In the Blood

by Adrian Phoenix

  Ah’ll be back…

  The day she was reduced to strangling someone with a binoculars strap would be the day she resigned. And took up action flicks? Her resentment of Beck’s presence eased. A deep breath in, tension out. A brief, heated conversation with her handlers at the Portland airport had gotten her nowhere.

  I don’t need a backup. Call him off.

  Wells and Wallace are yours, Caterina, and yours alone. Beck is there if something should go wrong. Better to be prepared, than caught unaware.

  Nothing will go wrong. Have I ever—

  Beck stays.

  And that had been that. Even though she usually worked alone and preferred it that way, her handlers sometimes saddled her with a backup on assignments with multiple targets. Like this one.

  Calmer, her pulse slow and steady, Caterina reviewed what she knew of the house’s occupants:

  Alexander Apollo Lyons: He’d taken his mother’s maiden name in an effort, an apparently successful one, to carve a career of his own without any juice from his father’s name. FBI agent, Special Agent in Charge of the Portland field office, thirty-five, six two and one-ninety, the younger twin by two minutes. His power climb through the Bureau had come to a screeching halt when his twin had become mentally ill and he’d transferred from D.C. in order to care for her.

  Athena Artemis Wells: A noted clinical psychiatrist specializing in abnormal psychology, thirty-five, five ten and one-forty. She’d been overtaken by schizophrenia, or a form of it, at age twenty-five. She’d managed to function for five more years before her madness landed her in a lockdown ward, drugged and restrained.

  Below, the house and the guest cottage beside it were quiet. Two more cars were parked in the driveway, a Saturn and a tarp-covered vehicle. The covered car was most likely Athena’s.

  Caterina’s research had revealed that Wells’s wife, Gloria, had been diagnosed with uterine cancer five years ago. She’d undergone surgery and radiation treatments. A year ago, Wells’s receipts revealed purchases of chemotherapy drugs and morphine and other medical supplies, so it would seem that the cancer had returned.

  Scanning the yard, Caterina saw no sign of a dog, or pets of any kind. Perhaps the Wellses weren’t a cuddly kind of family. The smell of pine and wet grass filled her nostrils.

  Had Bronlee sent the med-unit footage to Wells? Caterina planned to find out as soon as it was dark. Her mission that day was twofold: Clip Wells. Retrieve the missing footage—if it was in Wells’s possession.

  Several quiet hours later, the cottage door swung open and a figure stepped out. Caterina focused the binoculars on Athena Wells. Dressed in a stained lab coat and brown cords, she walked barefoot into the yard, leaving the door open behind her. She headed toward the main house, then stopped abruptly. She swiveled.

  And looked directly into Caterina’s binoculars.

  Athena touched a finger to her lips. Shhhh.

  “Christ,” Caterina breathed. Her skin prickled. “She knows we’re here.”

  “Impossible,” Beck said. “She’s a basket case. She doesn’t know shit.”

  Caterina had the distinct feeling that they were the ones who didn’t know shit.

  Athena Wells looked away, then skipped the rest of the way to the main house. Opening the front door, she slipped inside. It closed behind her. A moment later, Caterina’s handheld scanner beeped an all-clear on the alarm system.

  It was down. Off or disabled.

  Caterina watched the house for another half hour, feeling the tightrope stretch taut beneath her feet. “I’m going in.”

  “Roger that,” Beck replied, finally in work mode. He touched the com bud tucked into his ear. “I’ll signal you if the son returns.”

  Caterina packed up her binoculars and other gear, and started down the hillside, gun in hand.

  WELLS SAT DOWN BEHIND his desk, resting the shotgun against it. A slide show of family pictures flashed across his computer monitor: Gloria in the surf on the beach at Lincoln City, the twins as towheaded toddlers, Gloria laughing. The deep ache in his chest eased for the first time in months.

  Soon Gloria would be laughing again. In a matter of hours, Alex would ensure that S listened to the message on the iPod. Then S, beautiful and deadly, would spin into action and his assigned target, SAC Alberto Rodriguez, would die. Hopefully in great agony. And looking into S’s pale, merciless face, Rodriguez would know who had sent him and why.

  Once Alex brought S home, Dante Prejean would disappear forever. Wells would direct S to heal Gloria, to steal his beautiful Persephone from Hades’s heated grasp once more, and restore to Wells his laughing bride.

  A dark excitement uncoiled within Wells. He tapped his keyboard and the slide show disappeared. Scrolling through his files, he clicked on the one marked S and opened it. He relaxed into his chair as images filled the monitor.

  Locked inside a rabbit hutch, the toddler, black hair curling at the nape of his pale neck, watches as his few toys are tossed into a debris fire one by one. Following Wells’s instructions, the boozed-up foster parents tell the child that it’s his fault his toys are being burned.

  “You was a bad boy, you. Bad, bad, evil boy. All your fault, you.”

  A small plastic guitar melts in the flames. A ball joins it. But when the last toy, a ragged, chewed-up turtle plushie, is dangled above the blaze, the toddler tears his way free of the cage. Firelight glints on his tiny fangs as he snatches the turtle from his foster mother’s hand.

  “Shit and hellfire!” The foster father cries, then recovering from his shock, he grabs the toddler. The toddler’s hand and the turtle clutched in the little fingers are shoved into the flames.

  Let someone try that now, Wells mused. He scrolled forward through the file seeking other choice bits, other fond memories, then paused. Had he heard the front door open? An alarm beep-beep-beeped in a rapid cycle and Wells’s heart slammed into his throat. His pulse drummed so fast his vision grayed. He lowered his head, gasping for air, thinking, Lovely. All your preparations and you get caught gasping for air like a land-drowning goldfish.

  As he reached a shaking hand for the shotgun, the frantic beeping stopped. Locking his fingers around the gun, Wells grabbed it and strained to listen past his thundering pulse. After a moment, he became aware of a soft sound, like the whisper of the wind through the trees.

  He exhaled in relief. Only Athena. He drew a still trembling hand across his sweat-damp brow. The whispers preceded his daughter down the hall, the words she was repeating over and over, becoming clear.

  “Threeintoonethreeintoonethreeintoonethreeintoonethreeintoonethreeinto one…”

  But then a chilling question occurred to him—how had Athena silenced the alarm? Not even Alexander knew that he’d changed the codes, not yet.

  Still whispering, Athena walked into his office, her dirty, bare feet tracking mud across the pale carpet. She shuffled past his desk, her hands stuffed into the pockets of her spattered and stained lab coat.

  “Athena,” Wells said, tucking the shotgun under his arm and reaching for the psi blocker in his pants pocket. The whispers stopped. “What are you doing here?” He swiveled around in his chair.

  Athena stood in front of his collection of Hellenic spears, shields, and breastplates. She plucked a spear free and spun around on the balls of her feet. Her Aegean eyes gleamed, a sunlit tide. Smiling, she yanked from her pocket the Taser he’d hidden.

  The prongs pierced his chest. Electricity jolted through his body. Pain wiped all thought from his mind. His body twitched and convulsed and flopped onto the floor.

  Through a haze of thrumming, heated pain, he heard his daughter’s voice.

  “I’m breaking a promise, Daddy,” she said.

  22 NOT MEANT FOR ME

  Seattle, WA

  March 23

  SUDDEN SCRATCHING AT THE window in the front room along with an inquisitive chirp from Eerie caught Heather’s attention. She looked up from her laptop. “You hunting moths, kitty
boy?” Another thought flared in her mind: Nighttime. Dante. First thing tomorrow evening.

  She pushed back from the table and rose to her feet, reaching for her purse and the .38 tucked inside in case it wasn’t Dante crawling in through her fricking window again.

  The window slid open, pale hands grasping the edge, then Heather saw a black-clad leg edged from ankle to hip with vinyl straps and buckles swing over the window sill, and into the room, quickly followed by the rest of Dante. A hood hid his face, but not the lambent gleam of his eyes.

  “Hey,” he said as he straightened, pushing his hood back. A smile tilted his lips.

  The sight of him caught at her heart. As always. Heather’s muscles unknotted. “I could’ve shot you, you know. Why the hell don’t you use the front door?”

  Dante shrugged. Turning, his leather jacket creaking, he slid the window shut. He fingered the broken hasp. “I bought stuff to fix this.”

  “Do you even know how to use a screwdriver?”

  Dante snorted. “How hard can it be? Slide A into B, twist. Could be fun.”

  “Sounds sexy, but where’s the kiss?”

  Dante puckered his lips and blew her a kiss. “Good enough?”

  Heather glanced over her shoulder. “You missed, Cupid. But Eerie’s purring.”

  Dante laughed. He nodded at the computer. “You find anything out? Like where to find…him?”

  Heather shook her head. “Not yet. All of his Bureau records have levels of security like I’ve never seen. The last known address was in Maryland and it’s five years old. I’ve tracked him to the West Coast, then he vanishes. I’m still looking, though. But I’ve made a few other interesting discoveries.”

  “Yeah?”

  Heather hesitated. “You get into this with me, you’ll be in the crosshairs, Dante. More than you are now.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You were there for me, Heather. I’m here for you.”

  Heather held Dante’s gaze. “It was my job.”

  “Nuh-uh. You’d been called back. Case closed. You stayed, alone, and without backup, to help me.”

  And she’d failed him. More than once. “I didn’t do a very good job of it either.”

  “Yeah, you did,” Dante said. He crossed the floor in quick strides and joined her at the table. He cupped her face between his hands, fevered hands, and she looked into his dark eyes, drawn into their unguarded depths. “You risked everything for me. You never gave up.”

  “Neither did you.” Heather grasped his right hand and pressed it against her chest over her healed heart. Something chimed within her, triggered by his touch, and resonated from the palm of his hand to her heart and back, ringing between them like struck crystal, pure and clear and true.

  Her breath caught in her throat, and for a moment, she thought she saw black wings arching up from Dante’s back and sweeping around her.

  Wonder lit Dante’s eyes. “Listen,” he said, lowering his face to hers.

  Pulse racing, Heather tilted her face up and he kissed her, his lips as fevered as his hands, his kiss hungry and a little rough. As the kiss deepened, Heather thought she heard a song—wild and dark—its complicated melody weaving in and around the crystalline hand-to-heart refrain dancing between them. The song arced electricity through her heart, her mind, and sparked fire in her blood.

  She hears a rush of wings.

  All too soon, Dante ended the kiss and took a step back, his hands sliding away from her breast, from her face, and curling into fists. The song vanished. His jaw tightened.

  “What’s wrong?” Heather asked.

  He shook his head, then trailed a hand through his hair. “How’s Annie?”

  Bewildered by his abrupt physical and conversational shift, Heather shrugged. “She’s okay for the moment. She walked up to the market to get a pack of smokes.”

  “C’est bon.” Dante nodded at the table. “So what’d you find?”

  “Pull up a chair,” Heather said. “I’ll show you.”

  Dante shrugged off his leather jacket, then the hoodie beneath it, and hung both over the back of a chair. He wore a long-sleeved mesh shirt under his black tee. White letters on the chest read BLOW ME. In his usual manner, he swung the chair around, and then straddled it. He folded his arms along the chair’s back.

  Heather pulled her chair around so she could sit beside him. She awakened the laptop with a quick tap to the keypad. A file appeared on the monitor and she clicked it open. A photo flashed onto the screen.

  “SAC Alexander Lyons,” Heather said. “Portland office. He’s the one who accompanied me to my mom’s death site. Spotless record, amazing test scores, exemplary field work. He transferred to Portland from D.C. about five years ago.”

  “Why?”

  “An illness in the family. His mother had cancer, I believe.”

  “So how come he was asked to keep an eye on you, instead of someone lower in the food chain?”

  “Good question,” Heather said. “Near as I can find out, Rodriguez in Seattle gave him the assignment…oh, excuse me, the request to ensure my safety. And that’s another interesting thing.”

  “Interesting how?”

  Heather minimized Lyons’s file and clicked open another. She scrolled through text for a few moments until she found the section she was looking for and highlighted it. “Read it,” she said softly.

  “‘William Ricardo Rodriguez, whose reign of terror as the Boxcar Strangler ended ten years ago when he was captured by federal authorities, died in prison while serving out multiple life sentences. He was killed by another inmate during a dispute. Rodriguez’s father, FBI agent Alberto Rodriguez, had been instrumental in his capture.’” Dante quit reading and gave a long, low whistle. “Holy fucking hell.”

  Heather nodded. “Can you imagine? Not only is your son a serial killer, but you bring him in. Yet as amazing and tragic as that is, it’s not the interesting part.”

  “Yeah?”

  Heather held Dante’s gaze for a long silent moment, then she said. “The next part might be hard, maybe impossible, for you to read. I’ll—”

  Sudden understanding lit Dante’s eyes. “No, I’ll read it,” he said, voice low. “You take over if I…” He twirled a hand in the air.

  “Okay.”

  Dante returned his attention to the monitor. “‘Years earlier, SA Rodriguez filed a malpractice lawsuit against Dr. Robert…’” Dante’s voice trailed off. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “Hold on. Let me try again.”

  Heather reached over and squeezed Dante’s arm. “You don’t have to.”

  “Yeah, I kinda do.” Dante opened his eyes and looked at the monitor again. “‘Filed a malpractice lawsuit against Dr. Robert…’” His voice trailed off again and he blinked several times. He glanced at Heather, his pupils dilated. “What was I saying?”

  Heather stared at him, her fingers tightening on his arm. Cold panic crackled through her veins. “You were reading, do you remember?”

  Sweat glistened at Dante’s hairline, at his temples. “An FBI agent…”

  “Look at me, Dante, not the monitor.”

  “Yeah, d’accord.” Dante’s dark eyes fixed on Heather, focused.

  “An FBI agent, Rodriguez,” she said. “He filed a malpractice lawsuit against the man you can’t remember because that man had treated Rodriguez’s son for an antisocial disorder.”

  “And the son became the Boxcar Strangler,” Dante said. He pushed his hair back with both hands. His pale face was thoughtful, but pain glimmered in his eyes. “You wanna bet Rodriguez’s son was part of Bad Seed?”

  “It’s a sure bet,” Heather said. “Which would explain why Rodriguez asked an SAC like Lyons to accompany me. Anything or anyone connected to Bad Seed, like me and like you, Rodriguez would want to keep tabs on. And he’d want people he trusted to keep him informed, people with skill. He must trust Lyons.”

  She shifted in her chair and cupped her palm against Dante’s face. “You okay? I shouldn’t
have let you read—”

  “Nuh-uh, don’t even go there. My choice.”

  “I’m going to make some coffee,” Heather said, sliding her hand from his face and standing. “I’d offer you something stronger, but with Annie around, I’d rather not.”

  “Je comprend, catin.”

  Eerie bunted Dante’s chair with his head, mewed. Dante picked him up and placed him in his lap.

  “He’s really taken to you,” Heather said, walking into the kitchen. “I expected animals to be wary of nightkind, predator to predator, but so far, Eerie’s proved me wrong on that account.”

  “Nah, I’ve never had problems with animals,” Dante said. “Some nightkind do, but only the dickheads, y’know? I think it’s because we’re a part of the natural world.”

  Interesting thought. Vampires a part of the natural order. Heather spooned coffee into the filter, poured water into the coffee maker, and switched it on. Returning to the table, she sat down again.

  Eerie was curled in Dante’s lap, purring, eyes closed while Dante scratched under his chin with his left hand. He held a photo in his other hand. Heather took a quick glance—it was a photo of Shannon and James sitting on a floral-patterned sofa just before they married, before she’d been born.

  Shannon had been captured in the act of planting a kiss on James’s cheek, her hands with their purple-lacquered nails clutching his jeans-clad thigh. Her long red hair, teased into a retro-nineties stripper-chic bouffant, framed her face. A grin parted James’s lips, and behind his glasses his eyes were closed. A lock of honey-blond hair had tumbled across his forehead. They both looked so young. Happy.

  If Heather asked her father, would he even remember one laughing minute from twenty-plus years ago? Laughing moments slipped away, transient, light as a summer breeze; but tragedy was etched into hearts and souls, indelible, a lightning strike altering lives in a split second…

  Your mother isn’t coming home.…forever.