Etched in Bone (9 page)

“Terrific.” Pain prickled at Dante’s temples. “Ya’ll need to stand the hell up,” he growled. “Knock this kneeling shit off.”

One musical voice lifted into the air. “But you are the
creawdwr
. . .”

Dante raked a hand through his hair. Something dark and weary curled through him.
Ça fini pas
. “Yeah, yeah. Still. Stand up.”

One by one, the fallen angels complied, their movements awkward and unsure, their rapt faces—all gleaming eyes and parted lips—fixed on Dante. He felt their heated, hungry gazes nibbling at him, seizing whatever they could grab—whatever he
allowed
them to grab—just like the Cage-climbing audiences at Inferno gigs.

He pictured the fallen angels offering him CDs, clothing, and bared flesh to sign.
Sign just above my boob.
A coy flutter of wings.
I plan to get it tattooed on permanently.

Dante smiled at the image and a measure of calm stole through him, easing some of the tension from his muscles. Stabbing a finger in Lucien’s direction, he said, “No matter what he has or hasn’t done, he’s
mon père,
my father.”

A hundred pairs of eyes shifted their attention to Lucien—most wide with shock or surprise, even disbelief. Dante heard the scrape of Lucien’s sandals against the marble as he straightened and folded his arms over his blood-streaked chest, looking uncomfortable.

“And,” Dante continued, “no one here is going to lay—”

Trumpets bellowed, shattering the night, a deep, resonating, and unnerving primal blast of sound that vibrated up Dante’s spine and into the back of his aching skull.

“So much for slipping away,” the Morningstar said, voice grim. “The Seven have arrived to greet your return from the pit and to escort you to your place upon the Chaos Seat.”

Dante’s song, dark and savage and hungry, slashed out from his heart, a primal and furious aria slicing through the night. Energy prickled along his fingers, pooled blue in the palms of his hands. Pain throbbed at his temples.

“That’s what they think,” he said, voice tight.

7
TO DIE AS SAMURAI

A
LEXANDRIA
, VA,
O
LD
T
OWN
Night of March 27–28

N
IGHT-VISION GOGGLES DRAPED AROUND
her neck, Caterina Cortini slipped out of the stolen van and into the quiet residential street, looping a small knapsack containing her B-and-E gear over one shoulder. Her Sig P220 was tucked into the shoulder holster she wore beneath her black workman’s jacket and over her black T-shirt, its weight nestled comfortably against her ribs.

Avoiding the cone of pale light radiating from the street light, she crossed the road in an unhurried stride, her black-soled Air-walk sneakers silent against the pavement.

Three a.m. And all was still, the neighborhood asleep—including Epstein.

Caterina had been in place and watching when her boss/handler had returned from his nightly workout at the dojo, gym bag in hand, around seven
P.M.
The lights in his house had switched off near midnight and Caterina had waited inside the stuffy van for the next three hours, studying every shadow slanting in the driveway, inspecting every branch of the evergreens growing in front of Epstein’s dark and curtained living room window.

She gave the man plenty of time to fall asleep. Gave him time to stay that way.

She couldn’t take chances, didn’t dare assume—not with Joseph Epstein. Not with the man who’d taught her everything she knew about wetwork, the man who’d mentored her career in Shadow Branch black ops; a kindred spirit.

Not if she hoped to see another dawn.

Words Epstein had said less than forty-eight hours ago as they’d stood together in front of the filing cabinet in his office, audio jammer burbling away to guarantee that their words remained secret, burned bright in Caterina’s mind—a torch carried by a solitary runner.

With each life we end, we alter the future, end possibilities. We become agents of destiny. Severing some, fulfilling others. A hard and honorable duty.

Words she believed in. Words she’d always followed. Even now.

Caterina’s chest muscles cinched tight. Her hands knotted into fists, leather gloves creaking.
Especially
now.

She drew in a slow, deep breath of frost-crackling air and forced her muscles to relax. Once they had, she padded down Epstein’s hedge-shadowed driveway, past his Crown Victoria, and to his front porch.

A quick peek through the glass panes inset in the mahogany door revealed an alarm keypad set into the foyer wall. Its green all-systems-armed-and-functioning light glinted in the darkness, matching the green pinpoint light winking from the door’s lockbox.

Just as Caterina had expected. No secondary system. None was necessary. She knew Epstein well enough to know that he considered himself his home’s secondary security system. And for good reason.

She’d sparred with him often during training sessions and knew from painful experience how quick, deadly, and ruthless he could be. Several tours of combat duty in Iraq, then Pakistan, had honed the man’s reflexes guillotine-sharp.

Agents of destiny. Epstein’s words haunted her.

Unlike almost every other operative under my command, you’ve always known, always understood, what we did and why.

She understood all too well.

Caterina crouched and shrugged off her knapsack. She reached into it, her gloved fingers seeking and finding the EMP minibomb’s smooth shape—the B-and-E pro’s new all-purpose crowbar for gigs in the electronic world. She slid the minibomb onto the lockbox and thumbed in a ten-second countdown.

Swiveling around on her heels and turning her hunched back to the door, Caterina pulled her goggles up and over her eyes. The night shifted into shades of gray and ghost-green. She unholstered her Sig, then, with the silent countdown ticking away in her mind, she pulled her oil-cloth wrapped silencer from the knapsack. She screwed the silencer onto the barrel with quick and efficient twists, and chambered a round.

Her pulse threaded through her veins hard and fast. Her palms sweated inside her gloves. In the past, she’d always viewed her termination assignments as marks, targets. Her sworn duty.

But this time she would be executing a man she knew and respected.

With each life we end, we alter the future, end possibilities. We become agents of destiny. Severing some, fulfilling others. A hard and honorable duty.

Epstein had altered his future the moment he’d assigned Caterina to end Dante Baptiste’s life, handing her a folder with instructions on how to kill a True Blood, never suspecting she’d already altered her own destiny.

Caterina kneels and places her borrowed gun at Dante’s pale bare feet. He stares at her, disbelief flashing across his beautiful face . . .

A soft beep. Countdown achieved. The porch light vanished.

Caterina swung back around. The light on the lockbox had gone dark as well. The mini had done its job in complete silence, hitting the house and yard with a wave of EMP energy. A faint whiff of ozone curled into the air.

Rising to her feet, Caterina eased the door open just enough to slip inside, her sneakers squeaking against the hardwood floor. She winced, hoping against goddamned hope that the slide of rubber against wood hadn’t been heard upstairs. She pushed the door closed, but didn’t shut it—not all the way.

Sig in hand, Caterina hastily toed off her Airwalks. She listened. Adrenaline pumped through her veins with each rapid pulse of her heart, fine-tuning her senses.

Refrigerator hum. The ticking of the pendulum clock. A gurgle from the toilet. And silence from the bedrooms upstairs.

Caterina drew a breath in through her nose. The faint odor of Epstein’s cherry cordial pipe tobacco. The fishy scent of broiled salmon.

She padded along the foyer’s polished floor in her stocking feet, her shoulder against one wall, her Sig secured in both hands. She paused at the mouth of the dark living room. Her night-vision goggles painted the room in pale shades of green as light from outside—light beyond the limited reach of her mini-bomb—filtered in through the blinds, outlining the shadowed humps of furniture.

Locating the staircase, Caterina strode across the room and up the stairs, her socks whispering against the runner. She moved along the outer edge to avoid creaks, her gait swift and light. On the landing, she paused for a moment as she considered the shadowed mouths of three rooms.

Guest room. Bathroom. Master bedroom. One room on the right-hand side of the hall, one dead ahead—the bathroom, in all likelihood—one room on the left-hand side.

Caterina held her breath and listened. A low, almost inaudible snore drifted down the hall from the right. She swung to the right and followed the carpet runner stretching the length of the narrow hall to the doorway, her footsteps as light as meringue.

Pressing her back against the wall, Caterina stopped and listened again. Now she could hear Epstein’s breathing. Steady, rhythmic, the quiet snore buzzing into the air like a bumblebee every few breaths.

A hard and honorable duty. No, make that just a hard duty. No honor in shooting a sleeping man, no matter how necessary. She owed Epstein—mentor, hard-nosed boss, fellow samurai—more than that. But she couldn’t afford to give him more. Couldn’t afford to satisfy her own sense of honor. If she lost, Epstein would send someone else after Dante, maybe even himself. She couldn’t,
wouldn’t,
risk Dante’s life.

The future pumps within Dante’s heart and flows through his veins. The future for all of us: mortal, vampire, and Fallen. If Dante falls, the world and all it holds will fall with him.

Caterina rolled her shoulders, attempting to siphon some of the tension from her muscles, then she stepped into the room, lifted her gun, and fired twice at the figure curled on its side beneath the blankets. The body jumped with each hushed
thwip
.

Sorry, Ep. Nothing personal.

But even as her finger was squeezing the trigger, warning prickled along her spine. Instinct slammed into high gear. Pure adrenaline flooded her veins. She caught a faint whiff of cherry tobacco.

A motherfucking dummy in the bed.

Caterina ducked and whirled to the left, another gun’s muted
thwip
hot on her heels. She swung the Sig up for a return shot. But Epstein had anticipated her action and had stepped in even as she’d spun away, closing the distance between them in a single long-legged stride.

A gun barrel—well, the silencer, actually—jammed hard against Caterina’s forehead, its heated mouth burning against her skin. She went still. He yanked the Sig from her grip and tucked it into the back of his khakis.

The night-vision goggles stole the blue ice color from Epstein’s eyes, made them luminous with captured light. But the winter in his gaze chilled Caterina to the bone.

He wasn’t expecting just anyone. He was waiting for
me.

“Goddammit, Cortini,” he said, mingled disappointment and ice in his voice. His white hair, cut high and tight military-style, was a ghostly gleam in her goggles. “I was hoping to hell the evidence was wrong.”

“Evidence?” she asked, then a dark possibility occurred to her. “You found my gun. In Damascus.”

Epstein nodded, face grim. “And not just your gun. The techs processing the scene in Damascus also found your missing partner’s gun in what appeared to be an empty grave. Beck never would’ve left his weapon behind. So that suggested he’d never left the Wells compound, like you said, or driven you back to your hotel. It also suggested that you’ve been lying and Beck is dead. The only question is why.”

“It was necessary,” Caterina replied, holding Epstein’s gaze. “And not a decision I made lightly.”

“Very vague, Cortini,” Epstein growled. “Care to fill in a few details?”

“Not really.” She also didn’t plan to waste any more time with talk.

Swinging both hands up, she clapped her palms against Epstein’s ears, then hammered the heel of her hand into his unprotected belly just above the pubic bone.

Epstein doubled over, pain contorting his face, baring his teeth. Caterina pivoted behind him, reaching for the gun nestled against the small of his T-shirted back, but he twisted away and wheeled around before she could grab it.

Son of a bitch!

Sliding back a step, Caterina snapped out a front kick to Epstein’s gun hand, pinwheeling the Glock into the air. She barely had time to lower her foot back to the floor before Epstein came at her with a breath-stealing flurry of precise and deadly blows.

Caterina tossed up forearm and knee blocks, fending off each bruising hit from its intended target as she spun on the balls of her stocking-clad feet. She launched adrenaline-fueled punches and open-handed blows of her own as she danced a whirling, punishing, Mach-3 martial arts tango with the man who’d taught her much of what she knew.

Sweat trickled between Caterina’s breasts. Her breath burned in her lungs, her throat. She fought without pause or thought, her muscles and reflexes responding with speed and accuracy. This was a primal battle. One for survival. A duel between samurai.

And soon, one of them would be dead.

Caterina caught Epstein’s sudden subtle shift of position, and she used a change-body technique to slither aside just as his combat-boot-clad foot rocketed past her cheek in a lethal roundhouse kick.

Dropping, she knocked Epstein’s legs out from under him with a quick leg-sweep. He crashed into the bed, sliding down the comforter-humped but empty mattress—
wait, where’s the dummy or pillows or whatever that was rigged under the blankets to draw my fire?
—then rolling, but Caterina was on him. She yanked her captured Sig free of Epstein’s khakis.

The hair prickled on the back of Caterina’s neck.

Someone was behind her. Bastard wasn’t alone.