Darkest Before Dawn (16 page)

I pursed my lips. I wouldn’t let him go. I was as stubborn as he was committed. He just needed time to think it through. That was all. He’d change his mind. He’d battle his demon and win like I had all those years ago. He would because he was Stefan, and he was my hope that everything would work out in the end. He would survive because he always did. And if he could, then so could I. Two half bloods of opposing elements. Two hopeless dreamers.

He sighed. “I know where to find Valenti. I’ll take you. We’ll get Dawn. But you return with her to Boston, and leave me behind. That’s the deal.”

I held his arctic gaze with fire in my eyes. I’d leave him there over my dead body.

Two sharp knocks at the door shattered our negotiations. I swiped drying tears away and stalked to the door. I’d have to be curt with Lacy, lay down some scare tactics. I tugged open the door, a warning on my lips. Ryder shunted me aside. I reeled back and caught sight of the black-clad Enforcers outside my apartment, armed to the teeth behind riot gear.

“Easy... easy big fella...” Ryder trained a gun on Stefan. “No sudden moves, and nobody gets hurt.”

There are moments in life when events undo in front of you like the thread of a scarf, and no matter how you try to stop them, it all falls apart as though it’s inevitable. Fated. That moment in my apartment unraveled as time slowed. I watched, oddly detached, as Stefan’s entire body sparkled with ice dust. He dropped his stance, lifted his lips in a snarl, and I knew he would kill Ryder, right there, in front of me. He’d do it before Ryder could pull the trigger. A glimmer of thought would end it. Ryder was a dead man.

Instinct drove me forward. No hesitation, no stumbling, or slipping. I grabbed Ryder’s shoulder and yanked him back. He twisted, trying to shake me off. With dreadful certainty, I stepped in front of him. And the world blanched white for a second. Just a blink. When color bled back into my vision, I couldn’t make sense of it. Warm liquid spluttered from my lips. Silence smothered me. The world was quiet. At peace. And Stefan stood in front of me, so close I could have leaned in and brushed his lips with mine. Ice dusted his face. His eyes sparkled like they had at the park when we’d both been free—just for a little while. He pressed a hand to my face and said something, but the words tore from me. I was falling. An intangible dark pulsed in my peripheral vision, an inescapable truth.

Stefan pulled away. I was so very cold. I wanted him back, but my mind drifted. Looming shadows devoured my untethered thoughts. His expression shattered. His face twisted with horror. He staggered. A slither of light slipped across the dagger of ice gripped in his hand. A splash of deep red coated the serrated blade. Streams of blood dribbled over his clenched fingers. My blood?

He’d stabbed me.

From behind, strong arms coiled around my waist. I sank to the floor, falling against the warmth of the man who smelled like gun oil and hot metal. Heavy eyelids fluttered, but I couldn’t tear my gaze away from Stefan. If I looked away, he’d be gone. He lowered his gaze to the dagger in his hand, as though only just realizing what he’d done. When he said, “I’m sorry.” I didn’t hear the words, but I read them on his lips.

Dark lapped at my mind, breathing in and out, washing over me, drowning me. I clawed at the suffocating pressure and tried to fight my way back to the surface, but the pressure closed in, and after a while, my limbs wouldn’t respond. I drifted.
So cold.
I drew my thoughts into the warmth inside me. And let go.

T
hey’d kept me sedated
. Of that I was damned certain. I drifted in and out of consciousness and growled at the white-coats when they came near me, but I was so very weak. I couldn’t escape them. It felt like hours I’d been that way, but when I finally had enough strength to swing my trembling legs from the bed, my muscles clenched with atrophy, and I suspected it had been much longer. My body quivered under the effort of movement. Cool beads of perspiration broke over my skin. I could walk. I could escape.

My bed was the only one in the spearmint-green room. A wall of one-way glass drew my eye. I’d been there enough times to know I was inside the Institute’s medical facility, and they were watching, always watching.

I tore the IV from my arm, applied pressure to staunch the blood, and searched my room for clothes. I couldn’t very well escape in a flimsy hospital gown, but the room was barren, more like a morgue than a clinic.

Ryder burst through the door, and I nearly jumped out of my skin, not least because he carried a bunch of pink carnations and a grin so wide he must have gotten laid while I was out for the count.

I scowled at him. Ryder and flowers? “Did someone die?” My voice clawed its way out my parched throat. Shit, just how long had I been out?

He dumped the flowers on the end of the bed. “Yeah, you.” He tucked his thumbs over his belt. Rocking back on his heels, he wandered his wide-eyed gaze over me and then muttered a curse and swept me into a bear hug.

“Ah, easy.” A twinge of pain needled me in the ribs. “Ryder.” He squeezed tighter. “Kinda need to breathe here.”

He pulled back. “Dammit, Muse, you died in my arms.” He swept my bangs back from my face and searched my eyes. “I tried to get you out the apartment so you could summon your demon, but the Institute took over. The fuckers told me you’d died. And here you are. Shit, don’t do that again.” He glared at me, eyes flicking back and forth, tracing my expression, as though committing every nuance of my face to memory. Finally, he seemed to realize he was still clinging to me and stepped back.

“Well, I’m okay.” I tried to smile but winced instead. My side throbbed. I pressed a hand over the heat of the wound and felt the sticky bandage taped to my side from below my breast to my hip. “What happened?”

“You’ll have a bastard of a scar.”

I winced and tried to stretch out the pain. “Scars are my armor.”

“You saved my ass, Muse.” He scratched at his chin and then chewed on his thumbnail. “He was gunning for me. He’d have gutted me right there...”

Stefan.
My vision blurred. I gripped the bedside table. The Enforcers had stormed my apartment. Stefan stabbed me. I steeled my thoughts, packed all the unwieldy emotions down into a reinforced mental box, and rammed the lid on. When I met Ryder’s stare, my expression was blank.

“Did you kill him?”

“No. He opened the veil and stepped through. He’s gone.”

I blinked, heard my demon roaring, smacked her down into the box, and tied a pretty pink bow on top. Stefan had gone through the veil thinking he’d killed me. “How long ago?”

“Two weeks. The whole world thinks you died. The Institute released a statement. The demons who slaughtered their enforcers had been terminated. End of story. Charlotte Henderson is no more. Adam only told me you were alive two hours ago. I had thirteen days of thinking you’d bled out in my arms. Fuck, don’t ever do that again, lil’ firecracker.”

“I’m dead?” I might not have believed it, if it wasn’t for the excess moisture in Ryder’s eyes.

“As good as.”

I should have felt something. Anything. “I want to go home.” Why was I numb?

He smiled. “Adam wanted to keep you here. Yeah, don’t give me that look. I told him you’d be happier back home. At least, you wouldn’t try to kill him. He’s flexed some Institute muscle and forced your neighbors to sign a non-disclosure contract. If they talk about you or what they’ve seen, they’ll find themselves in a whole world of trouble.”

Ah, hell. I hadn’t wanted to get them involved at all. I lifted a trembling hand and rubbed my eyes. “What about Akil?”

Ryder shivered. “He’s dropped off the grid, probably gone back to hell. Good, fuckin’ riddance. Psycho tracked me down, damn near broke my arm, and demanded I give him a second-by-second break-down of what happened.” He rubbed at his arm. “He wasn’t best pleased with what I had to tell him.”

Akil thought I was dead. Stefan thought he’d killed me. Asmodeus would stop looking for me. So would Val, and Levi. I was... free? I touched my chest. No, not free. Damien still thrummed through me. But almost free. Was that even a thing? Almost free? No, you can’t be almost free. Free is an absolute.

I sighed out a weary breath. Did Dawn think me dead too?

I’d been dead to the world for two weeks. Two weeks in netherworld time was more like two months. I’d seen Stefan’s face. The horror and guilt had crushed him. “I need some time...”

“Sure yah do. Let me buy you a drink, though. Maybe a round of pool? Might even let you win this time.”

He was getting all mushy again. “Jeez, Ryder, who knew you had a heart behind all that swagger?”

He screwed up his face. “Yeah. I know. Don’t go spreadin’ it around. Seriously though, we need to talk. The night after you died, some weird shit started goin’ down. The number of demon incursions fell off the chart. The Institute number-crunchers said it was a glitch, but the sightings, events, they’re dwindling by the day. Demon chatter says something’s up beyond the veil. We’ve got a few demons in the cells, but they won’t talk. They’re scared.”

As he explained, I reached out a probing thought and poked at the veil. Usually, it rippled in the back of my mind, a constant that I ignored like the background noise of the city. When I reached for it, it should have pulsed and rippled. But when I reached for it then, it shivered and settled like the waters of a millpond. It didn’t move. Didn’t dance. Didn’t twitch.

I repressed the shock, kicked it into the same mental box with everything else, and nodded. “You’re right. That’s not normal. Something’s up, and it doesn’t feel good.”

A
month
after I’d been declared dead, I stood in the ladies washroom at The Voodoo Lounge, frowning at my pale reflection. The music thumped the air and drummed the inside of my skull. I’d had a headache before I’d arrived at the Lounge. Now it was pulsating mass of agony, as though Damien had shifted from my soul and settled behind my eyeballs. My stomach heaved. I gulped back pools of saliva.
How many drinks did I have?
Demons in people-suits brushed by me and muttered various slurs. The club had been packed to bursting point every night since reopening two weeks ago. I was here to find out why the Lounge was bustling. And I was fucking it up.

My reflection looking back at me in the mirrors above the rows of sinks was a stranger. I had my straight-as-nails hair cut above the shoulder and dyed bottle-blond. A pink and black short skirt ensemble accentuated curves I didn’t know I had. Lacy had assured me the outfit was as anti-Charlie Henderson as I could get. She was right. I hardly recognized myself. I had blue contacts in too. I’d melted the last pair when a demon got frisky a few days ago. He’d told me he’d rather live out his days in the Institute cells than go back across the veil. He’d fought like his life depended on it. Once, I would have killed him, but I let him go. Ryder didn’t know.

What the hell was I doing here, surrounded by demons, and dressed-up like some demon fangirl?

My reflection frowned at me. Yeah, that was right. This was my idea. “Let’s check out The Voodoo Lounge,” I said. Word in the demon-chatter said the place was jumping since the veil had fallen quiet. The demons were getting twitchy, grouping together, flocking.
Safety in numbers.
The Enforcers wanted to know why. The last time I’d been in the Lounge, Levi had trapped me in a cage. Who was running this club, and exactly what had the demons spooked so badly they would rather die than go home? I also had a darker motive for my visit, something I’d yet to fully admit to myself. I was looking for trouble, itching for a fight. I hadn’t slept properly since waking from my near-death experience. Blood soaked nightmares soiled my dreams. My demon hungered. So did I. If I didn’t find trouble, I started it. Ryder had already called me out on being careless while on duty. My head wasn’t in the game.

“Honey, too many flamin’ Zambuccas?” The woman—if one could call her that—might have appeared normal if not for the two furred tails twitching around the hem of her skirt and the fangs crowding her mouth. She laughed and left me hunched over the sink, trying to keep my churning stomach contents down.

Ryder didn’t know I’d been getting acquainted on a nightly basis with a bottle of wine. Not that he’d judge me. We all had our vices. I recognized the signs. I was slowly sinking in quicksand. The weight of despair pulled me under. I should have been happy. Ninety percent of my problems had evaporated overnight. The world thought I was dead. I was now happy Carla Gordons, who dyed her hair sunshine yellow and wore cherry red lipstick. I didn’t want it. I wanted to go home, curl up in my bed, and hide. Carla wasn’t me. I wasn’t a coward. I didn’t run. I didn’t hide. But I was running, and each time I reached for the bottle, I was hiding. The darkness inside me throbbed harder with every passing day.
The whispering dark...
Damien’s hideous laughter haunted me.

My phone chirped in my pocket. Snarling a curse, I answered it as yet another demon bumped into me and grunted something derisive. “Ryder...” His name was more a growl than an acknowledgement.

“Hey... Just checkin’ in. Everything okay?”

“Peachy.”

“You don’t have to do this, Muse. I can send another Enforcer in.” We both knew that wasn’t happening.

“No, I got it.” I needed to be here, among demons.

“Okay, I’ll call in an hour. Get something we can use.”

“Gotcha.” I jabbed the end-call button, splashed water on my face, and left the bathroom, heading for the dance floors.

The night wore on, and my mood soured. I managed to get a few tidbits of information out of a semi-conscious demon slumped over a table. It was bad across the veil. The princes were laying down their laws. Pick your allegiance or die. The demons who could escape had, but not all possessed the skill to cross the veil without assistance. Some bartered with higher demons for safe passage, but many didn’t make it that far. The princes forbade it. I tried to get out of him why the princes were battling when they’d had centuries of relative peace. He mumbled something indecipherable about the veil, titles crumbling, and the
fall of wrath
, whatever that meant, before proceeding to drink himself under the table.

Frustrated, I wandered the dance floors, scanning the sea of demons. My demon paced back and forth inside my mind. I couldn’t bring her to the show, not without revealing who I was. I could dye my hair and paint my nails pink all I liked, but my demon didn’t change. A half blood was rare enough. A half blood missing a wing? They’d know me the second I dropped my humanity.

My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket. I plucked it free and ducked to the side of the dance floor, almost falling over a crate as the crowd spat me free. Except it wasn’t a crate. I ignored Ryder’s call and crouched down beside the metal cage.

“Dawn?”

She was curled up in the middle of the cage, her filthy slip of a dress barely covering her grazed knees. She blinked doe eyes out from behind matted bangs. “Muse?”

“Move back.” I summoned a slither of heat into my palms, gripped the bars, and tried to pour it into the metal. White glyphs flared beneath my touch, sending my jolt of heat back up my arms. I cursed and let go. “It’ll be okay. I’m getting you out.” I wouldn’t leave her there. If I had to tear the club down around us, she was getting out of that cage.

She hugged herself tighter. “No. He’ll hurt me.”

“Who?” I pressed my face close to the bars. How could anyone do this to a little girl? I knew the answer. I’d had it done to me. They didn’t see a girl. Dawn was property. The demons in this club barely gave her a second glance. Just a half-blood toy in a cage, an abomination.

“He’s inside my head. He drowns me, but I don’t get wet. Just go. He’ll hurt you too.”

Drowns but doesn’t get wet? A shiver trickled across my flesh as the memory of experiencing exactly that bubbled to the surface of my thoughts. She had to be referring to Leviathan. Beneath the multicolored lights and deafening beat of the music, I couldn’t see anyone resembling Levi. The club was too full of demons and their mingling elements to even try to sense him. “Is he here, Dawn?”

She bit into her lip and nodded. “The one with the black wings brought me back here. I don’t like him. I don’t like any of them.”

Black wings?
Valenti
. My twisted excuse for a brother had handed her back to Levi. “Did the black-winged-one hurt you Dawn?”

She shook her head. “He said it wasn’t right for half bloods to be free.” She blinked, dislodging a silent tear. “The water prince likes it here. He told me he likes to make the demons thirsty. I get so thirsty. All I want is water. Then he drowns me...” Her tiny body shivered. “But it’s not real.”

“I know, honey.” I had to get her away from here. I searched the edges of the cage and found a padlock. Bolt cutters would get it open. Ryder would have those. “I can get you out, but I need tools. I’ll be back real soon, okay? I promise.”

Her eyes saddened, and she turned the torn rabbit over in her arms and hugged it close. “I want it to end. I want to hide.”

I closed my fingers around the bars. “Hiding won’t make it go away. Hiding just delays the inevitable. Unless we do something about it.” I offered her a hopeful grin. “I let my friend down once and didn’t get to him in time. That’s never happening again. Do you hear? I’ll be back later, and I’m getting you out. And if Levi shows up, I’ll boil him dry.”

She blinked and nodded. “Okay, Muse.”

I
called
Ryder from the parking lot beside the club and told him everything. He picked me up in the tired Mustang ten minutes later and drove a few blocks away before parking.

“Okay, listen up...” Twisting in the drivers seat, he gave me the no-bullshit glare. “The club closes at four hundred hours. I’ve checked local security footage. By five, the staff have gone. The security is non-existent, probably because nobody is stupid enough to break into a club owned by a Prince of Hell. So that’s what we’re doing. We break in. Cut open the cage. Grab Dawn. And get the hell out of there before anyone knows we’ve been inside. You sure you can deal with Levi if he shows up?”

“Yup.” Maybe, mostly... definitely. If I could suck the fire out of Akil, I could most definitely turn Levi to steam. I had to. I wasn’t leaving without Dawn. “Sounds like a plan.”

He grabbed a gun from the back seat, checked the chamber, magazine, and handed it to me. “You’re toting demon-killing soft point rounds, etched with glyphs. One shot to the head will take down any lesser demon, but the princes are tough bastards. It’ll slow a prince down, but it won’t kill him.”

Cool. “You tested it on a prince?”

“I planted a few in Akil a few months back, but he took ‘em like they were bee stings. Happened a few blocks from here.”

Oh. I ejected the magazine and examined the rounds, deliberately avoiding Ryder’s keen stare. I’d healed Akil’s wounds that night. Ryder’s bullets were more effective than he realized.

“You up to this?”

“Huh? Yeah. Sure.” The adrenalin had ousted much of the alcohol in my veins. A blast of fire from my demon would combust the rest. Unfortunately, my demon couldn’t help my fragile state of mind.

I briefed Ryder on the conversation I’d had with the wasted demon. Until a few months ago, the princes hardly featured on the lips of demons at all. It seemed they’d thrown off their complacent attitude and gotten their hands dirty. Akil would be in the midst of it. Perhaps I should have been concerned, but given his recent behavior, he clearly wasn’t as weak as he allowed everyone to believe. He was different, he’d said so himself.

Memories of the garden event summoned thoughts of Stefan. I quickly trampled those before my past dragged me down toward the yawning pit of despair I tried to crawl out of on a daily basis.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do once you have Dawn?” Ryder asked, anchoring my thoughts in the present.

“Take her home.”

He gave me a look that said,
try again, firecracker
. “Don’t blow your cover. If you take her back to your place, you might as well paint a target on the top of your building saying,
Muse isn’t dead
.”

“Damn.” I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Dawn was hot property. Every badass demon I knew wanted a piece of her.

“Hand her over to the Institute.”

“Ryder, no way. We’ve been through this.”

“Yeah, I know, and I’m still right. Look me in the eye, and tell me half bloods aren’t dangerous.”

He had me there. “Adam doesn’t have a great track record with half bloods. He’ll ruin her.”

“Muse, c’mon... she’s a little half-blood demon girl. If she survives to adulthood, it’ll be a bloody miracle. You only made it because Akil kept you safe.”

I flinched back. “I don’t belong to Akil.”

“That ain’t what I said.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Muse, don’t dump your shit on me, alright. Dawn doesn’t have an asshole like Akil besotted with her. She won’t last on her own. Her only chance is the Institute. You know it’s true. Stop trying to find her a happy ending. There ain’t no happy endings for half bloods. The best place for her is the Institute.”

“Did you know Adam has two other half bloods squirreled away somewhere? He’s buying or breeding them, rearing them like pets, and turning them into weapons. You think he’d care about Dawn at all? He ordered the death of his own son. I’m not giving her to him. I’ll take her away somewhere. I‘ll drop off the grid. I’ve got nothing else. I’ll keep her safe, Ryder, and don’t you dare try and take her from me.”

I’d tested his loyalty to the Institute before. There were times he should have bundled me back to the men in white coats, but he hadn’t. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t though. From the hardened military-grade stare he’d fixed on me, he clearly wasn’t negotiating.

“The Institute can’t have her,” I said. “Dawn deserves a chance at freedom, and maybe you’re right. Maybe half bloods don’t get happy endings. That’s why I have to give her what nobody else can. Freedom.”

His lips parted, and those old eyes steeled. “Then you’ll both die. If she doesn’t get you killed, she’ll blow a fuse one day and nuke the neighborhood.”

My scowl tightened and brought a snarl to my lips. “You’ve given her up as a lost cause already, haven’t you?”

“No. I want what’s best for the girl. If you stopped thinking with your heart, you’d see that.”

“Have you given up on me, too?”

He spat a curse. “I’m here, ain’t I?”

“Yeah, now. What about tomorrow or next week when I screw up, which I will, because I’m only human. What then? You gonna tie me up and bundle me off to the Institute too?”

He narrowed his eyes. “You know the answer.”

“Yeah, I do.” Crossing my arms, I slumped in the seat. The answer was yes. Ryder was the only man I knew—demon or otherwise—who never lied about what he was. “That morning at my apartment, you would have shot and killed Stefan.”

He flinched and turned his face away. “Yeah, and it would have been the right thing to do. I screwed up. Hesitated. It won’t happen again.” Slowly, he faced me once more. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “He nearly killed you.”

A sharp smile sliced across my lips “It must be easy, seeing in black and white.” His glare contracted. “Sometimes, there is no right thing. Sometimes wrong wins, and that’s okay. Life can’t be distilled down to right and wrong. It’s all about that messy gray area in between and how we deal with it. I sure hope I’m not the one staring down the barrel of your gun when you figure that out.”

He humped and glared out the window. It was going to be a long few hours until 5am.