Authors: Adrian Phoenix
Lowering the binoculars, Purcell tossed them onto the passenger seat. He yanked open the SUV’s glove box, then pulled his pocketknife free from its cluttered depths. He flipped the blade open. Hesitated.
Díon’s instructions had been more than a little nuts, but if they got him inside the sanitarium again, then—nuts or not—okay. He’d roll with it. What other choice did he have?
All we need is a bit of blood magic to protect you from the parking lot spell.
Blood magic. Christ. Whose blood?
Your own, of course
.
Shit. I had a feeling. What about the damned symbols on the building?
Not meant for you. Forget those. Concentrate on my instructions
.
And Purcell had. Even now Dion’s voice ran through his mind like an irritating commercial jingle that made him groan every time he caught himself humming it.
No more stalling
, he thought, drawing the blade gingerly across his palm. Blood welled.
Time to man up
.
Purcell cupped his stinging palm, creating a tiny well, and dipped a fingertip into its flesh-cradled ruby depths. Looking into the rearview mirror, he painted the first symbol on his forehead between his eyes.
Once symboled up and once the sun had set, he would continue to follow Díon’s instructions and strap on a small helmet-cam and make sure it fed into the mind reading prick’s cell phone so he could monitor the action as it all went down.
Motherfucker wanted to watch. No problem. Watch he would.
Purcell planned only one itty-bitty change to Díon’s S sanity-bashing plan. He’d forgo the part where Heather Wallace died at S’s programming-triggered hands and just kill the fucking little psycho instead.
Okay, sure, that was more than an
itty-bitty
change—it was an entirely different plan, but so fucking what? S was too dangerous to play games with, an all-important fact that Díon seemed incapable of grasping. So Purcell, good guy that he was, would help him the fuck out.
As for Heather Wallace, she could stay and die or she could walk away. Purcell didn’t really give a rat’s ass. The choice was hers. She’d never been anything more than a pawn, anyway.
And Díon—along with his mind-wiping threats—could go screw himself. The next time they met it would be with the muzzle of his Glock against the back of Díon’s skull. Purcell suspected he’d be doing the SB a favor when he pulled the trigger. He felt a dark and mocking smile tug at his lips.
Hell, they might even give him a promotion.
B
ATON
R
OUGE
D
OUCET
-B
AINBRIDGE
S
ANITARIUM
W
ITH A SOFT, PAINED
groan, Heather opened her eyes. She was on the floor in a corridor filled with soft red light.
Emergency lighting
, a more alert part of brain pointed out helpfully. With another groan, she shut her eyes again. Her head throbbed. She tasted blood at the back of her throat.
Where am I? And why the hell am I on the floor
?
She rolled her thoughts backward. Texas. The man who used to be her father. The SB and Little Rock. Caterina Cortini. The rest stop. The Fallen-marked sanitarium—
Catin. Pardonne-moi.
Heather’s eyes snapped open again. “Dante,” she whispered, remembering exactly why she was on the floor, why her head felt like a coconut being pounded non-stop against a rock, why she no longer felt the
hereherehere
tug of the bond.
Dante had severed it.
And she hoped, prayed, wished with all she had, that he’d done so deliberately. Otherwise, it meant—
“No,” Heather growled, pushing herself into a sitting position. Pain pulsed at her temples, then faded. “No. No. No.”
The fact that she was still alive gave her hope that Dante
was, as well. She was a novice where bonds were concerned—how they were made or what happened when they were unmade, but she suspected that, as a mortal, she might not survive his actual death.
Yet her traitorous mind offered a possible scenario: What if Dante severed the bond
prior
to death—a death he knew was coming—in order to keep her alive?
Catin. Pardonne-moi
.
Heather closed her stinging eyes, refusing the tears, refusing the hard knot of grief in her chest, refusing to believe he could be gone. “Not giving up on you, Baptiste,” she rasped through a throat gone so tight, it ached. “I know you’re alive. You
have
to be. So you hang on. Hear me? Hang on.”
I refuse to be too late
.
Opening her eyes, Heather wiped at them with angry swipes from the heel of her hand, before picking her Glock up from the floor. She rose to her feet, one hand to the wall to steady herself, wincing as a bolt of hot pain shot up from her twisted ankle. Her headache returned with her increase in altitude.
Neither would stop her. Nothing could.
Heather limped down the silent, red-lit corridor, the hair prickling on the back of her neck, her sense of horror deepening with each step she took.
Dear God. What the hell happened?
Or maybe the correct question was:
Who
the hell happened.
She found her answer on the third floor, in air thick with the coppery reek of blood and the ever-thickening stink of death.
Even in the dim lighting, there was no mistaking the dark smears and spatters and Rorschach splashes on the walls and floor for anything other than blood. No mistaking the forms—black-suited agents and medical staff in green scrubs, male and female—sprawled and curled like pill bugs on the polished
tile. And Heather didn’t need to crouch beside the bodies for a closer look to see how they had been killed.
Each had died beneath sharp, sharp nails or fangs or merciless, pale hands.
Oh, Dante, oh,
cher
. Looks like you made sure no one had time or voice enough to stop you through your programming—whether they knew how or not.
A few of the agents had died with fingers locked around the grips of their guns, and judging by the faint and fading scent of cordite beneath the thick smell of blood, more than one had gotten off a few shots.
She hoped none had hit their target.
They brought him here. They had to know what could happen if he slipped their leash of drugs and pain and mental torture. They brought him here against his will. They got what they deserved.
As Heather’s gaze skipped from the black-suited bodies to the crumpled and bloodied forms in green scrubs, she realized she might be wrong, that not all had deserved what they’d received. Then she spotted syringes filled with a dark reddish substance, clutched between the stiffening fingers of two of the slaughtered medical team, and her sympathy drained away.
What do you want to bet that’s the dragon’s blood tree resin Von told me about? The True Blood poison that’s keeping Dante from healing at best and slowly killing him at worst. So much for
do not harm.
Doors stood open at either side of the corridor, some lying flush against the wall as though flung or ripped open. Noticing a trail of bloody footprints leading from the nearest cell to the one across from it, then to the next, the dark prints disappearing into shadows stained red by the emergency lights, Heather felt the cold tingle of fear against her spine.
I think he’s had all he can take, doll . . .
Dante’s voice, low and husky, raw with emotion he kept
shoving aside, whispered through her memory, words from another time, another place of slaughter.
Run from me. Run as far as you can.
Heather’s throat tightened.
Oh,
cher
. What have you done?
But she already knew the answer to that: whatever he’d needed to survive. Just as she’d wished and prayed he would.
Hang on, Baptiste. Please.
Stepping past and around the bodies, Heather moved with caution, Glock held in both hands, her finger resting on the trigger. In the eerie silence, the quiet tread of her shoe soles against the tiled floor sounded as loud—to her, anyway—as those of a weekend hiker lumbering through crackling, summer-dried underbrush.
Heather winced, wishing she could move nightkind-silent, but doubted it would make any difference even if she could. Whichever one of the Fallen was keeping Dante company had probably heard the rapid beat of her heart the moment she’d crawled into the sigil-etched building.
And knew precisely where she was.
So what were they waiting for—applause? What Fallen game had she stumbled into?
Which brought up even more troubling questions: Why was Dante still here in this place of nightmare and blood and torture? Why hadn’t he been scooped up by his winged “rescuer” and flown back to Gehenna already?
One possibility stopped her cold, rooted her feet to the floor.
Maybe they had. Maybe Dante was in Gehenna right now. Without the bond, she wouldn’t know. She could be searching for someone who was no longer here.
Or worse, no longer breathing.
Heather closed her eyes, pulse pounding at her temples. Despite the cold fingers closed around her heart, she knew Dante was alive. And something deep inside of her, maybe an intuitive knowing, maybe some fundamental change Dante
had unintentionally made when healing her in D.C., whispered over and over:
He’s here
.
Heather choose to believe that whisper. Opening her eyes, she resumed her search.
When she reached the first open cell door, she saw Dante slumped on the floor at the far end of the hall, his pale skin gleaming like moonlight in the gloom. Faint red light glinted from the ring in his collar. He rested on his side, one arm half curled beneath his head.
Her breath caught in her throat, a near sob.
The next thing Heather knew, she was dropping to her knees beside him, the Glock once again tucked into her jeans beneath her sweater, her trembling hands smoothing his blood-sticky and sweat-damp hair back from his face. She had no memory of crossing the corridor, no memory of moving at all. But that didn’t matter.
She’d found Dante—her North Star, her nightkind of fire and twilight, her man.
“Baptiste,” she whispered, bending to kiss his lips, his forehead. The icy feel of his skin shocked her. “I’m here,
cher
. I’m here.”
She placed her hand over his chest and didn’t release her breath until she felt the slow, reassuring thump of his heart beneath her palm. His fevered heat was gone and Heather knew that couldn’t be good. Blood oozed from his nose. Spattered his pale, beautiful face. Stained his lips. His expression was worlds—
galaxies
—away from peaceful.
Blood grimed his fingers, smeared his hands, and streaked his forearms. Heather thought of the bodies littering the floor, thought of the footprints marking a wet, dark path from door to door, and she blinked furiously, eyes burning.
I feel like I’m running out of time,
catin.
No and no and no.
Heather’s jaw clenched when she saw the bullet wound right above his heart, half healed and trickling blood, and thought of the man who’d put it there.
May the bastard rot in hell.
Remembering her dream/vision of Dante running up flights of stairs with a red-haired girl wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh sweater and black paper wings in his arms, Heather stiffened. She scanned the corridor anxiously.
Violet. Where was Violet?
Heather refused to believe that history had repeated itself and that Violet now lay in a pool of blood, blue eyes wide open and empty like those of the little girl he’d killed and who haunted his heart, his long-lost Chloe.
He’d been only a boy then, little more than a child, abused and manipulated by adults—both mortal and nightkind—driven by instincts and a hunger he didn’t understand and had no idea how to control.
Dante was no longer a boy, no longer a shattered child. He was a man of quiet strength and fierce loyalty.
He
would
never
hurt Violet. No matter how lost he got, no matter how far he fell. She returned her gaze to Dante, brushed the backs of her fingers against his smooth, icy cheek.
As lost as I get, I will find you, Heather. Always.
“You’d better,” Heather said, each word scraping free from a too-tight throat. “I’m holding you to that, Baptiste. Come back, damn you. Come back to me.”
Eyes burning, Heather dug her borrowed cell phone out of her jeans pocket. Disappointment curled through her. No calls had come in while she’d been passed out on the floor. Meaning no one had heard from Lucien yet. But given the time displayed on the screen, it was nearly sunset. Dante would be waking soon.
The question was: would
soon
be soon enough?
So far, Heather had seen no sign of the fallen angel responsible for the parking lot spell and sigils. For all she knew, he or she could be watching her right now. Could she afford to wait until Dante awakened? Her gaze returned to the wound above his heart. Her fingers curled against her palms, nails
biting into the skin. And if his injuries prevented him from waking up?
I don’t think I can afford to wait. The dragon’s blood tree sap isn’t the only thing poisoning him. This place and all the twisted memories it holds is twice as toxic.
She’d find blankets in one of the cells and use them to shield Dante from the sun. If she worked it right, she should be able to lift Dante in a fireman’s carry. Getting to her feet with his weight draped across her shoulders would be another problem altogether. Not for the first time, she was grateful that he was five-nine and not six-two. She would just have to hope that determination, desperation, and adrenaline would be enough.
It’ll have to be.
And if it wasn’t? If her injured ankle refused to hold?