Etched in Bone (41 page)

The
wybrcathl
ended in a quiet spill of deep bass notes.

<
Got it,
mon ami,> Dante sent.

Heather glanced at Dante, wind slashing tendrils of red hair across her face. She touched her fingertips to her lips and kissed them. <
For luck. Don’t break anything.
>

<
Ditto,
catin.
See you below.
>

Dante contracted his delts and worked his wings, tipping to the left as he glided down toward the yacht.
Looks like I’m left-handed
and
left-winged
. Shifting his weight more to center, he leveled his descent. But not his speed.

The yacht was coming up fast.

Dante flapped and flexed his wings to slow himself down, and it worked to a small degree, just not as much as he’d hoped. He skimmed over the yacht’s antenna, satellite dishes, and sun deck, his shadow rippling across the jacuzzi’s bubbling water, and aimed himself at the main deck.

People in crisp white uniforms looked up. Dante caught a glimpse of their expressions—stunned disbelief, adrenaline-soaked panic, and terror—as he swooped past and down.

Fanning his wings to slow his descent—
nah, make that a controlled plummet
—Dante swung his body around to vertical and landed. His boots hit the deck hard and at a run. He slammed into the metal railing, knocking the air from his lungs and nearly catapulting over the side.

“It’s the Fallen!” someone screamed.

“Holyshitholyshitholyshitholyshit . . .”

White light strobed at the edges of Dante’s vision, migraine early warning. Pain pricked behind his left eye. Pulsed at his temples.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Dante shoved himself away from the railing and spun around to face Mauvais’s gun-wielding crew, his wings flaring out behind him, muscles spring-coiled.

Most of the crew scattered, pelting away in every direction, skirting around or jumping over the handful of bloodied bodies Trey and Silver had left behind on the teak-paneled deck. Dante heard a loud splash as someone opted for a
man-overboard
exit strategy.

But three others, two guys and a chick with gel-spiked blonde hair, carefully placed their guns down on the teak deck and surrendered. All three knelt and laced their fingers behind their bowed heads, their faces drained of color.

Dante studied them for a moment, unease prickling along his spine.
What’s wrong with this picture
? So far, he’d only seen mortals on the yacht. Where were Mauvais’s nightkind guards and crew? Protecting the
fi’ de garce
and his
chienne
of a
fille de sang
while leaving his servants to their own fucking fate?

“Don’t move a muscle,” Dante said, blurring across the decking to scoop up their guns and toss them over the side. “And y’all might live through this.”

Lucien touched down with a graceful flutter of wings. Another loud
man-overboard
splash greeted his arrival.

“Smooth landing, Baptiste,” Heather murmured, stepping from Lucien’s embrace.

“Almost brought tears to my eyes,” Von agreed.

“Nothing beats an appreciative audience, yeah—and y’all can blow me.”

An unshielded and anxious thought from one of the kneeling trio of white uniformed mortals spiked out into the adrenaline-and-cordite smoked air.

If only
M’sieu
were on board.

Dante went still. That couldn’t be right. Maybe the thought had been
intended
to be intercepted, to trick him into believing Mauvais wasn’t here. He closed his eyes and
listened
, tuning out the fast-paced patter of mortal pulses to focus on the slow pendulum swing of immortal hearts.

From the main deck:
BOOM. BOOM
. From the upper deck:
BOOM. BOOM
. Von and Lucien; Trey and Silver.

Dante opened his eyes. No other nightkind were on board. Which meant that either Vincent had lied to him or that Vincent had been lied
to
—but in either case, Dante had just led everyone he loved into a goddamned trap.

The yacht’s engines rumbled to life.

Justine’s words snaked through his aching mind:
Trust me, I’ll make sure you regret every breath you’ve ever drawn.

“Mauvais ain’t here,” Dante said, voice tight, sending his words to Silver and Trey at the same time. “And we’ve been set the fuck up. Get off the yacht
tout de suite
.”

<
Trey still ain’t listening,
> Silver sent. <
And I don’t think I can drag him out.
>

<
Split,
p’tit.
Get outta there. I’ll grab Trey.
>

“I’ll make sure the speed boat’s ready to roll,” Von said, tucking his Brownings back into the double holsters beneath his leather jacket and striding for the ladder leading to the lower deck. “Four is too many to be carried, we’re gonna need it.”

Looking at Lucien, Dante tilted his head at the kneeling crew members. “Find out what they know. Then get the hell out of here.”

Lucien nodded, then turned his gleaming gaze on the mortals. But the stubborn set of his jaw and his silence spoke volumes: He wasn’t leaving before Dante.

Dante raked a hand through his hair in frustration.

A firecracker string of muffled pops echoed from the upper deck, then Silver blazed to a stop beside Dante in a swirl of copper and cinnamon-scented air. Blood glistened on his vintage
Mad Max
T-shirt and smeared his pale face, some of it his own, judging by the scent and the blood-slicked hand he was pressing against his belly.

“Trey’s heading for the pilot house or bridge or whatever the fuck you call the steering place,” he said.

“Haul ass to the boat,” Dante said. “Von’s already on his way.”

Silver nodded.

“And you?” Heather asked. “What about
you
?”

“I’m gonna fetch Trey.”

“Then I’d put those things away, dude,” Silver advised, eyeing Dante’s wings. “Real tight quarters in there.”

“Shit. Good point,
cher
.” Dante drew in a breath, then contracted his deltoid muscles. He felt the smooth glide of his wings as they telescoped down and in, with a whisper of velvet against skin. He looked at Heather. “Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

Heather shook her head. Her fingers white-knuckled around the grip of her Colt. “I’m not leaving without you, Baptiste.”

Dante saw steel in her twilight gaze. Remembered his promise to her:
We’re in this together,
chérie.
Back-to-back and side-by-side.

“Then let’s go,
catin
.” Dante wrapped an arm around Heather’s waist and moved.

D
ANTE SPED THROUGH THE
upper deck—bar, salon, dining room, scrubbed and gleaming stainless-steel galley—following Trey’s bread-crumb trail of bloodied, white-uniformed bodies to the bridge.

Dante slowed to a halt, dread spinning tight in his chest like a wheel on the hatch of a submarine when he heard the rhythmic and muffled beep of a timer.

Time was running out, disaster breathing down its neck.

Heather slipped free of his embrace and did a slow three-sixty of the wheelhouse, gun lifted in a secure two-handed grip.

Trey stood at the equipment console, his fingers blurring across a computer keyboard, dreads dancing against his back and shoulders. Blood streaked the side of his face, saturated the back of his navy blue button-down shirt, the left hip of his jeans, the smell of it thick and heady in the enclosed space.

“You ain’t hiding from me,” Trey was muttering underneath his breath, over and over like a child’s curse/chant. “You ain’t hiding from me. You ain’t. You ain’t.”

“Trey,” Dante said softly, stepping up beside him. Pain chiseled at his concentration as his migraine revved into the red zone. “Mauvais ain’t here. He never was. This is a trap and we gotta go,
cher
.”

Nautical charts flashed across the computer’s monitor. “You ain’t hiding from me. You ain’t. You ain’t.”

“Trey . . .”

“I heard you, Tee-Tee,” Trey said, his fingers falling silent on the monitor. “
Fi’ de garce
is laughing at us. Thinks killing Simone was a game, him. Wish I could move like data through the Internet. I’d be on the motherfucker right now.”

“His night is coming,
cher
—and soon. It just ain’t tonight.”

A dark and furious grief radiated from Trey like the fiery corona of an eclipse. Metal screeched as his fingernails scraped across the console. He lifted his head, then looked at Dante. His eyes drank in the light, swallowed it whole, and gave none back.

“I’m gonna need more of your blood, Tee-Tee.”

“You’ll have it,” Dante promised. “But right now, we need to move our asses.”

Trey said, “See you topside,” then swiveled around, dreads swinging against his back. He
moved
, vanishing from the bridge in a streak of bloodied blue, and dark coils.

Relief cascaded through Dante and his heart slowed its double-time march against his ribs. As he moved away from the console to join Heather, he felt Lucien’s polite rap against his shields and opened up to him.

<
These three know nothing of a trap,
> Lucien sent. <
However, I just noticed several other crew members—including the captain—boarding a second power boat.
>

<
Fuck. Abandoning ship
after
starting the engines. I’m thinking a bomb.
>

<
As am I. Hurry, child.
>

Dante tucked Heather against his side. “Yacht might be a time bomb,
catin
.”

She stared at him, and he heard her pulse picking up speed. “Shit.”

Dante grabbed her hand and
moved
. When they reached the lower deck, Trey and Lucien were waiting for them at the stern, beside the ladder leading down to the wave-bobbing boat below. Another boat sped away across the lake, its engine a high-pitched drone, a V of black water rippling in its wake.

Dante waved Lucien and Trey on—
go, go, already, we’re right behind y’all
—then opened his mouth, but whatever he’d intended to say skated away beyond his recall as red-hot pain drilled through his skull. The yacht deck tilted like a capsizing ship as another image wheeled over it and clicked into place.

Mama Prejean smacks Jeanette as she sets the table, telling her she’s doing it ass-backwards. Papa, with an irritated grunt, backhands the girl and knocks her down.

Dante drops his
Metal Scene
mag and rises from the floor . . .

Another wheeling image . . .

An electronic beep sounds from the door. A green light reading
OPEN
scrolls across the lock’s LED screen. The thick door
ka-chunks
open.

Some douchebag wearing blue scrubs and paper slippers stands at the threshold, a priest’s satin stole draping his broad shoulders. He holds a brown leather carrying case in one hand, a loop of beads in the other. His face is hard and rugged, all weathered angles and planes, the tough mask of a resistance fighter. His blue eyes burn with a fierce light.

“I see you. You are not hidden from me,” he says, unzipping the case. “For our heavenly Father has removed the scales from my eyes. I see you. And I shall free you.”

And another . . .

Orem burns on a torn mattress inside a white padded room, a funeral pyre for a plushie orca and a red-haired princess in a Winnie the Pooh sweater.

Dante’s breath caught rough in his throat, the pain in his heart blotting out the firestorm in his head. Electricity arced through his mind. Fire crackled along his fingers.

The night turned blue.

D
ANTE STUMBLED TO A
stop, his face blanking as though he’d just forgotten where he was going or what he was doing. Alarm prickled along Heather’s spine. Just as she reached for him to steady him, to keep him moving toward the stern, blue flames flared out from around Dante’s clenched fists, engulfing his body in rings of blue fire with breathtaking speed as though he’d been doused in gasoline and lit with a welder’s torch.

Heather jerked her hands away and jumped back a step, her heart hammering against her ribs. A dark and past-frothing current raged against her blood-reinforced shields, then swirled away, leaving her mind untouched.

The smell of ozone electrified the air as Dante’s song raged into the night.

Heather heard the sharp snap of wings as De Noir took to the sky.

Blood streamed from Dante’s nose, spattering the deck in huge, dark drops. Pain rippled across his pale face. He squeezed his eyes shut. Coils of blue light whipped around him, some lashing out into the night, others striking the yacht.

Blue flames devoured a deck chair, twisting it into a sleek seal-creature. Sparks winked from the points of the wing-fin spikes bristling along its spine, glittered in its black eyes. It blinked, then flowed with liquid grace over the railing and into the lake.

A life preserver unfolded into a pale centipede, its hundreds of legs clicking along the deck.

Heather’s mouth dried.

Dante staggered, then fell to his hands and knees, the muscles in his chest, back, and arms taut with strain. The metal decorating his body—the steel loop in his collar, the hoops in his ears, the rings on his fingers and thumbs, the buckles on his belt and boots—burned with a cold blue radiance like distant stars.

Beneath Dante’s glowing hands, the deck heaved, shifted, humped up like whale flesh. A huge dorsal fin rose up like a long-lost island from beneath dark waves.

Heather fumbled for the morphine-filled syringe still tucked inside her pocket. Yanking it free, she eyed the rays of blue fire radiating out from around Dante, and her heart sank. She doubted she could get close enough to even use the syringe—not and remain in her current form—a form she was fond of and wished desperately to keep.