Etched in Bone

by Adrian Phoenix

  “Hey, Kaplan,” the agent said. “Look at what I found crawling through the underbrush on his belly like a worm grubbing through the goddamned dirt.”

  “Hey back, Slade. And I’ll bet it’s something I’ll wish Gillespie was here to take care of.” She sighed.

  “No doubt,” the male agent—Slade—agreed, sympathy tendering his voice.

  The female agent rose easily to her feet and swiveled around. She was frowning, her brow furrowed, her expression troubled. She looked at Slade. “Thought I saw something down there,” she said, nodding at the pit/cave.

  “Fucking awesome,” Agent Slade muttered. “Was it singing again?”

  The female agent—Kaplan—nodded. “Yup. So who’s the idiot?” she asked, directing her attention to Tim.

  “Claims he’s a reporter.” Slade held up the gas mask. “Came prepared with this and a camera.”

  Kaplan’s clear gray eyes swept over Tim and he felt her take his measure—past, present, and future—with one long knowing look. Under any other circumstances, Tim would’ve appreciated capturing a woman’s attention, but given that this one might order him to die at any moment, he was having a hard time working up any enthusiasm for the encounter, despite her looks.

  “He’s no reporter,” she said, studying him. “At least not a field reporter. If he works for a paper or magazine it’s as a mail boy or customer service rep.” A smirk slanted her decidedly delicious-looking lips.

  Tim wanted to blurt, Wrong! I’m an IT tech, bee-yotch. So much for your powers of observation, but instead he found himself saying, “I work for the Mike and Jill Carr radio talk show.”

  The smirk faded from Kaplan’s lips. “A radio talk show?” She glanced at Slade.

  “Even more fucking awesomeness,” Slade muttered. “Yeah, that’s a late-night conspiracy nut and UFO freak show. If they sent him, I betcha they’ll be monitoring everything going on.” He scanned the tree line with narrowed eyes. “Might even have someone watching right now.”

  Hope sparked within Tim, tiny flames melting the edges of the ice sheeting his soul. Had he actually blundered into saying the one thing that might save his effing life?

  Face grim, Kaplan touched a button on the small comlink attached to the collar of her windbreaker and ordered several agents to scour the tree line for unauthorized visitors.

  While she talked, Tim caught a flash of white behind her at the pit/cave’s mouth. But when he looked, nothing was there. An illusion shaped by mist and sunlight, maybe. Thinking he’d seen feathers, he wondered if a dove or seagull had flown into the pit.

  When Kaplan finished issuing orders, she focused her attention on Tim once more. “Any ID on him?” she asked.

  Slade shook his head. “Nope. Didn’t find any when I patted him down. Douchebag left his wallet at home, apparently.”

  Ah, back to douchebag. Effing wonderful.

  “So what’s your name, Mr. Talk-Show-Radio-Reporter?” Kaplan asked, folding her arms under her breasts.

  Just as Tim opened his mouth to reply—most likely with a fake name, something stupid like Timothy Bond or Jason Shaunn—he caught another flash of feathered white.

  But it didn’t disappear this time. No. Unfortunately.

  But as he stared at it helplessly, he truly wished that it had.

  What he’d glimpsed before hadn’t been a parlor trick of mist and sunlight, or a spelunking seagull. The thing that humped up out of the pit behind Kaplan wasn’t like anything Tim had ever imagined.

  Belly curdling, testicles attempting to crawl up as far as possible inside his body, Tim stumbled back a step, unable to wrench his gaze from the awful thing rising up like a pale and monstrous worm behind Kaplan’s wheat-blonde head.

  A smell came with it, a reek ripe with decay.

  Tim’s stunned brain struggled to process what he was seeing—pale gold fur and white feathers; three human faces, each taking its turn in front like a frame in a slide show; eyes blinking like stars throughout the beast/worm’s torso; rotating mouths opened—then his brain gave up.

  Her hand sliding inside her jacket for her gun, Kaplan whirled around to face the thing behind her just as those rotating mouths sang, “Holy, holy, holy . . .”

  She screamed.

  And the shrill, panicked sound bitch-slapped Tim’s brain into motion. He spun and bolted for the trees as more screams and gun shots cracked through the cool morning air, echoing from the mist-draped hills.

  22

  BLEEDTHROUGH

  PORTLAND, OR

  OUTSIDE THE DRIFTWOOD BAR AND LOUNGE

  Twenty Years Earlier

  Behind her, Shannon Wallace hears a familiar sound. A sound that freezes her in mid-stride like a blast of frigid Arctic air: the ka-chunk of a round being chambered.

  “Just get in the goddamned car, Shannon.”

  Shannon’s heart batters her ribs. Her booze-fueled buzz evaporates beneath a heated rush of adrenaline. Fear dries her mouth. But when she speaks, her voice is steady, scorn needling ice through her words.

  “So you’re Jim’s bitch now. Doing his dirty work so he can keep his motherfucking hands pristine. Figures.”

  “Get. In. The car.” The tension in Craig Stearns’s voice spools tighter with each word.

  Shannon laughs, her derision dark and razor-edged. “I’m not getting in the car. If your goal is to shoot me and dump my body in the middle of nowhere, then I don’t plan to make it easy for you. You’re gonna have to shoot me, then lug my dead-weight ass to the car and stuff it in the trunk.”

  His silence says everything.

  Pulse fluttering like a wild thing in her veins, at her temples, Shannon resumes walking, her shoes still in her hands, road grit peppering the soles of her feet, her nylons. She focuses her attention on the neon martini glass winking in the distant tavern’s black-painted window.

  Footsteps crunch on gravel behind her, coming up fast, and Shannon breaks into a run, pelting down the night-painted highway, the chilly October air burning in her lungs. But Craig is faster, Academy-trained and in prime lean-muscled shape. He grabs her, his fingers clamping around her biceps, and whirls her around.

  She stabs at him with the heel of her shoe, but he ducks and bobs and weaves like a boxer in one of those stupid, bloody fights her father used to watch on TV all the time. And she loses her grip on the shoe and it bounces into the road. She’s not sure what happened to the other shoe, but it’s gone as well.

  Shannon catches a glimpse of blurred motion out of the corner of her eye and throws up an arm to shield herself, but something—a hammer or a gun—slams against her skull. Bright pinwheels of light and pain explode through her mind.

  She crumples to the road, dazed, the pavement scraping her knees and the heels of her hands. She feels the hot, wet trickle of blood along her temple. Her stunned mind stutters like a jumping film frame and her thoughts stutter with it, flipping up and down, up and down.

  The bastard’s actually going to kill me. I’m going to miss Heather’s birthday. The bastard’s actually going to kill me. I’m going to miss Heather’s birthday . . .

  She sucks in the mingled odors of car exhaust, sage, and dewed blacktop as she forces air into her lungs and struggles to get back up on her feet, to run before the bastard swings the hammer again, but her muscles won’t respond to her screaming brain’s demands: Get up! Get up! Get UP!

  A rough hand latches around Shannon’s arm with bruising strength and hauls her upright again. Craig drags her back to the idling car. Flings open the passenger side door.

  “Dammit, Shannon. Goddammit all to hell,” he mutters almost as if to himself, the tension in his voice edged with regret.

  Regret? She’d show the motherfucker regret.

  Shannon swings up a hand to claw at Craig’s face like a pissed-off tabby—or tries to, anyway. Her movement takes forever, her hand caught in slo-mo molasses-time as if the air has thickened. Craig tilts his head to one side, a slow smile slanting his lips. And bat
s her hand aside with a casual nudge of his own.

  Craig’s face seems to shift, ripple with shadows. His body twists, flesh and clothing undulating. Denting.

  Shannon blinks. Her heart clatters against her ribs. The man holds her arm in one hand and a gun—no, not a gun, make that a—

  Shiv, baby. Make it a shiv. One just dying to get to know you better.

  Shannon stares at the man who used to be Craig Stearns, her insides transforming into a winter wonderland of ice and terror. Thinning hair, sunglasses. A grin loops across his lips.

  Behind him, flames lick up into the night sky, snapping the breath-stealing odor of burning wood and seared flesh into the air. A whirlwind of fire devours the tavern. The neon martini glass explodes in an electric shower of blue and red sparks.

  Voices scream, high-pitched and raw, until only one remains—a woman’s. Screaming. Burning.

  “S and fucking fire. He can’t keep away.” The man shakes his head, then turns it to watch the tavern inferno. Orange/yellow/red reflections flame across the lenses of his shades. “Well, so much for Goldilocks. A shame. She was one smokin’ hot chick.” He looks at Shannon and his grin stretches wide as a shark’s. “Gosh. Guess she still is.”

  He’s still grinning as he hurls Shannon into the car through the opened passenger door. She sprawls onto the seat, vinyl squeaking underneath her. The stink of old smoke and nicotine burns the inside of her nostrils. Pain throbs behind her eyes. She tastes blood, thick and coppery, at the back of her throat.

  The door clunks shut. Like the final closing of a coffin lid.

  As she listens to the footsteps walking—no, skipping —around the car, Shannon grabs the armrest and pulls herself upright. For a second, she considers giving in to the shiv and the shark’s dead grin.

  No more pills. No more booze. No more falling through the trapdoor into the unlit basement of her mind as her thoughts turn to lead. No more soaring catapult flights through the upper stratosphere, her consciousness full of fireflies and buzzing with ideas.

  For a second.

  Then she remembers she’s planned a surprise party for Heather’s twelfth birthday. Heather. Kevin. Annie. She’d be leaving her kids behind with an empty-hearted bastard of a man who had no problem asking his best friend to murder his wife, the mother of his children.

  A cynical question corkscrewed through her mind: Wonder what took the motherfucker so long?

  Shannon’s fingers fumble for the door handle. Just as she yanks the door open, spilling cool air inside the car, fingers curl into her hair and yank her back across the seat. Pain rips through her scalp. The door thunks shut again.

  The man’s face lowers over hers. A fire-scorched metallic wasp crawls along the upper rim of his sunglasses and her heart skips a beat seeing it.

  “Your nose is bleeding,” Elroy Jordan says. “That’s kinda sexy.”

  23

  KEEPSAKES

  NEW ORLEANS,

  CLUB HELL

  March 28

  HEATHER JERKED AWAKE, HER heart thudding against her ribs. She stared up at the unfamiliar and shadowed ceiling, struggling to remember where she was, Jordan’s lust-scorched words haunting her thoughts.

  Your nose is bleeding. That’s kinda sexy.

  She had the strong suspicion those had been words he’d said to Dante during the time he’d stolen him. Tortured him. Shoved his past down his throat.

  Has your father said anything about Bad Seed?

  No. Elroy told me. But I can’t hold on to it. No matter how hard I try.

  She could only imagine how Jordan had told him. Handcuffs, drugs, and knives. Her throat tightened. Dante’s dreams had somehow bled through into hers—maybe her shields had slipped or his had thinned, but his nightmares—past and present—had reshaped her dream of her mother’s final moments.

  How much of her dream had been true? She didn’t want to believe that Stearns had killed her mother. Didn’t want to believe that her father had somehow coerced Stearns—the man who’d mentored her career in the FBI and who’d been more of a father to her than James Wallace ever had—into the murder. Motive eluded her, slippery as a wet bar of soap.

  Tainted evidence, this version of the dream. Can’t trust it.

  Or, more to the heart of the matter, didn’t want to trust it.

  With a soft sigh, Heather looked from the ornamental tin ceiling bordered with ornate crown molding to the French windows curtained in heavy crimson velvet that completely blocked out the sunlight burning beyond.

  Where clicked into place. Club Hell. Upstairs. The events of the previous long night—a night that had stretched across two worlds—flashed like a slide show through her mind: pulling the SUV into the driveway of Dante’s home; the gun battle aboard the Winter Rose; the fire and Simone’s death; the shock wave ripping the cemetery apart as Dante punched his way into Gehenna; the pungent smell of his blood as his wings ripped through his back.

  Heather’s calming heart kicked into high gear again. Dante’s wings.

  She rolled onto her side to face him. He Slept on his back, one arm across his bare, muscle-flat waist, his pale face turned toward her, his black hair trailing across the pillow. Blood trickled from one nostril, stained his lips. Heat radiated from him as though an inner furnace had been stoked to white-hot heat.

  His Sleep didn’t look peaceful, and given the creepy and violent alterations to her own dream, she could only imagine the darkness roiling through his.

  No escape, no time out. His broken past won’t leave him alone for a moment. Won’t let him rest. Won’t let him heal. Won’t even let him stay here and now.

  Heather brushed the backs of her fingers against Dante’s smooth, fevered cheek.

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

  I’ll help you stop it forever.

  She wished for a way to keep her promise to him. After everything that had happened last night, she realized that she was somehow able to anchor him through their new bond, to hush the cacophony—and worse, the quiet whispers—inside his head. But only for a little while. She needed to find a way to make the silence permanent.

  Her finger trailed along the firm line of his jaw. At least the no-whiskers mystery had been solved, she mused. She hadn’t seen a single mustache or beard or any kind of facial hair, not even a soul patch, among the Fallen males in Gehenna, so she figured being whiskerless was a Fallen trait.

  Fallen. Heather shifted her gaze to the sigil etched into the white skin above Dante’s heart and gingerly traced the ridged scar with her fingertips. A vow made in blood and fire. But the sigil—both angular and looping—felt cold as winter-iced ground in the shade, untouched by the sunrise of Dante’s fierce heat.

  Cold whispered against the skin above Heather’s heart, like crackling frost—until she removed her finger from the sigil. The Morningstar’s words flickered through her memory.

  She’s mortal. The pledge won’t affect her in the same way—if at all. At most she might get a whisper, an echo. But as long as you fulfill your promise, neither of you will feel anything.

  Seemed the ivory-haired fallen angel had spoken the truth. Or a piece of it, anyway. There was no way to know what the Morningstar—Lucifer, the oh-so-lustrous Prince of Darkness—had left unsaid when he’d seared the sigil into Dante’s flesh.

  Heather sighed, hoping that she and Dante wouldn’t find out the hard way.

  It’s the only way I know.

  Dante’s words, spoken to her during their first conversation at the club over a month ago—a lifetime ago. She was worried those words—about doing it the hard way—were still true.

  Dante’s earthy autumn scent curled around her, beckoned her, drew her in. Reawakened heat and hunger. Her fingers slid up from his chest to his throat, lingered on his collar. She looked down along the flat, taut-muscled expanse of his abs to his still unbuckled leather pants and yearned for twilight.

  Leaning forward on her elbows, Heather kissed Dante’s burning
lips. “Wake up soon, Baptiste,” she murmured. She licked the heady taste of his blood from her lips, then reluctantly rolled off the bed.

  She needed a very cold shower. And she needed to check on Annie.

  Thinking it felt like afternoon, Heather glanced around the thick-shadowed room for the glowing LED numbers of a clock, but wasn’t surprised when she didn’t see one. She doubted that keeping an eye on the time would’ve been important to the club VIPs and private partiers this room was probably intended for.

  But something else caught her eye. What looked like a couple of neat stacks of clothing on top of the dresser nestled against the wall. Frowning, Heather rose to her feet and went to check it out.

  She’d been right. Rising from the bureau were two modest towers of clothing with the tags still attached, one tower for her, the other for Dante. And not only that—a gun, along with an extra magazine, two boxes of ammo, and a cell phone rested beside “her” stack.

  Heather picked up the gun, wrapping her fingers around the rosewood grip. It was nearly a duplicate of the Colt .38 Super that she’d lost when Alexander Lyons had confiscated it from her in Damascus. Removing the magazine and making sure the safety was on, she put the Colt back down on the dresser.

  She flipped through her pile of clothing with a growing sense of astonishment—jeans and black cords, sweaters, blouses and smocks, rock T-shirts, bras, packages of bikini panties and socks. Every tag and label held the correct size.

  Heather yanked out a pair of black boot-cut jeans and held them against her hips. Looked like a perfect fit. She grabbed a lavender lace bra. Again, the right size.

  Who . . . ?

  De Noir’s image flashed in her mind. She remembered how he’d moved her bags into Dante’s bathroom that first time at his place, stealing in and out while she’d slept, curled against Dante’s warmth.

  Looks like De Noir did it again, only this time he went shopping too.

  And, although Heather was grateful to have clean clothes to wear, she wondered how he’d known what sizes to purchase for her. Did he have a good eye? Had he crept into the room with a tape measure in hand? Or had he simply asked Annie, who probably woke up hours ago, hangover free as usual.