Jay’s last words. He wouldn’t let them be Heather’s as well.
“It’s not too late,” Dion urged. “You can still save her—”
Dion’s words disappeared beneath the deep droning of angry wasps. White light flickered at the edges of Dante’s vision. Pain pulsed at his temples. Shivved his lungs. He swallowed back blood.
He focused on the sounds behind him—the door slamming open, the heavy thud of footsteps as more suits raced on to the roof, the sharp intake of shocked breath. Focused on Jesus Christ and holy shit. Focused on multiple cha-chunks as gun slides were pulled back.
“Hold your fire!” Dion yelled.
Wings slashing through the air in powerful strokes, Dante swung around to face the tall immortal in his black suit. He regarded Dante with wary eyes, sweat glistening at his hairline. Six suits—male and female—formed a semicircle around Dion, guns held in white-knuckled, shaking grips, faces drained of all color. A hard sweep of air from Dante’s wings plastered their clothes to their bodies, gusted through their hair.
“Surrender and you can still save—”
Dante’s song sprang to life, bristling with dark fury. Violet squeaked in surprise as power crackled to life along the fingers of his right hand in pale blue flames. Ghost flames, thin and wavering, barely there, but power enough to cram down Dion’s lying throat. Dion’s eyes suddenly widened. Panic flitted across his face. He took a careful step back toward the door.
Not now, not fucking now, that prick ain’t escaping, Dante thought in mingled frustration and fury as a lightning bolt surged through his skull, torching his mind. The seizure bit into him with electric teeth. The flames surrounding his hands flickered, then vanished as though doused with water, and his song spilled away in a jumble of harsh and jagged notes.
The stars returned in brilliant and broken and endless prickles of light behind Dante’s eyes. His body arched. His fangs pierced his lower lip as his jaw locked. He tasted blood, smelled it.
“He’s going to drop that kid or break her damned ribs,” someone warned.
“Let him,” Dion replied. “Either is fine.”
Just as Dante’s vision whited out, he caught a quicksilver flash of movement, then felt Chloe— no, Violet, ma p’tite ange—yanked from his arms. Heard her scream his name. Heard Dion cursing in furious Spanish at whoever had disobeyed him.
The world whirled and Dante went with it, a torn kite tumbling from the sky. The ground rushed up at light speed, eager to meet him. He had no idea if he’d plummeted eight stories to the Dumpster-strewn blacktop below or just to the roof. Eight stories or ten feet, he hit hard. The air exploded from his lungs. Retching, he tried to suck more in, but his shock-paralyzed lungs refused to work.
“Give me your trank gun,” Dion demanded from somewhere above him.
But breathing seemed like a small thing, really, maybe even an unnecessary thing, as the seizure devoured Dante with a voracious white-hot appetite. Tore him apart, joint by joint, tendon by tendon. Torqued each muscle and limb and wing without mercy.
Send it below or fucking use it.
But below seized the opportunity to fucking use him instead when the dart pierced his throat and threaded ice through his veins.
Below yanked Dante under.
Shoved him down.
Kicked his convulsing ass into the shattered, wasp-droning depths.
11
DARK PROPHECY
DALLAS, TEXAS
THE STRICKLAND DEPROGRAMMING INSTITUTE
SHE SEES DANTE, DESPITE the fact that he’s blurring up endless flights of concrete stairs, a red-haired little girl tucked against his side. Sees a determined scowl on his beautiful pale face and crimson striping the deep brown of his irises. Sees blood smeared on the skin above his heart, staining his lips, the skin beneath his nose. His black hair trails behind him, a silken slice of starless night.
For a moment, she thinks she has somehow stumbled into Dante’s memories since he’s carrying Chloe in her Winnie-the-Pooh sweater and purple cords tight against him. Thinks he’s caught in an old and heartbreaking loop—himself and Chloe at the sanitarium—but then she realizes he’s not the thirteen-year-old version of himself in jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, but the lean-muscled adult in boots, leather pants, and bondage collar.
Not the past. Not haunted memories.
Then she notices that black paper wings are taped to the back of Chloe’s sweater. Black paper wings. No plushie orca.
The little girl isn’t Chloe at all.
She’s Violet. The head-shot child Dante had transformed in the motel parking lot in Oregon. And she remembers all the SB agents that had been there. Remembers the sweating, grim- faced agent who ordered the resurrected and newly freckled Violet and her mother away from Dante and—no doubt—into their custody.
And she knows, bone deep—no dream. Not memories. Reality.
Her pulse races. She’s found him at last. Then fear knots cold in her belly. She’s found him, yes—in a desperate run for survival.
A voice with a mild European twist echoes up the stairwell, calling Dante’s name, but he never slows. Yanking open a door, he streaks out onto a rooftop.
She’s right behind him, close enough to touch. She feels the cool night air against her face, smells old tar, coppery blood, and Dante’s scent of frost and burning leaves. But when she tries to grasp his arm, to pull him against her and to safety, her fingertips brush a smooth, invisible barrier—like a one-way observation mirror in an interrogation room.
So she reaches for him through their bond instead, to let him know that he’s not alone and that she’s okay, to guide him back, to anchor him in the present.
<Baptiste.>
He stumbles. Nearly falls to his knees. Blood trickles from his nose. His face blanks and his shocked gaze turns inward—and seeing that, she knows he was mentally locked into the past, her psionic touch triggering an avalanche of now inside him.
<Baptiste. I’m here, cher. Right here in the here-and-now. Find me.>
She hears Dante’s breath catch in his throat as an expression of stunned revelation washes over his face, sweeping the blankness away. Then he looks around, his expression sharp and aware and troubled, a dreamer awakening to find himself on the floor beside a bed he doesn’t recognize.
She has a feeling Dante reaches back—or tries to—but scalding pain blasts through the bond and he disappears from her sight as the mirror ripples, then shatters into thousands of glittering pieces.
HEATHER AWAKENED, HEART THUDDING hard against her ribs, temples throbbing as the lights overhead pierced her eyes.
“Found you,” she whispered. Closing her eyes again, she draped an arm across them to seal in the darkness and to prevent any last needles of light from sliding in. Her headache dimmed.
Found Dante, yes, but where? An institutional building of some kind, judging by the stairwell and the big air-conditioning units on the roof. Heather realized that the urgent, insistent tug she felt to the east was now defined as southeast.
