Authors: Adrian Phoenix
Underneath the kicking and hammering and muffled yells, he heard someone singing—
hey, that’s one of my songs
—voice husky and low and simmering with a barely contained rage. A voice he recognized.
“I am what you made me / no matter where you hide / where you run / I will find you / I am what you made me / nothing can stop me / I have nothing left to lose / I’m coming for you . . .”
Purcell.
The SB and the FBI.
The psychotic assholes locked behind those doors.
The motherfucking world.
They have it coming in fucking spades, yeah?
Letting the song trail away, unfinished, Dante whispered, “
Oui
, for true.”
Then let’s give it to them.
Dante opened his eyes and his heart jumped into his throat. He was no longer leaning against the wall. Instead, he stood in the wide-open doorway of an inmate’s room, his blood-grimed fingertips resting on the door’s keypad. He hadn’t realized that he’d even moved, let alone keyed open the door.
“Shit,” he breathed, jerking his hand away from the keypad.
Light from the corridor spilled into the room, revealing someone curled on the stark and narrow bed in the white-padded room’s center. Someone with golden curls spiraling to her straitjacketed waist. The mattress creaked as she struggled to sit up. She looked at Dante, blinking in the light, her pale face uncertain, her brown eyes drug-dilated.
Dante’s breath caught in his throat, his stunned heart pulsing hard and fast.
Fire scorches her lungs. Blackens her skin. Devours her with relentless teeth.
“Simone?” he whispered.
“What did you say? Who . . . who are you?” she asked in a tremulous voice, a voice deeper than her own had ever been. Somehow masculine. But that was okay. She was alive. And that was all that mattered.
Wrong. This is all wrong. She burned. You felt her die. Wake the fuck up.
Maybe she didn’t. Maybe someone stole her before it was too late.
You fucking
felt
her die.
But Von’s words, spoken in the graveyard hush of St. Louis No. 3, filled Dante’s mind:
A spoken thing or wished-hard thing takes a shape within the heart.
“Takes shape,” Dante continued aloud. “Becomes real.”
“Who are you?” Maybe-Simone asked again. “What was going on out there?”
Feeling light-headed, like the floor was dropping away from beneath his feet, Dante stepped into the room. A high-pitched
buzzing filled his ears. The room wheeled, spinning like a merry-go-round caught in a Category 5 blow-down.
Dante snapped his eyes shut. Steadied himself with a hand to the padded wall and waited for the gut-wrenching dizziness to pass. Once it had and once the floor was motionless beneath his socked feet again, he opened his eyes.
And found himself standing in front of a tomb in the silent heart of St. Louis No. 3. But this St. Louis was whole and intact, not the shattered ruin he still needed to set right.
How did I get here?
Like stove-warmed taffy, reality and dreams stretched beyond their normal shapes and boundaries and merged. Took a new shape within his heart.
Shadows clung to the tomb’s moon-washed marble like black-leafed ivy. Beneath the sweet perfume of graveyard flowers and cherry blossoms, Dante caught a whiff of bones moldering behind old marble, of ice and cold stone and fallow hearts.
From within the tomb’s dank depths, something stirred. He heard the dusty grit of time, of ashes and bone, beneath sandal soles. Then: “I’ve missed you,
cher
.”
Dante’s breath caught rough at the sound of that voice—Cajun-musical and wistful, it pierced his heart like a knife.
Simone appeared in the tomb’s open mouth, darkness sluicing away from her like black water. She knelt upon the threshold in fire-crisped tank top and cut-offs, hair tumbling over her shoulders in long, golden spirals that framed her pale, soot-streaked face in luminous curls. Her magnolia scent was scorched and blackened, all sweetness seared away.
Dante took another step forward, then dropped to his knees on the stone walk in front of her. “Miss you too.” He started to reach for her hair, but before his fingers could so much as graze a silken strand, he stopped, then knotted his hands into fists atop his leather-clad thighs. He couldn’t trust himself.
Didn’t dare.
Down in the wasp-droning shattered depths, someone laughed.
A cold finger pressed against his lips, hushing the words he’d been about to say—
My fault,
chère
. I failed you and Trey both. You died because of my fucking mistakes.
“I don’t want you taking blame or refusing comfort. I only want you to make them pay. Make them burn for me, Dante.”
Shadows crept from the tomb’s arched mouth and slithered over Simone, stealing the light from her golden curls and veiling her face in inky darkness. Only her voice remained, a fierce but fading whisper.
“Make every single bastard burn, make the world burn,
mon cher ami, mon ange
, and set me free.”
Dante grabbed for Simone, his desperation—to keep her from the tomb’s icy darkness, to hold her safe—outweighing his self-distrust. His fingers closed tight around her arm. He yanked her free from the fetid shadows, free from fiery death, from the unalterable past.
And back onto a bed in the sanitarium, once again buckled into a straitjacket.
“How about getting me out of this thing, buddy?” she asked in a deep voice mysteriously empty of Cajun rhythm.
But that was okay. She was alive. She’d never burned, never—
Pain scraped across Dante’s thoughts. He sucked in a breath as a warning floated up from the droning, whispering depths.
Ain’t Simone. That’s
Papa
in a Simone-suit playing possum.
Dante’s heart kicked hard against his chest. He narrowed his eyes.
Oui
. Made sense. The masculine voice. The questions, all innocent and confused. He could see it now. Papa playing him for a motherfucking fool, just waiting to snap the cuffs around his wrists and trap him once more in the basement’s moldering darkness.
Fucker won’t stay dead. How many times do I need to tear out his goddamned throat?
Dante shook his head, laughing low, the padded walls soaking up the smoked whiskey and velvet music of his voice, exposing the cold, knowing tone underneath. “You must really think I’m an idiot.”
“What? I don’t—”
Dante laughed again. “Sure you do. ‘Boy needs a lesson,’ right? Ain’t those your words? ‘Boy
always
needs a lesson.’ ”
Papa’s voice turned desperate, but Dante heard the slyness crouched beneath the words. “I don’t know who you’re looking for, but you’ve got the wrong—”
Thick shadows drifted like dark smoke across the padded walls, transforming them into cold and dank concrete blocks. In the basement’s corner, the furnace rumbled to life, a comforting sound despite the furnace’s predatory, shadow-twisted posture.
Welcome home, S. Welcome back,
petit.
“Yeah? I don’t think so.” Dante pinched Papa’s doughy chin between his fingers. Fury knotted the muscles in his chest. “And you know what? Fuck you.”
Deep within the basement’s dark and water-stained heart, Dante set to work. And Papa screamed and screamed and screamed.
T
HE PUNGENT SMELL OF
blood, thick and wet and fresh, filled Dante’s nostrils. Blinking, he stared at the body sprawled upon the blood-soaked mattress—a man buckled into a straitjacket. A man he didn’t recognize. Blond hair lay across his openmouthed face in lank strands. Fear looped icy coils around Dante’s belly. He couldn’t remember who he thought he’d been killing.
Something about playing possum in a Simone suit. Holy fucking Christ.
A bloody hole cratered the dead-dead-dead inmate’s chest right at heart level. Pulse drumming at his temples, Dante
looked down at his hand. At what he held tight between his blood-sticky fingers.
Not the stuff of valentines, maybe, but kinda cool all the same, yeah?
Tais-toi,
you
.
The pale heart spilled from Dante’s hand, hitting the concrete floor with a soft, fleshy
splat
. The high-pitched buzzing returned, erasing the silence. He rose to his feet slowly, wiped his hands against his leather pants.
Plucking a heart from some deserving motherfucker’s chest was one thing—
—and who says that cooling corpse on the bed wasn’t deserving? He was locked in here, after all. Might’ve been an SB experiment just like you. Me. Us.
—but ripping it from some straitjacketed
fi’ de garce
? What if it had truly been Simone? Or Heather? How about Violet or Von?
No one can ever be used against you if you’re willing to kill them yourself.
Fuck you.
The truth is never what you hope it will be.
“Ain’t listening,” Dante muttered, even though he was—he couldn’t help it. He stumbled back out into the corridor, into air thick with the reek of death, of coppery blood and pungent piss. The silence soothed the ache in his head.
Silence.
He paused, taking in the flung-open doors on either side of the corridor, doors that had been closed and locked the last time he’d stood in the corridor, feeling cold to his soul—and listened.
No thumping, no pounding, no steel-muffled shouts.
No heartbeats but his own.
Bloody footprints trailed from one flung-open door to the next. Remembering the heart he’d held in his hand, Dante didn’t need to look inside the rooms to know what he’d find.
Had to be done. They were locked up just like you, yeah? For the same reasons.
Little fucking psycho.
Dante swallowed hard. He had to haul ass out of this fucking place, and he had to make sure he kept away from Heather and everyone else that he cared about.
Smart move. But first we need to wait for that asshole Purcell.
Dante shook his head. “No. I’ll deal with him some other time. Ain’t staying.” But he noticed his socked feet remained motionless. Noticed that his blood-grimed hands flexed restlessly at his sides. Noticed with a deepening sense of frustration and despair that his body seemed to have no intention whatsoever of searching for an exit.
Welcome back, S. Welcome home.
Ain’t finished here. Not by a long shot.
For true, that. Maybe waiting wasn’t such a bad idea, after all. Give the drugs time to wear off. And once they had, he’d be able to reach Heather, Von, Lucien—everyone. But that realization snaked cold and uneasy around his heart.
Keep away. Run from me—
“I am what you made me / no matter where you hide, where you run,” Dante heard himself singing, “I will find you . . .”
“Dante?”
Dante whirled at the sound of his name, song dying in his throat. A tall figure stood motionless in the shadows at the corridor’s far end. A tall figure with wings arching above his head and eyes burning like stars.
Lucien.
Relief flooded through Dante. Lucien would keep Heather safe. Keep her far from S and his-ours-no-
his
itching trigger finger. Keep her—
Electricity arced through his mind, short-circuiting his thoughts, locking his muscles, and dropping him to the floor as the seizure blossomed full flower. He felt himself gathered into strong arms, caught a glimpse of long, black hair, golden eyes,
but Lucien’s scent of deep earth and green leaves eluded him. All he smelled was blood and ozone and crackling lightning. Pain seared his joints, wrung his muscles like wet rags.
Warm fingers brushed at his temples. <
Child, let me in. Let me help you
.>
There was no need to ask, his shields were already falling. But this Lucien’s psionic touch was different. Unfamiliar. Wrong.
The fallen angel holding him wasn’t his father.
Deep inside, someone laughed and laughed.
Pain pierced Dante’s mind, stuttered his heart as someone searched through the mountainous debris of his fractured memories, creating a kaleidoscope of ugly images whirling into one another, each set of foster parents blurring into the next, an infinite looping montage of casual cruelty and heart-hollowing loss.
—Papa and Mama Prejean.
—Chloe and her plushie BFF Orem.
—Gina and Jay.
—The Perv (another Bad Seed bro, yeah?) and his van of horrors.
—Ronin’s fingernail slicing across Jay’s throat.
—Johanna Moore and the white-coated man with the blurred face.
—Simone and Trey.
—The sanitarium.
—Heather. Heather. Heather.
The fallen angel breathed blue fire into Dante and he felt his thrashing body go limp, but the storm crackling through his mind raged unabated.
<
So beautiful, little
creawdwr
, and so damaged. I like that. We shall do wondrous and terrible things together, you and I. Awful things.
>
Dante’s vision narrowed onto the blood-freckled ceiling, then whited out as entire constellations were born behind his rolled-back eyes in explosions of icy light.
S
O EASY.
F
AR EASIER
than he’d ever imagined.
Loki withdrew from the blood-drenched
creawdwr
’s oh-so-broken mind and laughed, the sound of it floating down the corridor like a cheerful birthday balloon.
All that fretting for nothing.
He’d flown from New Orleans following the faint and dying echoes of a song he’d barely heard, pondering the best ways to manipulate Dante’s trust and fretting over how to get the Nightbringer’s son to drop his shields. To let him in.
Just to take a peek at a
creawdwr
’s inner workings.