On Midnight Wings

Foreboding trailed an icy finger down Lucien’s spine, whispered arctic words in his ear: What if you don’t find him? And your son lays waste to the world in the meantime instead? Or tries to? What then?

I will find him, Lucien thought numbly. No other outcome is possible.

Stepping into the room, he regarded Silver and Von, Sleeping side by side on the bed, a cheerful quilt covering them to the waist. Both pale faces were smooth and peaceful; another disquieting illusion, one revealed by the pillows with their dark stains, by the blood-matted hair pushed away from Sleep-cool foreheads.

Von McGuinn Slept on the side of the bed closest to the door, the ends of his nut-brown hair trailing over his bare shoulders. Even in the curtained gloom, Lucien could see the nomad clan tattoos blue-inked in graceful Celtic designs—dragons, antlered hunters, and ravens to name a few—swirling along Von’s shoulders, down his arms, and across his pectoral muscles and abdomen and, beneath the quilt, even lower; each had been earned when he’d still been mortal.

But the crescent moon tattoo beneath Von’s right eye, glimmering like star-silvered water, was unlike all the others. No mortal could wear it. It was the badge of his office—llygad. Keeper of history. Counselor. Warrior bard, one of many within the impartial, truth-seeking ranks of the llygaid. The guardians of nightkind history.

Lucien had no doubt that Von would know what James Wallace had loaded into the bullets, and how to counteract it.

Rolling his shoulders back to ease tension from taut muscles, he crossed to the bed, then knelt beside it, the floor creaking beneath his black-trousered knees. Underneath the odors of clotted blood and nostril-tingling antiseptic, he caught a faint, reassuring trace of Von’s scent of frost and gun oil.

“I can’t wait for twilight, llygad,” Lucien apologized. A bead of ruby blood welled up on the inside of his wrist as he pierced the skin with a talon. “We need to speak now.”

Lucien licked the blood from his wrist, then lowered his head over Von’s pale face. Kissing the nomad’s mustache-framed lips, he parted them with his blood-smeared tongue. Breathed energy and the pomegranate- and-copper taste of his own blood into Von, drew him up from Sleep.

And filled his waking mind with Annie’s dark and bitter pearls.

When the nomad sucked in a sharp breath, Lucien ended the kiss and lifted his head to look into vivid green eyes wide with shock.

“Holy hell.” Von’s voice was a hoarse whisper. He struggled to rise, but, weakened by blood loss and the disorienting effects of interrupted Sleep, he fell back against the mattress, sweat beading his forehead. “We gotta find them.”

“We will,” Lucien promised. “Once we locate Heather through your link with her, her bond with Dante will lead us straight to him.”

“Shit. My link. Their bond. Yeah.”

“But right now I need you to regain your strength and clear your head.” Lucien extended his arm to Von, offered his already healed wrist. “Feed, then we’ll get to work.”

Without another word, Von grabbed the proffered arm, tore hungrily into the taut flesh with his fangs, and drank deep.

3 ONE STUBBORN MOTHERFUCKER MARCH 30–31

SNATCHING JEANS FROM THE small pile of clothing Jack had left for him on top of the bureau, Von yanked them on over his gray pin-striped boxers, zipping them up with a furious jerk of his wrist. His pulse pounded in his temples as he counted the many ways in which they’d been fucked over in just a few short hours.

Heather drugged and nabbed by her own goddamned father.

Dante shot and left to burn, before some mysterious asshole slipped into the building, bundled him up, then carted him out into the blazing noontime sun. And disappeared.

Silver and himself shot. Annie, tranked. The club torched.

Oh, and don’t forget the other little revelation Lucien had plucked from Annie’s mind: Heather’s little sister was pregnant. As for how far along she was, the identity of the baby-daddy, and whether or not she even planned to keep the squatter in her womb, that information was still tucked safe inside Annie’s head, hers to keep.

Von wondered if Heather even knew about her sister’s pregnancy. A worry for another time, like after he’d found Heather, hauled her lovely ass out of the fire, then followed her psionic GPS of a bond straight to Dante.

Von had made his first attempt to contact Heather right after he’d fueled up on Lucien’s blood—the Fallen/angelic stuff was like nitrous oxide to nightkind. A blast of furious energy had exploded through Von’s every cell, lighting his mind up like a Las Vegas casino marquee, and thrumming like electricity through his veins. Despite that intoxicating rush, his attempt had been only partially successful. And, thus, a complete disappointment.

“Keep trying,” Lucien commands in a voice of edged steel.

“No shit,” Von growls. “I know you’re worried sick, man, me too. But you’re driving me nuts staring holes through me. Why don’t you go raid Jack’s liquor cabinet and give me some space?”

Lucien stares a few more holes through him with narrowed eyes before swiveling and stalking silently from the room.

Attempts two through ten had ended with the same frustrating results. And Von had decided to give it a rest, give the drugs in Heather’s system a little bit of time to wear off. But he had also learned a few very important things.

One: his link with Heather was definitely still intact.

Two: Heather was drugged and unconscious, her mind wrapped up in a cotton ball of static and currently beyond his reach.

Three: he’d better keep his fingers crossed and wish with everything he had that whatever she’d been doped with would wear off before their blood link unraveled.

Grabbing the neatly folded olive-green T-shirt from the bureau, Von tugged it on, then went over to the bed to check on Silver before leaving to join the others. Dried blood darkened the right side of his midnight purple hair—thanks to goddamned James Wallace. Bastard would pay. And not just for Silver.

I’ve come for you, pumpkin.

He won’t be getting up again, not with those bullets inside of him.

Hands clenched into white-knuckled fists, Von left the bedroom. When he stalked into the darkened kitchen with its blanket draped windows, AWOL Shadow Branch agent Emmett Thibodaux—long, lean, and looking like a young, ginger-haired Clint Eastwood—took one look at Von’s chest, then quirked up an amused eyebrow.

“Sorry I missed that,” Thibodaux drawled, folding his arms along the back of the chair he straddled. His assessing blue-iris gaze grew thoughtful. “Real damned sorry.”

Frowning, Von looked down at the borrowed T-shirt, then groaned. It read GATOR FEST WET BOXERS CONTEST CHAMPION, each letter shaped out of tiny green and brown gators. He aimed a glare at an innocent- looking Jack. “Cajun smart-ass,” he muttered. “Or maybe Cajun clairvoyant, given the title and all.”

The drummer grinned. “More like Cajun delusional, given the title and all.”

“I second that,” Lucien put in. He leaned against the counter in front of the sink, expression neutral, pretending to be relaxed, despite the tension cording nearly every muscle on his six-eight frame.

“Sad how the truth can be too much for some people,” Von offered with a long-suffering shake of his head.

Thibodaux made a sound that was halfway between a snort and a cough, then got up and went to the refrigerator for a beer. Von watched him closely as he returned to his chair, a frosty bottle of Dixie in hand. He