Maybe it was even the guns. Or the bullwhip.
Or maybe it was her raped, traumatized daughter whimpering even through the sedation. Sometimes people aren’t prepared for their loved ones to be brought back hurt or marred. The disappearance itself throws everything off, screws everything up, and life is never normal again even if their loved one comes back.
That was Perry on the phone. A galvanic shudder spilled through me, from top to toes. He’s about to start messing with you again, Jill. It figures he would wait until Saul is out of town.
I wanted to call Saul, but he would immediately be able to tell something was wrong. He didn’t need another burden right now. He already sounded too worried. When he could get me on the phone, that is.
I repressed another shiver. I could still smell smoke, my clothes on the floor sending out invisible waves of stink like Pig-Pen in the old Peanuts cartoons.
I should get up, work out, and hit the street.
For a few minutes I lay there, breathing, my eyes full of light. Trying not to follow the inevitable chain of logic.
You know what this means. Perry’s thinking about you.
I wished it didn’t make me feel so unsteady. He’d almost gotten into my head more than once. Almost pushed me over that edge every hunter lives on.
We commit murder on an almost daily basis. It doesn’t matter if it’s hellbreed, Trader, scurf, Middle Way adepts, what-have-you. It’s still killing sentient beings. The fact that most of these sentient beings are kill-crazy predators doesn’t absolve a hunter of responsibility.
The Church, after all, does not admit us into Heaven, even if we’re buried in hallowed ground.
Sometimes I wonder about that. I wonder more and more, the longer I do this sort of work.
Getting that close to the edge is necessary. You can’t kill a hellbreed if you hesitate or flinch. But no matter how close you get to that edge, no matter how you put your little toesies on it and peer over into the howling abyss that lies beyond, you cannot go over. It’s a razor-thin line, but you cannot, ever, go over it.
I had been so close.
Get up, Jill. Work out, and go out and do your job. Let Perry suck eggs in his little hellbreed hole. When he pops back up you’ll deal with him.
It sounded good.
I just wished I believed it.
I rolled up out of bed, taking the knife with me, and got ready to face another night.
3
I’d just given the Impala a tune-up, so my baby purred as I took her up into the suburbs, the red fuzzy dice Galina had given me dangling from the mirror. Kutchner’s widow lived in the Cruzada district, nice little houses from the seventies, fenced yards, and neighbors as old as Methuselah—on the right streets. On the wrong streets, the neighbors have bad crack problems that make them look like Methuselah.
Only in the ’burbs do you find this combination. No wonder they need sitcoms to dull the pain.
The wrong streets tend to cluster on higher ground, further away from the artery of the river. Closer to the desert. Mrs. Kutchner lived on the edge, high enough up that security bars on the windows were not just a fashion statement. Still, it was an okay neighborhood, and as the sun slid bloody below the rim of the mountains, I slammed the Impala’s door and eyed the house, a neat little adobe with a trim, if weedy, yard and a chain-link fence. Out here the grass was yellow; people had better things to spend their money on than astronomical water bills.
I leaned against the car door and examined the place. The right-hand neighbors had kids—someone had to play with the toys scattered around their yard. On the other side, a scraggly greenbelt cut through the neighborhood, edging a ditch that would take runoff in flash-flood season. The fence was higher on that side, and so were the weeds.
The blinds were all pulled behind blank windows and vertical iron security bars. The red-painted door looked like a tight-pursed mouth, and the high arched windows gave the street a perpetually surprised glance. The brick-colored roof tiles were still fresh, not bleached by a few high-grade summer scorches.
Now why does this not look right? I pulled my sunglasses off as the sky turned indigo, pink and orange lingering in the west. The mountains glowed, furnace teeth spearing up to catch high thin cumulus clouds. The original seven-veil dance, performed nightly, hold the applause, just throw cash.
Wind came off the desert, smelling of sand and shimmering heat. Oven-warm, drying the sweat along my forehead and tinkling the charms knotted into my hair with red thread. My silver apprentice-ring rested against my left ring finger. I played with it as I watched the house, hairs rising on my nape.
My smart eye—the blue one, the one that can see below the surface of the world—watered a bit as I focused. A pall lay over Kutchner’s house, etheric energy turned thick and bruise-clotted.
There could be a number of reasons for this—grief, or any strong negative emotion over time. A murder or suicide in the recent past—this was listed as Kutchner’s last known address before he ventilated his own skull.
Hellbreed contamination, or even just plain sorcery of the darker variety, will also congest the ether around a place, just like a bruise is congested blood.
Kutchner had been found in a flophouse hotel on the edge of the barrio. Still, brooding about suicide for a while, especially if you’re serious enough to actually do it, can cause your house to get a bit stale, etherically speaking.
I dunno. That’s an awful lot of static.
Well, no time like the present to stick my nose in and find out.
I crossed the street and opened the squeaking chain-link gate. A narrow strip of concrete unreeled to the steps leading to the entryway, and dried husks of yucca flowers rattled in the breeze. The sound was like clicking small bones together in a wooden cup, and my right hand crept for a gun.
Great, Jill. Show up at the widow’s door and scare the crap out of her with a Glock shoved in her face. Monty said he wanted this quiet, you know.
Quiet’s one thing, and disregarding your instincts is another. A hunter who ignores instinct is half dead already. The other half comes when you do something stupid, like not drawing when every nerve in your body screams something’s behind Door Number One, sweetheart!
I drew, keeping the gun low along my side. Leather rustled as I walked up the path, and the dead blossoms rattled, rattled. Like handcuffs. My coat brushed my ankles as I stepped cautiously, the transition to nighttime taking a breath all along the edges of my city. Sometimes I feel that deep breath just after dusk, right under my sternum. It’s like every instrument in an orchestra tuned to the same key and suddenly giving out the deepest tone it’s capable of.
The entryway held pots of cacti, different spiny little things that might have been flowering if they weren’t desiccated enough to be used for tinder. The charms in my hair tinkled as they rubbed against each other. Deep shadows at the end of the roofed entryway moved as I stepped forward, cautiously, and my sensitive nose picked out something it was all too familiar with. A ripe, overwhelming smell.
Under my leather cuff, the scar pulsed hotly. It didn’t seem to be getting any bigger.
Stop thinking like that, Jill. My entire body flushed hot, then cold.
The wind was coming from behind me, or I would have noticed the smell earlier. The door creaked a little bit as the breeze pushed it.
It was open.
Monty swiped at his forehead. Sweat sheened his face. “Jesus,” he said, for the third time.
Usually we only get one Jesus out of him per crime scene.
Jacinta Kutchner’s corpse hung from a white and blue striped nylon rope looped over an exposed ceiling beam creaking slightly as the house settled for the night. She wore a pale blue housedress and one slipper, and had been dead for a while, if the state of the body was any indication. The air conditioning had been turned off sometime in the recent past, and the house was breathlessly hot and stale.
Not to mention reeking of decay.
I folded
my arms, doing my best not to lean against the wall. The forensic techs were hard at work, gathering evidence, photographing, trying to ignore the smell. A few of them had Vicks smeared on their upper lips, it was that bad. A few days in desert heat will dry a body out, but hot moisture in an enclosed house is bad for dead human tissue.
“I don’t like this.” I kept my voice low. The techs were giving me little sideways looks, except for plump brunette Piper. She was off maternity leave and slimming down again, my very favorite forensic tech and my particular liaison with that department. Not much disturbs her serenity.
Maybe it’s having kids that does it. I’ve never seen Piper even blanch. She’s even been known to whistle Disney tunes at scenes.
The mind boggles.
“I don’t either.” Monty looked miserable. I didn’t blame him. One suicide is chance, two coincidence.
I didn’t want a third.
“This isn’t my type of case,” I said again. “There’s no smell of anything hinky on this one. Not extra-human hinky, that is.”
“What about human hinky?”
You don’t want me to tell you anything you don’t already know, Montaigne. You just want someone else to say it out loud. I glanced around the living room. “What the hell did she stand on? She’s only five-three, recent stretching notwithstanding.” It felt horrible, but you don’t last long around violent death without evolving some black humor. I ticked them off on my fingers. “Where’s her other slipper? Not to mention most women want to look pretty right before they take the plunge. They usually hang themselves in more private places, too.”
A fresh wave of stench rolled toward me. There was a large stain on the carpet below the body, and the insect life was having a ball. Not as much as there would be outside, but you’d be surprised how little time it takes for six-legged critters to find a recently deceased piece of meat.
“I thought about that too.” His gaze came up, touched my face, skittered away. He palmed a couple of Tums up to his mouth and started chewing. “Goddammit.”
Full night had folded around the house, darkness swirling in corners where it wasn’t driven away by electric fixtures and portable lights brought in by the crime-scene team. The shadows in the corners had weight, only seen through my blue eye.
Seen from between, violent death has its own eddies and currents. She had suffered before passing out of this place and into whatever awaited her.
This isn’t one of yours, Jill. Get going, there’s other things out there tonight you should be taking care of.
But I made no move to leave beyond shifting my weight from one foot to the other.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Carper said irritably from the entryway, hunching his shoulders. His sharp blue eyes flicked once over the scene, taking everything in.
In his sneakers and tweed jackets, Carp looks more like a college professor than a homicide deet. Behind him, his partner Rosenfeld was conferring with the blue holding down the site log. Rosenfeld’s spiky auburn halo threw back what little light made it past the long mirror on the wall.
“Relax, Carp.” I let my shoulders drop. “It’s not one of mine.”
He looked only barely relieved. “Great. What’re you doing, then?”
“Conferring with Montaigne. If that’s all right with you.” Don’t get snitty with me, Carp. I’m not in the mood.
“Hi, Jill.” Rosie ambled past her partner, bumping him with her shoulder. Her jaw would have done a prizefighter proud, and her leather jacket creaked a little bit. The Terrible Two of the Homicide department, appearing nightly on the scene. “What’s going on?”
It was an excessively casual question. Santa Luz’s finest get a little bit nervous around me, though they take bets on where I’ll show up next. There’s a whole system of verifying hunter sightings left over from Mikhail’s time.
It’s when they lose track of me for a few weeks that everyone gets jumpy.
Still, very few cops like being around me. The mandatory class I put all rookies through takes care of that. My tiger’s eye rosary bumped my stomach as I shifted again. “Not much for me here. See you later, Monty.”
He couldn’t quite bring himself to ask me, but he spread his hands as I passed, brushing close to Carp and almost enjoying when the man stepped away. He used to be able to get a rise out of me. Now Carper and I just go through the motions. It’s a comforting routine on both sides.
He rolled his eyes, and I grinned at him. The corner of his mouth twitched, and he looked away, the twinkle going out of his baby blues as he studied the shape of Jacinta Kutchner hanging, the edge of her robe fluttering a bit. “Goddamn,” he said, softly.
I paused at the entryway, next to the blue. He didn’t offer me the site log, but he gripped it until paper crackled. If I looked closely I would probably remember his name. “Monty.”
“Yeah?” He palmed another couple of Tums. The vacation was wearing off.
What else could I say? He wanted me to look into it, and someone else was dead. Worst case of suicide I ever saw, the tagline to an old joke floated through my head. “I’ll be in touch.”
Then I was out the door, plunging into the night, crossing the street to the Impala. She stuck out like a sore thumb, having no flashing lights, and I noticed something else about the neighborhood.
Jacinta Kutchner’s neighbors didn’t come out to see what the fuss was. At all.
So much for suburbia.
4
Gray predawn was breaking, again, when the phone rang and my pager went off simultaneously. I left my trench dripping on the rack in the utility room and hobbled through the hall, through the cavern of the sparring space and living room, every muscle I’d pulled singing its own separate note in the orchestra of pain. I’d broken my left arm this time, the arkeus I’d run across on the east side of town had put up a hell of a fight.
Get it, Jill? A Hell of a fight? Arf arf.
But I’d found out, to my lasting satisfaction, which pile of hell-soaked waste had given the mad accountant his power. It was unmistakable, especially when an arkeus pulls a flame-jet six feet long out of its mouth and tries to feed it to you.
The scar provides me with faster healing and damage regeneration, but when it’s busy splinting bones and replacing a few quarts of blood, pulled muscles heal more slowly. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if it started spreading, or if Perry decided it wasn’t such a hot idea to have me drawing on a hellbreed’s tainted power if he wasn’t getting anything in return—even if it was his own damn fault.
Don’t think like that. The phone brayed, the pager buzzed against my hip, and I stopped short of picking up as the answering machine clicked. There were a few moments of silence, then a beep.
“Hey, kitten.” A voice I knew as well as my own slid from the speaker, only slightly distorted. “Guess you’re out—”
My pager quit buzzing. I was already scrambling for the phone. I scooped it up and pressed the talk button, and the machine clicked over with a feedback squeal. “Sorry about that.” Breathless, now, I folded down on the bed. “God, it’s good to hear you.”
“Hey.” Saul sounded tired. “Glad I caught you too, kitten. What’s happening in the big bad city?”
A sharp ache welled up in my chest. I miss you, and Perry called. “Not much. A couple things Monty wants me to look into. A Trader.”
“Bad?” He had a nice voice, to go with all the rest of him.
I shut my eyes, imagining him right next to me. Tall dark-haired Were, looking like a romance-novel Native American except for the gold-green sheen off his eyes in certain light, the rods and cones reflecting differently. “Nothing out of the ordinary. I even got a civilian out alive.”
“That’s my girl.” A warm rumble of approval, carried through a phone line and suddenly threatening to ease every muscle.
“How’s your mom?” I swallowed sudden dryness in my throat. Saul’s mother hadn’t been too happy to meet the hellbreed-tainted hun
ter he’d given up his place in the tribe for, but with faultless Were courtesy she’d accepted me into her home as a guest and cooked for me. She’d even introduced me to the extended family and officiated at the firelit ceremony that formalized everything. As far as Saul was concerned, we were formally mated.
As far as his tribe was concerned, we were as good as married, even if I was… well, disappointing. But they hadn’t said a word, just welcomed me with Were politeness.
I wondered if they regretted it now.
“There’s morphine.” Saul’s tone changed now. Deeper, and just a bit rougher. “It’s not bad. My aunts are here. They’re singing to her.”
Oh, Christ. She must be close to passing. No more needed to be said.
I listened to him breathing for a few moments, knowing he was doing the same thing. “I love you,” I whispered. I can’t make it better. If I could I would. I’d hunt down the cancer and put a gun to its head. Slit its throat. Kill it for you.
“I know that, kitten.” A thin vibration came through the phone—he was rumbling, deep down in his chest, a werecougar’s response to a mate’s distress. “You sure you’re okay?”
His mother was dying and he was out there alone, because I couldn’t leave the city—nobody was around to take some of the load; the apprentices who had come out last time to handle the overflow while we were honeymooning had gone home and were needed desperately there.
And he was asking if I was okay.
I don’t deserve you, Saul. The charms in my hair jingled as I played with my pager, unclipping it from my belt. It was habit to take the damn thing with me everywhere, in a padded pocket except when I was hosing blood and stink out of my coat. “Right as rain. Wish I could be there.”
“I wish so too. You be careful for me, you hear?” He was already worrying about the next thing, or he wouldn’t have told me to be careful. He almost never did that, because it implied I couldn’t take care of myself.