Dante Valentine

  The thought that had been tormenting me all the way back from the island slammed into the forefront of my mind again. Who do you think helped me escape from Hell? He’s Lucifer’s assassin, his Right Hand! You’ve been used! “I doubt you’d tell me the truth if I asked,” I said. “Why waste my breath?”

  “He is A’nankimel, Fallen. I can no longer use him, and he has tied himself to you. Besides, I promised him his freedom.” Lucifer seemed to sink even further into the cushions. “I never thought to see the day my assassin was brought low by a human woman.”

  I got the distinct idea that Lucifer was not pleased with this turn of events.

  Now we come to it, I thought clinically, wishing I had my sword. “So? He’s free. Fine.”

  Lucifer blinked.

  I suppressed a tired urge to giggle.

  “Let me be perfectly clear, Dante: you do not want to play with me.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not playing, Lucifer. I don’t care anymore. I just want to go and get some sleep.” I spread my hands—my new, golden-skinned hands, sparks from my rings popping in the charged air. It felt like a thunderstorm was gathering.

  For all I knew, one was.

  He sat up, his boots touching the floor. I tensed. But he only leaned forward, hands on his knees. “Very well then. Here is your choice. Give me the child, and I will give you Japhrimel.”

  That did it.

  I tipped my head back and laughed. It started out as a giggle, blew through a chuckle, and ended up full-fledged howling mirth. I laughed until tears squirted out of my eyes and my stomach hurt. When the laughter finally faded in a series of hitching gasps I wiped my eyes and regarded the Prince of Hell.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said pleasantly, “if it will reach. If you think I’m going to hand an innocent kid—Doreen’s kid—over to you for gods-alone-know-what you want to do to her, you’ve got another think coming. You made the bargain with Japhrimel that he had his freedom when he finished this job, and he finished it. You can’t keep him, you sorry son of a bitch, and I’d like to see you try. He’ll eat you for breakfast.” I took a deep breath, my rings sparking, Power cloaking me in close swirls. “Let me give you a piece of advice, Iblis Lucifer. Don’t ever try to double-cross a Necromance. As scary as you are, Prince, Death’s bigger and badder.”

  I finished my speech with my hands on my hips and my chin held high, my right hand flaring with pain as I balled it into a tight fist. Lucifer didn’t move. His eyes glittered, that was all. No wonder he was afraid—if Santino could challenge him with Eve, Lucifer probably thought I could too, if he pissed me off enough.

  “How do you think you will feed her, Dante? Or teach her to live in the human world? Hell is separate from earth for a reason. You cannot raise an Androgyne.” He said it softly, silk brushing my ears, whispering in my veins, tapping behind my heartbeat.

  “I promised,” I said. “I promised to take care of her. I don’t want Hell or any fancy-schmancy deals. You should have told me everything at the beginning, Lucifer. She wasn’t part of the deal. Let Japhrimel go.”

  I waited. The air turned prickling-hot. I didn’t move, meeting his eyes, finding out that I only had to be too tired to care before I won a staring match with the Devil.

  He finally spoke again. “Japhrimel is no longer a demon,” he said quietly. “Any bargain I made with him does not apply. I will keep him in Hell, enchained, tortured for as long as his life lasts. And I will be certain to let him know that you could have saved him from his fate, and did not.”

  “You really are a piece of work,” I said, my left hand creeping toward my knifehilt. Left-handed? I couldn’t kill the Devil left-handed. “I am not handing a kid over to you, you freak. And if you go ahead and torture Japhrimel—which I don’t recommend—you’ll just be a fucking grifter. How will that look—the Prince of Hell has to welsh on a deal? You’re already known for being a liar, now you’re a cheat, too—”

  I didn’t even see him move. One moment I was standing there, hands on hips, talking smack to the Prince of Hell. The next instant, he had me by the throat, his grip crushing-strong, holding me against the side of the hover as casually as he might hold a kitten by the scruff. “I am being merciful,” he said softly, pleasantly, “because you have been useful. You are under the illusion—” His hand tightened, here, and I kicked fruitlessly, “that you have a choice. Do not interfere with the child, and I will let you and Japhrimel live out your miserable lives unmolested.”

  What happened to being my friend? I struggled, black spots dancing over my vision. His fingers were like iron bars even for my newfound demon strength. Something crackled in my throat; he eased up a little. I managed a little bit of air. “Fuck… you…” I croaked, and his eyes blazed. He didn’t look so pretty when he was angry.

  My left shoulder began to burn. Faintly at first, but steadily. The black spots danced over my vision. I kicked, weakly, once, twice.

  “Ah.” Staring over my shoulder, out the window, he dropped me like a pile of trash and I coughed, rolling onto my side and rubbing my throat. Blessed air roared into my lungs. It took me two tries to get to my feet. The side hatch of the hoverlimo was open, white sunlight from the Nuevo Rio day pouring up and making a square on the ceiling.

  I half-fell out of the hover and down the stairs, sharp edges biting into my hip, smacking my head on one. The skin split and blood dripped down my face. I landed in a heap on hot slick stone and scrabbled to my feet.

  The child—Eve—stood by the garbage scow, the fierce sunlight making her hair seem even paler, glittering. Her eyes blazed, incandescent blue.

  And Lucifer stood in front of her.

  “No—” I choked, scrambling over the marble. “No!”

  The Prince of Hell knelt slowly, sinking down, a black blot on the carnivorous white of the day. I saw Jace, braced in the side door of the hover, shaking his head as if dazed. Lucifer held up the Egg, and settled the thin gold chain around Eve’s neck.

  She smiled up at him.

  My abused body couldn’t go anymore. My feet tangled, and I fell. Lucifer rose like a dark wave, and the child put her arms around his neck and hugged him, resting her head on his shoulder.

  Just like a little girl with her daddy. My gorge rose. But demons weren’t human—and human rules didn’t apply to them. For all I knew, all of Lucifer’s bed-buddies were his children. He was the Androgyne. The first.

  Then Lucifer turned on his heel, took three steps, and lifted one golden hand. His hair ran with sunlight, a furnace of gold, glittering unbearably. I heard the whine of hover displacement, didn’t care. I saw Iblis Lucifer rip a hole in the fabric of reality and step through as if going from one room to another. Flame licked the corners of the hole he made, and the last thing I saw was Eve smiling over his shoulder, her blue eyes fixed on me, calm and tranquil and utterly inhuman. Power rippled, rent the air, nausea spiking under my breastbone.

  Something thudded on the marble. Jace’s boots rang—but the thump was from behind me. He reached me, dropping to his knees with a heavy sound, grabbing my shoulders. We watched together as the limo-hovers lifted into the sky, quickly, then dived over the well of Nuevo Rio. The police cruisers made one circuit of the mansion and then slid down into the city, going back to patrol probably.

  Game over. Lucifer wins.

  Jace cursed, shook me. “Danny! Danny!”

  “What the fuck?” My tongue felt too thick for my mouth.

  Jace’s arms crushed me. “Fuck, Danny. What happened? The kid heard his voice on the commlink and just walked out; she said her daddy was here to get her.”

  I groaned. “I hate this line of work,” I husked dryly, then looked back over my shoulder, to where the limo-hovers had rested.

  Another black blot on the pavement, this one with short ink-black hair.

  “They tossed him out,” Jace said into my hair. “Danny—”

  “Help me up. Help me up.”

  He dragged me up to my feet, steadying m
e as I swayed.

  “What the fuck is going on out there?” Eddie yelled from the hatch.

  “Go back,” I told Jace. “I’ll be fine.”

  “You’re not fine,” he shot back at me. “Look at you. Your hand—your throat—”

  “Go make sure Gabe’s okay,” I said, and shoved him away. “Go on.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. He took a step back, his face going cold and hard as the marble under us. I think I watched Jace Monroe age five years in that one moment, his shoulders slumping, his blue eyes gone pale as frost.

  “Danny,” he said. “You’re not seriously…”

  The heat poured down on us like oil from Nuevo Rio’s blue sky. “Go on, Jace. Go.”

  I turned away. Limped toward the crumpled dark shape lying against the whiteness. Too still. He was too still.

  “Danny,” I heard Jace say behind me, shut the sound out. I didn’t care.

  It took me a long time to limp across the marble. I finally reached him and went down on my knees. He lay twisted against the smooth slick stone, legs shattered, his face unrecognizable. Nothing could possibly be that broken and live.

  I flattened my left hand against his shredded chest. His wings lay bent and broken, tattered, draped across him. He had stopped bleeding. Smoke threaded up from his wings, his blood burning, burning.

  “No,” I whispered. “No.”

  His eyes were mere slits, glazed over. “Japhrimel?” I whispered. The mark on my shoulder had stopped its flaming pain. Now it was cold, all the way down to my bones. Numb cold, the cold of shock.

  No spark of life. I touched his throat, pried up one ruined eyelid and peered at his eye. No pulse. No reaction in the pupil. Just the steady drift of smoke rising from him.

  My head dropped. I sighed. The sound seemed to go on forever. My throat pulsed with pain.

  I reached, with all the Power I had left. I tried to find the spark of life in him. I rested my left palm on his body and closed my eyes, searching, but nothing was there. This was only a shell.

  Japhrimel was gone.

  Free. He was finally free. Lucifer had killed him—or let him die.

  I didn’t realize the tears splashing his battered face were mine. I bent over him for a long moment, frantically searching for any sign of life, and then settled back on my heels, cold in the middle of the furnacelike sunshine. The flames began in earnest, eating his demon body, self-combusting with a smell like burning cinnamon.

  Then I tipped back my head and howled to the uncaring blue sky.

  Epilogue

  Gabe was fine. Shaky, battered, weak from blood loss, and possessed of an interesting new set of scars where Santino had ripped her belly open, but fine. She lived, and after a couple of days she called me to say Eddie had stopped rampaging through the mansion threatening to break windows. I stayed in a hotel down in Nuevo Rio, a cockroach-infested place where I had to listen to screaming and the pops of projectile guns outside my window every night. Gabe also told me Jace was going to give them the Baby, and they planned to fly the garbage scow back to Saint City. Eddie had wanted a hover anyway.

  I said nothing, just listened to her on the phone and then slowly closed the sound of her voice away, setting the receiver down in its cradle. Good for them.

  I flew first class in a passenger transport. My right hand was an awkward claw, but I got around with my left just fine. It would take me a long time to bless another sword if my hand ever straightened out.

  I carried the urn with me. It was black lacquer, beautiful, and heavy. Pure fine cinnamon-scented ash, scraped together from white marble and carefully placed in the urn’s embrace. Every speck of ash I had been able to find had gone into the urn, left by Lucifer as a parting gift maybe. Just to rub everything in.

  Jace did not see me off at the dock. I didn’t expect him to. I’d left his mansion like a thief in the middle of the night, carrying Japhrimel’s ashes with me. Jace hadn’t tried to find me or talk to me.

  Good.

  It was while I was sitting in the hover, resting my head against the side of the seat, that everything became clear. Of course Japhrimel had helped Vardimal escape Hell. It made sense, especially since Lucifer probably let him do it, figuring that Vardimal wouldn’t find anything of value among humans, even humans carrying the strain of the Fallen—psions. What Lucifer didn’t know, and Japhrimel probably didn’t know either, was that Vardimal had taken the Egg. And when Lucifer found that out, suddenly Vardimal wasn’t so little a threat. If Lucifer hadn’t known about the kid then, he’d probably guessed when he found the Egg gone and took notice of the human world again; finding out that Vardimal, true to form, had been taking samples from human psychics and had then disappeared. And at some point, Lucifer had made contact with Eve—way before I did, but probably by following the same link of blood I’d followed. Only his link with the child would be stronger, since it was his genetic material, and I only had the fading echo of my love for Doreen and our shared human link.

  And if Lucifer had been unable to leave Hell without the Egg, all of a sudden it became necessary to attack Vardimal from a direction the scavenger demon wouldn’t see coming. No demon would think that the Prince would hire a human.

  Lucifer had been playing to retain his control of Hell; Eve was another playing piece with potential value as a created Androgyne. It would be child’s play for Lucifer to reverse-engineer and find Vardimal’s “shining path of genes,” securing his own grasp on the reproduction of other demons. And it probably piqued the hell out of Lucifer that Vardimal had managed to do something the Prince couldn’t.

  Vardimal had been playing for control of Hell itself. Japhrimel had been playing for his freedom, and just when it seemed possible that he might live out the game, Lucifer had killed him for letting Vardimal escape—never mind that Lucifer allowed and probably facilitated it.

  It was all very logical, once I got a chance to think about it. Simple enough.

  Me? Just a human tool. I’d been playing for my life. And here I was alive, and the demon who lied to me was dead. I’d killed Santino at last, but Lucifer had Doreen’s kid. If that made us even, it also made me the loser.

  Maybe Lucifer hadn’t expected Japhrimel to turn me into whatever I was now. And that was a problem—just what the hell was I? Japhrimel had expected to be alive enough to explain it to me when everything was said and done. Maybe he miscalculated just how deeply Lucifer would detest the idea of anyone winning anything from him—even his assassin, whom he’d thrown away anyway.

  The transport finally docked, and I waited until everyone else had a chance to get off before I made my way out into the hoverport, breathing in the Saint City stink again, feeling the cold glow of my home’s Power rasping against my flesh. It took me bare seconds to adapt, because I wasn’t… human.

  I caught a cab home, the urn cuddled against my belly, and found myself in my own front yard again, under a blessedly cloudy Saint City sky. A faint light rain was misting down, decking out my garden with small silvery beads of water. I’d need to weed soon, and tear up half the valerian. Dry out the roots to use for sleeping-tea.

  If I could ever sleep again, that was.

  I unlocked my door and stamped my feet on the mat. My familiar, soothing house folded around me.

  I carried the urn into the stale, quiet dimness of my house. The hall had that peculiar odor of a place where nobody has breathed for a while, a house closed up on itself for too long.

  Halfway up the stairs, the niche with the little statue of Anubis was just the same as it had always been. Dusty, but just the same. My house was still here, still standing. It was only my life that had been burned to the ground.

  I settled the urn between two slim vases of dead flowers—I had forgotten to throw them out before I left—and lit two tall black candles in crystal holders. Then I trudged up the rest of the stairs, one by one. I draped my coat over the banister, unbuttoned my shirt, freed my hair from its filthy braid. Somehow wash
ing off all the crud hadn’t seemed worth it.

  My personal computer deck stood in the upstairs study, next to the file cabinet where Santino’s file had rested. I flicked it on and spent a few moments tapping.

  When I finally signed on to my bank statements, I sat and stared at the screen for a long time.

  I was no longer Danny Valentine, struggling mercenary and Necromance.

  I was rich. Not just rich—phenomenally rich. The breath slammed out of me while I sat there, staring at the flickering screen. I would never have to worry about money again—not for a long, long time, anyway.

  And just how long would I live, cursing myself, knowing I’d been outplayed by the Devil in a game I hadn’t even known I was going to be sucked into? All things being equal, I was lucky to still be breathing.

  I looked at the numbers, my pulse beating frail and hard in my throat and wrists. At least Lucifer hadn’t welshed on that part of his promise.

  I logged out and switched the deck off, then sat looking at my hands in the gathering twilight. The blessed quiet of my house enfolded me.

  My hands lay obediently in my lap, golden-skinned and graceful. The right was still twisted into a kind of claw, but if I tried I could move the fingers a little more each day. My wrists were slender marvels of bone architecture. If I scrubbed the dirt off my face I could look in a mirror and see a demon’s beauty under a long fall of dark hair, the emerald glowing from my cheek.

  Would I still be able to enter Death? I was pretty sure… but I didn’t have the stinking courage to find out for sure. Not yet.

  Empty. I was an empty doll.

  You will not leave me to wander the earth alone. Had he meant it?

  Had the only thing Japhrimel not planned for been me? Or had I been part of his game?

  Somehow, I didn’t think I’d been something he’d planned. Call me stupid, but… I didn’t think so.

  The breath left me in another walloping rush. I blinked. A tear dropped from my eyelid, splashed onto my right hand.