Etched in Bone (Maker's Song #4)

by Adrian Phoenix

  “I see you. You are not hidden from me,” he says, unzipping the case. “For our heavenly Father has removed the scales from my eyes. I see you. And I shall free you.”

  And another . . .

  Orem burns on a torn mattress inside a white padded room, a funeral pyre for a plushie orca and a red-haired princess in a Winnie the Pooh sweater.

  Dante’s breath caught rough in his throat, the pain in his heart blotting out the firestorm in his head. Electricity arced through his mind. Fire crackled along his fingers.

  The night turned blue.

  DANTE STUMBLED TO A stop, his face blanking as though he’d just forgotten where he was going or what he was doing. Alarm prickled along Heather’s spine. Just as she reached for him to steady him, to keep him moving toward the stern, blue flames flared out from around Dante’s clenched fists, engulfing his body in rings of blue fire with breathtaking speed as though he’d been doused in gasoline and lit with a welder’s torch.

  Heather jerked her hands away and jumped back a step, her heart hammering against her ribs. A dark and past-frothing current raged against her blood-reinforced shields, then swirled away, leaving her mind untouched.

  The smell of ozone electrified the air as Dante’s song raged into the night.

  Heather heard the sharp snap of wings as De Noir took to the sky.

  Blood streamed from Dante’s nose, spattering the deck in huge, dark drops. Pain rippled across his pale face. He squeezed his eyes shut. Coils of blue light whipped around him, some lashing out into the night, others striking the yacht.

  Blue flames devoured a deck chair, twisting it into a sleek seal-creature. Sparks winked from the points of the wing-fin spikes bristling along its spine, glittered in its black eyes. It blinked, then flowed with liquid grace over the railing and into the lake.

  A life preserver unfolded into a pale centipede, its hundreds of legs clicking along the deck.

  Heather’s mouth dried.

  Dante staggered, then fell to his hands and knees, the muscles in his chest, back, and arms taut with strain. The metal decorating his body—the steel loop in his collar, the hoops in his ears, the rings on his fingers and thumbs, the buckles on his belt and boots—burned with a cold blue radiance like distant stars.

  Beneath Dante’s glowing hands, the deck heaved, shifted, humped up like whale flesh. A huge dorsal fin rose up like a long-lost island from beneath dark waves.

  Heather fumbled for the morphine-filled syringe still tucked inside her pocket. Yanking it free, she eyed the rays of blue fire radiating out from around Dante, and her heart sank. She doubted she could get close enough to even use the syringe—not and remain in her current form—a form she was fond of and wished desperately to keep.

  Her belly knotted tight as a fist as she felt their remaining seconds slip away. It might take more time than they had for her to calm the storm raging inside Dante’s mind by funneling white silence through their bond.

  But a bullet to the head took no time at all.

  Heather’s fingers curled around the grip of her Colt. It won’t kill him. He’ll be hurt, yes, but it’ll snuff the creawdwr fire and it won’t kill him. It won’t.

  “Baptiste,” she whispered. Heather lifted the Colt. As her finger flexed against the trigger, three things happened with simultaneous and heart-stopping speed.

  The morphine syringe was yanked from her hand; a shape blurred away.

  A pool of blue fire washed across the deck, rippling toward Heather’s feet.

  Fingers latched onto the collar of her trench coat and hoisted her up and away from the transforming flood racing toward her. Aim spoiled, the gunshot rolled like thunder through the night.

  As De Noir wrapped an arm around Heather’s waist, securing her against his side, his wings sweeping through the air, she stared in horror at what was taking place on the incandescent and undulating deck.

  Trey stood in the lake of creawdwr fire, the syringe tucked like a cigarette between two long fingers. He knelt in front of Dante, blue flames swarming over his body, flickering along his dreads, gleaming in his eyes. But instead of spiking Dante full of morphine, Trey slid his hands along Dante’s shoulders and lifted him up into an embrace. Whispered into his ear. Then he pulled back and closed his mouth over Dante’s in a tender kiss.

  Dante’s burning hands cupped Trey’s face. The web-runner’s shape wavered.

  Fear iced Heather’s heart. She swung the Colt up again and aimed carefully, her pulse pounding in her temples. Heated fingers locked around her wrist.

  “No. You can’t. It’s too late,” De Noir said, his voice sounding as stunned and shaken as she felt. “You shoot Dante now and whatever’s happening to Trey will be finished, but incomplete. But if you reach Dante through your bond and manage to balance him, then perhaps he’ll be able to reverse the transformation before its done.”

  Unspoken: If there’s still time.

  Heather closed her eyes. She felt Von’s presence in the mouthfuls of blood coursing through her veins. Felt him feed energy and strength into her shields. Even though she couldn’t speak to him the way she could with Dante, she could still hear the nomad through their temporary link: I’ve got your back and your shields, doll. Hurry.

  Drawing in a deep breath of ozone-prickling air, Heather fought to calm and center herself as she called to Dante through their bond, guiding him from the dark and ragged reef of the broken past.

  FROM MILES AWAY, DANTE heard someone shouting his name, over and over. A familiar voice. One composed of cool white light and rain-wet lilac and sage and shaped by silence.

  It’s quiet when I’m with you. The noise stops.

  I’ll help you stop it forever.

  You’re not alone. I’m here, waiting for you.

  Come back to me, Baptiste.

  Heather.

  Dante struggled to remember here-and-now. He shoved the pain and the crooning voices below, but it was getting pretty damned crowded in there, packed to the brim.

  Heather whispered to him: Lake Pontchartrain, the boat ramp, La Belle Femme, the bomb . . .

  The here-and-now slammed into Dante with sledgehammer force: the firebugs waiting on the boat ramp, his first flight through the Louisiana night, the yacht, Trey, the quiet beep of a timer.

  Dante tasted blood at the back of his throat, felt it trickle hot from his nose. Pain throbbed at his temples. Creation energy poured through him, wild and unfettered, and he shivered, caught in its flow, his song keeping tempo with the chaos rhythm permeating his heart.

  The deck humped up beneath his knees, then dropped back down—a deck that felt more like living flesh. Dante opened his eyes. And his heart leapt into his throat.

  He held Trey’s face—a face that flickered and shifted, a face that seemed composed of blue neon ones and zeros —between his blue-lit hands. Trey’s dreads, now gleaming and twisted bundles of wire, snaked into the burning air.

  Dante tried to let go, to yank his hands away, but Trey locked fingers ending in what looked like flat and square USB interface tips around one wrist, holding his left hand in place, while his other hand blurred out of view.

  Dante felt something prick the skin of his neck. Sensed Trey’s thumb pushing a plunger. A cold, chemical taste iced the back of his throat as the morphine slithered cold through his veins.

  “No, let me fix this . . .” Dante whispered. His muscles uncoiled and he slumped onto the breathing deck’s smooth, wet skin. His song faltered, then died, his fire snuffed.

  Trey sent,

  Dante’s thoughts slowed, mired in opium. “Ain’t losing . . . you,” he slurred.

 

  Dante tried to force himself up onto his knees, tried to reach for Trey’s flicker
ing shape, but his body, straitjacketed by morphine, refused to cooperate. He heard a rush of wings above him, felt warm hands grasp his biceps.

 

  Trey flickered, his body a blue stream of ones and zeroes, then winked out.

  “No . . . Trey . . .”

  As Dante was hauled up, the night exploded in a blinding burst of light and sound: whoomph. A giant and heated hand slammed against his back, searing his flesh, and slapping him from Lucien’s grip. Dante fell, plummeting into the lake with a hard splash.

  Before the water closed over his head, he caught a glimpse of a fireball searing the sky, of fused chunks of leviathan flesh and yacht wreckage raining into the lake, of Lucien tumbling through the air in a fiery trajectory like a falling star, his wings folded protectively around Heather.

  Dante sank into the cold black beneath the water and within his heart.

  42

  FUNERAL BLOSSOM

  ALEXANDRIA, VA

  SHADOW BRANCH HQ

  March 29

  TEODORO FINISHED PAINTING THE final sigil in the circle’s outer ring, the mingled scents of the spell components—frankincense, anise, and his own blood—nearly hidden beneath the pungent smell of the paint.

  Power tingled against his skin. The hair lifted on his arms, at the back of his neck. The protection sigils tattooed centuries before above his heart and solar plexus threaded cool and insulating energy throughout his body, protecting him from the circle of holding he’d just created on the bare concrete floor of his office with precise strokes of a paint brush and spell-spiked black paint.

  Something he hadn’t done in more decades than he cared to count.

  Teodoro sat back on his heels and regarded the glyphrimmed circle spanning from just inside the threshold to his desk. The most likely path for the young creawdwr to walk.

  Provided he ever got this far. But Teodoro was a firm believer in better safe than sorry. Nephilim didn’t survive long among the Elohim by being careless.

  Sometimes they didn’t survive at all.

  An image of his daughter’s lifeless white face and her empty purple eyes drifted through his memory like a pale funeral blossom floating on a river’s dark current.

  But his grief and anger had burned away to cold gray ash long, long ago. All that remained was a heart scoured clean by deepest loss and lit with a pure flame—that of justice.

  Wheels. Circles. Cycles.

  Fate was cycling around for the Fallen, and this time it came in the lovely form of a half-blood and damaged creawdwr named Dante Baptiste; the passing seconds of their coming Second Fall marked out in paint on a concrete floor.

  Teodoro nodded, satisfied with his efforts, then gathered up both paint can and brush and rose smoothly to his feet. Once the circle had dried, he would tack the carpet and pad back down over it.

  In his stocking feet—to spare his fine leather Italian shoes any accidental paint drips—he padded behind his desk. His cell phone bumbled like an angry bee against his desk blotter. Putting the paint can and brush on top of the cloth bag he’d carried them in, he sank into his desk chair and grabbed the phone. A quick glance at the caller ID confirmed the call was one he was expecting—Purcell.

  The field agent started speaking without any preamble as soon as Teodoro flipped the cell open.

  “I picked the kid up at the Baton Rouge airport and got her all settled at Doucet-Bainbridge,” Purcell said. “She seems happy enough. Especially since she thinks her goddamned psycho angel will be coming to see her.”

  “And so he will. Once you’ve fetched Wallace.”

  “I gotta admit, seeing that kid was a shock. She looks exactly like Chloe.”

  “Looks, yes,” Teodoro agreed. “But Violet is very much herself.”

  “All right. I’m heading back to New Orleans. Anything else?”

  “No. Just be sure that Wallace dies in front of S. Make sure he watches.”

  “Understood.”

  A click, then dead air. Purcell had ended the call in the same abrupt manner in which he had started it.

  Teodoro tossed his cell onto the desk blotter, then leaned into his chair, the springs creaking comfortably beneath him as he rocked back. He felt a sharp pang of regret as he thought of Violet.

  She yearned to see her angel again, unaware that the next visit from her dark-haired savior would most likely result in her death—a live-action replay of a heart-breaking dance in a white-padded room, a hook curving from the ceiling.

  According to the memories and knowledge Teodoro had gleaned from Caterina Cortini’s mind, the young creawdwr was struggling for balance, for a handhold in the present, but kept slipping into the past.

  Heather Wallace seemed to anchor him. Steady him. Calm him.

  Maybe reenacting Chloe’s death wouldn’t be necessary, Teodoro mused. Maybe simply seeing Violet/Chloe in that sanitarium would be enough to tip Dante Baptiste into madness, especially after watching Heather Wallace die.

  Thinking of lifeless white faces and funeral blossoms, Teodoro wished with every bit of his heart that it could be so.

  He’d always had a soft spot for children.

  43

  ALL HE CAN TAKE

  NEW ORLEANS,

  CLUB HELL

  March 29

  DANTE SLEPT ON HIS stomach, his face turned toward the door, black tendrils of hair across his face. But his face wasn’t peaceful and his dreams weren’t pleasant. She’d felt his nightmares scraping against her shields, drawing her up from sleep.

  Wearing only a fleur-de-lis T-shirt and panties, Heather sat down on the mattress beside him and held her breath as she gently pulled the sheet back. The skin on Dante’s back was white and flawless again, the third-degree burns healed.

  Heather released her pent-up breath in a low, relieved sigh. Dante’s intoxicating scent of burning leaves and November frost filled her nostrils, the gut-wrenching reek of scorched flesh gone.

  She didn’t know how long it normally took for injuries as devastating as Dante’s burns to heal, but she had a feeling the blood De Noir had forced past Dante’s lips during their highspeed power boat race across Lake Pontchartrain had helped accelerate the process.

  Heather caressed Dante’s sweat-damp hair back from his pale, beautiful face. It hurt to realize that he wasn’t resting, not really, not with his fevered heat, the tight line of his jaw, the blood oozing from his nose, the tension in his Sleep-caught body.

  I think he’s had all he can take, doll. Heart and mind. If I knew a way to hide him from the world until he could regain his balance, until he had the chance to face his past on his own terms and reconcile himself to it . . .

  Too late. Much too late.

  Heather didn’t harbor any doubts that Dante blamed himself for what had happened to Trey. She also knew that he wouldn’t forgive himself for it either.

  And she would never forgive Trey.

  Heather raked her fingers through her sleep-tangled hair, a red-hot knot of anger burning in her belly. It pissed her off that Trey had used Dante to commit suicide-by-Maker or whatever he’d been trying to accomplish. She wished she knew what the web-runner had whispered in Dante’s ear as he’d embraced him.

  Whatever it had been, he’d used Dante—no matter his reasons, no matter his grief or his need to avenge his sister, no matter how wobbly his sanity—he’d wielded Dante like a razor blade to the wrist, and she would never forget that.

  She honestly didn’t know if Trey was dead or simply transformed. The web-runner had vanished from the yacht in a blue wink of light, then all hell had broken loose.

  Heather locks her arms around De Noir’s neck so he can use both hands to scoop Dante’s drugged form up from the glistening hide of the half-Made heaving and rolling leviathan. De Noir rises with powerful strokes of his wings, Dante clasped between his hands.

  Trey flickers like a dying light, then blinks out.

  Heather’s alarm klaxons blare as all outside sound seems
to vanish, as though the vast lake has sucked in its breath. For a microsecond, the night holds utterly still.

  Then a deep, bone-vibrating whoomph shatters the silence as the yacht/leviathan detonates, but Heather never sees the explosion, never sees Dante knocked from his father’s grip. De Noir has already swept his wings around to shield her.

  A concussive blast of superheated air hammers into them, bowling them across the sky. Heather clings to the fallen angel with every bit of her Von-enhanced strength, battered even within the shelter of his wings. Her blood chills when she sees an orange glow backlighting De Noir’s wings and realizes he is on fire. And that they are falling.

  They hit the lake with bruising force. As Heather sinks, struggling for air and entangled in De Noir’s wings and her trench coat, she hears the water hiss as it douses the flames.

  Someone splashes into the water, seizing her with steel-fingered hands, hauling her to the surface and to the waiting power boat. Von. The nomad lifts her up so Silver can pull her in.

  Dante lies unconscious in a puddle of water on the boat’s bottom, his back a charred and blistered mess. Heart pounding, Heather sinks down beside him. Her hands sweep over him, seeking other injuries, and she discovers that his latex jeans have melted to his legs in a few spots. Her stomach knots.

  De Noir joins them a moment later, his blackened and burned flesh already healing, his hair once more spilling like black silk down to his waist. He is nude, his trousers having burned away, but holds himself with an easy and unself-conscious grace. Heather’s cheeks heat as she realizes Dante has inherited more than just large wings from his father.

  De Noir kneels on Dante’s other side. He slices a talon along the inside of his wrist and, as the blood wells up, smears it across Dante’s lips.

  KNUCKLES RAPPED ON THE bedroom door. “Heather? You awake?” Annie’s voice.

  “Yeah, come in,” Heather replied, pulling the sheet back over Dante.

  The door swung open and Annie stepped inside in a swirl of cigarette smoke and cherry-vanilla perfume. She wore a black safety-pinned T-shirt reading Drama Queen in white letters and a purple taffeta skirt over fishnet tights and her Doc Martens.