Authors: Adrian Phoenix
“But you do?”
“Oh, yes,” Purcell said. “When I get back, I’m going to kill you. I’m going to take you apart and burn each piece until nothing but ash remains. And then I’ll flush those ashes down the goddamned toilet.”
“You’re gonna
try
, anyway.”
“Still a cocky bastard. Good.”
Purcell moved up from the foot of the table to stand beside Dante and, reaching inside his suit jacket, withdrew a syringe containing a thick, reddish substance. “Just a little something whipped up by Mother Nature to keep born bloodsuckers in permanent check,” he murmured as he bent and jabbed the needle into Dante’s neck. “But this is only a half dose. I want you weak, but I don’t want you to bleed out. Not yet anyway.”
“Ain’t you a thoughtful asshole?” Dante said as cold flowed through his veins, chilling him from the inside out. Devouring his strength. He tasted something woody and thick and bitter at the back of his throat. Cold sweat iced his skin.
Purcell dropped the emptied syringe onto the floor. It hit with a hard plastic
tick
. “When it comes to you, yeah. I’m
extremely
thoughtful.”
Dante’s heartbeat stuttered, paused, then resumed an uneasy rhythm. He coughed, and pain ripped through his lungs. He tasted blood, warm and coppery. Felt its hot trickle from his nose down across his lips. His vision grayed. The world wheeled.
Stay awake. Don’t you dare fucking pass out.
Dante bit down, his fangs slicing into his lower lip. The sudden, sharp pain cleared his vision as more blood seeped into his mouth. The wheeling world slowed.
“Y’know, that whole bit of yours with Violet was pretty
damned convincing,” Purcell said, folding his arms casually over his chest, just two old drinking buddies shooting the shit. Never mind that one was in a straitjacket. Details.
“Bit?” Dante questioned.
“If I didn’t know that you’re a sociopath incapable of feeling anything for anyone except yourself, you’d almost have me believing that you actually cared. You’re good at pretending. Damned good. Always were. You even managed to fool people who should’ve known better. But you’ve never fooled me.”
“Think you know me, huh?”
“Better than anyone,” Purcell said quietly. “I know what Violet and Heather don’t—that you
always
turn on those foolish enough to trust you, the ones who think they’re actually safe with you. Just ask Chloe. While you’re at it, you could quiz Gina and Jay also. They trusted you too, right? And where did that land them? Oh, yeah, on metal tables in the morgue.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Dante growled. Pain pulsed through his head, hollowed his heart. From the shattered depths within, voices whispered and droned.
You’re gonna end up hurting everyone around you because you can’t help it.
She trusted you. Guess she got what she deserved.
No escape for you, sweetie.
That’s my Bad Seed bro.
“Go fuck myself, huh?” Purcell questioned, a deep satisfaction crinkling the corners of his eyes. “Sounds like I hit a nerve.” He touched the com set curving around his ear. “Graham, Morgan, c’mon in.”
Two men in the standard black suits strode into the room, one holding a not-so-standard baseball bat, the other an even-less-standard drill. One was white, the other black, and both were tall and broad-shouldered. They stopped, each taking a place on either side of the table, both eyeing Dante with cold and savage intensity.
“Friends of the men you killed earlier tonight,” Purcell
said. “I promised them a little payback. After I see Violet onto her plane, I’m heading to New Orleans to check in with our surveillance team, before returning here tomorrow afternoon. Should give everyone plenty of time to get acquainted.”
Shit. Fuck. Sonuvabitch.
Purcell headed for the door, then stopped with a snap of his fingers. Swiveling around, he returned to the table. “Just one thing before I go. I watched you kill Chloe. Watched you tear her throat open. I watched every single thing you did that night.”
Dante stared at Purcell, pulse pounding in his temples.
“You never even hesitated. Just sliced and diced and kept on fighting like a good little programmed monster—even at twelve or thirteen or however old you were at the time. Wells and Moore were so goddamned proud of you. Even though she punished you for”—Purcell put air quotes around the next word with his fingers—“ ‘grieving’ afterward.” He shook his head in disgust. “Fucking little psycho.”
Fucking little psycho.
The jackhammer slammed home.
Cracks splintered in every direction across the dam’s broken face with breathtaking speed. Dark water began to trickle from a few of the deeper rifts.
Reality took a slow, sideways roll as Dante
remembered
Purcell.
Strapped into a straitjacket, Dante hangs upside down from a gleaming hook. Purcell stands beside the man whose face Dante can’t see as anything but a headache-inducing blur. Purcell nudges Chloe’s cooling body with the toe of his polished shoe, then glances at Dante.
She trusted you. Guess she got what she deserved. . . .
“She was eight years old and you slaughtered her,” Purcell now said, stating facts. “Just like you’ll slaughter Violet and Heather and anyone else who gets close to you. It’s what you do. It’s who you are.”
“Fuck you,” Dante whispered, voice raw, rough.
“No,” Purcell replied. “
Fuck
you.” Glancing at his men, he said, “Do whatever the hell you want with him. Just make sure he’s breathing and aware again by the time I get back from NOLA.”
“With pleasure, sir.”
Without another word, Purcell strode from the room, pausing long enough to switch off the room’s camera. The camera’s green power light winked out. The drill whined to life. Dante flexed against the restraints one more time, frustration a cold coil in the middle of his chest. But neither steel nor canvas nor drugs would give an inch.
“This, you bloodsucking son of a bitch, is for the
human being
you turned into a goddamned meal. His name was Josh Bronson.”
At that moment—the worst moment possible—an old commercial Dante had once seen on YouTube decided to pop into his head, some candy commercial where sharks on a taste test panel discovered that the guy they’d chosen as the yummiest among the contenders had eaten one of the candy bars before becoming a shark snack.
Steve was delicious
, one shark says.
So was Josh—minus candy
, but Dante decided to keep that opinion to himself.
Molten pain whirred into Dante’s shoulder. He gritted his teeth as warm blood spattered his face, refusing to cry out, refusing to give the bastards the satisfaction. The baseball bat thudded against his ribs, knocking the air from his lungs.
Reality wheeled.
Black water poured in an eager rush from the ever-multiplying fissures in the dam’s crumbling face.
Purcell and his men swarm into Dante’s water-soaked cell and blast Orem’s box-spring funeral pyre with a stream of white foam from the fire extinguisher. Darts from Purcell’s trank gun hit Dante in the throat, chest, and hand—but not before Dante snatches the fire extinguisher from the wielder and beats the man
to death with it, furious tears gleaming in red-streaked eyes, blood freckling his pale face:
Orem’s mine, motherfucker. Mine. I ain’t letting you touch him.
The dam began to fragment. Water geysered, a roaring waterfall. Concrete tumbled away into star-spinning darkness.
Stepping over Papa’s bleeding body, Dante goes to the sideboard and grabs up Mama’s leather purse. The other kids watch him in stunned silence, their faces pale, eyes wide and dark. He dumps the purse’s contents onto the blood-spattered oak floor—cinnamon Certs, wadded bits of tissue, keys, cell phone, bobby pins, a clutch of crumpled store coupons—and scoops up the wallet with blood-sticky hands.
He divvies up the cash—several hundred that he himself probably earned down in the basement—and credit spikes among the others. Jeannette, the ashy color fading from her dark cheeks, wraps her fingers tightly around her share of the money, and steps forward, gingerly avoiding the bits of blood, bone, and brain smearing the floor.
What about you?
she asks.
You didn’t keep nothing for yo’self.
Reality wheeled.
Dante struggled to block the overwhelming flood of memories, fought with savage desperation and every bit of strength the drugs hadn’t stripped from him to remain here-and-now. Shielded himself with promises made, promises to be kept.
As lost as I get, I will find you, Heather. Always.
I ain’t leaving you there in that place,
ma p’tite ange.
I
will
come for you.
Found you,
mon cher ami, mon père,
and I ain’t never losing you again.
You’ll always have a clan in me,
Von, mon ami,
in
us.
You’ll never ride solo.
J’su ici. J’su ici. J’su ici. J’su—
Electricity surged through his skull, arcing along his spine, disintegrating his shields. Dante’s vision whited-out. His
muscles locked as the seizure battered his convulsing body against the steel restraints. Wrenched loose his stubborn and desperate hold on the here-and-now.
Reality wheeled.
Orem burns on a torn mattress
. . . .
Humming happily, Chloe brushes Dante’s hair while he practices printing the alphabet
. . . .
She trusted you. Guess she got what she deserved.
The dam gave way, collapsing in on itself in an avalanche of concrete and foaming black water. The past swallowed Dante whole, a hungry beast carried in on a dark and unforgiving tide.
I’ll make sure you regret every breath you’ve ever drawn.
No escape for you, sweetie.
How does it feel,
marmot
?
What’s he screaming?
Kill me.
Trapped in the belly of the beast and overwhelmed, his consciousness fading, a savage and desperate fury torched Dante’s heart.
Not fucking yet. I have promises to keep.
His song rose, pale and burning, a ghost. His canvas-bound fingers tingled.
Not so fast, dere
, p’tit, the past said in the gravelly tones of Papa Prejean as it/he shoved Dante’s head under and held it there.
Time for penance, you. Time to take yo’ medicine.
The past carried Dante, drowning in memories, down into the shattered depths. Something stirred in the whispering darkness as he plummeted toward its heart, something shaped of smoldering embers and razored steel. No, some
one
born of straitjackets and meat hooks, of shallow graves and shovels, of endless nights spent handcuffed in a dank basement while pervs played their sweaty little games.
Someone uncoiling from the ashes, pale skin crawling with droning wasps.
Someone Dante knew well.
There’s my Bad Seed bro.
S laughs: The truth is never what you hope it will be, yeah?
Yeah. And it usually carries a motherfuckin’ shiv.
Beneath his blood-soaked straitjacket, power danced cool and electric along his fingers.
“Fuck penance,” S whispered, opening his eyes.
I
NTERSTATE
530 S
OUTH
H
EATHER
W
ALLACE TALKED A
good game. Spun a well-crafted web of lies.
But then,
Caterina reflected as she steered the Nissan south at Heather’s urging,
so do I
. A skill she’d learned in Renata’s household as a mortal girl trying to counter and survive the machinations of bored vampires; a skill honed in the SB.
And a large part of that skill involved listening, so she could then use the liar’s own verbal web against them. In this case, knowing the truth definitely helped. Otherwise, Heather’s detailed recitation of events at Club Hell—spoken in low, emotional tones—might have been convincing.
The son of a bitch shot Dante with bullets containing sap from a dragon’s blood tree, then torched the club, leaving him and Von and Silver to die in the flames.
But then Heather had taken her bit of creative fiction a step too far.
I don’t know how it all works, but Dante bonded me, and I feel its pull. I know I can follow that pull straight to him
. . .
Caterina couldn’t understand why Heather had risked the believability of her story with an outrageous statement like that.
A bond with a mortal would leave Dante ultimately vulnerable. And that wouldn’t be allowed.
Maybe Heather had been overconfident. Or maybe an intuitive part of her simply sensed what was coming and was attempting to prevent it. The woman
was
a survivor.
Kill me and harm Dante.
Doubts floated to the surface of Caterina’s aching mind like rain-drowned worms.
A bond would mean that Dante had seen into the core of her. She wouldn’t be able to hide lies or treachery from him then. And if that were the case, it would mean that
I’ve
been the one fooled, not Dante.
No. That was what Heather wanted her to think. Díon had revealed the former fed for who she truly was—a backstabbing undercover spy.
Caterina took one hand from the steering wheel and rubbed her forehead. Her headache hadn’t improved since she’d driven from Germantown despite the handful of ibuprofen she’d swallowed. In fact, since Heather Wallace had slid into the Nissan’s shotgun seat beside Caterina, her pain had worsened.
“Headache?” Heather asked. “You have anything to take for it?”
“Ibuprofen in the glove box. Snacks too, if you’re hungry.”
“Great. I’m starving.”
A moment later, Caterina had dry-swallowed four more ibuprofen tablets. She heard the crinkle of a wrapper as Heather tore into a package of snack crackers. The smell of peanut butter and fake cheese filled the car’s interior.