On Midnight Wings

The spell’s repelling force—like hands shoving at his chest, like a frantic voice endlessly yelling, Darkness comes and death, flee-flee-flee!—vanished as soon as Lucien had flown beyond its range.

“Lucien, wait!” Hekate’s concerned voice. “Your son is in that sanitarium.”

Wings slashing the air like knife blades, Lucien wheeled around to face Hekate and the Morningstar. “Don’t you think I know that?” he answered, his voice harsh even to his own ears. “Dante is Sleeping inside a sanitarium sealed with Elohim blood sigils, alone with whoever put them there. And I couldn’t think, let alone act, because of that damned spell. I had to pull free of its influence.”

“How very odd,” the Morningstar murmured. Late afternoon sunlight transformed the ice melting from the edges of his alabaster wings into hundreds of tiny, fiery prisms. He tilted his head, curious, cataloguing potential weaknesses for future use. “We need to figure out why you were affected and we weren’t.”

Lucien already knew why. The answer burned like bitter acid at the back of his throat. “My protection sigils are gone. Have been for nearly twenty-four years.”

Comprehension blossomed in Hekate’s hyacinth eyes. “The story you told me earlier while we waited for my father.” Swallowing back the questions she no doubt yearned to ask, she touched the small leather bag looped through the belt around her waist and said, “We must remedy that, then.”

“THERE. ALL PROTECTED,” HEKATE said, wiping silver ink from her opalescent talons with a napkin. The ink’s wild mint aroma scented the air, cutting through the smell of spicy fried chicken.

“Thank you.” Lucien studied Hekate’s handiwork. The protection sigils inked into his chest, above his heart and solar plexus, glimmered like moonlit winter ice and tingled cool against his skin like camphor, a sensation already fading.

They sat at a small table inside a Popeye’s restaurant, hidden behind an illusion woven by the Morningstar that showed a table occupied by plump fast-food aficionados instead of a trio of fallen angels engaged in a tattoo session.

“It was because you couldn’t return to Gehenna,” the Morningstar mumbled around a mouthful of red beans and rice. “At least, you couldn’t until just recently.”

Lucien glanced at him, frowning. “What was?” he asked, ignoring the Morningstar’s aggrieved why-aren’t-you-keeping-up-with-my-train-of-thought expression.

“Why you’ve remained without protective sigils for the last twenty-four years,” he sighed, pushing back from the table, his meal of red beans and rice, plus biscuits finished. “No mortal possesses the secret of our protective spells.”

“True enough,” Lucien admitted.

“How did you lose your original sigils?” Hekate asked. “I thought they were permanent, to protect us from mortal and vampire summoning spells.”

Lucien’s thoughts traveled back to Lincoln City and the tiny tattoo shop perched above the cliff-lashing Pacific, back to the woman he’d hunted, only to end up as prey himself.

With one twist of her hand, Paloma summons the ink out of Lucien’s skin, siphoning it through his pores, and unraveling his protection sigils. The silvery ink spatters to the floor, tiny beads of mercury. A heartbeat later, he finds himself trapped inside a magicked circle in a windowless room etched with powerful sigils and angelic script from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.

“They are,” Lucien finally answered, rising to his feet. “But it’s a long story and we don’t have the time. We need to get back to Dante.”

As the three of them walked out into the Popeye’s parking lot, the Morningstar commented, “Not really much need for the protection sigils anymore. Very little summoning going on these days—unlike the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Not with the Internet gods holding mortal attention.”

“True,” Lucien agreed. “And I, for one, don’t miss it.” Unfurling his wings, he leaped into the sky.

LANDING ONCE MORE IN the sanitarium’s car-dotted parking lot, Lucien folded his wings behind him, flicking beads of moisture into air smelling of distant wood smoke and dew. For a moment, he thought he caught a faint whiff of Heather’s scent, but dismissed it. Even if she had escaped and made her way to Baton Rouge, the spell would’ve turned her around and sent her home.

No, just wishful thinking.

He studied the silent and sigil-painted building, feeling an electric tingle as his protective glyphs shielded his mind from the repelling spell’s flee-flee-flee command.

All Fallen magic, whether offensive or defensive, was dark, but—he felt a fierce smile curve his lips—not half as dark or deadly or determined as a father seeking his stolen child.

Lucien arrowed a thought into Dante’s Sleeping mind: <I’m here and I’m not leaving without you.> The sending vanished like a coin into the black depths of a wishing well, yet still he hoped it had buried itself deep into his son’s dreaming subconscious.

As for whoever held him—Lucien strode straight for the sigil-tattooed doors, voicing a wybrcathl of challenge, of sharp-taloned promise, into the evening air as he approached the sanitarium.

Wings snapped and fluttered as Hekate and the Morningstar descended behind him.

“Wait,” Hekate called. “Something doesn’t look right.” But her warning came too late.

Five feet from the doors, pain exploded within Lucien, an internal pipe bomb that sucked the air from his lungs and knocked him to his knees. He bent over, forehead pressed to the sidewalk, teeth gritted, body knotted, as pain raked and clawed and burned.

He felt as though he’d walked straight into a high-voltage barbed-wire fence and swallowed broken glass— not to mention that pipe bomb full of nails. His one regret was his newfound inability to pass out.

“You need to move!” Someone shouted. Hekate, he thought, but the humming in his ears made it hard to know for certain. “Roll! Crawl! MOVE!”

Lucien wanted to snarl that she should try rolling or crawling or moving while her insides were being pureed and see how reasonable she found that particular suggestion—yet he knew she was right. He had to move.

Forcing his spasming muscles into motion, Lucien managed a one-shouldered roll toward Hekate and her father and away from the building. As he did, the pain vanished. “By all that’s holy,” he panted, staggering up to his feet. Aside from a few twinges along his spine, he felt fine. “What was that?”

“A new kind of spell,” Hekate said, frowning as she studied the sanitarium. A light breeze, smelling of distant lightning and impending rain, swept a silver ringlet across her forehead. “Our protection is working against the repulsion spell, but not this one. This isn’t a typical banishing spell. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen before,” she admitted reluctantly, shifting her violet gaze to Lucien. “I didn’t notice the difference until now.”

“Neither did I,” Lucien replied, shaking his head.

Hekate touched his cheek, her fingers soft against his skin. “Are you all right?”

Lucien offered her a smile. “Aside from feeling foolish, yes.”

A melodic wybrcathl shivered into the air in response to his earlier one, a defiant manifesto that both shocked and chilled Lucien—especially given its source.

“Loki,” Lucien breathed, stunned. “Here and flesh again. How? He should still be stone and guarding a tomb in St. Louis No. 3.”

“So that’s what happened to the sly bastard,” the Morningstar mused. “I’d wondered.”

Lucien gave him a sidelong glance. “No doubt. Given that he was here doing your bidding.”

The Morningstar sighed. “So he must’ve claimed. And everyone knows each word Loki utters is purest truth. But whose bidding Loki was or wasn’t doing doesn’t matter at the moment. If you didn’t free him, then who?”

Lucien remembered standing in St. Louis No. 3 several weeks ago and watching his son disappear into the night on the back of Von’s Harley. Remembered the fading feel of Dante’s power skipping along Loki’s stone shape, remembered the faint smell of his unique blood. Remembered the paper prayer folded at Loki’s stone feet.

Keep her safe, ma mere. Even from me. S’il te plait.

Lucien rubbed his face with his hands, exasperated. In seeking truth, Dante had somehow managed to