On Midnight Wings

“Ooo. Minus points for being touchy. But”—Von unfolded his arms and held up a just-be-patient hand when she scowled, brows knitting over her velvet-brown eyes—“I don’t mind telling you what went down.”

Von drew in a deep breath, one laced with smoke fragrant with spice and cloves and tobacco, then released it and started talking. Some things he kept to himself, like Dante’s creawdwr abilities and how he turned a ticking time bomb of a yacht into a living, breathing leviathan—or mostly, anyway.

And what he did to Trey.

Dante holds Trey’s face—a face that now flickers and shifts, a face that seems composed of blue neon ones and zeros—between his blue-flamed hands. Trey’s dreads, transformed into gleaming and twisted bundles of wire, snake into the burning air . . .

But he told Merri the rest in a low, flat voice—Vincent informing Dante that Mauvais would be meeting the arsonists responsible for the fire and Simone’s death at a wharf on Lake Pontchartrain and picking them up; Dante’s determination to avenge Simone, to give her brother Trey a reason to keep breathing; the nearly empty yacht, minus Mauvais, a decoy; the explosion.

“After all the shit that went down on Lake Pontchartrain,” Von concluded, sweeping his gaze along the busy street, “Vincent probably figured someone—Mauvais or Dante—would be coming to rip him and his entire household new ones for being treacherous SOBs, so I’d bet my left rim he went into hiding.”

“So was he?” Merri asked, dark eyes glinting. “A treacherous SOB?”

“Well, now, that depends on who you ask,” Von replied, smoothing his thumb and index finger along his mustache. “Vincent was definitely betraying Mauvais when he gave us the info he did; but since the info was false and it led to a trap, he screwed us as well—even if it was an unintentional screwing.”

“If Vincent was the guy whose web-runner you planned to borrow, then that unintentional screwing isn’t over yet,” Merri said softly.

“The screwing that just keeps on giving and giving,” Von agreed. He trailed a hand through his unbound hair; Jack seemed to be lacking in hair ties, but not gator print shirts, go figure. “I think my search plan just got flushed down the toilet.”

So far they had only one piece of the puzzle leading to Heather’s whereabouts and that had come from Heather herself: Strickland. Lucien had questioned a fed in Portland and learned that James Wallace had been unaware that the Bureau had been using him as a means to Heather.

Unfortunately, that had been all that particular fed had known. He’d been left out of the loop as far as any details of FBI hush-hush operations went, but he’d known who would know, and now Lucien was in Washington, D.C., paying a visit to a fed who was in that oh-so-exclusive hush-hush loop.

Von felt a grim satisfaction as he imagined how that meeting might go down.

Basic web searches run by himself, Jack, Silver—hell, even Merri and Thibodaux—hadn’t revealed all that much. Or at least hadn’t revealed much that would lead them to Heather. Turned out that Strickland was a popular name for funeral homes and Chevrolet dealerships. Who knew?

What they’d needed was a web-runner. Someone who could search deep and fast. Someone they could trust. Or someone who owed them big-time. So he’d figured he’d pay Vincent a little visit while Merri and her partner checked the club for clues to the identity of Dante’s abductor or location.

No point to that little visit now.

Von’s jaw tightened. Just a night or two ago, he could’ve put their own web-runner to work on the problem, but Trey’s grief had forced him to do the unthinkable both to himself and to Dante, and now Trey was just fucking gone. Transformed into an instrument of revenge for a sister he could never bring back.

Grief could tear a person apart and remake them into someone unrecognizable, someone cold and obsessed, a stranger. As much as Von ached to make Mauvais pay for Simone’s death too, he never would’ve used Dante like Trey had done, never would’ve risked a friend’s heart and sanity.

Of course, in his right mind, Trey never would’ve either.

Von scrubbed his face with his hands. “Christ.”

“So now what?” Merri asked. “You got a plan B in mind?”

Dropping his hands to his sides, Von sighed. “Looks like waiting to hear from Lucien is plan B.” He didn’t like it, but didn’t have any other ideas—brilliant or otherwise. And there was still Holly to deal with too.

A moist breeze laced with the smells of fried beignets, whitewashed tombs from St. Louis No. 1, and Mississippi mud momentarily cleared away the rotting vegetation stink from the garbage bags pyramided in the gutter. A brief respite for which Von was grateful.