Etched in Bone (Maker's Song #4)

by Adrian Phoenix

  Dante’s version of hunting was as true as that of any silent-pawed predator—pouncing, tearing into warm and frantic flesh, rending. Killing. The lion never allowed the gazelle to live.

  Of course, Dante possessed the ability to reason in a way the lion couldn’t, but Von couldn’t help but wonder if Dante’s lethal feeding tendencies were the natural instincts of a born nightkind or the result of the damage wreaked by Bad Seed, or a bit of both.

  “Alone?” Von asked. “Ain’t sure that’s wise.”

  “Yeah, alone. And at the moment, I don’t give a fuck if it’s wise or not.” Tension corded Dante’s muscles, peppered his scent. Hunger and something darker, something feral, tightened his features. “Gotta hunt.”

  Von knew that some low-life, small-time predator was about to disappear from among the ranks of the living, leaving the Big Easy with one less scumbag.

  The right or wrong of it didn’t matter. Not right now. He could work on teaching Dante how to hunt without needing to kill some other time. This wasn’t it.

  “You’d better get moving then, man,” Von said. “Dawn’s in less than two hours.”

  “I know,” Dante murmured. In a rush of air smelling of frost and burning leaves and blood, he stepped in front of Von and cupped his face between fevered hands. Von’s breath caught in his throat at the heat baking against his skin.

  He’s burning up, like his core is white-hot, a sun about to split the night as it goes nova. How long can he burn like this before everything inside a him goes dark?

  Dante kissed him with lips as hot as his hands and tasting of amaretto and blood. “Thanks, mon ami, for staying behind and keeping an eye on everyone, for keeping them safe. That means everything to me.”

  “You’re welcome, little brother. Not that I exactly had a choice.”

  “You coulda told me to fuck myself.”

  “I almost did.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “Knowing that you were right. Won’t save you next time, however.”

  A smile tilted Dante’s lips. “That works. Don’t wanna be saved.”

  “You might change your mind about that after I’m done with you.”

  “I’ll take everything you’ve got and more.”

  Von laughed. “Bet you would too, you pigheaded sonuvabitch. Only question is—are we talking about the same thing anymore?”

  “Hope so, could be interesting otherwise.” Dante’s hands slid away from Von’s face and the air suddenly felt cold as winter against his skin in their absence.

  Von’s amusement faded as he registered the strain edging Dante’s voice. He almost made me forget with his kiss and his hot hands and his hunger. “Why you pretending that you ain’t in pain?”

  And even as the words left Von’s lips, the answer flashed through his mind: He doesn’t know anything else. He probably figures that as long as he’s upright and conscious, he’s just fucking fine.

  “Ain’t pretending nothing. And fuck you, by the way.”

  “Yeah, yeah, and fuck you back. You don’t hafta keep hurting, little brother. After you feed, I can grab some morphine so you can—”

  “Spike myself right into la-la land?” Dante shook his head. “Don’t think so. Зa va bien.”

  “Зa va bien, my ass,” Von grumbled. “But, hey, you’re a big boy and all.”

  “For fucking true.” Dante whapped Von’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “Stop worrying about me. Go feed, you.” He looked past Von to Silver. “You too, cher.” Pushing away from the bar, he headed for the club entrance.

  Studying Dante’s blood-streaked back as he walked away, Von frowned. The blood patterns on his skin looked almost like an outline of wings.

  “Hey!” Silver called, scooping Dante’s hoodie up from the counter. He wadded up the pile of black material and tossed it at Dante. “Catch!”

  Dante spun around, his pale hand blurring up to snag the hoodie in midair.

  “Thought maybe you wouldn’t want to attract too much attention,” Silver said with a shrug.

  A smile tilted Dante’s lips. “You thought right. Merci beaucoup.” Shrugging the hoodie on—the one with the red, safety-pinned letters he’d been wearing when the evening had begun ages ago—he turned back around and continued across the floor.

  “Hey,” Von called as Dante stepped into the red-lit hall. “Just one question.”

  Dante paused, and looked at Von from over one black-clad shoulder. “Yeah?”

  “Who put that mark on you?”

  “The Morningstar,” Dante said, pulling up his hood and shadowing his pale face. He resumed walking, his boots soundless against the hardwood.

  Von stared after him, his heart kicking against his ribs. Holy hell. A glacier of fear settled in his belly, radiating cold throughout his body.

  “Who’s the Morningstar?” Silver asked.

  “Lucifer,” Von replied, each word as bitter and tongue-curling as absinthe. “The Prince of fucking Darkness.”

  16

  NIGHT HUNT

  NEW ORLEANS

  THE FRENCH QUARTER

  March 28

  DANTE STEERED HIMSELF TOWARD Bourbon Street, hunger drumming a savage tempo through his veins. He extended his senses, listening for a dark and violent heart, a mind bursting at the seams with blood-slicked shivs and steel cuffs and motherfucking lies.

  That’s my Bad Seed bro.

  Pain throbbed against Dante’s temples, behind his eyes. Wrong, motherfucker. Not anymore. Bad Seed is dead. Like you.

  Sure about that?

  “T’es sыr,” Dante muttered. “Now shut the fuck up.”

  Laughter trickled up from below. Laughter that sounded familiar—like his own—and left him uneasy.

  He picked up his pace, breezing past a couple of hard-partying tourists stumbling back to their hotel rooms and reeking of rum and strawberries. The last of the street regulars were heading home, done with souvenir selling and impromptu guided tours and fast-hand card tricks, disappearing into the dying night like twists of smoke.

  Dawn was on the way.

  The Quarter was about to curl up and take a catnap—except for Bourbon Street, party jamboree and flesh-fest central, twenty-four/seven, and as wide awake as a lap-dancing tweaker go-juiced to the eyebrows.

  Party jamboree, yeah. And a strobe-light beacon for pervs on the prowl.

  And the reason he’d aimed his hunt in this direction. The past stirred, restless and full of venomous whispers.

  Trиs joli, dis one, like an angel. Play with him all you want, but don’t put nuthin’ in his mouth. Boy bites.

  Do you think you could love me?

  Nope.

  If I had Papa remove your handcuffs, could you love me then?

  Nope. I’d kill you then.

  Searing pain shoved a red-hot poker behind Dante’s left eye, and blood trickled hot from his nose. Jaw clenched, he wiped at his nose automatically with the back of his hand, smearing blood across the skin.

  You could kill them all, y’know. Nothing and no one could stop you.

  Dante’s breath caught in his throat as those words soaked into his mind like melting ice—clear and cold and true.

  Dante-angel?

  It’s okay, princess. I ain’t listening.

  More laughter, warm and low and too familiar, spiraled up from below. Liar.

  Dante jammed his fisted hands into the pockets of his hoodie.

  Halfway to Bourbon, Dante’s searching senses brushed up against that dark and violent heart he was scouring the night for, a mind bursting at the seams with blood-slicked shivs and steel cuffs and motherfucking lies, but this predator/perv was cold and efficient, a gutter shark fueled by survival, by power and money, and not lust—at least not for sex.

  Pulling his hands from his pockets, Dante paused on the empty sidewalk, his gaze on a sleek old Caddy gleaming like a white-washed tomb beneath the street lights, nestled against the curb on Saint Peter, just before Preservation Hall.
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  The beats of two mortal hearts—one hammering out a desperate rhythm, the other a lazy roll of thunder, the shark’s unhurried tempo—echoed from the car’s interior.

  Behind the Caddy’s windshield, Dante saw a dark-skinned boy with close-cropped black curls struggling to slide across the passenger seat to the door. One hand reached for the door handle. But the Caddy’s driver wasn’t having it. His fingers twisted into the teen’s long-sleeved black T-shirt and yanked him back. Shook him.

  “You think I don’t know a lie when I hear it, you little shit?” The driver’s face was impassive, without a flicker of emotion, his voice matter-of-fact. “Robbed, my ass. You done smoked-up my money again. And for the last fucking time. You’re gonna be a lesson for the rest of the little shits.”

  Hard-knuckled images flashed through the man’s mind as he doubled up a large fist. Bullet to the temple. Body dumped into the Caddy’s trunk. A quick drive out to the bayou. A Happy Meal for hungry gators.

  From the darkness below, Papa-fucking-Prejean laughed. Boy needs a lesson. Boy always needs a lesson.

  Dante moved.

  Before the fi’ de garce had even lowered his fist, Dante had wrenched open the Caddy’s passenger side door, tearing it from its hinges in an eardrum-scraping shriek of metal and tossing it to the sidewalk. Steel clanged against brick.

  Two pairs of dark and startled eyes focused on Dante, bodies frozen in a stark still-frame of impending violence.

  Dante breathed in the smell of sweat and beer and the heady, smoky aroma of panic-peppered adrenaline and shivered as hunger twisted through him. He moved again. Leaning into the car, Dante grabbed the teen’s wrist and jerked him free of the driver’s grip, out of the Caddy, and onto the sidewalk.

  The boy—maybe fourteen or fifteen and meth-skinny—stared at Dante, mouth open, panic still bright in his eyes. “God-damn,” he breathed.

  Dante spun the teen around, then pushed him away from the Caddy with a shove to the back of his How to Destroy Angels T-shirt with its skeletal beast graphic.

  “Fucking go. And don’t look back.”

  The boy bolted toward Bourbon Street, his sneakers slapping against the sidewalk bricks with ever increasing speed.

  Dante turned back around to face the Caddy and its driver—nah, make that pimp—who was reaching under his seat—no doubt for the gun he’d planned to use on the now-fleeing teen, his dead-eyed gaze on Dante.

  “You’ve just made the last mistake of your life, asshole,” the man stated, his tone level and easy, a man ordering mashed potatoes with his BBQ ribs, as he swung the gun out from beneath the seat.

  Dante moved, blurring into the Caddy, across the front seat, slamming against the pimp, a forearm pressed against his throat. The back of the pimp’s head smashed against the driver’s side window, a spiderweb of fractures crackling across the glass behind his trimmed ’fro. Dante snugged his leather-clad knee against the man’s crotch.

  Wincing and struggling for air, the pimp fi’ de garce shoved the gun muzzle underneath Dante’s hoodie and against his ribs. Dante reached down and wrapped his fingers around the gun’s barrel. And twisted. Fingers and other small bones in the pimp’s hand and wrist snapped.

  The man screamed, the sound scraping like fingernails across Dante’s aching mind. Dante released the gun and it bounced onto the seat before thudding onto the floorboards. Grabbing the pimp’s chin, Dante forced his face aside, exposing his throat.

  “Still thinking this is the last mistake of my life, motherfucker?”

  “Go screw—” were the only words said motherfucker managed to grate out from between clenched teeth before pain-triggered endorphins flooded his adrenaline-saturated scent. And Dante’s hunger uncoiled like a striking rattler.

  Dante tore into the pimp’s taut, whiskered throat with his fangs, shredding flesh and muscle and larynx, lost to everything except the rush of hot, coppery blood pulsing in between his lips.

  DANTE TOSSED THE CADDY’S keys into the trunk alongside the pimp’s already cooling body, then shut the lid.

  Guess the fucker was right about a body in the trunk, just wrong about whose.

  A sliver of molten pain pierced Dante’s mind. “Fuck,” he muttered, rubbing his temples with his fingers.

  Despite feeding, pain still chiseled away at his thoughts; his migraine refused to relent one fucking iota. And the blood-fed energy surging through his veins was only skating along the surface of his exhaustion, like a dragonfly skimming the Mississippi, instead of washing it away like normal.

  Looks like trashing cemeteries and creating gates comes with a honking huge price tag. Who knew, yeah? And I’m flat-ass broke.

  Maybe after Sleep . . .

  He thought of Heather, felt her presence at the back of his mind like a blue-white star, cool and soothing and constant. Beacon and anchor both. But their bond was a danger to her if he couldn’t keep his shit together and stay in the here-and-now.

  Ain’t losing her too.

  He stepped up from the street onto the sidewalk, skirting the Caddy’s liberated passenger door. He swiveled around, looking past green-shuttered doorways, past night-pooled balconies with pots of ferns and roses and geraniums hanging from their black iron scrollwork, the flowers perfuming the humid air, and toward the restless flickers of neon on Bourbon.

  He hoped that the teen with the black curls and HDA tee had found a safe place to snooze, but knew safe was real fucking relative when you lived on the streets.

  With a last glance toward Bourbon Street, Dante said, “Bonne chance, p’tit.”

  Tugging the edges of his hood past his face, Dante strode up the empty sidewalk, his boots soundless against the brickwork. Headlights starred the night, dazzling his vision and needling pain into his eyes, as a car turned onto Saint Peter and purred up the street. Wishing for a pair of shades, he both shielded his sight with his arm and looked down at the bit of sidewalk between his boots.

  He and the car reached the club at the same time. The headlights winked out as the vehicle glided up against the curb, in front of Von’s Harley. The engine revved, a high-performance eight cylinder’s throaty roar, idling down into a low rumble as the driver eased off the gas pedal, then killed the engine.

  Dante looked up, his muscles coiling in anticipation.

  A silver Jaguar convertible with black-tinted windows glinted beneath the gaslights. Music escaped from the car’s interior, penetrating the night—bass throb and sexy, up-tempo drumbeat, a pensive voice—David’s Bowie’s “China Girl.”

  Dante frowned. He didn’t recognize the car. Given the Louisiana license plates, it sure as hell wasn’t piloted by a lost tourist. Maybe one of Mauvais’s muscle-nerds looking to play?

  Glancing at the star-faded horizon, Dante felt the deadly dawn burning beneath it, searing away the night. Still an hour or so away. A cold smile tugged at his lips. Maybe the night’s hunt wasn’t over, after all.

  Dante pushed his hood back from his face and stepped over to the Jaguar, his hands loose and ready at his sides.

  The driver’s side window hummed as it glided down into its slot and a cloud of smoke smelling of premium, dark-leaf tobacco and vanilla rolled out from the car’s interior, carried on “China Girl’s” dark and yearning chords.

  “Christ. I always forget how bloody gorgeous you are, mate,” a male voice with a light British accent said, managing to sound both amused and rueful at the same time. A voice Dante recognized as belonging to one of Simone and Silver’s friends, the lord of the household down on Magazine Street—a household allied with Mauvais’s. “I think it must be a self-defense mechanism of some sort.”

  Body still tensed for action, Dante met Vincent’s gleaming, eye liner-rimmed gaze. “Self-defense mechanism, huh?”

  “Must be. Otherwise I’d become obsessed with figuring out how to get you into bed for a proper and thorough shagging. Then I’d never get anything bloody done.”

  “You could just ask me.”

  Vi
ncent blinked, mouth open. He moved, blurring out of the car and onto the sidewalk. Dante caught a glimpse of the Jaguar’s full moon–white interior before the car door thunked shut again. The music shut off.

  Vincent leaned against the Jaguar, dressed in his usual 1970s glam-style—skin-tight purple and blue paisley button-down shirt, the black top of his usual pack of Pink Elephant cigarettes poking up from the pocket; snug mock-snakeskin vinyl pants and platform-soled boots. His shoulder-length dark brown hair was cut glam star shag-style, his face clean-shaven. Several centuries old, maybe more, but he didn’t look a day over thirty.

  Dante had always thought he looked like Ewan McGregor’s character, sexy and out-of-control Curt Wild, in that old movie Velvet Goldmine. Minus the heroin habit. And the tendency to expose himself. Well, maybe not on that last one. At the moment, however, Vincent was staring at him, arms folded over his chest, the expression on his handsome face one of utter disbelief.

  “I could just ask? And where would the sodding fun be in that?”

  “In the proper and thorough shagging if the answer was yes, would be my guess,” Dante said with a shrug. “Whatcha doing here, Vincent? Kinda late for a visit, yeah?”

  Emotion tightened the corners of Vincent’s mouth and all amusement vanished from his hazel eyes. “Silver called me. Told me about the fire . . . and Simone. My condolences, mate.”

  Dante nodded, his muscles twisting several turns tighter. “Merci bien, but you didn’t hafta fucking drive out here to tell me that. What else?”

  “Your nose is bleeding.” Vincent tapped a paint-stained fingertip under his own nose. “And no, I didn’t drive out here to tell you that,” he added with a roll of his eyes. “I’m not bloody psychic or that desperate.”

  Dante snorted. “What else?” he repeated, wiping at his nose with the sleeve of his hoodie.

  Shaking his head, Vincent straightened and stepped away from the Jaguar to stand less than a handspan from Dante. Underneath the nicotine, tobacco, and vanilla reek of his smokes, his skin smelled of turpentine and ink and fresh canvas.

  “I don’t know what Mauvais’s beef with you is exactly,” Vincent said, “and to be honest, I don’t sodding care. The man’s a prick. So are you at times. But I suspect that whatever it is, it’s the reason Simone died. Which means you fucked up, mate.”