Etched in Bone (5 page)

What about Wallace? Take her out too?

Gillespie sighted in on the attractive redhead, his hands sweating around the binoculars. An FBI agent with a stellar career—until she’d met Dante Prejean and been corrupted. Gillespie remembered the words Wallace had spoken to him a couple of nights ago in the motel parking lot outside Damascus, Oregon.

They’re lying to you. Ask about Bad Seed.

I know about Bad Seed. I know what Dante Prejean is.

I doubt that.

Wallace had been right. He’d had
no
idea. But that had changed. He also realized it was too late to save the lovely fed; she was lost to Dante-fucking-Prejean, body and soul. And that was a goddamned shame.

He’d make sure that Prejean paid for her too.

But the question now was, what the hell were they doing in the cemetery?

Gillespie breathed in the cool, moist scent of dew-slick grass and sweet cherry blossoms as he studied Wallace and Prejean. The redhead, wearing a purple tank top and black leather pants underneath her unbelted black trench, dropped into a crouch in front of a crypt, her expression perplexed as she studied the path. What were they looking for?

Prejean bent and scooped something up from the path. Gillespie frowned. A rock? His heart slammed against his ribs when blue flames flickered to life around the vamp’s pale hands, sparked from the rings on his fingers and thumbs. Prejean bowed his head, his glossy black hair swinging forward to curtain his face. Wallace stood beside her lover, her expression concerned.

What the hell is the little shit doing now?

“Don’t move,” a woman’s low voice said from behind Gillespie. A familiar voice. One he couldn’t quite place. Something hard jabbed into the base of his skull.

Gillespie froze, his fingers still wrapped around the binoculars. Sweat broke out on his forehead when he heard the click of a trigger easing back. “I’m not moving,” he managed to say in a level tone.

“Must admit, I’m surprised to see
you
here, Chief Gillespie,” the woman said. “I expected someone lower on the totem pole to be sent to safeguard SB interests. Or is this Underwood’s idea of punishment? Have a few beers too many on the job?”

Safeguard?
Relief washed through Gillespie. Whoever this woman was, she thought he’d been assigned to
protect
Prejean. She knew his name and his reputation for boozing, knew just how low he’d fallen in Special Ops Director Underwood’s regard.

A fellow Shadow Branch agent? If so, as much as he didn’t like it, he would have to kill her before she reported his presence in New Orleans.

But she’d said “
SB
interests,” not “
our
interests.”

“I haven’t yet discovered what constitutes too many beers,” Gillespie replied, allowing his brain time to root around in his memory for a face to match the familiar voice. “Whose interests are
you
safeguarding?”

“Certainly not Dante Prejean’s.”

Interesting. “Perhaps we have something in common, then.”

The woman snorted. “Oh, I doubt that.” She pressed the gun barrel harder against Gillespie’s skull. “Lower the binoculars, but keep your hands up.”

Gillespie did as instructed, looping the binoculars strap around his neck, then lifting his hands, slow and easy. “I’m not safeguarding SB interests, ma’am,” he said quietly, still trying to place her voice. He felt her gaze burning a hole through his skull. “And Underwood doesn’t know I’m here.”

At least not yet. But time was running out.

“If that’s the case, what
are
you doing here?” she asked.

“Safeguarding human interests by killing Prejean.”

“And what are your plans for Wallace?”

The woman’s voice clicked then, a slot sliding into place inside Gillespie’s mind. And the knowledge shocked him like a screwdriver into an electrical outlet.

Monica Rutgers. FBI. Assistant Director in Charge. His mind scrabbled for a reason why she would be in New Orleans instead of at her desk in FBI headquarters in D.C. She was years and many pay grades away from field work.

Instinct guided his next words. “I have no interest in Wallace, ma’am,” he lied. “Just Prejean. But why are you here?”

“You can drop the ‘
ma’am,
’ Rutgers will do. I’ve resigned and I’m here as a private citizen.”

Gillespie stared at the black wrought iron gate in front of him, stunned.
Resigned?
When had
that
happened, and why?

“But it seems that you’re right, Chief Gillespie. We
do
have something in common, after all.”

“That is?”

“We both want Prejean dead,” Rutgers said.

Gillespie’s pulse picked up speed. “We might have a better chance of accomplishing that together.”

“Perhaps. What’s he doing in the cemetery?”

Gillespie started to shake his head, but the painful scrape of the gun barrel against his scalp aborted the movement. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “He and Wallace seem to be looking for someone or something.”

“Well, then, put those binoculars to use, Chief, and let’s see if they’ve found what they’re looking for.”

The gun barrel’s pressure vanished from the back of his head and Gillespie exhaled in relief. He glanced at the woman as she stepped up beside him.

The former Bureau ADIC wore a belted tan trench and black slacks and stood a pear-shaped five-six or five-seven, compared to his six-one. Dark brown curls threaded through with gray cupped her angular face. He knew she was in her fifties, but beneath the oak’s shadows, she looked younger. She met his regard with calm brown eyes.

Gillespie had never met Rutgers, had only spoken to her over the phone during times when SB and FBI interests intersected. Like with motherfucking Bad Seed. And with the mysterious events outside Damascus at the Wells/Lyons compound.

A dark cave stretches across the ground where the main house had once stood, a cave ringed with a Stonehenge of white stone angels. And sitting quietly in the SB’s watchful custody, the FBI agent Rutgers sent to tail Prejean and Wallace, his sanity on permanent vacation.

Mysterious events and Dante Prejean seemed to go hand-in-hand, like a high school couple going steady.

Returning his attention to the cemetery, Gillespie lifted the binoculars to his eyes and trained them on the area he’d last seen Prejean and Wallace. He spotted them still beside the crypt, but now the bloodsucker stood with both blue-flames-flickering palms against its white stone, Wallace right behind him—and it looked like she had looped a hand through the back of his belt.

Prejean drew back his left fist. Then punched it into the crypt.

Gillespie frowned.
What the hell
—Before he could finish his thought, a blinding flash of blue light exploded from the cemetery. Sudden pressure jabbed his ears, then he felt the air sucked from his lungs.

Whoomph!

A heated rush of air slammed into him, lifting him off his feet and hurling him like a Frisbee—a flesh and bone Frisbee—across the sidewalk and against a parked car. Blue stars flickered through his vision as his head cracked into a fender. He bit his tongue. The old nickel taste of blood filled his mouth.

Gillespie tumbled into the street, landing face-first on the pavement. More flickering stars. Another mouthful of old nickels. Curling into a ball to protect himself as debris
tink
ed and
clunk
ed to the ground beside him, Gillespie folded his arms over his head.

The ground quaked and shuddered beneath him for a moment, then went still once more. But he knew what he’d felt had been the aftereffects of an explosive shock wave and not an earthquake. He smelled ozone thick in the air, but no smoke. Through the painful ringing in his ears he heard car alarms beeping and whooping, heard stones crashing against concrete and pavement, heard the clang of iron, heard the high-pressure gush of a broken water main and the panicked shouts of people.

“Holy Jesus, did you see that?”

“An explosion in the cemetery!”

“Dear Lord, oh, it’s the end of days—a ring of fire!”

“Someone call 911! Call the shittin’ bomb squad!”

A hand gripped Gillespie’s shoulder. Lowering his arms, he looked up into Monica Rutgers’s ashen face. Her dark curls were disheveled, her expression grim and making her look every one of her fifty-plus years.

“Jesus Christ,” she muttered. “Are you all right?”

Good question. Gillespie pushed against the pavement and eased himself into a sitting position. Pain rang his skull like a noontime bell. Nausea twisted through his guts. He felt a cold sweat pop up on his forehead.

“I’ll live,” he said. Then he chuckled as he realized he’d swallowed his gum.

Rutgers shook her head. Her lips stretched into a thin line. Her expression told him that he looked as bad as he felt. He grasped the hand she offered and allowed her to help him up to his feet.

He stared at the wreckage surrounding him, pulse racing, mouth dry. Shattered glass was everywhere—in the street, on the sidewalk, strewn like sharp and glittering confetti on cars, grass, in bushes. Water from a broken hydrant geysered into the night, a pale starward stream. His Nissan rested on its side on the sidewalk beside a now tattered-looking rose bush.

Then he looked across the cemetery. Its walls and gate had been smashed into blue-flickering ruin.

“Jesus,” he breathed. “What the hell happened?”

“Damned if I know,” Rutgers replied. “But I intend to find out.”

She hurried back to the sidewalk and Gillespie followed, fumbling in his jacket pocket for his glasses. He realized the binoculars no longer dangled from around his neck. His fingers skimmed across his glasses and he was surprised, but happy, to find them in one piece. Pulling them free, he slid them on.

Gillespie stepped up onto the cracked sidewalk and felt ice flow through his veins. Throughout the cemetery, tombs, crypts, and statues had been cut in half, their contents spilling onto the ruptured stone paths; the sliced-off tops of cypresses and oaks had tumbled onto chunks of broken stone and masonry, their leaves aglow with blue flames.

Uneasiness snaked through Gillespie as he recalled his last sight of Prejean.

Blue fire swallows the bloodsucker’s hands. Prejean draws back his left fist. Then punches it into the crypt.

Blue flames. Just like those devouring the leaves and sparking along the ruptured tombs.

Dear God. Had
Prejean
caused the explosion? Gillespie’s thoughts flipped back to what he’d seen on the security cam disk he’d stolen in Damascus.

The energy surrounding Prejean shafts into Johanna Moore’s body from dozens of different points. Explodes from her eyes. From her nostrils. Her screaming mouth. She separates into strands, wet and glistening. Prejean’s energy unthreads Moore. Pulls apart every single element of her flesh.

Johanna Moore spills to the tiled floor, her scream ending in a gurgle.

If Prejean could
unmake
a woman, then he could also
make
a cave like the one that had mysteriously appeared in Damascus. Could surround its raw edge with a Stonehenge of white stone angels—smooth-winged angels that he’d bet anything had once been flesh—while something deep within the cave’s dark and glistening guts sang
holy, holy, holy
.

Jesus Christ. Listen to yourself. You’ve finally pickled your brain. No way Prejean’s responsible for all that. Not possible.
Can’t
be possible.

That final conversation with Wallace replayed through his aching mind, intensifying the dread knotting up his belly.

They’re lying to you. Ask about Bad Seed.

I know about Bad Seed. I know what Dante Prejean is.

I doubt that.

Three simple words containing depths beyond Gillespie’s imagining.

Pain pulsed through Gillespie’s head, throbbed at the back of his skull. He looked around for his rifle and found it, tarp-free, in the gutter. He scooped it up, then started running along the cracked concrete path, heading for the spot he’d last seen Prejean and Wallace through the binoculars.

“Hold up,” Rutgers panted, winded already after too many years behind a desk. “Where are we headed?”

“To where I last saw Prejean.” Gillespie stumbled to a stop in front of a ruined white tomb. He could make out the name carved into the shattered marble—
BARONNE
. A wisp of pale smoke curled from behind the tomb’s remains. He stepped over chunks of masonry and looked. What he saw catapulted his heart into his throat.

A large hole, molten-rimmed and glowing yellow-orange, swallowed up most of the tomb’s only intact wall.

But that wasn’t what scraped fear through Gillespie’s mind and across his heart. On the other side of the embered hole, he didn’t see what he expected to see—a tomb’s dusty interior. Instead, hallways stretched away from the hole, with sky blue marble floors and ridged marble columns that reached into pale night skies.

Pale night skies full of rustling wings.

“Dear God. What
is
that?” Rutgers’s voice was stunned, disbelieving.

A faint whiff of smoky incense wafted from the hole. “Do you feel like stepping inside and finding out?” Gillespie asked.

“Are you out of your goddamned mind?”

“Not yet,” Gillespie replied. He nodded at the smoldering portal. “But I feel zero hour rapidly approaching.”

“Christ, what the hell am I looking at—a dimensional doorway?” Rutgers asked. “What could cause
that
? Create it?”

Remembering pale hands swallowed by blue flames, Gillespie said, “Not
what,
but
who
.”

Gillespie felt Rutgers’s gaze bulls-eye in on the side of his head.

“Are you saying that
Prejean
did this?” she questioned, voice flat. “Now I know you’re out of your goddamned mind. The bastard’s a True Blood vampire and a programmed sociopath, but—”