Etched in Bone

by Adrian Phoenix

“Don’t move a muscle,” Dante said, blurring across the decking to scoop up their guns and toss them over the side. “And y’all might live through this.”

  Lucien touched down with a graceful flutter of wings. Another loud man-overboard splash greeted his arrival.

  “Smooth landing, Baptiste,” Heather murmured, stepping from Lucien’s embrace.

  “Almost brought tears to my eyes,” Von agreed.

  “Nothing beats an appreciative audience, yeah—and y’all can blow me.”

  An unshielded and anxious thought from one of the kneeling trio of white uniformed mortals spiked out into the adrenaline-and-cordite smoked air.

  If only M’sieu were on board.

  Dante went still. That couldn’t be right. Maybe the thought had been intended to be intercepted, to trick him into believing Mauvais wasn’t here. He closed his eyes and listened, tuning out the fast-paced patter of mortal pulses to focus on the slow pendulum swing of immortal hearts.

  From the main deck: BOOM. BOOM. From the upper deck: BOOM. BOOM. Von and Lucien; Trey and Silver.

  Dante opened his eyes. No other nightkind were on board. Which meant that either Vincent had lied to him or that Vincent had been lied to—but in either case, Dante had just led everyone he loved into a goddamned trap.

  The yacht’s engines rumbled to life.

  Justine’s words snaked through his aching mind: Trust me, I’ll make sure you regret every breath you’ve ever drawn.

  “Mauvais ain’t here,” Dante said, voice tight, sending his words to Silver and Trey at the same time. “And we’ve been set the fuck up. Get off the yacht tout de suite.”

  Silver sent.

 

  “I’ll make sure the speed boat’s ready to roll,” Von said, tucking his Brownings back into the double holsters beneath his leather jacket and striding for the ladder leading to the lower deck. “Four is too many to be carried, we’re gonna need it.”

  Looking at Lucien, Dante tilted his head at the kneeling crew members. “Find out what they know. Then get the hell out of here.”

  Lucien nodded, then turned his gleaming gaze on the mortals. But the stubborn set of his jaw and his silence spoke volumes: He wasn’t leaving before Dante.

  Dante raked a hand through his hair in frustration.

  A firecracker string of muffled pops echoed from the upper deck, then Silver blazed to a stop beside Dante in a swirl of copper and cinnamon-scented air. Blood glistened on his vintage Mad Max T-shirt and smeared his pale face, some of it his own, judging by the scent and the blood-slicked hand he was pressing against his belly.

  “Trey’s heading for the pilot house or bridge or whatever the fuck you call the steering place,” he said.

  “Haul ass to the boat,” Dante said. “Von’s already on his way.”

  Silver nodded.

  “And you?” Heather asked. “What about you?”

  “I’m gonna fetch Trey.”

  “Then I’d put those things away, dude,” Silver advised, eyeing Dante’s wings. “Real tight quarters in there.”

  “Shit. Good point, cher.” Dante drew in a breath, then contracted his deltoid muscles. He felt the smooth glide of his wings as they telescoped down and in, with a whisper of velvet against skin. He looked at Heather. “Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

  Heather shook her head. Her fingers white-knuckled around the grip of her Colt. “I’m not leaving without you, Baptiste.”

  Dante saw steel in her twilight gaze. Remembered his promise to her: We’re in this together, chérie. Back-to-back and side-by-side.

  “Then let’s go, catin.” Dante wrapped an arm around Heather’s waist and moved.

  DANTE SPED THROUGH THE upper deck—bar, salon, dining room, scrubbed and gleaming stainless-steel galley—following Trey’s bread-crumb trail of bloodied, white-uniformed bodies to the bridge.

  Dante slowed to a halt, dread spinning tight in his chest like a wheel on the hatch of a submarine when he heard the rhythmic and muffled beep of a timer.

  Time was running out, disaster breathing down its neck.

  Heather slipped free of his embrace and did a slow three-sixty of the wheelhouse, gun lifted in a secure two-handed grip.

  Trey stood at the equipment console, his fingers blurring across a computer keyboard, dreads dancing against his back and shoulders. Blood streaked the side of his face, saturated the back of his navy blue button-down shirt, the left hip of his jeans, the smell of it thick and heady in the enclosed space.

  “You ain’t hiding from me,” Trey was muttering underneath his breath, over and over like a child’s curse/chant. “You ain’t hiding from me. You ain’t. You ain’t.”

  “Trey,” Dante said softly, stepping up beside him. Pain chiseled at his concentration as his migraine revved into the red zone. “Mauvais ain’t here. He never was. This is a trap and we gotta go, cher.”

  Nautical charts flashed across the computer’s monitor. “You ain’t hiding from me. You ain’t. You ain’t.”

  “Trey . . .”

  “I heard you, Tee-Tee,” Trey said, his fingers falling silent on the monitor. “Fi’ de garce is laughing at us. Thinks killing Simone was a game, him. Wish I could move like data through the Internet. I’d be on the motherfucker right now.”

  “His night is coming, cher—and soon. It just ain’t tonight.”

  A dark and furious grief radiated from Trey like the fiery corona of an eclipse. Metal screeched as his fingernails scraped across the console. He lifted his head, then looked at Dante. His eyes drank in the light, swallowed it whole, and gave none back.

  “I’m gonna need more of your blood, Tee-Tee.”

  “You’ll have it,” Dante promised. “But right now, we need to move our asses.”

  Trey said, “See you topside,” then swiveled around, dreads swinging against his back. He moved, vanishing from the bridge in a streak of bloodied blue, and dark coils.

  Relief cascaded through Dante and his heart slowed its double-time march against his ribs. As he moved away from the console to join Heather, he felt Lucien’s polite rap against his shields and opened up to him.

  Lucien sent.

 

 

  Dante tucked Heather against his side. “Yacht might be a time bomb, catin.”

  She stared at him, and he heard her pulse picking up speed. “Shit.”

  Dante grabbed her hand and moved. When they reached the lower deck, Trey and Lucien were waiting for them at the stern, beside the ladder leading down to the wave-bobbing boat below. Another boat sped away across the lake, its engine a high-pitched drone, a V of black water rippling in its wake.

  Dante waved Lucien and Trey on—go, go, already, we’re right behind y’all—then opened his mouth, but whatever he’d intended to say skated away beyond his recall as red-hot pain drilled through his skull. The yacht deck tilted like a capsizing ship as another image wheeled over it and clicked into place.

  Mama Prejean smacks Jeanette as she sets the table, telling her she’s doing it ass-backwards. Papa, with an irritated grunt, backhands the girl and knocks her down.

  Dante drops his Metal Scene mag and rises from the floor . . .

  Another wheeling image . . .

  An electronic beep sounds from the door. A green light reading OPEN scrolls across the lock’s LED screen. The thick door ka-chunks open.

  Some douchebag wearing blue scrubs and paper slippers stands at the threshold, a priest’s satin stole draping his broad shoulders. He holds a brown leather carrying case in one hand, a loop of beads in the other. His face is hard and rugged, all weathered angles and planes, the tough mask of a resistance fighter. His blue eyes burn
with a fierce light.

  “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 flickering 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.