Adrian Phoenix - On Midnight Wings

Splinter: “ It’s not Dante I want. I’ve come for you, pumpkin. ”

Fragment: Two members of the black-uniformed posse carry Heather out from behind the bar on a stretcher. Flex-cuffs bind her wrists and tendrils of red hair trail across her face. Out cold. Tranked . . .

Splinter: “ Shoot the others. Burn it down. ”

Splinter: “ He won’t be getting up again, not with those bullets inside of him. ”

Fragment: He presses the muzzle of his gun against Dante’s blood-slicked chest, above his heart, and squeezes off two more rounds. Then he places the gun against Dante’s temple.

Once Lucien had prized each dark and bitter pearl of knowledge about that morning’s events from Annie’s mind—including a secret that made him glance at her robe-covered belly—he withdrew. A cold and furious anger thrummed through his veins. An acrid taste burned at the back of his throat. Words he’d once said to Dante came back to mock him.

The truth is never what you hope it will be.

Raking a hand through his hair, Lucien looked up and alarm flickered across Jack’s face at whatever he saw in his eyes.

“What?” Jack asked, straightening out of his slouch, his voice knotted with dread.

“It was Heather and Annie’s father—FBI agent James Wallace—and he didn’t take Dante. He shot him”—Lucien’s voice roughened as he visualized the trench-coated man standing over his son’s motionless and bloodied form, gun in hand, an image acid etched into his mind—“then left him to burn with the others.”

JACK STARED AT LUCIEN, his expression speed-shifting from stunned disbelief to bewilderment. “If not the FBI, then who the hell took him?”

Lucien had to force out each bitter word. “I don’t know.”

But one thing he was damned certain of—given what he’d witnessed in Annie’s memories—the substance in those bullets had been designed to kill a True Blood. Dante in particular.

James Wallace had apparently done his research very, very well.

Having been a part of Dante’s life only for the last five years, there was still so much Lucien didn’t know about his own son. He could count on one hand—with a finger or two to spare—the born vampires he’d met during the nearly two dozen centuries since his escape to the mortal world from Gehenna.

Rare, brimming with power and magic and a riveting, nightbred beauty, they were solitary beings—an elemental, but dying, bloodline—who had eventually become little more than wistful myth for the global community of turned-nightkind.

But, myth or not, that hadn’t stopped James Wallace from discovering the truth and learning exactly how to harm Dante.

He won’t be getting up again, not with those bullets inside of him.

Lucien intended to make James Wallace profoundly regret those words before he killed him. Rising to his feet, he headed for the doorway, the floor creaking beneath his shoes.

“Well, shit. So now what?” Jack asked, sucking himself up against the threshold in order to allow room for Lucien to step through. “Wait until twilight? See if Tee-Tee makes contact?”

“Dante’s injured and I don’t know how badly. He might not be capable of making contact.”

But Heather . . . that was another story. If the temporary blood link between her and Von still held, the nomad should be able to find out where she’d been taken. If it still held. But given that most blood links lasted anywhere from twenty-four to seventy-two hours, and the one between Heather and Von wasn’t quite forty hours old yet, the odds were slightly in their favor that it did.

Lucien strode down the hall. “I need to awaken Von.”

“But . . . how?” Jack protested. “It’s still daylight.”

Lucien paused in the guest bedroom’s darkened doorway, then glanced back at Jack. “I have a method for pulling nightkind up from Sleep. However, the results can vary, so it might be best if you waited with Thibodaux. This could get violent.”

Jack looked unimpressed. “My mama says the same thing at every Cheramie family reunion.”

“I’m serious.”

“So’s my mama.” Jack blew out a breath, then nodded. “Okay. You do what you gotta do. I’ll keep Thibodaux company, me. I’ll just tell him to ignore anything he hears coming from the guest room—hissing, screaming, wing-flapping, girlish pleas for mercy.” A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “Y’know. The usual.”

“The only girlish pleas for mercy will be your own if you don’t get moving,” Lucien growled, pointing one taloned finger toward the kitchen. He appreciated Jack’s attempt to ease the tension with a bit of dark humor, and it helped—for a moment.

“Another thing my mama says. Often.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Lucien replied, voice dry.

Chuckling, Jack turned and headed down the hall. Just as he reached the dust-mote-flecked spill of sunlight emanating from the kitchen, he called, “We’re gonna find them, for true. Tee-Tee and Heather both.” His words and confident tone were as bracing as a tumbler of top-shelf scotch—for them both, Lucien suspected.

“Yes, we are,” Lucien agreed.

There was nothing he wouldn’t do to ensure that outcome. Nothing.

I would lay the world to waste for my son.

Foreboding trailed an icy finger down Lucien’s spine, whispered arctic words in his ear: What if you don’t find him? And your son lays waste to the world in the meantime instead? Or tries to? What then?

I will find him, Lucien thought numbly. No other outcome is possible.

Stepping into the room, he regarded Silver and Von, Sleeping side by side on the bed, a cheerful quilt covering them to the waist. Both pale faces were smooth and peaceful; another disquieting illusion, one revealed by the pillows with their dark stains, by the blood-matted hair pushed away from Sleep-cool foreheads.

Von McGuinn Slept on the side of the bed closest to the door, the ends of his nut-brown hair trailing over his bare shoulders. Even in the curtained gloom, Lucien could see the nomad clan tattoos blue-inked in graceful Celtic designs—dragons, antlered hunters, and ravens to name a few—swirling along Von’s shoulders, down his arms, and across his pectoral muscles and abdomen and, beneath the quilt, even lower; each had been earned when he’d still been mortal.

But the crescent moon tattoo beneath Von’s right eye, glimmering like star-silvered water, was unlike all the others. No mortal could wear it. It was the badge of his office— llygad . Keeper of history. Counselor. Warrior bard, one of many within the impartial, truth-seeking ranks of the llygaid . The guardians of nightkind history.

Lucien had no doubt that Von would know what James Wallace had loaded into the bullets, and how to counteract it.

Rolling his shoulders back to ease tension from taut muscles, he crossed to the bed, then knelt beside it, the floor creaking beneath his black-trousered knees. Underneath the odors of clotted blood and nostril-tingling antiseptic, he caught a faint, reassuring trace of Von’s scent of frost and gun oil.

“I can’t wait for twilight, llygad ,” Lucien apologized. A bead of ruby blood welled up on the inside of his wrist as he pierced the skin with a talon. “We need to speak now .”

Lucien licked the blood from his wrist, then lowered his head over Von’s pale face. Kissing the nomad’s mustache-framed lips, he parted them with his blood-smeared tongue. Breathed energy and the pomegranate-and-copper taste of his own blood into Von, drew him up from Sleep.