Welcome home, S. Welcome back.
Set things to rights, cher. Make them pay in blood and fire.
You won’t save her, you know.
The truth is never what you hope it will be.
Yeah, and it usually carries a motherfucking shiv.
Reality wheeled. And wheeled. And wheeled again.
Dante’s song raged unabated into the night. Set it ablaze.
51
ANHREFNCATHL
DANTE’S SONG SLASHED INTO the night. An aurora borealis of blue flame undulated across the sky. The ground shook and shuddered, a restless beast answering its master’s call. Hekate watched from the sanitarium’s glass-sprinkled parking lot as the sanitarium burned, fierce yellow-white flames snapping from windows and roof. Chunks of masonry fell from the building to shatter in the parking lot.
“Why haven’t they come out?” she asked, struggling for balance as the earth shuddered beneath her feet. “Something must be wrong.”
“That’s an understatement,” the Morningstar said, “given that Dante has apparently lost his fight.” He looked up and Hekate followed her father’s gaze to the Elohim silhouetted against the flaming skies as they circled above the burning building.
Wybrcathl trilled and warbled songs of despair and lost hope, of another creawdwr lost to madness. A young creawdwr who needed to be killed before he wrenched mortal and Elohim worlds apart.
“Is there any way to stop him, short of killing him?” she asked.
The Morningstar nodded. “Perhaps. An Banna Cruach.” He met his daughter’s gaze. “We need to find Michael’s tomb and then we need to hope that the bond—if it truly exists—will work on a mixed-blood Maker.”
AT LOUIS ARMSTRONG INTERNATIONAL Airport, Renata Alessa Cortini and her well-dressed entourage had just disembarked from her private jet when the earthquake struck. She looked up into the sky and her heart turned to ice. An aurora borealis of blue fire danced and undulated across the sky; a sky filled with Elohim.
Images from the vision that had brought her from Rome—a vision coming true at this very moment—flashed behind her eyes.
In a hallway gleaming with faint red light, a fallen angel with black wings and short, ginger locks lounges upon a throne composed of dead and stiffening bodies . . .
The night burns, the sky on fire from horizon to horizon . . .
Dante Baptiste uncoils from a bloodied tile floor, his pale, breathtaking face smeared with blood, his eyes dark wells of madness, loss, and simmering rage . . .
A tattoo of a running black wolf inked beneath a desperate green eye . . .
Pale blue flames explode out from around the Great Destroyer’s lean body in transforming tongues of cool fire. His kohl-rimmed eyes open as his song rakes the burning night . . .
A sign emblazoned with the words: Doucet-Bainbridge Sanitarium; Fallen sigils painted in blood upon glass . . .
I have promises to keep, Dante whispers, blood trickling from one nostril. Then puts out the world’s light.
Not knowing if the ground would ever stop shaking, Renata ordered her driver to take the youngest members of her household to Doucet-Bainbridge. As for herself and her older children—she rose into the humid air, spiraling upward.
ANHREFNCATHL AND THOUSANDS OF wybrcathl summoned Leviathan from her decade long sleep. The sea boiled and bubbled with warbled information. But one piece she held close, a priceless pearl: the creawdwr was the Nightbringer’s son.
Leviathan rose like a mountain from the deepest chasm of the Atlantic, an ocean of endless folds rippling across the sky.
Do you have any children?
No.
Best you keep it that way. For I shall claim your firstborn as my own—to kill or to love, as I deem fit.
She had a promise to keep.
HEATHER DROPPED TO HER knees beside Dante’s convulsing body, coughing as smoke and flames crept into the corridor. Her skin tightened in the heat, felt fevered. Ever widening wheels of blue and black light spun out from around Dante, sinking through the floor and cycling through the ceiling, transforming everything they touched. Black ivy beaded with tiny sapphire blue eyes blinking in the acrid smoke draped the walls.
Ceiling tiles fell as the earthquake continued its violent, apparently endless motion—and Heather suspected that the earthquake would end when Dante’s seizure did. The floor shuddered, tiles rippling as though suddenly fluid. Cracks zigzagged through the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. Gleaming wasps flitted out of the cracks. The air vibrated with their droning.
My kingdom for a syringe full of morphine to ease my prince into Sleep.
“Time to go,” Lucien said. “I’ll carry Dante—but not you or we run the risk of him changing you as well.”
Coughing, Heather shook her head. Smoke stung her eyes. “You don’t need to risk it either. Not yet. Let me try to reach him through the blood link.”
Lucien studied the buckling ceiling. “Hurry.”
Heather nodded and closed her eyes.
PAIN AND WHITE LIGHT pinwheeled through Dante’s mind as reality wheeled and circled and wheeled again. Electricity spasmed through every muscle. Splintered memories shifted together, forming pictures that broke his heart. Voices whispered and demanded, wasps droned and burrowed and he’s fucking had enough, enough, ENOUGH.
<Baptiste. I’m here.>
The pinwheels slowed as the image of a beautiful red-haired woman flared behind his eyes, an image that smelled of sage and lilacs in the rain, a fragrant midnight garden.
It’s quiet when I’m with you.
I’ll help you stop it forever.
We’re in this together, face-to-face and back-to-back.
I trust you.
Don’t.
<Baptiste.>
As lost as I get, I will find you, Heather. Always.
Dante reached back, pouring himself through the blood link and forging a new bond as he did. The blue-white star of Heather’s presence suddenly appeared, burning bright and unobstructed at the bruised center of his mind, radiating a cool, white light. Silence poured in, hushing the noise, quieting the internal storm.
His convulsions stopped.
Dante opened his eyes.
Grasping his hand, Heather helped him up to his feet. He touched his forehead to hers, his hands on her hips, trying hard not to think of what he’d almost done to her, the gun against her temple, his finger on the trigger. “J’su ici, catin,” he whispered, throat tight. “J’su ici.”
“And you found me,” she whispered back. “Like you promised.”
“Always.”
“We need to go,” Lucien said. “And we need someplace safe from—”
A subsonic bellow blasted through the air, hitting the sanitarium like a fertilizer bomb. Dante wrapped himself and his wings around Heather as the building collapsed in a roar of stone and screeching metal. Waves of midnight water doused the fire.
Leviathan descended.
52
A DARK PATH
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE
LLYGAID COMPOUND
VON DECIDED THAT HE preferred getting his neck broken to being interrogated. Worse, he wasn’t even being questioned by the filidh.
“I suggest you start talking,” Galiana said. She sat in one of the Bards’s great chairs, the tops of each carved into stag horns. “Otherwise it will be one of the mortals who will pay the price.”
On his knees, hands cuffed behind his back, Von slid a sidelong glance at Merri. Her stiff posture and frozen expression spoke volumes. She had no idea her mère de sang had been using her. Silver was beside Merri, also on his knees, also cuffed.
Jack, Thibodaux, and Annie had been stashed elsewhere. But Von had been assured all three were safe and unharmed. He didn’t know if he believed that.
Dammit. They’d all be safe if I’da nixed the rescue plan.
Von drew in a deep breath of smoky air fragrant with myrrh. He remembered the feel of the charcoal sketch beneath his fingers, rem
embered the image it bore and the penciled-in title—Secrets. Felt precious time slipping away.
Remembering the rage, loss, and madness simmering in Dante’s sending—I ain’t playing your game, Papa—Von realized that the time for secrets was over. Too much was at stake.
Forgive me, little brother.
In a low voice, he started speaking, holding nothing back.
“CREAWDWR,” GALIANA BREATHED, BOTH wonder and worry chiseling her dark face. “A vampire Maker. But a damaged one.”
“He just needs time to heal,” Von said. “And I need to get to him, move him somewhere safe. Somewhere quiet. And I need to go now. We all do.”
“I have a private jet,” Galiana mused. “We could be in Baton Rouge in a little over an hour.”
The floor started shaking. A chair toppled over. Light fixtures swayed.
“Outside!” someone yelled.
Von jumped to his feet and ran, dodging falling furniture and broken lightbulbs on his way out the front door. He raced down the steps and onto the lawn, then looked up. His mouth dried. His vision—if that’s what it was—was coming true.
An aurora borealis of fire danced across the southern sky. The ground shuddered, then quieted once more. The Great Destroyer had awakened. Von’s heart sank. Dante had chosen a path. A dark one.
Galiana stared at the sky in horror. “What does it mean?” she whispered.
“We’re going to need that plane,” Von said. “Now.”
Hold on, little brother. Hold on.
ADRIAN PHOENIX is the critically acclaimed author of The Maker’s Song series: A Rush of Wings, In the Blood, Beneath the Skin, Etched in Bone, and On Midnight Wings. She is also the author of Black Dust Mambo and Black Heart Loa, a new series featuring hoodoo apprentice Kallie Rivière. She has published stories in several magazines and anthologies. She lives in Oregon (with three cats, of course), but travels to New Orleans, the city of her heart, whenever possible.
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Pocket Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Adrian Phoenix
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Pocket Books paperback edition October 2013
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Cover illustration by Craig White
ISBN 978-1-4516-4534-7
ISBN 978-1-4516-4536-1 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Chapter 1: Dark and Bitter Pearls
Chapter 2: Interrupted Sleep
Chapter 3: One Stubborn Motherfucker
Chapter 4: Poisoned Apples
Chapter 5: True North
Chapter 6: Once Only
Chapter 7: Beneath a Curved Shadow
Chapter 8: Full of Surprises
Chapter 9: Beneath Pain and Broken Glass
Chapter 10: Carnival Barker
Chapter 11: Dark Prophecy
Chapter 12: Nothing Personal
Chapter 13: The First Breath of Winter
Chapter 15: Like Distant Thunder
Chapter 16: Captured in Charcoal
Chapter 17: Badass and Beautiful
Chapter 18: Consequences
Chapter 19: Like Ashes in Her Mouth
Chapter 20: Receding in the Rearview
Chapter 21: A Simple, Unavoidable Truth
Chapter 22: As Many as It Takes
Chapter 23: Deadly Little Puppet
Chapter 24: April Fool’s Day
Chapter 25: Deeper into Hell
Chapter 26: A Familiar and Dangerous Voice
Chapter 27: No Witnesses
Chapter 28: The Smell of Piss
Chapter 29: It’s Now or Never
Chapter 30: Carnival
Chapter 31: Gold into Diamonds
Chapter 32: Shape-Shifter
Chapter 33: Nightkind and Cats
Chapter 34: The Clock Runs Out
Chapter 35: Angry Loa
Chapter 36: A Mother’s Grief
Chapter 37: No Longer the Ancient World
Chapter 38: Welcome to the Horror Show
Chapter 39: Planting Seeds
Chapter 40: North Star
Chapter 41: Uncoiling from the Ashes
Chapter 42: This Is the Beginning of the End
Chapter 43: A Child’s Whisper
Chapter 44: As Lost as I Get
Chapter 45: Fallen Magic
Chapter 46: Falling Apart with Breathtaking Speed
Chapter 47: To Hell in an Express Lane Handbasket
Chapter 48: Becoming
Chapter 49: Racing Their Fates
Chapter 50: Water into Gasoline
Chapter 51: Anhrefncathl
Chapter 52: A Dark Path
About Adrian Phoenix