He all but vanished into the sudden darkness, the lights at the bend of the warehouses failing utterly, and there was a sound like pipe organs chuckling in some deep subterranean cavern while a madman pounded on the keys. I let out a long shaking breath, forcing my arms to come down and rest stiff at my sides, weighed down by the guns and their cargo of deadly silver.
“What. The fuck. Was that?” Leon spoke for both of us.
“I don’t know.” I sounded tired even to myself. “This does not look good.”
“Every time I see that motherfucker he looks like he just won the lottery.”
Just like any other hellbreed. “He can’t cash the check as long as I’m around, Leon.” My eyes dropped down to the quick-rotting ’breed on the floor. The stink had just officially gotten worse. Runnels of decay poured from the smashed head, down the neck and through the chest cavity, fouling the clothes—a pale blue shirt that was Brooks Brothers, unless I missed my guess, and a pair of high-end designer khakis. Alligator wingtips, too.
I felt a momentary flash of guilt. It hadn’t been necessary to kill them, if Perry was telling the truth and he’d come here to help.
Get real, Jill. What kind of “help” do you think Perry’s going to offer you? Nothing you’d want to accept. You made the deal with him because Mikhail said it was a good idea, and now you’re sitting pretty.
As pretty as you can sit with a hellbreed mark on your wrist and Perry laughing at you. Cold fingers touched my spine as I stared at the collapsing face.
It was a relief it didn’t look human. Well, much.
You’re not thinking straight. Focus.
Just as I prepared to make another of those gut-clenching physical efforts to tear my mind out of a psychological dead end, I froze and tipped my head back, staring up at the fixtures slowly losing their dangling momentum.
“Jill?” Leon was getting to the edge of not-quite-frantic-but-definitely-uncomfortable. “I’d like to buy a fuckin’ vowel, please.”
Me too. But I think I just got one. “Shhh.” The thought circled, returned, and I leapt on it.
Irene’s voice floated through the cavern of my skull. The name on his credit card was Alfred Bernardino. Italian, greasy, built wide and hairy.
Echoing against it came Carp’s voice, from a few days and a wide shoal of darkness away. They won’t talk to me or to Bernie—his partner—but it doesn’t seem possible that one of them pulled the trigger on him.
Bernie, in Vice. Italian, built like a dockworker, with a foul mouth—always an asset in the Vice department—and stubby fingers always holding a filterless cigarette. Pedro Ayala’s partner.
The insight hit me in a flash of blinding white, the fluorescents overhead beginning to buzz again, the warehouse brightening as hellbreed contamination ebbed.
“Holy shit,” I breathed. “Leon, I’m an idiot.”
He magnanimously refused to comment on that. “Can we get the fuck outta here now?”
“Sure thing. Let’s go back to Galina’s, I need to talk to Carp.”
23
Dawn leached gray through the sky. Galina’s eyes were smudged with sleeplessness. “Thank God you’re here,” she greeted me. “Your detective’s all right, but that Trader—”
Oh, Jesus. What now? “Do I have to kill her?” I only sounded weary, which was a bad sign. Leon sighed, leaning against the door, and Galina handed him a cold can of Pabst.
That’s your local Sanc. On tap with whatever you need. Galina made a slight moue of distaste. “She’s up in the greenhouse, crying. Tried to get out, but you said you wanted her here. Something about Fairfax, and—”
“I can kill her,” Leon volunteered hopefully, popping the top and taking a slurp. The eyeliner turned his eyes into dark holes, and made the smudges of exhaustion under them deeper. “Put a real capper on my night.”
It’s not like a Trader to cry, unless there’s an advantage in it. Still, she saved Carp. Under threat of death, but still. I let out a sigh that was mostly weariness, with a soupçon of irritation thrown in. “Not yet.” Not tonight, at least. Or today, since it’s dawn. “Where’s Carp?”
“In bed. He’s sedated. I think he’ll be fine, if he can get over the nightmares.” Galina sighed, too. She really was a gentle soul.
It made me wonder sometimes. If I’d ever been a gentle soul, would my life have knocked it out of me? Would I have survived hunter training and the nights afterward if I’d had any gentleness left in me?
Stay with the here and now, Jill. “Can he talk?”
Galina shrugged, slipping her hands in the pockets of her gray knit hoodie. She looked like she could use a night or two of rest as well. “Depends on what you want to talk to him about. He’s not going to be doing quadratic equations, but he’s coherent.”
Upstairs, in the spare room over the shop, Carp lay still as death under a vintage yellow counterpane. He was cottage-cheese pale, his sandy hair a bird’s nest, and even though the blood had been washed off the wound on his head was glaring. He stared at me through the gray light spilling through windows humming with a Sanctuary’s powerful defenses, and I knew that look in his eyes.
Carper was now haunted. He’d seen the nightside up close. Not just the fragrance of difference that hung on a Were, not just the bodies left after a nightside eruption into the civilian world. He’d been in the nightclub for forty-five minutes or so—more than enough time for him to see up close what lurked under the fabric of reality.
They just wanted to play with him before Shen came down, Irene had said. God alone knew what game they had played. One that involved taking a bite out him, apparently.
I dragged a straight-backed chair over to the side of the bed. “Hey.” Even though I needed words out of him, needed them quickly, I spoke slowly, softly. “How are you?”
He managed a harsh little thread of a laugh. “Kismet.” It wasn’t an answer. “Jesus.”
“Just the former, Detective.” A little humor, to set him at ease.
Who was I kidding? No way was Carp going to be set at ease. He’d seen under the mask.
I decided to get down to it. I couldn’t make the shock any less, but I could at least get usable information out of him if he was coherent. “Bernardino, Alfie Bernardino. Ayala’s partner. What do you know about him, Carp?”
Still, even as I said it, I hated myself. He needed sedation and a therapist, not me digging around and reminding him of things he was probably goddamn eager to start forgetting.
He blinked. Made an internal effort, things shifting behind his eyes. “Ayala. His partner. Slippery fucker.”
Man, this just keeps getting better. “He’s in it up to his neck, and probably deeper. But then you know that, right?”
“Credit card statements about this waitress—Irene. She—” He coughed, weakly, his eyelids falling down. “Kiss, their eyes. Their eyes were glowing.”
They always do, Carp. I laid a hand against his forehead—my left hand, since the right was humming with fever-hot hellbreed-tainted force. “Just rest. It’ll fade.”
I was lying. Things like this don’t fade. They come back in nightmares and in waking dreams, flashbacks and stress disorders you need antidepressants for—or something stronger.
Something like a steel-cold barrel in the mouth, or the bottle in the hand, or pills you can’t get in the States. Something, anything, to make it go away so you can face the normal world.
Except sometimes you can’t.
“Do you have anything else on Bernardino?” I didn’t want to push him… but I had to know. I had to.
“File. Maybe in the file… their eyes. And the teeth…” His eyelids drifted down, and Carp took refuge in the sedation.
I didn’t blame him.
I sat there for a long few moments, gray gathering strength through the windows, dawn coming up. My left hand lay human-cold and limp on Carp’s sweating forehead, under the gash that ran along his hairline and jagged into his temple, sutured up and quiescent und
er a dabble of green herbal paste running with the clear gold of Sanctuary sorcery. Galina’s work, fine and gentle, stitching together damage.
I wished she had something that would stitch up the damage inside him. I’d have to get him to a trauma counselor; there were a few on call that took care of things like this and billed the police department.
What comes next, Jill? Come up with a plan. Your brain works just fine, now for God’s sweet sake, use it.
I took my fingers gently away from Carp’s feverish, damp, human skin.
It took longer than I liked, breathing deeply and staring at the gray filling up the cup of the window, for my mental floor to clear. I needed sleep, and food, and a good few hours of hard thinking.
So many things I needed. What I was going to get was a long mess before this was all through.
When I finally pushed myself up, leather creaking, I stood looking down at Carp’s slack face. He was still shocky-pale, but breathing all right. He might wake up not remembering much, the brain outright refusing, to keep the psyche from being further traumatized. Or he might wake up reliving every single second of it, replaying it like a CD on repeat until he had a psychotic break.
It was too soon to tell.
“Jill?” Leon stood in the door, the copper tied in his hair clinking and shifting as soon as he spoke.
“Where’s the Trader?” I kept staring at the planes and valleys of Carp’s unhandsome face, as if they would turn into a map that would lead me out of this.
The amulets around Leon’s throat jingled a bit as he touched them, his version of a nervous tic. “Up in the greenhouse, Galina says. Are we sitting tight or moving out?”
I swallowed hard, juggling priorities. Rest easy, Carper. I’m on the job. “Moving in fifteen, Leon. Get what you need.”
“Where we going?”
The next step is to find Bernardino—after we visit Hutch. “Hutch’s, to find out what we’re up against. Then we’re going cop-hunting. Leave your truck here.”
24
Hutch pushed his glasses up on his beaky nose. “Oh, Christ.” At least he didn’t try to slam the door in my face. I pushed past him and into his bookshop, the familiar smell of dust, paper, and tea enveloping me. “I hate it when you do this.”
“Hey, Hutch.” Leon grinned. “How you doing?”
“Not you too.” Hutch backed up to give both of us plenty of room. Chatham’s Books, Used and Rare, was painted on a weathered board out front as well as in peeling gilt on the front window, and he did a good trade in repairing old texts. Most of his business is done over the Internet, which is the way he likes it.
Still, the place would’ve probably gone under if it wasn’t for the back room. That room gets Hutch a subsidy from the resident hunter and resident law enforcement—a room with triple-locked doors, long wooden tables, and high narrow bookcases stuffed with leather-jacketed tomes on the occult, the theory and history of sorcery, accounts of the nightside, and just about every useful book a hunter needs.
Hey, we’re not savages. Sometimes research is the only thing that keeps a hunter’s ass from being knocked sideways by the unexpected. Ninety percent of solving any nightside problem is figuring out exactly what you’re up against.
And if it wasn’t in books, Hutch could still probably find it for you. He’d discovered computers in the dark ages when they still used floppy disks; they were still talking about his raids on government databases in law-enforcement classes.
He hadn’t wanted to use the information, Hutch always pointed out. He’d just wanted to prove it could be hacked.
Nowadays he collects information the resident hunter might need—enough of an exercise for Hutch’s skills to keep him out of trouble. If he did anything more, at least he didn’t get caught. Which is all I or Mikhail ever really asked for. In return, we kept him out of trouble with the law when he went a-fishing and a-hacking on our behalf.
Today Hutch wore a Santa Luz Wheelwrights sweatshirt and a pair of khaki shorts, his thin hairy calves exposed. His beaky, mournful face twisted as he locked the front door and flipped the sign to “closed.” “I really hate it when you do this. What is it now?”
He isn’t one for excitement in the flesh, our local nightside historian. Wise man.
“Internet trace, Hutch. Find me the vitals on one Alfred Bernardino. He’s in the Precinct 13 Vice squad. Hack if you have to, but don’t leave any fingerprints.” I barely broke stride. “And make yourself some tea, we’re going to be here a while.”
“Why aren’t you asking Monty to do this? Or someone else?” Hutch pulled all his angles in, from his thin elbows to his knobby knees, and I considered telling him we had a scurf infestation and all sorts of trouble boiling into town.
I erred on the side of mercy, for once. “Because this time it’s the police that are the problem, Hutchinson. Find the cop for me, and we’re spending some time in the back room. I need to know about something.”
“About what?” He didn’t quite perk up, but any chance of poking through dusty old books brightens him considerably, even if he’s allergic to the idea of seeing anything abnormal up close.
I’m not the only one with personality quirks.
“Something called Argoth. And something about an airfield just outside of town.”
The milky pallor under his freckles deepened. “Argoth?” He actually squeaked.
I halted next to the counter with the antique cash register. A brand-spanking-new credit-card reader sat next to the old brass machine. I turned, on the balls of my feet, my coat swaying with me, and met Hutch’s eyes, swimming behind their thick lenses. “You know something about Argoth?”
“Only that he’s a hellbreed, operated mostly in Eastern Europe. The last time he surfaced was 1929, he went back down in 1946.” Hutch’s thin shoulders came up, dropped. The bookstore breathed all around me. “You can guess where he was stationed.”
And indeed I could. Both World Wars created enough chaos, pain, and horror to blast the doors between here and other places wide open; the battlefields and camps were playgrounds for all sorts of nastiness. Some places on earth still haven’t recovered—like Eastern Europe, the hunter population out there is still scrambling to get a lid on some of what was let loose decades ago.
“Christ.” Leon sneezed twice. It was dusty in here.
I’d heard rumors about the war before, but this was unexpected. “Pull me the basic references on Argoth, then get me that cop’s vitals. And I need you to find me everything you can on an airfield out of town, possibly called ARA.”
Hutch had produced a small steno pad, a mechanical pencil, and was scribbling furiously. “And after that I change water into wine, right?”
If you could, I’d ask for a bottle or two of a nice pinot noir. “Don’t get cute. After that you’re going to Galina’s while I poke around in here some more.”
His eyebrows shot up and his pencil paused. “Again?”
Yes, again. Because if they know I’m alive and they know I go to Galina’s, they probably know I come here too. “Yes, again. Unless you want to get a severe case of lead poisoning.”
“What have you gotten me into now?” But he went back to scribbling. “Okay, come on into the back room. Christ on a crutch, why did I ever take this job?”
“Because you thought it would be interesting, Hutch, and Mikhail saved you from being locked in a six-by-nine.” I really must have been feeling savage, because for once even mild-mannered Hutch shot me a dirty look and I realized that was a really, really bitchy thing to say to someone who had risked his ass over and over again to help me. “I’m sor—”
“Oh, shut up. Get into the back room. I just got a new machine, best way to break it in.” He made little shooing motions with his hands, for all the world like a farmer’s wife herding chickens. “Come on, kids. Let’s go see what Uncle Hutch can dig up.”
It’s certainly something to see an underweight, glorified librarian poke and prod two fully trained and armed
hunters around like a chicken herder. If I was less tired, I might even have been amused.
Hutch left about an hour later. I should have taken him to Galina’s, but there was precious little time. The next half-hour passed slowly, both Leon and I up to our eyeballs in reading material. He’d taken the Argoth references; I took Carp’s file and Bernardino’s stats as well as whatever Hutch could dig up on the airfield.
“We are looking at some serious shit,” Leon said quietly.
I glanced up from Carp’s file. “How bad?”
He tapped the thick, dust-choked leather-bound tome sitting open in front of him. “Bad enough that I’ve got the heebie-jeebies, darlin’.” Copper clinked in his hair, and he took a pull off the only beer Hutch had stocked—a brown-bottled microbrew Leon wrinkled his nose at but took down three of. “Says here that Argoth surfaced earlier than Hutch thought. First recorded instance of him is in 1918, something involving a batch of three hundred shell-shocked soldiers in a hospital ending up with a serious case of dead and half-eaten.”
“Charming.” I didn’t quite shudder, but it was close. “Any verification?”
“Some British hunter thinks it was him, anyway. Then he shows up in Germany in 1924. A couple of Alsatian hunters living in Munich ID’d him hanging around with an Austrian wannabe rabble-rouser who came to power a little later.”
I let out a slow whistle, air bleeding between my lips. Ugh. Nasty. “A talyn?” I hazarded. It certainly seemed likely. When they come out of Hell, they come hungry. And shell-shocked, vulnerable humans would be a nice snack.
“Could be. Sources ain’t specific enough. Went through the hunters in Germany like a hot knife through butter all the way through the war; the Allies had to bring in their own hunters attached to the armies just to stay afloat of all the nasty.” Leon’s mouth pulled down like he tasted something sour. He probably did.
I dimly remembered hearing about that time from my own training, one of the long sessions with my head on Mikhail’s chest and his fingers in my hair, his voice tracing through the history of what we know—and even more important, what we suspect. “Mikhail mentioned that.”