On Midnight Wings

the right path.”

“But Annie ain’t awake yet.”

“She doesn’t need to be. Like most mortals, her mind is unshielded and open. All I need do is to go inside.” As Jack’s brows drew down in a worried V, Lucien added soothingly, “She won’t feel a thing.” Which was true, but even if it hadn’t been, he still wouldn’t have hesitated, not with Dante’s life on the line.

No risk, no sacrifice would ever be too great.

Not just because Dante was his son—even though that was more than reason enough—but because Dante was also a creawdwr. The only one in existence and the first to walk the world since Yahweh’s death more than two thousand years ago, not to mention his being the first mixed-blood Maker ever. Capable of creating—Making—places, beings, life itself. And equally capable of Unmaking it all, as well.

Untrained, unbound, except for his bond to Heather, Dante strode the same edge of madness that each creawdwr before him had walked—a precipice crumbling beneath his boots—fighting the damage done to him by Bad Seed, fighting for his sanity, for the right to claim his life as his own, to piece together his shattered past.

If Dante fell into darkness and chaos, all worlds—mortal, vampire, and Fallen—would fall with him. And if Dante died . . .

Lucien shoved the thought aside, refusing it.

Centering himself with another deep breath, he rested his fingertips against Annie’s temple, then closed his eyes. He slipped inside her mind. Absently, he shielded himself from the raw emotions swirling through her subconscious, a whirlpool of self-loathing, grief, guilt, and fury. He eased past her nonsensical narcotic dreams and delved into her memories. Looked through her eyes.

Images flashed and twirled, a mirror-bright disco ball of out-of-sequence fragments and splinters, a glittering puzzle-play of light, shadow, and betrayal.

Fragment: Desperate relief pours through Annie. Dante is somehow awake. He leans drunkenly against the threshold to his and Heather’s room, naked except for the bondage collar strapped around his throat, his pale hands clutching either side of the doorjamb for balance. It seems as though he’s already slipping back into Sleep, but beneath his milk-white skin, his muscles are taut, corded, rippling . . .

Splinter: “It’s not Dante I want. I’ve come for you, pumpkin.”

Fragment: Two members of the black-uniformed posse carry Heather out from behind the bar on a stretcher. Flex-cuffs bind her wrists and tendrils of red hair trail across her face. Out cold. Tranked . . .

Splinter: “Shoot the others. Burn it down.”

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

Fragment: He presses the muzzle of his gun against Dante’s blood-slicked chest, above his heart, and squeezes off two more rounds. Then he places the gun against Dante’s temple.

Once Lucien had prized each dark and bitter pearl of knowledge about that morning’s events from Annie’s mind—including a secret that made him glance at her robe-covered belly—he withdrew. A cold and furious anger thrummed through his veins. An acrid taste burned at the back of his throat. Words he’d once said to Dante came back to mock him.

The truth is never what you hope it will be.

Raking a hand through his hair, Lucien looked up and alarm flickered across Jack’s face at whatever he saw in his eyes.

“What?” Jack asked, straightening out of his slouch, his voice knotted with dread.

“It was Heather and Annie’s father—FBI agent James Wallace—and he didn’t take Dante. He shot him”— Lucien’s voice roughened as he visualized the trench-coated man standing over his son’s motionless and bloodied form, gun in hand, an image acid etched into his mind—“then left him to burn with the others.”

2 INTERRUPTED SLEEP

JACK STARED AT LUCIEN, his expression speed-shifting from stunned disbelief to bewilderment. “If not the FBI, then who the hell took him?”

Lucien had to force out each bitter word. “I don’t know.”

But one thing he was damned certain of—given what he’d witnessed in Annie’s memories—the substance in those bullets had been designed to kill a True Blood. Dante in particular.

James Wallace had apparently done his research very, very well.

Having been a part of Dante’s life only for the last five years, there was still so much Lucien didn’t know about his own son. He could count on one hand—with a finger or two to spare—the born vampires he’d met during the nearly two dozen centuries since his escape to the mortal world from Gehenna.

Rare, brimming with power and magic and a riveting, nightbred beauty, they were solitary beings—an elemental, but dying, bloodline—who had eventually become little more than wistful myth for the global community of turned-nightkind.

But, myth or not, that hadn’t stopped James Wallace from discovering the truth and learning exactly how to harm Dante.

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

Lucien intended to make James Wallace profoundly regret those words before he killed him. Rising to his feet, he headed for the doorway, the floor creaking beneath his shoes.

“Well, shit. So now what?” Jack asked, sucking himself up against the threshold in order to allow room for Lucien to step through. “Wait until twilight? See if Tee-Tee makes contact?”

“Dante’s injured and I don’t know how badly. He might not be capable of making contact.”

But Heather . . . that was another story. If the temporary blood link between her and Von still held, the nomad should be able to find out where she’d been taken. If it still held. But given that most blood links lasted anywhere from twenty-four to seventy-two hours, and the one between Heather and Von wasn’t quite forty hours old yet, the odds were slightly in their favor that it did.

Lucien strode down the hall. “I need to awaken Von.”

“But . . . how?” Jack protested. “It’s still daylight.”

Lucien paused in the guest bedroom’s darkened doorway, then glanced back at Jack. “I have a method for pulling nightkind up from Sleep. However, the results can vary, so it might be best if you waited with Thibodaux. This could get violent.”

Jack looked unimpressed. “My mama says the same thing at every Cheramie family reunion.”

“I’m serious.”

“So’s my mama.” Jack blew out a breath, then nodded. “Okay. You do what you gotta do. I’ll keep Thibodaux company, me. I’ll just tell him to ignore anything he hears coming from the guest room—hissing, screaming, wing-flapping, girlish pleas for mercy.” A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “Y’know. The usual.”

“The only girlish pleas for mercy will be your own if you don’t get moving,” Lucien growled, pointing one taloned finger toward the kitchen. He appreciated Jack’s attempt to ease the tension with a bit of dark humor, and it helped—for a moment.

“Another thing my mama says. Often.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Lucien replied, voice dry.

Chuckling, Jack turned and headed down the hall. Just as he reached the dust-mote-flecked spill of sunlight emanating from the kitchen, he called, “We’re gonna find them, for true. Tee-Tee and Heather both.” His words and confident tone were as bracing as a tumbler of top-shelf scotch—for them both, Lucien suspected.

“Yes, we are,” Lucien agreed.

There was nothing he wouldn’t do to ensure that outcome. Nothing.

I would lay the world to waste for my son.