On Midnight Wings

Wrong. This is still all wrong. Wake the fuck up.

Dante shoved the troubling thought aside. It would have to wait.

“Hold on tight, chère,” he warned, snugging her even closer.

“ ’Kay.”

After aiming a dark and savage fuck-you smile at the camera, Dante moved. He sped out into the hall, streaking past rows of closed steel doors and security/medical monitoring stations, and bewildered faces as he blurred past, a cool and unexpected gust of wind—one most likely smelling of fresh blood, death, and strawberries.

“It feels like we’re flying,” Chloe said happily. “Even without your wings.”

Dante was about to remind her that he wasn’t an angel and therefore lacked wings in the first place, when he heard determined shouts behind them, followed by muted thwips as bullets or trank darts breezed past. Whatever they were—bullets or darts—one breezed through his hair. Then pain burned across the top of his shoulder as another grazed his flesh. Blood trickled hot down his back.

“No bullets!” someone shouted, voice tight and furious. “You might hit the girl.”

Surprised that anyone gave a damn, but still not risking a glance over his shoulder to see who, Dante tightened his grip on Chloe and kept moving.

He’d survive a bullet. Chloe wouldn’t.

He surged forward, pushing for more speed, and hung a left at the next corridor T. More doors and surprised/puzzled faces blurred past. The shouts and sounds of pursuit faded, then vanished.

A glowing red EXIT–STAIRS sign appeared on the right and instinct insisted he take the stairs even while a more rational part of his mind warned him he’d have nowhere to go but down—the hard way—if he did.

Grabbing the handle, Dante yanked the door open and followed his instincts. An alarm blared and he winced as the steady shriek pierced his eardrums and his aching head. By the time the steel door thunked shut behind them, thankfully muffling the alarm, he’d already vaulted up the first flight of stairs.

He’d just rounded the fourth flight of concrete stairs when he heard the door bang open again below.

“Baptiste!”

The same determined voice from before. How was the fucker keeping up? Frowning, Dante mulled over the name said fucker had used—not Prejean, not goddamned S, but Baptiste. . . .

“There’s no way out, Baptiste. You’re boxing yourself in.” Closer, the voice.

Ignoring it, Dante kept going until he hit the final door, wrenched it open, and raced onto the roof and into a night smelling of old tar and damp blacktop and, faintly, of dewed grass. A sudden pain spiked behind his eyes.

<Baptiste.>

A star, cool and white, burned at his mind’s core. A bond. A familiar and constant presence buried beneath pain and broken glass and barbed wire. The sending carried with it the scent of rain and lilacs and sage, a scent he knew intimately.

<Baptiste. I’m here, cher. Right here in the here-and-now. Find me.>

He saw her then—waves of red hair. Twilight blue eyes, that brightened to moonlit cornflower when she laughed. Lovely, heart-shaped face. Deadly aim with a gun. A woman of heart and steel.

Heather.

10 CARNIVAL BARKER

THE WORLD TREMORED VIOLENTLY beneath Dante’s feet, cracked open. The past receded. And the here-and-now poured in like storm-frothed water through a breached levee.

Lucien soaring through a star-jeweled sky—

Von feeding his blood to Heather—

Guy Mauvais and Lake Pontchartrain—

Trey transformed beneath his hands in blue fire—

Annie slapping his face, telling him, Heather’s in trouble—

A cold-eyed man in a tan trench coat, pulling a trigger—

Dante’s breath caught rough in his throat. Heather’s in trouble. A dark and chilling possibility unfolded within his mind; maybe he wasn’t here alone. Maybe Heather, Von, Silver—hell, even Annie—were locked in their own padded cells and were busy eyeing hooks curving sharp and deadly from the ceilings. One way to find out.

<Catin.>

Dante’s sending boomeranged, slamming into his aching mind. His vision grayed. He tasted blood at the back of his throat as blood oozed from his nose. Puddled hot in his ears.

Dante stumbled to a halt near the roof’s edge, and his heart constricted as he looked at the little girl he held so tight, so close. He couldn’t breathe, but it wasn’t blood that stole the air from his lungs this time.

“Chloe,” he whispered.

Her blood spills hot and fragrant and crimson over his fingers . . .

She lies on the concrete floor, staring up at the hook, her blue eyes as wide and empty as a doll’s. The blood from her slashed throat stains her hair a deep red.

She shook her head. “I’m Violet, remember?”