On Midnight Wings

Not fucking yet. I have promises to keep.

His song rose, pale and burning, a ghost. His canvas-bound fingers tingled.

Not so fast, dere, p’tit, the past said in the gravelly tones of Papa Prejean as it/he shoved Dante’s head under and held it there. Time for penance, you. Time to take yo’ medicine.

The past carried Dante, drowning in memories, down into the shattered depths. Something stirred in the whispering darkness as he plummeted toward its heart, something shaped of smoldering embers and razored steel. No, someone born of straitjackets and meat hooks, of shallow graves and shovels, of endless nights spent handcuffed in a dank basement while pervs played their sweaty little games.

Someone uncoiling from the ashes, pale skin crawling with droning wasps.

Someone Dante knew well.

There’s my Bad Seed bro.

S laughs: The truth is never what you hope it will be, yeah?

Yeah. And it usually carries a motherfuckin’ shiv.

Beneath his blood-soaked straitjacket, power danced cool and electric along his fingers.

“Fuck penance,” S whispered, opening his eyes.

27 NO WITNESSES INTERSTATE 530 SOUTH

HEATHER WALLACE TALKED A good game. Spun a well-crafted web of lies.

But then, Caterina reflected as she steered the Nissan south at Heather’s urging, so do I. A skill she’d learned in Renata’s household as a mortal girl trying to counter and survive the machinations of bored vampires; a skill honed in the SB.

And a large part of that skill involved listening, so she could then use the liar’s own verbal web against them. In this case, knowing the truth definitely helped. Otherwise, Heather’s detailed recitation of events at Club Hell—spoken in low, emotional tones—might have been convincing.

The son of a bitch shot Dante with bullets containing sap from a dragon’s blood tree, then torched the club, leaving him and Von and Silver to die in the flames.

But then Heather had taken her bit of creative fiction a step too far.

I don’t know how it all works, but Dante bonded me, and I feel its pull. I know I can follow that pull straight to him . . .

Caterina couldn’t understand why Heather had risked the believability of her story with an outrageous statement like that. A bond with a mortal would leave Dante ultimately vulnerable. And that wouldn’t be allowed.

Maybe Heather had been overconfident. Or maybe an intuitive part of her simply sensed what was coming and was attempting to prevent it. The woman was a survivor.

Kill me and harm Dante.

Doubts floated to the surface of Caterina’s aching mind like rain-drowned worms.

A bond would mean that Dante had seen into the core of her. She wouldn’t be able to hide lies or treachery from him then. And if that were the case, it would mean that I’ve been the one fooled, not Dante.

No. That was what Heather wanted her to think. Díon had revealed the former fed for who she truly was—a backstabbing undercover spy.

Caterina took one hand from the steering wheel and rubbed her forehead. Her headache hadn’t improved since she’d driven from Germantown despite the handful of ibuprofen she’d swallowed. In fact, since Heather Wallace had slid into the Nissan’s shotgun seat beside Caterina, her pain had worsened.

“Headache?” Heather asked. “You have anything to take for it?”

“Ibuprofen in the glove box. Snacks too, if you’re hungry.”

“Great. I’m starving.”

A moment later, Caterina had dry-swallowed four more ibuprofen tablets. She heard the crinkle of a wrapper as Heather tore into a package of snack crackers. The smell of peanut butter and fake cheese filled the car’s interior.

“The pull’s getting stronger,” Heather said around a mouthful of cracker. “So south is definitely the right direction. My gut says he’s still in Louisiana. We just need to figure out where. If the bastards would stop drugging him, I could reach him.”

Caterina cut a quick glance at the FBI agent. Red light from the dashboard glimmered faintly against Heather’s face, highlighting the tension in her jaw, her compressed lips, her shadow-hollowed eyes. She held one vivid orange cracker tightly between her fingers.