On Midnight Wings

Caterina pulls a gun from a holster underneath her blazer. She steps up onto the sidewalk. But she doesn’t move toward the sign reading WOMEN. Instead, she follows after Heather in quick, silent strides, coming up behind her fast, lifting the gun, her face cold and hard and unforgiving.

Dante tries to move, to blur across the neglected parking lot and rip out Caterina’s throat before her finger even finishes pulling the trigger—but his body refuses to obey. His limbs feel like they’re encased in cement. Dead weight.

He opens his mouth to shout a warning, but no sound emerges.

Dante keeps fighting, struggling, pouring all of his strength and concentration into moving, dammit, just . . . fucking . . . MOVE as Caterina aims the gun at the back of Heather’s skull. The dark-haired assassin’s finger curls around the trigger. Then she stops, turns her head, and looks right at him.

And her features shift. She becomes taller. Blonde. Nightkind pale.

Dante goes still. She is no longer Caterina.

Johanna Moore’s ice-blue gaze meets his and her generous lips curve into a smile. “What are you waiting for?” she asks, then adds in a commanding near-whisper, “You should do the honors, my sleeping beauty.”

Something calm and cold uncoils inside of Dante and slithers into place. Something he can’t stop. And he suddenly finds himself in Johanna/Caterina’s place, the rubber grip of the gun in his hand, the muzzle aimed at the back of Heather’s head, the trigger smooth beneath his finger.

He draws in an easy breath, smells her—lilacs and sage and rain. He hears his own voice, low and husky, saying, “Hey,

catin.”

Heather starts to turn around.

He pulls the trigger.

Her head rocks forward with the first bullet, then snaps back with the second, tendrils of red hair whipping through the air. She drops like an air-gunned steer. The thick, heady smells of blood and cordite saturate the air. Hunger pulses through him.

Voices buzz around him, annoying houseflies.

You’re gonna end up hurting everyone around you because you can’t help it.

No one can ever be used against you if you’re willing to kill them yourself.

There he is. That’s my Bad Seed bro.

How does it feel, marmot?

S laughs. “Pretty fucking good, actually.”

26

A FAMILIAR AND DANGEROUS VOICE

DANTE JERKED AWAKE, HEART hammering, his body bathed in a cold sweat. Light needled his eyes and he snapped them shut again—too late; the pain in his head intensified. Whatever he’d been dreaming was gone. The last image, tendrils of red hair sinking into a moonlit pool of blood, an image that iced his heart, vanished like smoke in the rain, leaving him with only a disturbing blankness.

Something dark and ugly had happened in the dream. Something that scared him to his core. Something inescapable and unstoppable, a massive boulder rolling straight for a lonely highway, aimed at the single car traveling upon it.

Tendrils of red hair whipping through the air. . . .

Gone.