On Midnight Wings

ground shook and shuddered, a restless beast answering its master’s call. Hekate watched from the sanitarium’s glass-sprinkled parking lot as the sanitarium burned, fierce yellow-white flames snapping from windows and roof. Chunks of masonry fell from the building to shatter in the parking lot.

“Why haven’t they come out?” she asked, struggling for balance as the earth shuddered beneath her feet. “Something must be wrong.”

“That’s an understatement,” the Morningstar said, “given that Dante has apparently lost his fight.” He looked up and Hekate followed her father’s gaze to the Elohim silhouetted against the flaming skies as they circled above the burning building.

Wybrcathl trilled and warbled songs of despair and lost hope, of another creawdwr lost to madness. A young creawdwr who needed to be killed before he wrenched mortal and Elohim worlds apart.

“Is there any way to stop him, short of killing him?” she asked.

The Morningstar nodded. “Perhaps. An Banna Cruach.” He met his daughter’s gaze. “We need to find Michael’s tomb and then we need to hope that the bond—if it truly exists—will work on a mixed-blood Maker.”

AT LOUIS ARMSTRONG INTERNATIONAL Airport, Renata Alessa Cortini and her well-dressed entourage had just disembarked from her private jet when the earthquake struck. She looked up into the sky and her heart turned to ice. An aurora borealis of blue fire danced and undulated across the sky; a sky filled with Elohim.

Images from the vision that had brought her from Rome—a vision coming true at this very moment—flashed behind her eyes.

In a hallway gleaming with faint red light, a fallen angel with black wings and short, ginger locks lounges upon a throne composed of dead and stiffening bodies . . .

The night burns, the sky on fire from horizon to horizon . . .

Dante Baptiste uncoils from a bloodied tile floor, his pale, breathtaking face smeared with blood, his eyes dark wells of madness, loss, and simmering rage . . .

A tattoo of a running black wolf inked beneath a desperate green eye . . .

Pale blue flames explode out from around the Great Destroyer’s lean body in transforming tongues of cool fire. His kohl-rimmed eyes open as his song rakes the burning night . . .

A sign emblazoned with the words: Doucet-Bainbridge Sanitarium; Fallen sigils painted in blood upon glass . . .

I have promises to keep, Dante whispers, blood trickling from one nostril. Then puts out the world’s light.

Not knowing if the ground would ever stop shaking, Renata ordered her driver to take the youngest members of her household to Doucet-Bainbridge. As for herself and her older children—she rose into the humid air, spiraling upward.

ANHREFNCATHL AND THOUSANDS OF wybrcathl summoned Leviathan from her decade long sleep. The sea boiled and bubbled with warbled information. But one piece she held close, a priceless pearl: the creawdwr was the Nightbringer’s son.

Leviathan rose like a mountain from the deepest chasm of the Atlantic, an ocean of endless folds rippling across the sky.

Do you have any children?

No.

Best you keep it that way. For I shall claim your firstborn as my own—to kill or to love, as I deem fit.

She had a promise to keep.

HEATHER DROPPED TO HER knees beside Dante’s convulsing body, coughing as smoke and flames crept into the corridor. Her skin tightened in the heat, felt fevered. Ever widening wheels of blue and black light spun out from around Dante, sinking through the floor and cycling through the ceiling, transforming everything they touched. Black ivy beaded with tiny sapphire blue eyes blinking in the acrid smoke draped the walls.

Ceiling tiles fell as the earthquake continued its violent, apparently endless motion—and Heather suspected that the earthquake would end when Dante’s seizure did. The floor shuddered, tiles rippling as though suddenly fluid. Cracks zigzagged through the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. Gleaming wasps flitted out of the cracks. The air vibrated with their droning.

My kingdom for a syringe full of morphine to ease my prince into Sleep.

“Time to go,” Lucien said. “I’ll carry Dante—but not you or we run the risk of him changing you as well.”

Coughing, Heather shook her head. Smoke stung her eyes. “You don’t need to risk it either. Not yet. Let me try to reach him through the blood link.”

Lucien studied the buckling ceiling. “Hurry.”

Heather nodded and closed her eyes.

PAIN AND WHITE LIGHT pinwheeled through Dante’s mind as reality wheeled and circled and wheeled again. Electricity spasmed through every muscle. Splintered memories shifted together, forming pictures that broke his heart. Voices whispered and demanded, wasps droned and burrowed and he’s fucking had enough, enough, ENOUGH.

<Baptiste. I’m here.>

The pinwheels slowed as the image of a beautiful red-haired woman flared behind his eyes, an image that smelled of sage and lilacs in the rain, a fragrant midnight garden.

It’s quiet when I’m with you.

I’ll help you stop it forever.

We’re in this together, face-to-face and back-to-back.

I trust you.

Don’t.

<Baptiste.>

As lost as I get, I will find you, Heather. Always.

Dante reached back, pouring himself through the blood link and forging a new bond as he did. The blue- white star of Heather’s presence suddenly appeared, burning bright and unobstructed at the bruised center of his mind, radiating a cool, white light. Silence poured in, hushing the noise, quieting the internal storm.

His convulsions stopped.

Dante opened his eyes.

Grasping his hand, Heather helped him up to his feet. He touched his forehead to hers, his hands on her hips, trying hard not to think of what he’d almost done to her, the gun against her temple, his finger on the trigger. “J’su ici, catin,” he whispered, throat tight. “J’su ici.”

“And you found me,” she whispered back. “Like you promised.”

“Always.”

“We need to go,” Lucien said. “And we need someplace safe from—”

A subsonic bellow blasted through the air, hitting the sanitarium like a fertilizer bomb. Dante wrapped himself and his wings around Heather as the building collapsed in a roar of stone and screeching metal. Waves of midnight water doused the fire.

Leviathan descended.

52 A DARK PATH MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE