In the Blood

by Adrian Phoenix

  “No,” Heather threw in before Lyons could answer him. “He lied to us. He’s still holding Annie.”

  Dante’s gaze shifted to Heather and the dangerous light faded from his face. “You okay, chérie?” His eyes were glassy and dilated, just a thin ring of deepest brown slashed with red circled each pupil.

  “I’m good,” she said. “I’m just trying to convince Lyons to give Annie the car keys so she can go.”

  Dante’s gaze returned to Lyons. “Did I do what I was fucking supposed to do?”

  Lyons nodded. “You did.”

  A muscle in Dante’s jaw flexed. “Yeah? Then why you still holding Heather and Annie? You want me to heal your sister? I’ll do it.”

  Lyons chuckled. “Just like that?”

  Dante nodded. “I can be as easy as you want me to be. Just let them go.” His nostrils flared as though he’d caught a whiff of something bad, then he turned and looked toward the hall. “Fuck,” he whispered.

  The stench of death wafted into the air, greasy and thick, and carried on a murmured tide of words Heather couldn’t make out. A tall, slender woman in a white Grecian-style gown streaked with dark smears and smudges walked into the room. She held a spear in one grimy hand, her other hand locked around a wide-eyed Annie’s arm.

  “My sister,” Lyons said. A strange mix of love and despair swept across his face. “The Lord of the Underworld.”

  A chill rippled down Heather’s spine. If this was Lyons’s sister, then she was worse off than Heather had imagined, much worse.

  “What do you see, my Hades?” Lyons asked, his voice hushed.

  The murmured tide of whispers stopped. Athena Wells looked at Dante.

  “I can’t see beyond his beautiful face,” she said, her voice low and full of wonder. “I’ve tried and tried and tried. Either he blocks the way or he is the way.”

  “The way?” Lyons questioned. He moved around the sofa and pulled Annie from his sister’s grasp, walked her to Heather’s recliner.

  Heather saw the fear in Annie’s eyes. “It’ll be okay,” she promised. “We’ll get you out of here.”

  “I fucked up,” Annie whispered. She looked away, blinking, jaw tight.

  “Give me the car keys,” Lyons said, holding out his hand.

  Rising to her feet, Heather worked her fingers into her jeans pocket, snagged her keys and pulled them from her pocket. She flashed a look at Annie, one her sister caught, then fumbled the keys. They jingled to the carpet.

  Annie scooped them up like a first baseman diving for a low ball.

  “Whoops,” Heather said.

  Lyons looked at her, an almost smile on his lips. “Smooth, Wallace.” Opening up his pocketknife, he cut through the flex-cuffs binding Annie’s wrists. “Okay, all right, Annie can go. I’ll even walk her out to the car.”

  The glint in Lyons’s eyes hinted of nastiness to come: a bullet fired into Annie’s skull underneath the evergreens, her body dumped into the trunk of Heather’s car, or maybe out in the woods.

  Cold lanced through Heather. “No, wait—”

  With a quick shove of his hand to her chest, Lyons pushed Heather back into the recliner. She landed hard, her head bouncing against the back of the chair.

  A blur of fluid motion rocketed across Heather’s field of vision, a blur of leather and white skin launched from the sofa. Lyons slammed to the floor, Dante on top of him. The gun Lyons had just pulled somersaulted from his hand, across the carpet, and disappeared under the TV stand.

  Heather jumped to her feet. “Annie! Run!”

  Annie whirled and bolted out the front door.

  “Both of you!” Dante yelled, straddling Lyons. “Fucking run!” Hands still cuffed behind him, he dipped his face toward Lyons’s throat. A flash of fangs and then he slashed into either the arm Lyons had flung up or into his throat.

  Outside on the porch, Annie stopped in front of the window and mouthed run. But Heather shook her head and motioned for Annie to keep going. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t, abandon Dante. They were in this fight together.

  Annie’s eyes widened in horror and she clapped a hand over her mouth.

  Skin prickling, Heather spun around.

  The Lord of the Underworld drove her spear into Dante’s back, just beneath his left shoulder blade. Dante sucked in a sharp, pained breath. She yanked the spear free, the tip flinging dark droplets of blood through the air. She swiveled around to face Heather, a breath-stealing smile on her lips. Heather froze.

  Outside the Trans Am revved to life. Gravel scattered under tires.

  “Welcome to Hell,” Athena Wells said.

  37 BROKEN

  Damascus, OR

  March 24–25

  ANNIE SLAMMED THE TRANS Am into fifth gear as she peeled down the dark road and away from the winding driveway marked PRIVATE, peeled away from the image of the Lord of the Underworld driving her spear into Dante. Peeled away from the image of her cuffed sister still trapped inside that house of horrors.

  Annie! Run!

  But she couldn’t peel away from the truth.

  Because of her stupidity, Heather and Dante might die.

  Slamming on the brake and clutch, Annie brought the Trans Am to a stuttering, rubber-burning, smoking stop. Her heart launched into a moshing frenzy and she felt faint, sick. She sucked in a breath and it stuck in her throat, a ragged sob.

  I almost lost Heather once. She’s still alive and here because of Dante.

  Don’t walk away! Man up! Fucking do something!

  Annie searched the car for a cell phone, rifled Heather’s abandoned trenchcoat, the glove box, but turned up nothing. She pounded her fists against the steering wheel. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” she screamed.

  Who was she going to call, anyway? The cops? She had no idea where she was and she’d never trusted cops. Call Dad? Bitter anger percolated within her.

  She looked out the windshield. The night stretched down the road and merged with the dark, tree-bristling humps of the hills and, in the distance, scattered lights glowed like tiny candles.

  Candles. Candlelight glinting in Silver’s eyes. His voice whispered through her memory: Temporary links are formed when we take blood from someone, that’s why you can hear my thoughts right now. Blood-forged, my père de sang says. You could say good-bye to me in the air, Annie, and I could say good-bye back.

  Fuck your good-bye and fuck you.

  Closing her eyes and swallowing her pride, Annie called to Silver.

  DANTE COUGHED UP BLOOD. Pain burned through his back, his chest. His entire body ached. He felt himself lifted, then lowered, but didn’t feel hands.

  I’m back in the Perv’s van. Hurtling through the night. Musta dreamed I escaped.

  Something warm and wet stroked his stinging eyelids. He tasted blood, his own, mingled with alcohol and the wormwood-bitter, anise-sweet flavor of absinthe. Green light skipped like a stone along the surface of his thoughts.

  Constant murmuring whispers, like the rush of wind through the trees, or maybe the sweep of strong wings through the night, flowed all around him.

  Holytrinitydantewillmakeusoneholytrinitydantewillmakeusoneholytrinity…

  He felt the hot trickle of blood from his nose. A hand smacked his cheek. Fingers snapped in front of his face. “Dante? C’mon, boy, wake up. Focus.”

  “Leave him alone, goddammit!” Heather’s voice?

  “Heather,” Dante croaked. His throat felt raw, sandpaper scrubbed.

  “Here, Baptiste, I’m here.”

  Dante opened his eyes, but instead of the Perv’s grinning face, he looked up into a handsome, beard-stubbled face, a familiar face, then it clicked and memory slid into place—Lyin’ Lyons. A taped-on gauze pad bandaged the bites in Lyons’s forearm, but Dante still smelled the blood, and the aroma slammed straight into his aching head.

  The whispers stopped. A woman’s voice said, “You’ve had another seizure. Did you keep any of the memories?”

  Those words trailed cold fing
ers down Dante’s spine. He glanced in the direction of the voice, at his feet. He realized he was stretched out on the sofa, his head pillowed in Lyons’s lap, his legs across the Lord of the Underworld’s thighs. Realized she held a laptop computer.

  Lyons’s twin, the mud-haired, tunic-wearing chick with the spear, smiled at him, a strangely shy and girlish smile. “Did you keep any?” she asked again.

  Another seizure? Panic coiled through Dante. How much time had passed? He looked past Lyons’s sister to Heather sitting rigidly in the recliner. She met his gaze, her face pale and strained, her bound hands clenched into fists in her lap. “Annie got away,” she said. “Thanks to you.”

  “Bon. Let Heather go—”

  Heather shook her head. “I’m staying with you.”

  Fingers stroked Dante’s hair, stroked and tugged, a hurtful caress—Lyons. “You haven’t answered Athena,” he chided.

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Hades,” his sister corrected. “Did you keep any memories this time?”

  “You can fuck yourself too.”

  Lyons yanked Dante’s hair. “Answer the question. Or I start in on Heather.”

  Jaw tight, Dante said, “Nothing. I remember nothing.” But deep within, wasps stirred, droned, and a chill shuddered through him. Sweat trickled down his temples. Sure about that?

  Lyons sighed. “Okay, let’s go again. I hate to keep doing this to you.”

  “Liar,” Dante said. The fed’s voice said he liked doing this to him, liked it a lot. And hoped to keep doing it. “How many times already?”

  “Five,” the Lord of the Underworld said.

  Fear curled into Dante. Five? “How many seizures?”

  Lyons laughed. “Five, gorgeous, five. I keep thinking you’re gonna tear yourself apart, but you don’t. Not yet, anyway.” He paused. “Ready, Athe—Hades?”

  The whispers breezed awake: “Holytrinitydantewillmakeusoneholytrinitydante…”

  Alex lifted a green bottle, his stolen bottle of absinthe. “Open wide, time for more medicine.”

  “The green waters of remembrance,” Athena/Hades murmured. “Drink deep, so when you’re killing our father, you’ll know why. Then our rebirth can begin.”

  Dante clamped his lips shut and turned his face away. He wanted his past, wanted to see, wanted to know, but on his own terms and with Heather. Jordan had tortured him with the past and now Lyons and his gone-gone-gone sister were doing the same.

  No more. Fuck each one of them.

  “Your choice,” Lyons muttered. He grasped Dante’s jaw with hard fingers, forced his head around.

  A prickling column of energy pried at Dante’s lips, forcing his mouth open, and wedging into one corner. His heart trip-hammered against his ribs, triggering hot, liquid pain in his chest. Sweat trickled down his face, stung his eyes.

  Athena/Hades watched, a gore-smeared hand resting on Dante’s leather-clad shins, her pale brows drawn down. “You’re hurting him, again,” she said. “You shouldn’t. He’s a part of us.”

  “He isn’t yet. And I don’t have time to be gentle.”

  A thought brushed against his blazing mind, and Dante became aware of two things: His shields were down, drug-dropped, and Lyons was scared.

 

  Lyons positioned the absinthe bottle between Dante’s lips and poured. The pale green liquor filled his mouth faster than he could swallow. He choked, and coughed, breathless.

  “That’s the last of it,” Lyons said.

  The wedge of energy vanished and Dante, coughing, jaw aching, closed his mouth. He saw Athena/Hades lifting a laptop. Images flickered across the monitor. Familiar images. Pain chiseled at his thoughts. He squeezed his eyes shut. They couldn’t keep torturing him if he didn’t look.

  But Lyons sighed and said, “Again with the closed eyes? You really don’t remember, do you? Or maybe you’re just fucking stubborn.”

  “Both and both and both,” Athena/Hades chanted.

  Absinthe-green light pinwheeled and flickered behind Dante’s eyes as the heavy dose of wormwood burned though his veins like gasoline and pooled in his mind, just waiting for a match.

  “You’re not alone, Baptiste.” Heather’s voice, as cool and steady as river water. “I’m with you. I’m with you. I’m here and I’m with you.”

  And Dante held on to that promise with all his strength, refused to let go even as tiny metal hooks pierced his eyelids and hoisted them up—again. Even as the laptop with its flickering images—Is that me? descended over his face—again. Even as pain shuddered through him, cracking his psyche like an egg against the hidden past—again.

  Images quaked up from the jagged depths below, each one a struck match tossed into his wormwood-soaked mind.

  Papa Prejean uses the special straps to bind Dante’s hands, then shoves him onto his knees in front of the bathtub full of steaming hot water.

  You wanna take her punishment, p’tit? D’accord, if you so hellfire eager, take it.

  Papa grabs Dante’s hair and plunges his head and upper body into the scalding water, holds him down and holds him under until he finally sucks in a lungful of water and drowns…

  Dante drains the last of the men, the men that came to do bad things to Chloe, and wipes a hand across his mouth. He swivels on his knees and reaches for his princess, but she’s lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood, her empty blue eyes wide with shock…

  Whoomf!

  On their burning wings, wasps carried voices aloft.

  Dante-angel? I’m cold. Can I sleep with you?

  Time to get yo’ ass down in the basement, p’tit.

  What’s he screamin’?

  A very clear demand: Kill me.

  You’re not alone. I’m here and I’m with you.

  Dante held onto that promise.

  Even when he couldn’t hold onto anything else.

  Even after he could no longer scream.

  He held onto her promise.

  ANNIE CROUCHED DOWN BESIDE the main house’s back door, away from the light streaming through the small window in its center, and tucked herself into the shadow-draped bushes beside the door with a minimum of twig snapping and leaf rustling. She hunkered down, her knees against her chest, her back against the house.

  Her fingers slid along the handle of the pocketknife she’d swiped from Alex’s red truck. Dante’s anguished screams had masked any noise she might’ve made while ransacking the vehicle. Her eyes stung.

  Silver had let her know that Von was on his way. But when had been something they’d been unable to communicate, for whatever reason.

  Stay right where you are. Von will find you.

  But Annie had whipped the Trans Am around and had torn up the highway going back the way she’d come. She’d parked at the mouth of the long, steep driveway, then had hiked up to the house.

  Annie unlaced her Docs, tugged them off her feet, and stashed them in the bushes. Pulse racing, and wishing for a drink of beer, water, anything, she rose to her feet. Before she could think herself out of it, she opened the back door and slipped into the brightly lit kitchen.

  HEATHER WIPED THE TEARS from her face with the back of one bound hand. Dante was sprawled half on the sofa, his booted feet on the floor. His eyes were open, but his gaze was turned inward, unseeing, his body knotted with pain.

  Her breath caught in her throat. He looked broken. A toy shaken apart by an angry child, then tossed aside.

  She’d lost count of how many times Lyons and his sister had tried to awaken Dante’s memories. Had lost count of the number of seizures Dante’d endured.

  Dante falls silent when the seizure ripples the length of his body. His muscles lock, his back arches, and his limbs twist. His head whips back and forth, a blur. Blood flings into the air from his nose, his mouth, his pierced eyelids. The twins push Dante onto the floor and allow
the seizure to have its way with him.

  Athena kneels on the blood-flecked carpet beside Dante’s convulsing body and whispers to him: Rememberandrememberandrememberandremember…

  The seizure ends and Dante curls up on the floor, dazed and trembling, sweat-damp black hair clinging to his forehead, his cheek.

  Lyons floats Dante up into the air and back onto the sofa. He bends over Dante with a washrag and wipes the blood from his face. And the process starts all over again.

  And each seizure is worse than the one before.

  Athena paced at the opposite end of the room, her spear thumping against the carpet with each step. Her reflection in the windows behind her echoed her movement. “I can’t see past Dante. Nothing stretches beyond him.” She looked at her brother. “He’s either the end of us or the beginning.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to be able to make him whole again,” Lyons said. He trailed both hands through his curls. “Not without Father’s help. Maybe he told the truth about the labyrinth.”

  “He’d tell us anything to get free.” Athena stopped pacing and faced her twin. A bitter smile touched her lips. “But he’d only lead us to the minotaur within the labyrinth’s heart.”

  Heather went still. Wells was here? And a prisoner of his own warped children? She felt a dark smile twist across her lips. Maybe there was such a thing as karma, after all. She hoped he remained a prisoner. She didn’t want to think about what he could do to Dante if freed. Or worse, what he would make Dante do.

  Didn’t want to think about what she might do to Wells, given the chance.

  “Blood might give Dante the strength to reclaim his past,” Athena/Hades said.

  Lyons nodded. “I’ll fetch his meal.” He walked from the room.

  With a low sigh, the Athena-wind gusted into the air. “Holytrinitydante…” She resumed pacing, her spear once again thumping against the floor. Her eyes closed. “Holytrinitydantewillmakeusoneholytrinity…”

  Hoping Athena was as lost in thought as she appeared, Heather rose from the recliner. Pulse racing, she knelt beside the sofa and touched Dante’s face. “Can you get up?” she murmured.