Etched in Bone (Maker's Song #4)

by Adrian Phoenix

  “Hypnotized by beauty,” Silver commented. “Like a rat in front of a cobra. Wish I could do that,” he added.

  Heather flicked a glance at Silver, wondering at his wistful tone. His attention was focused on Dante, his expression shadowed and brooding, a teenager’s intense and single-minded want despite the fact that he was actually a year or two older than Dante.

  Heather looked away, a wisp of uneasiness curling through her. He has a crush on Dante. And not in a good way. Does Annie know?

  “Our quarrel ain’t with you,” Dante said to the boat pilot. “We’ll leave you—”

  Blood sprayed across Dante’s face. Fountained into the air from the pilot’s headless neck stump. Spattered the concrete in dark and glistening drops. Trey stood behind the pilot, the man’s open-mouthed head in his hands.

  Heather blinked. She hadn’t even seen the web-runner move. Her stomach knotted and she looked away from the head he held.

  Dante released the spasming body. It crumpled against the ramp. He wiped blood from his face with his mesh sleeve. “Dammit, Trey! That wasn’t necessary. He was just a fucking servant.”

  But Trey said nothing. He simply tossed the head into the dark waters of the lake, the splash loud in the strained silence. The slaughter on the boat ramp had happened with breathtaking speed. Three dead in less than three minutes.

  “So much for the element of surprise, doll.” A whiff of gun oil and frost.

  Heather jumped. Whirling, she glared at the nomad now standing beside her. “Christ! I need to get bells for all of you.”

  Von snorted. “You still wouldn’t hear us coming, woman.”

  Thinking of Dante’s silent tread, his soundless motion even with jinglies on his leather jacket, Heather sighed and nodded. “Probably not,” she agreed.

  “The question now is, did the nightkind half of this house-torching pair get a warning off to Mauvais before Trey wrenched his head from his shoulders?” Von said, stroking the sides of his mustache with his thumb and index finger.

  Heather returned her gaze to the lake where it blended with the starlit horizon and spotted what she believed to be Mauvais’s yacht in the distance, a shape outlined in white pearls of holiday light—La Belle Femme.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “The yacht doesn’t seem to be moving.”

  “I’d bet my left rim Mauvais knows we’re here, doll—or that someone is, anyway.”

  Heather frowned. “But why wouldn’t he just leave?”

  “ ’Cuz he ain’t worried, catin,” Dante said, trailing a hand through his hair. “We’re nothing but a household of snot-nosed kids to him.”

  “Exactly,” Von said. “But just because he ain’t worried, it doesn’t mean he ain’t gonna hunt you down later to spank your ass over this. Especially when three of his own—one nightkind and two mortals—are dead.” He glanced at the headless night-kind body. “Well, mostly dead. We still need to burn this bastard.”

  “So what now?” Silver asked. “We’ve got the boat. Do we go after the asshole and finish this?”

  “Oui, cher, we finish this,” Dante said quietly, his gaze flicking over each of them in turn before returning to Silver. “If we don’t, if we wait for a different night or better odds—it won’t be me the fi’ de garce comes after, it’ll be all of you.”

  “So he’ll punish you through us,” Heather said, studying the light-beaded yacht.

  “Not if he’s dead,” Trey said, voice flat. “Not if I feast on his heart.”

  “Exactement.”

  A shadow swooped across the dock and Heather looked up. His black wings extended like a thermal-gliding dragon’s, De Noir glided through the night sky in a slow, lazy spiral on his way down to the ground.

  “Von mentioned that Mauvais tasted your blood,” De Noir said to Dante as his feet touched the concrete. “He’ll want more. He might be hoping you’ll come to him.” His wings folded shut behind him with an easy grace. “And he’ll be ready.”

  “So he can keep you on tap,” Von speculated, his expression providing a new standard for deadpan. “Chain you up and keep you in the wine cellar to be brought out for those special occasions.”

  Dante snorted. “You mean he’ll try. I ain’t planning on letting anyone hold me down this time.”

  “You didn’t plan on that last time either, little brother,” Von pointed out.

  “Yeah, yeah, blow me. But I get your point, llygad.”

  “Wait. You what? Check my pulse, doll. Did my heart just stop?”

  “That can be arranged,” Dante growled.

  “Tempting as that is, I think I’m gonna pass on the opportunity to become a part of the body count. But thanks for thinking of me.”

  Dante rolled his eyes. “Anytime.”

  “Excuse me, but is his heart still beating?” Heather asked, pointing at the headless nightkind body on the ramp. Her memory flipped back to the night Dante had killed Йtienne in the slaughterhouse.

  Wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his wrist, Dante stands. Йtienne’s head dangles from his other hand, braids wrapped around his fingers. He drops the head onto Йtienne’s chest. The braids jitter with each beat of the heart. The eyes blink.

  “Oui, he’s still alive,” Dante replied. “And we need to finish him.”

  De Noir joined Dante beside the bodies. “You kill him, Mauvais will feel it and know beyond a doubt something is wrong. There will be no turning back.”

  “We’re already past the point of no return,” Dante replied, nodding at the bodies.

  “The murdering motherfucker burns,” Trey said. He was staring out across the lake to the yacht, despair hollowing out his eyes. His bloodied hands flexed at his sides. “I don’t give a shit what Mauvais knows or feels or suspects. This murdering motherfucker burns.”

  Dante gave De Noir a look, one that seemed to say, that settles it, yeah?

  A muscle flexed in De Noir’s jaw, but he said nothing more.

  “I’ll check the boat for a gas can or something,” Silver said. He loped across the ramp, jumped into the power boat, then ducked into the cabin.

  A stiff breeze, smelling of saltwater and fish, gusted against Heather and she pulled her trench coat tighter, grateful she’d worn it. She tucked her Colt back into her pocket. The yacht remained on the horizon, glittering like a constellation upon the lake.

  Von nudged her with his shoulder. “Hell, this’ll probably be our best shot at Mauvais, anyway,” he said. “He wasn’t expecting us when he took to his yacht in the first place, so he can’t have more than a fraction of his household with him.”

  “Not to mention a smaller cache of weapons,” Heather said.

  Von nodded. “True, darlin’.” He strolled up the ramp toward the bodies.

  Dante bent and hooked his fingers into the collar of the headless nightkind’s burgundy silk shirt. Or, at least Heather thought the shirt was burgundy. Maybe it hadn’t been before all the blood.

  Von scooped up the head and held it by its short, bleached blond hair, a look of mild distaste on his face. “Picking up severed heads. I’ll never get used to shit like this,” he muttered. “And if I ever do—fucking bring me down in a hail of bullets.”

  Heather felt a sympathetic smile twitch across her lips. “As long as you promise to do the same for me.”

  “Done, doll.”

  Dante hauled the body toward Heather’s end of the ramp, blood painting a dark, wet trail on the concrete behind him. Heather’s shoulder muscles cabled tight as she remembered how Йtienne’s body had struggled to escape the flames.

  Dante’s dark eyes met hers. Comprehension and sympathy glinted in their depths.

 

 

  Dante’s breath caught in his throat and he stumbled. The shirt collar slid from his grip. The body thumped bonelessly to the concrete. Dante squeezed his eyes shut, his body st
iffening with pain and tension.

  “Aw shit, little brother.”

  Heather’s heart skipped a beat when she saw a dark line of blood ooze from Dante’s left nostril. She felt something jagged and red-hot, like a broken and burning branch, jab against her shields.

  Pulse racing, Heather struggled to spin her shields tight, to layer more steel around her mind, but instead she felt something different, something she hadn’t experienced before during the short time of their bond—a thought-blanking, body-numbing arc of electricity, as though a downed and wriggling power line had been jammed into her skull. Her muscles spasmed, locked.

  Just before her vision whited out, she caught a glimpse of Dante falling, his body convulsing, heard frantic voices—Von and De Noir—and the high drone of an engine powering away, and smelled the thunderstorm scent of ozone.

  Then bolt after searing bolt of lightning struck her, contorting her muscles and reducing her mind to molten slag.

  HEATHER TASTED BLOOD, COPPERY and warm, but with an unusual undertone, like just-ripened grapes. Felt it fill her mouth. She turned her head to spit it out, but a strong hand held her jaw closed.

  “No, you don’t, doll. You need to swallow it, just like the other mouthful.”

  The other mouthful?

  Her body hurt all over—muscles throbbing, joints aching—as though she’d been in bed for days with a severe case of flu, and her skin prickled, a pincushion for a million tiny needles.

  What happened? Where am I?

  “Swallow, darlin’,” Von repeated. “And I totally mean that in a non-dirty way.”

  Realizing the blood had to be Von’s, Heather did as the nomad urged and choked down her mouthful. Coughing, she opened her eyes.

  Von leaned over her, the skin between his eyebrows creased, worry in his green eyes. Several strands of dark hair had escaped his ponytail and trailed across his face. A relieved smile brushed his lips.

  “Hey,” she whispered. “What happened?”

  “Hey back, woman. You gave us a scare.”

  Heather blinked. Tried to remember where she was. She looked up into the night sky. She smelled brackish water and mud, heard the slap of water against pilings. Then, like a pool being filled with a garden hose, where and when and what trickled into her mind.

  Lake Pontchartrain. La Belle Femme. Trey soaked in blood. Mauvais. Severed heads. Dante . . .

  Dante.

  Heather tried to sit up, but Von pinned her down to the concrete, his hands to her shoulders. “Wait a moment, let the blood do its work, doll. Dante’s okay. Lucien’s with him right now.”

  “It was a seizure, wasn’t it?” Heather asked.

  “Yup, and Dante ended up taking you along for the ride too.” Von released his hold on her and smoothed her hair back from her face, his road-calloused hands light, gentle.

  “My fault,” she murmured. “I didn’t tighten my shields in time. I’d lowered them to send to him and . . .”

  “Ain’t nobody’s fault,” Von chided. “It just happened. But we got a big problem. Trey’s on his way to the yacht and he’s got a good five minutes head start.”

  Memory clicked—the sound of an engine powering away. “Shit. And Silver?”

  “Silver’s still on the boat. He’s been sending to us. He’s tried to reason with Trey, but . . .” Von shook his head. “Boy’s lost to grief and blood-lust and Silver ain’t a match for Trey’s strength—not with Dante’s blood powering through his veins.”

  “So what do we do?” Heather asked. “What’s the plan?”

  Dante’s voice, husky and urgent, said, “Merci, but let me up.”

  Heather heard the creak of latex, the soft bellows-rush of fanning wings, then Dante’s autumn scent—burning leaves and November frost—curled around her as he sank to his knees beside her and gathered her into his arms, into his fevered heat, and held her tight.

  “Fuck, catin, goddammit. Зa va? Je regrette—”

  Heather silenced him with a finger laid against his blood-smeared lips. She looked into his eyes, troubled by the still-dilated pupils, the pain tightening the line of his jaw.

  “Keep your apology, Baptiste. It wasn’t your fault, okay? Let it go.”

  His silence and steady gaze triggered a pigheaded alert in Heather’s head: He’s not going to let it go.

  “We need to catch up with Trey,” he said finally, “before he gets himself and Silver hurt—or worse.” He rose to his feet with fluid grace, pulling her up with him. Releasing her hand, he tugged off his hoodie, dropped it onto the concrete, then began unstrapping his PVC and mesh shirt.

  Heather froze as unfamiliar energy uncoiled through her bloodstream, speed-shifting her pulse into high gear. Steam-cleaned the lingering fog from her mind, fed strength into her muscles. Pumped through her heart. Heat flushed her skin.

  Dante glanced at her, nostrils flaring, as he peeled off his shirt. “Von’s blood is kicking in, yeah, catin?”

  “Christ, yeah,” Heather breathed. Her pain—aches, throbs, and needle pricks—vanished as though smoothed away by heated fingers. The night brightened, taking on a silver, full-moon hue.

  She felt Von’s presence beside her—warm and confident, brimming with strength, and realized they had a temporary link, like the ones she used to share with Dante before their bond. She glanced at the nomad.

  Von winked.

  Then he bent and scooped up the nightkind’s head, his fingers curling into the short hair, looking for a good grip. “Looks like his lucky night.” He drew back his arm like a baseball pitcher winding up a throw. He hurled the head into the night.

  It hit the water with a distant ker-plop. “Again,” Heather said. “What’s the plan?”

  Dante flexed his shoulder muscles and his wings unfurled behind him with a soft whoosh. Heather stared with a new blood-heightened appreciation at the beautiful loops and spirals etched on their blue and purple undersides.

  De Noir stepped forward, tendrils of his ebony hair dancing in the breeze. His wings flared out, snapping like a canvas sail.

  “We’re flying, catin,” Dante said.

  40

  WITHOUT MERCY

  NEW ORLEANS,

  THE Winter Rose

  March 28

  GUY MAUVAIS CHISELED FREE the last bit of white stone from the nude, crouching figure and tossed it onto the wood-paneled floor of the riverboat’s workroom—a floor dusted nearly white with powdered and pebbled stone. A winter scent—fallow earth and cold stone and thin, crackling ice—chilled the air.

  Mauvais laid the chisel down on the sturdy wood table and rubbed his dusty hands against the leather tradesman’s apron he wore over his fine French linen shirt and morning gray slacks. He regarded the fruit of his labor, a sense of triumph flitting through his blood.

  He’d been right.

  Leathery wings, black beneath their sprinkling of dust; taloned fingers and toes; waist-length red hair; mouth open in a silent and endless scream; abstract Celtic designs—concentric circles, triskelions, delicate loops—were inked along the right-hand side of the body, throat, torso, hand; a thick gold torc twisted around the throat; bracers encircled both corded wrists and the right biceps.

  One of the Fallen. One clearly in need of rescue.

  Mauvais stepped back from the table and frowned. Such an unfortunate and undignified position, and naked, no less. He tsked. Not at all becoming. Who or what had caught this fallen angel off guard and trapped him inside stone?

  Returning to the table, Mauvais wrestled the crouching angel onto its back and attempted to straighten the limbs, to no avail—despite the strength burning through his veins from the True Blood’s unwilling, but much appreciated, donation. It was like tugging on a statue’s leg or a mannequin’s, unbending and unyielding. Even though he’d managed to free the angel from his stone prison, whatever spell had locked him inside still held him prisoner.

  Mauvais sighed and gave up the cause for lost. He picked up his tumbler of brandy and sipp
ed as he eyed the fallen angel, the liquor as smooth as heated honey. He tapped a finger thoughtfully against his chin.

  An urgent sending arrowed against Mauvais’s shields. Recognizing the energy as belonging to one of his own—Stephen, Mauvais admitted it.

 

  An image accompanied Stephen’s sending: a pale face, rage-streaked eyes, dark dreads whipping through the night air, bared and lethal fangs. Mauvais didn’t recognize the vampire attacking Stephen. But as for the figure blurring into view behind the stranger? Ah, that face he knew well, the singular True Blood beauty, Dante Baptiste.

  So the child has come seeking payback. Seems he has another lesson to learn.

  Stephen’s sending ended in a burst of pain that Mauvais automatically flexed away. Yanking off his apron, Mauvais moved up the stairs, his fingernails striking sparks from the iron railing. He called to his fille de sang.

 

  Mauvais blurred onto the upper deck. Mortal servants and apprentis bowed their heads respectfully as he strode past them to the railing. Moonlight trailed a pale finger along the night-blackened water of the Mississippi.

 

  Mauvais locked his hands around the moisture-beaded wood railing and frowned.

 

 

  A slow heartbeat later, the thick scent of roses perfumed the air, blotting out the river’s cold scent. Silk rustled, whispered against skin. Then a delicate and pale hand rested on the railing next to Mauvais’s.

  Mauvais refused to look at his only blood daughter, refused to allow the sight of her—thick waves of coffee dark hair, white skin, dark eyes, and cherry red lips, his own lovely and heartbreaking Snow White—to cool his simmering anger.