Etched in Bone (15 page)

“Worthless, huh? Fuck you.” Dante glanced at the redhead—at
Heather
—standing beside him. “We’re done here. Let’s go,
catin
.”

“Right behind you.” Heather slipped a hand into her trench’s right pocket, pulling her gun free. She held it with practiced ease down at her side.

Not just a bedroom toy, Dante’s delicious little mortal, given her gun and protective stance, her adrenaline-cocked muscles and the taut line of her jaw.

As Dante started forward, Heather at his side, Astarte blocked his path, panic rippling across her face, flecking her eyes with gold. “No, stay, please,” she urged breathlessly. “Rooms have been prepared for you and your . . .
cydymaith
. . . a warm bath to soothe your wings, blood to ease your hunger . . .” Without thinking, she grabbed the
creawdwr
’s forearm.

Staring at Dante’s glowing hands, Eros sucked in a breath.

Dante glanced at her hand. “Only gonna tell you once. Don’t touch me.”

All color drained from Astarte’s face. She looked down. Reflected blue light flickered in her eyes. She yanked her hand away from Dante’s arm as though the hot embered coals of the pit burned beneath his skin.

“Of course,” she stammered. Sweat glistened on her forehead. Looking faint, she stepped aside.

Dante walked past her and up to the loose line Eros, Morrigan, Uriel, and Janus had formed in front of the palace’s arched threshold. Braziers at either side of the entry snapped sparks and the sharp smell of myrrh and cedar into the night.

Just as Eros was about to ease forward and intercept the sexy little
creawdwr
, Uriel’s hand clamped onto Eros’s shoulder. Electric pain arrowed down his arm to his fingers. Uriel squeezed once, a not-so-gentle warning, then shoved past him and planted himself in front of Dante.

Fire flared in Dante’s eyes, his body tensed. But he halted, the redhead on one side, Lucien on the other.

“It sounds as though you’ve been misled about our intentions,” Uriel said, his voice a rolling rumble of thunder. “We’ve been waiting for you for thousands of years. In no way would we ever harm you. Our duty is to educate you, train you in
your
duties—”

Dante frowned. “My
duties
? Fuck that. Ain’t got no duty but to friends—” He paused and glanced at Lucien, then added, “And family.”

Eros tilted his head, pondering the relief that had flickered quick as lightning across Lucien’s face when the word
family
had slipped from Dante’s lips. Interesting. Despite the fact that his son had broken into another world to find him, Lucien had apparently harbored doubts about their relationship. Eros carefully filed that tidbit of information away for later examination.

Disbelief danced across Uriel’s face. “But Gehenna—”

“
Je connais
,” Dante said, voice weary, a near sigh. “The Morningstar told me that your world is dying and y’all need me to pump new life into it, yeah? I’m willing to consider it, but on my own time and my own terms.”

“Perhaps after you’ve seen your father and Heather home,” the Morningstar said, crossing the terrace in long strides. Brushing past Lucien, he sauntered to a stop beside Uriel. “And after you’ve rested.”

Dante shrugged. “Maybe, yeah. We’ll see.”

Heather stiffened. “If he returns to Gehenna, it won’t be alone.”

“Of course,” the Morningstar murmured.

Uriel’s smile suddenly looked strained, looked more like clenched teeth than a smile. White fire pooled in the palms of both hands, spun into two tiny wheels. “Even though . . .
Lucien
is your father, I fear for your safety. He murdered the last
creawdwr
and I’m concerned that history might repeat itself.”

Dante shook his head. “I’m not, and it won’t.”

“If we allow you to leave Gehenna, how do we know you’ll return?” Uriel asked, his little spinning wheels vanishing like snuffed candle flame when he fisted both hands. “We can’t rely on
maybe
and
we’ll see
.”

“You ain’t got no say in whether I leave or not,” Dante said, another dark and dangerous smile slanting across his lips. Eros caught a tantalizing glimpse of fang tips. “Let me make this real fucking clear: I. Ain’t. Running. And I sure as hell ain’t hiding. I’m gonna be easy to find.”

“We can set up a meet-and-greet like you mentioned earlier,” the Morningstar said, his pale brows knitting together thoughtfully. “Allow all of the Elohim to see you and speak with you. After that, we can discuss making arrangements for you to heal the land. And for training you how to do so.”

Dante raked a hand through his hair, blue flames pinwheeling along his fingers. “Yeah,
d’accord
, that’ll work—as long as the
nephilim
and the chalky dudes are at the meet-and-greet too.”

“
Chalkydri
,” the Morningstar reminded.

A hint of a smile brushed Dante’s lips. “You can still blow me.”

Dante’s flippant, Cajun-spiced words goosed Eros’s pulse. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to dip his toes into the heated pool of an incubus’s natural erotic vision; he imagined the Morningstar dropping to his knees in front of Dante and unbuckling his belt. Then replaced the Morningstar with himself. Felt the belt buckle’s cold steel beneath his fingers, heard the rasp of the zipper as he drew it down inch by inch.

Fire pulsed through Eros’s loins.

<
Stop. Your vision is edging outward.
>

Morrigan’s command splashed into Eros’s imaginings like a boulder into a mud puddle. His eyes jerked open, the vision ruined.

Uriel frowned at Dante. “Even if we agreed to these arrangements, what guarantee do we have that you’d actually return?”

“I said I would,” Dante replied, looking him in the eye.

Uriel stared at him. Seemed nonplussed. “You’re giving me your . . .
word
?”

Morrigan laughed, a crow’s mocking amusement. “Do you also cross your heart and hope to die?”

Without looking away from Uriel, Dante raised his hands level with Morrigan’s veiled face and extended both middle fingers. “Yup. I’m giving you my word.”

“Dante never lies,” Lucien said. “If he says he’ll return, then he’ll return.”

“That may be true, but it’s not good enough,” Uriel said, shaking his head. Starlight glinted along the glyphs inked into his black skin. “We’ve waited too long, Dante. We can’t just let you walk away again. We either need a hostage—and I vote we keep your father—or a blood pledge.”

“Keep me then,” Lucien said, wings flexing. Gold light glimmered in his eyes.

“They’re not keeping you or anyone else,” Dante growled, gaze locked with Uriel’s. “No hostages.”

“Then we need your blood pledge,” Janus said in a light Italian accent. Beads clicked as his fingers worked along his rosary. He studied Dante with eyes the deep blue of a long summer evening—and unreadable. “It will be your promise to us that you will return. A promise we can trust.”

“No,” Lucien said. “Absolutely not.”

Eros arched an eyebrow. “Do you speak for the
creawdwr
?”

“No, he doesn’t,” Dante answered. He rubbed a hand over his face. “Fuck. Fine. Tell me what this blood pledge involves.”

“Like Janus said, it’s a promise,” the Morningstar said. “The only blood involved will be your own, so no one will be attempting to lay a blood spell on you. It will simply link you to your word, make your promise physical. And once the promise is fulfilled, the link vanishes.”

“So it’s temporary, yeah?”

The Morningstar nodded. “Yes. And harmless—for the most part.”

“For the most part?” Heather questioned. “What the hell does
that
mean?”

“If a pledge isn’t fulfilled in a timely manner, then the link begins to produce pain as a reminder and as incentive.” The Morningstar shrugged. “Mild pain. Nothing to be concerned about.”

“What he
hasn’t
told you,” Lucien said, “is that Heather will be affected by your pledge too. All bondmates are. Any pain you earn from the pledge, she’ll share.”

“She’s
mortal
,” the Morningstar pointed out, voice amused. “The pledge won’t affect her in the same way—if at all. At most she might get a whisper, an echo. But as long as you fulfill your promise, neither of you will feel anything.”

Dante shook his head. “Ain’t risking Heather.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a risk, Baptiste.”

Dante glanced at Heather and, seeing the question in his dilated eyes, Eros realized that the gorgeous mortal was more than just a bodyguard. She was the
creawdwr
’s partner in more ways than one, a partner whose opinion he valued—a true bond.

“Too many to fight,” she murmured. “But I’ll back your play—whatever it is. If we can leave here together and intact, I can live with sharing your promise.”

Dante twisted around to face her, then bent his head and touched his forehead to hers. She rested her free hand on his leather-clad hip. Neither said a word, but Eros had no doubt plenty was passing between them.

A dark pang of envy jabbed into Eros as he watched them together. They burned like a strong flame cupped between two hands.

Dante could do anything to her—reshape her, transform her, unmake her—yet she didn’t hesitate to touch him.

“Okay,” Dante said, lifting his head to look at Uriel. “I’ll do it, but I choose the Morningstar.”

A muscle flexed in Uriel’s jaw. “Of course.”

Regarding Uriel from beneath his silver lashes, the Morning-star smiled.

Emotions flashed across Lucien’s face in rapid succession—anger, frustration, despair, fear—and his taloned hands knotted into fists. “I don’t know how you managed to trick Dante into trusting you,” he said, his gaze on the Morningstar, his eyes dangerous black ice. “But I plan to be sure
my
son knows how skilled you are at manipulating the truth to your own ends.”

The Morningstar laughed. “Well, you would know all about manipulating the truth to your own ends, wouldn’t you? Given that
your
son has no understanding of his heritage or his gifts. Nor of his duties. You’ve manipulated him all of his very young life. Kept him ignorant of who and what he is.”

Dante arrowed a razored look at the Morningstar. “You’re still talking about shit you know nothing about,” he said, then slashed an equally sharp glance at his father. “And he
hasn’t
tricked me, since I don’t fucking trust him, so
you
don’t know what you’re talking about either. I’m choosing the lesser of . . .” He paused to make a point of counting each of the Seven, before finishing, “. . . five evils.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing, child,” Lucien grated. “I appreciate you coming for me, but leave me behind. Take Heather and go.”

“No. Quit fighting me, dammit,” Dante said, his voice strained. He looked at his father with a strange mix of fury and anguish. “I ain’t losing you again.”

The muscles in Lucien’s shoulders cabled. Drops of dark blood spattered the marble beneath his clenched hands. Closing his eyes, he nodded.

Shifting his attention to the Morningstar, Dante asked, “So how do we do this?”

“It’s simple,” the Morningstar replied. “A bit of blood from you, a bit of magic from me and we’ll seal the pledge to your heart. You need to take off that torn and bloodied thing you call a shirt first.”

“That part of the ritual?”

“No. I despise that shirt.”

A smile tilted the
creawdwr
’s luscious lips. He peeled off the offending shirt with the cryptic NIN letters in one fluid motion, wincing in pain as he did, then stuffed one end of it into the left rear pocket of his leather pants.

His muscles must still be tender from wing-birth.
Eros paused in his admiration of Dante’s bared torso—white skin, lean muscles, hard, flat abs, and on the sculpted chest above the left nipple, a small bat tattoo—and thinned his shields so he could extend his senses outward, rechanneling his erotic focus into a healer’s questing scan. Brushing against Dante’s ragged shields, he took a peek inside.

A grave lined with upright shovels, their blades buried into the sawgrass . . .

Boy needs a lesson. Boy
always
needs a lesson . . .

Wasps wriggle beneath black-painted fingernails . . .

A savage meat hook gleams beneath fluorescent lights . . .

Holy, holy, holy . . .

I’m scared, Dante-angel. But I’m glad I’m with you . . .

Eros reeled himself away, feeling scorched, his senses crisped—and he hadn’t even gone inside. His breath hissed out between his teeth. Fire ravaged the
creawdwr
’s mind. Voices whispered and capered. The past and the present flipped back and forth like a double-hinged gate in a gale.

Not only young and untrained, the
creawdwr
was
damaged
. Dante wasn’t mad, not yet. But he would be. Between the
creu tân
and the damage he’d only glimpsed, Eros knew it was only a matter of rapidly passing time.

Was it possible to heal him? Or was the damage irreparable? Or would it be more advantageous to make sure Dante continued to need a healer—one he might wish to bind himself to? Eros’s heart kicked hard against his ribs. He might’ve just found a way to gain the upper hand against the Morningstar and the other members of the Seven.

“What’s next?” Dante asked. Sweat glistened on his forehead. His muscles rippled and flexed as though he was struggling for control. His eyes unfocused. “Ready for use, yeah, Papa?” he whispered.

“Baptiste?” Concern knitted Heather’s brows. She reached for him. “Stay with me.”

As though the marble floor had abruptly tilted beneath his boots, Dante stumbled a step sideways. He threw out a flame-swallowed hand to brace himself against one of the fluted columns guarding the entry.

Blue flames flared against the moonlit marble column. The column dissolved into a hailstorm of tiny blue stones that scattered across the floor in all directions. Dante hit the marble on his hands and knees, his wings flaring and flapping in a belated effort to restore his balance.