On Midnight Wings

Too dangerous, catin. Ain’t risking you.

That’s my decision, not yours. I choose you, Baptiste, and everything that comes with you.

Dante felt a smile flicker across his lips. “Then you don’t know my pigheaded woman. Lucien will hafta tie her down. She won’t stop.”

“Maybe not. But with the bond sealed, she won’t be able to find you.”

Dante wasn’t so sure about that. Not only was Heather a damned good detective, something beyond their bond linked them—and always had—something intrinsic and soul deep. One way or another, she would find him.

Just as he would find her.

His finger squeezes the trigger. Heather falls and falls and falls.

Icy fingers closed around Dante’s heart.

“I know your concentration is a little fucked right now, so let me help you close the bond.”

It might not stop Heather in the end, but if he could slow her down . . .

Run from me, catin. Je t’en prie.

Dante nodded. “Oui. Yeah. Let’s do it.”

The nomad wasted no time in crossing the corridor. He stopped in front of Dante and brushed the backs of his fingers against Dante’s temples. A smile ghosted across his lips, a smile Dante returned in kind. Von started speaking, but a high-pitched humming filled Dante’s ears, drowning out Von’s words.

Dante sensed the past opening up beneath him, a bottomless lake he treaded, fighting to keep his head above its dark waters. He wanted desperately to remain in this moment, to believe in it.

This is Von, goddammit . . .

You sure about that?

A determined frown furrowed Von’s brow and, for a split second, it seemed like his form rippled. A warped reflection in a funhouse mirror.

See? I told you. Fi’ de garce is doing it again. Fucker won’t stay dead.

Yeah? Well, then we’ll kill him as many times as it takes.

Dante stabbed his fingers into Von’s chest—ain’t Von. Just motherfucking Papa in a Von- suit—his fingers tearing through leather and black pearl-buttoned shirt, ribs and heated flesh. Wrapped around the pulsing heart.

Papa/Von’s mouth opened in a soundless gasp. He looked down. “Little brother—”

“No, fuck you, you don’t get to say that to me. Only Von can. And you fucking ain’t Von.” Dante yanked Papa’s heart from the bloodied hole in his chest and tossed it down the corridor.

Papa dropped to the floor with a heavy, boneless thud, his Von-suit rippling away to reveal not Papa but a big dude with short red hair and empty eyes.

Dante tilted his head, studied the newest body on the tiles. “Huh.”

Another suit. Papa’s like those fucking Russian nesting dolls. One skin suit after another, but I don’t know this one.

Sleep washed over Dante in a numbing, narcotic tide and he stumbled back a step, shaking it off—or trying to, anyway—like a dog from a leash. He had one crucial thing to do yet before Sleep claimed him, one crucial thing to protect his woman of heart and steel.

Before he forgot who she was.

Papa in his now heartless skin suit had been both right and wrong. Closing the bond wouldn’t stop Heather, but severing it would.

Don’t chase her away. Lure her in. We’ll play. It’ll be fun, je te promets.

Before he forgot why it mattered.

A cold sweat beaded Dante’s forehead. Knotting his hands into fists, he fought Sleep’s relentless surge with everything he had—scared to his fucking bones it wouldn’t be enough. Darkness pinpricked his vision. He sent to Heather, not knowing if it would reach her or not. Then he imagined slicing through the bond tethering them together with a red-hot knife. Both ends whipped away like fallen power lines.

The northward tug vanished. And the blue-white star of Heather’s presence, anchor and beacon both, and still buried beneath miles of dark glass, went with it. Pain pierced Dante’s heart. His breath caught rough and raw in his throat. Fiery sparks snapped in the darkness behind his eyes. His mind sizzled, a bonfire of agony. Electricity thrummed down his spine as the severed bond jump-started another seizure. His muscles locked.

Now she’s safe.

Dante closed his stinging eyes in relief, lashes wet against his skin, as the seizure continued to kick his ass. He felt himself hit the floor beside Papa’s body. Felt his skull bounce off the tile. The sparks became a super nova.

Sleep wrapped Dante up in thick, narcotic chains, shoved him under. He sank like an anchor into the subterranean depths of the past. Reality wheeled and wheeled and wheeled.

—He hides Boo underneath the stained mattress when he hears his foster daddy’s heavy footsteps tromping on down the hallway. The plushie turtle doesn’t seem to mind being squashed flat. Boo understands. Better squashed than all burned up, for true.

—Hidden in the shed behind Papa’s house, breathing in the aromas of gasoline and old motor oil and skin fragrant with soap and sweat, he and Jeannette and Mark take turns kissing each other, feeling each other up, exploring with eager hands and heated mouths. Neither one minds the touch of his fangs.

—Carved into the insides of Gina’s pale thighs, the anarchy symbol. Smeared in her own blood on the wall above her body: WAKE UP S.

Make them pay. Burn the world. Make them pay. Burn the world.

In his dreams, Dante walked the path he’d been born to walk.

And it was dark.

CRAWLING UP THE LONG concrete steps to the sanitarium entrance, Heather stared, dazed, at the door. The lock plate appeared scorched, melted. She fumbled the door open with a drunk’s palsied hands.

The pain in her head was a white-hot sledgehammer and it just wouldn’t stop. It kept pounding and pounding and pounding. She felt the hot trickle of blood from her nose. Tasted it at the back of her throat.

Grabbing onto the cold metal of the threshold, she hauled herself into the red-lit corridor, panting. The door slammed shut behind her. Lacking the strength to sit up, she rested her cheek against the floor’s cool tile.

Despair rolled through her, dark and thick, endless.

The bond was gone. Her North Star had winked out.

And she was scared to her core that it’s loss meant Dante had died. The only thing giving her hope that he still breathed was the abrupt sending she’d received just before the internal GPS went dark.

Catin. Pardonne-moi.

Three words, there and gone in a split second; words she refused to accept.

“Not letting you go, Baptiste,” Heather whispered in a voice that sounded broken and raw even to herself, each word a hot coal searing her throat. “Not giving up. If you want to say you’re sorry, if you want me to forgive you, then you’re going to have to ask me face to face.”

She closed her burning eyes and prayed with everything she had that when she found Dante, he would be able to do just that.

Heather felt one more sledgehammer blow, white-hot pain—

—then nothing.

42 THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END