissed cough punctuating his words. Behind the blood, he tasted something else at the back of his throat—amber-thick, woody, and ice-cold—something he couldn’t name. But whatever it was, it left him feeling uneasy. “Hell, I don’t even remember yesterday. Is this a hospital or—”

His words jammed up in his throat as he stared at the steel hook bolted into the white-tiled ceiling. Light slid like hot grease along its wicked curve. Not a hospital, no.

Dante felt the floor shift beneath him. Cold dread twisted through his gut.

You can do this hard or easy, kid.

Welcome back, S. We’ve missed you.

His vision blurred once again while memories flipped back and forth as though someone in his head couldn’t choose between two favorite channels.

Flip: Himself as a punk-ass kid in a Muse tee, jeans, and duct-taped sneakers bolting from Papa Prejean’s ramshackle foster home of fucked-up delights, Chloe tucked tight against his side and squeaking with surprise . . .

Flip: Himself as a smart-ass adult in leather and buckle-strapped mesh fighting beside a tall man with a crescent moon tattoo beneath his right eye and a red-haired woman with twilight eyes, who smells of sage and rain-fresh lilacs, a woman of heart and steel, a woman who tells him, Stay with me, Baptiste. Stay here-and-now—

Flip: The newborn evening races past punk-ass kid Dante in a cool, rain-wet blur as he moves, his fingers practically welded around Chloe’s wrist, determined that she’ll never have to pay a visit to Papa and Mama Prejean’s shadow-eaten basement/pimp crib. Never have to learn the things he has in its depths . . .

Flip: Hands, warm and callused, grasp smart-ass adult Dante’s shoulders and steady him. A calm male voice, one achingly familiar, says, Gotcha, little brother—