Beneath the Skin

20 A SHALLOW GRAVE

ON I-84 EAST

March 25–26

THE SUV’S TIRES HUMMED along the interstate, a steady, hypnotic sound. With Dante doped and Sleeping, his head cushioned in her lap, her fingers stroking his hair, Heather decided to close her eyes. Just for a moment. She rested her head against the window. And dreamed.

OCTOBER AND THE AIR is crisp. But she’s not cold, she’s on fire and alive and flying. Heather’s birthday is coming up. She’ll be twelve. Twelve going on forty. She sees too much and maybe not enough.

Have I lost her?

I’ll make her birthday special, bake her a chocolate cake with butter-cream frosting. I’ll decorate the house with red, blue, and yellow balloons and string a HAPPY BIRTHDAY banner across the dining room archway.

Shannon stumbles, her heel catching on the asphalt’s ragged edge. She giggles. Good thing she isn’t driving. Point in her favor. She licks the tip of a finger and strokes an imaginary line in the air. Sliding off her shoe, she peers at the heel.

Headlights pierce the night. Shannon sticks out her shoe instead of her thumb, cocking her weight onto one hip and smiling. The headlights glow, twin moons filling her vision and dazzling her sight.

The car pulls over, tires crunching on gravel, the muffler streaming a plume of exhaust and the heady smell of gasoline in the air. The engine purrs.

Headlight-blinded, she wobbles as she tries to put her shoe back on. She hops backward before sprawling on her ass. She throws back her head and laughs. Good thing she isn’t walking the line for a cop. Another point in her favor. She draws another imaginary line in the air.

Slipping off her other shoe, damned heels playing havoc with her balance, well, that and all the booze, Shannon climbs to her feet, stumbling only a little. She’s brushing the dirt off her rear end when the driver’s door opens.

A man slips out of the purring car, and something gleams in his hand.

“Need help, Shannon?” he asks.

Shannon shades her eyes from the headlight dazzle with the edge of her hand. Recognizing the tall figure with its tousled dark hair and tight smile, she mutters, “Crap.”

Her good humor, her joie de vivre—as her drinking buddies at the Driftwood Bar and Lounge call it—evaporates. “Whatcha doing out here, Craig? Jim send you?”

“Jim? Only if you’re on the Most Wanted list, Shan.” Craig chuckles, but Shannon thinks she hears a bitter note in his laughter and wonders if something’s come between her husband and his best friend. “Been helping a buddy work on his car. Just on my way home.”

“That why you’re holding a hammer?”

Craig looks down as if he just realized that he is, indeed, carrying a hammer. His fingers white-knuckle around the handle. Lifting his gaze back to Shannon’s, he says quietly, “Get in the car. I’ll take you home.”

Shannon shakes her head. Her husband’s friend and coworker seems strung tighter than a tennis racquet, for whatever reason. Maybe he needs a drink. She swallows back the giggles bubbling against her lips.

“Thanks anyway.”

Craig sighs. “You aren’t going to let me give you a ride, are you?”

“Bingo!” Shannon says. “Give the man a prize. No, I’m not going with you. No matter what you say, I know Jim sent you. I’ll just go back to the Driftwood and call a cab.”

Shoes in hand, Shannon manages an about-face and keeps her balance. Score. She draws another imaginary point in the air. She feels her joie de vivre catching a second wind. She steps onto the smooth road to spare her bare feet bruises from pebbles.

“Tell Jim he can go to hell. And you can go right with him.”

“I have a feeling you’re going first.”

Behind her, Shannon hears a familiar sound. A sound that freezes her in midstride like a blast of frigid Arctic air: the ka-chunk of a round being chambered.

“Just get in the goddamned car, Shannon.”

HEATHER TRIED TO FORCE her eyes open, tried to wake herself up, but couldn’t. It felt like unseen and heavy hands held her in place. Paralyzed her. The dream shifted. The lonely highway housing an idling car, two people—her long-ago murdered mother and her recently KIA mentor in the FBI—aimed on destroying themselves, and a tavern gleaming with warm light … all of it pinwheeled away, the images getting smaller and smaller until they vanished altogether.

Something tugged at Heather, tried to yank her down into the dark. She gasped as pain scratched and clawed behind her eyelids. An inner borealis, streamers of undulating light—red, violet, blue, and green—accompanied the pain.

The unseen hands pressing down on her disappeared.

And something else hooked her and dragged her into darkness.

NIGHT-SHADOWED CYPRESS and twisted old oaks surround two men standing behind a rust-pocked old Chevy, eyeing the contents of the trunk they’ve opened. One man holds a shovel.

“A shame you killed dem, for true,” one says.

“Dammit, I tole you it was an accident. Now shut the hell up about it, you.”

“Why we burying dem? Next blowdown will wash dem bodies right outta the ground. We should feed ’em to the gators.”

“Tais-toi, fool. Just dig.”

The high-pitched and rhythmic scrubbing-against-thewashboard song of katydids fills the hot, humid night with natural music as the men—both of equal height, but one heavier than the other, and both in jeans and sweat-stained T-shirts—pull the bodies out of the trunk one by one and dump them onto the sawgrass.

Teenagers. Hands cuffed behind their backs.

One has black hair and pale, pale skin that seems to gleam in the moonlight. Blood glistens at his temple. Heath-er’s heart hammers against her ribs. Dante. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. This isn’t in the Bad Seed files—at least not the ones she’s viewed.

One of the men kneels and pushes Dante’s hair back from his face. “I don’t tink dis one’s dead, Cecil.”

“ ’Course the boy ain’t dead, you fool. He’s the best moneymaker I got or ever had, for true. I just held him under in the tub until he sucked some water into his lungs, then I pulled him out. Mighta knocked a few things off-a his skull too for good measure.”

“Den why the hell we drag his ass down here?”

A smile curves Papa Cecil’s lips, sharp as an icepick and twice as heartless. “Boy needs a lesson. Boy always needs a lesson.”

Papa and his friend take turns digging a hole in the moist ground, tossing shovelfuls of sawgrass and dirt into air thick with the smells of moss and rotting wood and brackish water.

Once Papa judges the hole deep enough, he wipes sweat off his forehead with a bandana from his back pocket. “Fetch him,” he pants, pointing at Dante.

“But he ain’t dead.”

“Fetch him anyway and toss him in the goddamned grave.”

Papa’s buddy sighs, then drags Dante to the edge of the impromptu grave. After glancing at Papa one more time, he rolls Dante into the hole.

“Now fetch the dead one,” Papa says. “And drop him in too. Den start shoveling the dirt back in.”

Dizziness twists through Heather. Nausea wrenches at her stomach. She spins, the cypress and old oaks whipping around her, the star-flecked sky wheeling above. She tumbles into the open grave.

She falls in slow motion. And even though the grave is only five feet deep, she falls forever and ever. Dante lies sprawled at the grave’s bottom. Water seeps up from beneath him, turning the dirt into dark and stinking mud.

Just before Heather slams into Dante, his eyes open.

“Où suis-je?” he whispers.

THE BEAUTIFUL SLEEPING REDHEAD’S eyes flew open. Panic rimmed her twilight blue gaze. Sweat beaded her forehead. “You’re with me,” she whispered, answering Dante’s question.

“And who are you?” Even as Dante voiced the words, even as he reached up to protect her from the shovelfuls of dark, damp dirt flying into the hole—ain’t a hole, it’s a grave—he realized he knew her. He just didn’t know when.

“Heather,” he breathed. Her sweet evening scent—sage and rain-wet lilacs—curled around him, filled his lungs.

A smile flickered across her lips. She nodded. “Here, Baptiste.”

Shovelfuls of dirt cascaded down on them, peppered her hair. Mud and swampy water sucked at Dante, soaked through his T-shirt and jeans. Electricity crackled along his fingers, pooled in his hands. Wasps droned. Voices murmured and capered and insisted.

Boy always needs a lesson.

Dante-angel, run, run, run!

You’ll fail, you know.

“Roll over,” Dante said, “and let me up. I ain’t gonna let fucking Papa bury us.”

Heather cupped a warm hand against his face. “You’re not in that grave, Baptiste. That happened a long time ago,” she said. “You’re here on the road to New Orleans with me. I won’t let you fall. I won’t let you go.”

A high tide of white silence rolled through Dante, sluicing away the droning wasps and the poison they needled into his veins; drowned the goddamned voices. Everything stopped. The world spun white and silent around him—except for the North Star pull of Heather’s voice.

“STAY HERE AND NOW, Baptiste,” Heather said. “Stay here with us.”

Fear twisted icy knots through her guts. She stared at Dante’s glowing hands, Violet’s transformation beneath those same hands playing behind her eyes.

Black hair ripples into red tresses, golden skin lightens to freckled and fair, life-sparked blue replaces empty jade green eyes.

A transformation Heather believed he hadn’t intended. But lost to his past, he was also losing control over his Fallen magic.

So you trust him?

With my life.

Bending her head, Heather whispered into Dante’s hoop-rimmed ear, “I’ll never leave you behind, Baptiste, so you do the same for me. Come back.”

Dante’s tension-taut body quivered for a moment, then he unclenched his blue-fire engulfed fists. Closing his eyes, he visibly forced himself to relax muscle by muscle. Blue flames danced along the rings on his fingers and thumbs. Gleamed along the thighs of his leather pants.

“Holy hell, am I seeing blue in the rearview? Need help, doll?”

“Shit!” Annie cried. “Toss him out before he touches anyone!”

“Pull over in case I need to move real fast. Don’t wanna do that at eighty plus.”

“You got it.”

The SUV slowed as Von eased up on the gas and steered the vehicle into the emergency lane, blinkers flashing.

Heather brushed the backs of her fingers against Dante’s pale cheek. His thick, black eyelashes deepened the blue smudges under his eyes. “I’m here,” she said.

“Moi aussi,” he said.

Heather’s breath caught in her throat as Dante’s song, a beautiful and haunting aria, arced between them, heart-to-heart, crystalline and strong. It strummed across the deep-threaded strings composing her soul; a wild song, burning and passionate and tender.

Fire blazed through Heather’s veins, torched her heart.

Dante opened his eyes. Gold flecked his deep brown irises, but his hands no longer glowed. He touched fevered fingers to Heather’s face and traced a molten path along her jawline to her throat.

“Je t’aime,” he whispered.

“T’es sûr de sa?” she said, her voice husky. “ ’Cause I love you back.”

A smile tilted Dante’s lips. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Dante lifted up on one elbow as she brought her face down, his hot hand sliding around to the back of her neck. He kissed her long and deep, his lips burning against hers; kissed her breath away. Tasting amaretto on her tongue, her lips, Heather deepened the kiss, her fingers twisting in his silky hair. Heated flutters rippled through her belly.

When the kiss ended several breathless minutes later, Dante traced a finger along Heather’s lips. He searched her eyes, his own unguarded. His pale, beautiful face was quiet, thoughtful.

“As lost as I get, I will find you, Heather. Always.”

“You’d better,” she whispered, throat tight.

Dante pulled her down into another long kiss.