On Midnight Wings

Welcome back, S. Welcome home.

Ain’t finished here. Not by a long shot.

For true, that. Maybe waiting wasn’t such a bad idea, after all. Give the drugs time to wear off. And once they had, he’d be able to reach Heather, Von, Lucien—everyone. But that realization snaked cold and uneasy around his heart.

Keep away. Run from me—

“I am what you made me / no matter where you hide, where you run,” Dante heard himself singing, “I will find you . . .”

“Dante?”

Dante whirled at the sound of his name, song dying in his throat. A tall figure stood motionless in the shadows at the corridor’s far end. A tall figure with wings arching above his head and eyes burning like stars.

Lucien.

Relief flooded through Dante. Lucien would keep Heather safe. Keep her far from S and his-ours-no- his itching trigger finger. Keep her—

Electricity arced through his mind, short-circuiting his thoughts, locking his muscles, and dropping him to the floor as the seizure blossomed full flower. He felt himself gathered into strong arms, caught a glimpse of long, black hair, golden eyes, but Lucien’s scent of deep earth and green leaves eluded him. All he smelled was blood and ozone and crackling lightning. Pain seared his joints, wrung his muscles like wet rags.

Warm fingers brushed at his temples. <Child, let me in. Let me help you.>

There was no need to ask, his shields were already falling. But this Lucien’s psionic touch was different. Unfamiliar. Wrong.

The fallen angel holding him wasn’t his father.

Deep inside, someone laughed and laughed.

Pain pierced Dante’s mind, stuttered his heart as someone searched through the mountainous debris of his fractured memories, creating a kaleidoscope of ugly images whirling into one another, each set of foster parents blurring into the next, an infinite looping montage of casual cruelty and heart-hollowing loss.

—Papa and Mama Prejean.

—Chloe and her plushie BFF Orem.

—Gina and Jay.

—The Perv (another Bad Seed bro, yeah?) and his van of horrors.

—Ronin’s fingernail slicing across Jay’s throat.

—Johanna Moore and the white-coated man with the blurred face.

—Simone and Trey.

—The sanitarium.

—Heather. Heather. Heather.

The fallen angel breathed blue fire into Dante and he felt his thrashing body go limp, but the storm crackling through his mind raged unabated.

<So beautiful, little creawdwr, and so damaged. I like that. We shall do wondrous and terrible things together, you and I. Awful things.>

Dante’s vision narrowed onto the blood-freckled ceiling, then whited out as entire constellations were born behind his rolled-back eyes in explosions of icy light.

39 PLANTING SEEDS

SO EASY. FAR EASIER than he’d ever imagined.

Loki withdrew from the blood-drenched creawdwr’s oh-so-broken mind and laughed, the sound of it floating down the corridor like a cheerful birthday balloon.

All that fretting for nothing.

He’d flown from New Orleans following the faint and dying echoes of a song he’d barely heard, pondering the best ways to manipulate Dante’s trust and fretting over how to get the Nightbringer’s son to drop his shields. To let him in.

Just to take a peek at a creawdwr’s inner workings.

Or those of the Great Destroyer.

Loki had a fertile imagination, one he employed constantly, but he never could’ve imagined arriving at a better moment—just as a seizure dropped Dante right into his arms, his shields already crumbling thanks to a near-lethal mix of vampire tranquilizers, True Blood poison, and pure, simple exhaustion—mental, emotional, and physical.

Fate had finally landed on Loki’s side.

And no wonder Dante—or S, as he sometimes thought of himself—was exhausted. Loki grinned in approval as he drank in Dante’s handiwork.

He’s been a very busy boy.

Crumpled into dark pools of their own thickening blood, bodies clad in either black suits or medical scrubs littered the blood and gore-festooned corridor. Then there were the doors flung open on either side of the corridor and leading into rooms full of silence and the rich reek of coppery blood and musky fear.

Nothing like a little slaughter to perk up a place. Child has talent.

Loki looked at Dante, still held within his arms, with genuine fondness. The first mixed-blood creawdwr in history—a pale-skinned reality in leather pants and blood-smeared flesh that no one had ever thought possible—if they’d given it any thought at all.

Mine to guide. Mine to wind-up and turn loose. Mine alone.

Well, perhaps not completely, Loki reflected sourly as he regarded the intricate and raised white scar high on the left side of Dante’s chest. The Morningstar’s mark. And—as gleaned from Dante’s unprotected mind—a blood pledge to return to Gehenna to restore the fading land.

A pledge the narcissistic Morningstar would live long enough to regret. Deeply.

Loki pushed Dante’s blood-and sweat-dampened hair back from his face. Drew in an appreciative breath. Wild and fey, Dante’s beauty, burning with a dark and mesmerizing heat and all the deadlier for it. Helen’s beauty launched only a thousand ships; Dante’s would ignite worlds.

The Great Destroyer.

How long have I waited for this? How many eons?

More than he cared to count. But no longer. The waiting was finally done.

Lifting his gaze, Loki studied Dante’s first dark miracle—a secret, government-run sanitarium/brainwashing facility transformed into a silent abattoir. And all while drugs and poison had been busy short-circuiting his power, not to mention his sanity.

“Bravo,” Loki whispered.

I can’t wait to see what he does next. And I’ve got a ringside seat.

Once the drugs wore off, once Dante had healed, and once he had full use of the creu tan again, Loki had a feeling that a certain quote from the dusty Old Testament would once more ring true—a promise like a searing white nuclear light, one that left nothing but shadows in its wake: And there shall be great wailing and gnashing of teeth.

And when the Elohim finally heard Dante’s song and came winging down from the heavens into the sanitarium’s parking lot—excuse me, apologies, abattoir—and discovered themselves blocked from entering the building due to the spell Loki had carefully cast in his own blood before going inside?

Furious would only be the start.

Loki laughed, a happy sound brimming with anticipation. Lowering his head, he pressed his lips against Dante’s in a gentle kiss. Tasted copper and salt. Breathed in the scent of burning leaves, November frost, and