On Midnight Wings Read Online Free

protested. “It’s still daylight.”
    Lucien paused in the guest bedroom’s darkened doorway, then glanced back at Jack. “I have a method for pulling nightkind up from Sleep. However, the results can vary, so it might be best if you waited with Thibodaux. This could get violent.”
    Jack looked unimpressed. “My mama says the same thing at every Cheramie family reunion.”
    “I’m serious.”
    “So’s my mama.” Jack blew out a breath, then nodded. “Okay. You do what you gotta do. I’ll keep Thibodaux company, me. I’ll just tell him to ignore anything he hears coming from the guest room—hissing, screaming, wing-flapping, girlish pleas for mercy.” A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “Y’know. The usual.”
    “The only girlish pleas for mercy will be your own if you don’t get moving,” Lucien growled, pointing one taloned finger toward the kitchen. He appreciated Jack’s attempt to ease the tension with a bit of dark humor, and it helped—for a moment.
    “Another thing my mama says. Often.”
    “I can’t imagine why,” Lucien replied, voice dry.
    Chuckling, Jack turned and headed down the hall. Just as he reached the dust-mote-flecked spill of sunlight emanating from the kitchen, he called, “We’re gonna find them, for true. Tee-Tee and Heather both.” His words and confident tone were as bracing as a tumbler of top-shelf scotch—for them both, Lucien suspected.
    “Yes, we are,” Lucien agreed.
    There was nothing he wouldn’t do to ensure that outcome. Nothing.
    I would lay the world to waste for my son.
    Foreboding trailed an icy finger down Lucien’s spine, whispered arctic words in his ear: What if you don’t find him? And your son lays waste to the world in the meantime instead? Or tries to? What then?
    I will find him, Lucien thought numbly. No other outcome is possible.
    Stepping into the room, he regarded Silver and Von, Sleeping side by side on the bed, a cheerful quilt covering them to the waist. Both pale faces were smooth and peaceful; another disquieting illusion, one revealed by the pillows with their dark stains, by the blood-matted hair pushed away from Sleep-cool foreheads.
    Von McGuinn Slept on the side of the bed closest to the door, the ends of his nut-brown hair trailing over his bare shoulders. Even in the curtained gloom, Lucien could see the nomad clan tattoos blue-inked in graceful Celtic designs—dragons, antlered hunters, and ravens to name a few—swirling along Von’s shoulders, down his arms, and across his pectoral muscles and abdomen and, beneath the quilt, even lower; each had been earned when he’d still been mortal.
    But the crescent moon tattoo beneath Von’s right eye, glimmering like star-silvered water, was unlike all the others. No mortal could wear it. It was the badge of his office— llygad . Keeper of history. Counselor. Warrior bard, one of many within the impartial, truth-seeking ranks of the llygaid . The guardians of nightkind history.
    Lucien had no doubt that Von would know what James Wallace had loaded into the bullets, and how to counteract it.
    Rolling his shoulders back to ease tension from taut muscles, he crossed to the bed, then knelt beside it, the floor creaking beneath his black-trousered knees. Underneath the odors of clotted blood and nostril-tingling antiseptic, he caught a faint, reassuring trace of Von’s scent of frost and gun oil.
    “I can’t wait for twilight, llygad ,” Lucien apologized. A bead of ruby blood welled up on the inside of his wrist as he pierced the skin with a talon. “We need to speak now .”
    Lucien licked the blood from his wrist, then lowered his head over Von’s pale face. Kissing the nomad’s mustache-framed lips, he parted them with his blood-smeared tongue. Breathed energy and the pomegranate-and-copper taste of his own blood into Von, drew him up from Sleep.
    And filled his waking mind with Annie’s dark and bitter pearls.
    When the nomad sucked in a sharp breath, Lucien