I sat cross-legged on the bed. It felt good to be dressed in clean clothes, and felt even better to be clean myself, my hair damp from the shower and smelling like sandalwood. Japhrimel, expressionless, produced my katana. The sheath was lost, so I balanced naked metal across my knees. “Okay,” I said, once we’d all settled in. “Breakfast is due up in a quarter-hour. Japhrimel’s checked the staff here and says they’re trustworthy. I’m going to start tracking Santino as soon as—”
“Wait a minute.” Gabe held up her hand. “How in Hades are you going to find him without alerting him? He’s got a day’s head start, and he’s a demon—Magi magick might find him, but if he’s on his guard it might just put him in a snit. And we can’t afford to have you come down with another case of backlash. There’s a limit to the amount of abuse you can take, Danny—despite what you seem to think.”
I held up my hand. “Gabe,” I said with excessive patience, “we may not be able to track him, even with Dake’s little toy. But he’s got the kid. And the kid’s at least half Doreen; I shared my mind and my bed with her. I can find the kid, we’re bound by Doreen’s blood. Where she is, Santino will be.”
Gabe shrugged. She glanced at Jace, seemed about to say something, and stopped.
“What about this kid?” Eddie asked suddenly. “What the demons gonna do with her?”
I looked up at Japhrimel, who shrugged. His eyes darkened, more strange runic patterns slipping through their depths—but he looked down at the floor, as if avoiding my gaze. “The Prince will perhaps take her as a lover,” he said, “or as a vassal. Androgynes are precious, and she is far too young to challenge his rule.”
“Like hell,” I said. “I’ll take care of the kid. I owe it to Doreen. Lucifer didn’t contract me to bring the kid back, he contracted me to kill Santino and return this Egg thing. He doesn’t even need to know about the kid. You haven’t told him, have you, Japhrimel?”
Please tell me I’ve guessed right and he hasn’t told Lucifer about the kid.
Silence crawled through the room.
“You would ask me to lie to the Prince,” Japhrimel said, finally. He stood at the side of the bed, his head down, his eyes hidden, hands clasped behind his back. His coat rustled slightly; I wondered again why he wore it.
“You can’t trust a demon, Danny,” Jace piped up. I ignored him, watching Japhrimel. His reaction told me he’d kept his mouth shut. If he hadn’t told Lucifer about the little girl, he had to have guessed I would ask him not to.
He finally tilted his head back up, his green eyes meeting mine for a long moment. It wasn’t hard to hold his gaze anymore. “I have not . . . told Lucifer of the child, only that Vardimal was attempting to create an Androgyne. I did not think it wise, as Lucifer would perhaps seek a different means of effecting Santino’s capture. That would endanger you, Dante.” He paused, his eyes holding mine. Here it comes, I thought, amazed I’d been able to predict him for once. “However, to lie to the Prince after Santino is dead . . . I will do as you ask,” he said, “but in return, I will ask a price.”
I shrugged. “I expected as much.” My throat went dry. “What price?”
“I will tell you when the time comes,” he said. “It is nothing you cannot pay.”
“Danny—” Jace sat bolt upright.
“Shut up, Jace,” I said, my eyes fixed on the demon. “All right, Japhrimel. It’s a deal. Gods grant I don’t regret it.”
“I would speak with you privately, Mistress,” he said, formally, nodding slightly. That managed to hurt my feelings—so we were back to Mistress, were we?
You will not leave me to wander the earth alone. Had he really said that, or had it been some kind of near-death hallucination?
I shook the thought away, hair sliding over my shoulders. “Soon enough. Gabe, I need you and Eddie at full strength. Do what you have to do to get there. We’re hitting the trail soon as possible. Before twelve hours I need a work-up of every bit of munitions we can beg borrow or steal. Everything. Plasguns, assault rifles, projectile guns, explosives, everything. Eddie, I need as many golem’ai as you can make before we leave—and firestarters, too. You’re the best Skinlin I know, and the mud-things will even the odds for us. Jace—” He flinched as I said his name, his shoulders hunching protectively. “Get yourself up to full strength and outfit us. We need transport, supplies, and passports into Mob Circle.”
“Mob Circle?” Eddie actually sputtered. “Are you crazy?”
“We can’t travel everywhere in the world just on a hunt,” I said. “If Santino goes into any Freetowns, Mob Circle passports will give us some kind of protection and a place to sleep. Can you do that, Jace?”
He was paler than I’d ever seen him. “You’d trust me?” he asked, his blue eyes stuttering up to mine then sliding away, as if he couldn’t stand to look at my face. “You’d trust me to do that?”
“I’m not going to forgive you,” I told him. “I’m just going to overlook the fact that you took up a year and a half of my life with a complete lie. You do this for me, and we’re even, your debt’s paid. After this job, I never want to see your face again. If I see you after this is over, I’ll fucking kill you—but if you help me take Santino down, I’ll let you go your own way. Alive. All accounts balanced.”
“Danny—” he began.
“You lied to me,” I hissed. “Every time you touched me, it was a lie. And you didn’t come clean when I came here, either—you kept lying to me. What, were you thinking I’d never find out?”
“You never would have—” he began.
“Well, we’ll never know now, will we? I never had the chance.” I shook my head, looking away to where the sheaf of sunlight fell into the green room, pure light glowing on every surface. It was nothing like the clear light of Death, but it was close enough that my heart twisted. The room was beautiful, clean, and made my entire body hurt. I wanted to be home, with Santino dead and the Devil’s lies and little games out of my life. “Either you do this for me, or I’ll kill you, Jace. It’s that simple.”
I don’t know if it was my level tone or the way my face felt frozen, or maybe it was just the way my fingers touched the katana’s hilt, but Jace believed me. He stared at the floor, his jaw working.
“Fine,” he finally said. “If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way we’ll play it.”
“Good.” I looked up at Japhrimel, who was wearing a faintly startled expression. “Japhrimel?”
He shrugged again, one of those faint, evocative movements. Nothing to add or subtract, and he wouldn’t talk to me in front of them. Fine.
“Okay,” I said. “That about covers it. Let’s get moving.”
Jace hitched himself up to his feet with a single measuring glance at Eddie. The Skinlin sat absolutely still, his eyes slitted, his hair tangling over his forehead. “I’ll start working on passports and supplies,” Jace said. “The staff will bring you breakfast, and whatever else you need.”
I nodded.
He strode from the room without giving me a second glance.
Gabe whistled, shaking her head. “Are you crazy?” she said. “What if he’s still working for Santino?”
“He’s not. If he was, we’d all be dead.” I sighed.
“You’re letting him off easy,” Eddie snarled.
I knew it. Ten years ago I might have gone after Jace just on principle. But I was just too tired. And the vision of all those canisters behind that glass shield, Santino’s claws skritching against the glass, wouldn’t go away. So much death, who was I to add to it? I was a Necromance. It was my job to bring people back. I was so tired of killing.
“Danny?” Eddie snapped his fingers to get my attention. “You’re lettin’ him off easy. You should fuck him up at the least, break a few bones. He—”
“Relax, Eddie,” Gabe broke in, reaching out with her bare toes to rub his knee. “She knows what she’s doing. The munitions aren’t for a frontal assault on Santino, are they, sweets?”
&nb
sp; “Of course not,” I said. “They’re for erasing whatever’s left of the Corvins from the face of the earth. And Jace is going to do it himself. If he fails, we don’t get any blowback, because Jace will be dead and his Family just another failed attempt at cutting out turf. If he succeeds, Santino doesn’t have a Mob Family to do his dirty work, I’m free of the Corvin Family for good—and Jace will owe me a big-ass favor, since he’ll be free too. Really free, not just street-war free.”
“The golem’ai and the firestarters?” Eddie asked, comprehension dawning over his hairy face.
I suppressed a shudder. The golem’ai—semisentient mud creatures a Skinlin could create from organic matter and pure magick—made my skin crawl. “Those,” I said, “are for Santino.”
CHAPTER 40
We had a nice, if hurried, breakfast; the thick Nuevo Rio coffee-with-chicory did a good deal to dispel the cobwebs and ease my pounding head. Japhrimel was oddly silent, watching me eat, occasionally walking to the window and gazing out, his hands clasped behind his back. I didn’t want to know. His silence seemed to infect all of us. Maybe there was just nothing left to say. The maids who came to clear away breakfast were both pale, their hands trembling, stealing little glances at me out of the corners of their eyes.
I couldn’t even work up enough steam to care. You’d think they’d be used to psions, working for a Shaman.
I finally sent Gabe and Eddie to do their work and yawned, looking down at my katana. Oddly enough, the blade didn’t seem to be reacting to Japhrimel’s presence—it should have been spitting glowing blue as it had every other time he’d touched it.
Then again, after dealing with Santino and almost dying there was precious little Power left in the steel. I’d have to recharge before I could make my blade burn again. It was a kind of torture—the longer we waited, the more prepared we were to kick Santino’s ass, but the more time he had to dig himself into a bolthole it would cost us blood to crack.
The door shut behind Eddie, and Japhrimel turned on his heel, sunlight falling into the bottomless dark of his coat.
“Okay.” I slid my feet off the bed and stood up, the katana whirling in an ellipse that ended up with the blade safely tucked behind my arm, the hilt loosely clasped in my hand and pointed downward. “You’ve been acting weird, even for a demon. What’s up?”
He shook his head, light moving over the planes of his face. I took a closer look.
I’d thought he was plain, his face saturnine and almost ugly. I’d never noticed the exact arch of his eyebrows, his thin mouth half-quirked into a smile, or the high impossible arcs of his cheekbones. It was nothing to compare to Lucifer’s beauty, of course . . . but he was actually kind of easy on the eyes. “Spit it out,” I persisted. “You said you had something to discuss with me?” My bare feet curled against the hardwood floor, and I shivered. I was so used to the blanket of Nuevo Rio heat by now that the climate control was a little chilly.
Japhrimel took one step toward me. Then another. His eyes burned, seeming to make the sunlight on his face slightly green.
He approached slowly, his hands clasped behind his back, and finally ended up looming over me, less than a foot away. The musk smell of demon drenched me, his aura sliding over mine. I tilted my head back to look up into his face. “Well?”
He shook his head again. Then he unclasped his hands. His left hand came up, cupped my right shoulder, heat scorching through the material of my shirt. His eyes caught mine.
My heart gave a huge thudding leap. “Japhrimel?” I asked.
He slid his left hand down my right arm, and his fingers curled over mine. He took the katana’s hilt from my hand, the sword chimed against the floor. I would have lunged for it, but his eyes held mine in a cage of emerald light. “Dante,” he answered.
His voice was no longer the robotic, uninflected flatline it had been before. Instead, he sounded . . . husky, as if he had something caught in his throat. I blinked.
“Are you—” I began to ask him if he was all right, but his eyes flared and the words died in my throat. He didn’t sound okay.
Then, the crowning absurdity—he slowly, so slowly, dropped down to his knees, his hand still holding mine. He wrapped his other arm around me and buried his face in my belly.
Nothing in my life had ever prepared me for this.
I stood rigid, uncertain. Then I lifted my free hand, and smoothed the rough inky silk of his hair. “Japhrimel.” I said, again. “What—”
“I failed,” he said, his breath blurring hot through my shirt to touch my skin. I barely understood him, his voice was so muffled; he pressed against me like a cat or a child. “I failed you.”
“What are you talking about?” My own voice refused to work properly. Instead, I sounded like I had something lodged in my windpipe, strangling my words, making me breathless.
He looked up, his arm still pressing me forward. “I knew you were not dead,” he said, his eyes blazing so brightly I almost expected to smell scorching in the air. “For I was not returned to Hell. Yet I did not know what Vardimal would do to you—keep you alive to torture you, or wait until I reached you before he killed you. I did not know, Dante. I failed to protect you, and you were taken.”
“It’s all right,” I whispered. “Look, you couldn’t know they’d paste me with a plasgun bolt. Even you can’t outrun one of those. It’s not your fault, Japhrimel.”
“I found myself faced with a vision of an existence without you, Dante. It was . . . unpleasant.” His lips peeled back from his teeth in a pained snarl that tried to be a smile.
You will not leave me to wander the earth alone. His voice traced a rough line through my memory.
I smoothed his hair. The inky darkness was silky, slightly coarse, slipping through my fingers. “Hey,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. It’s all right now.”
I sounded awkward even to myself. He’s a demon, Danny. What is he doing?
“You will hate me, Dante. It cannot be avoided.”
A jagged laugh snapped out of me. “I don’t hate you,” I admitted. Great, Danny. He’s too old for you. He’s not even human.
But he came for me, I protested.
Only because he’s got a stake in this. He’s playing with you, Danny. He’s playing. Nobody could ever—
I don’t care, I thought. He doesn’t look like he’s playing. I don’t care. “But you’re a—”
“You must know,” he said. “I am no longer demon.”
What? I stared at him, my fingers stopping, curling into his hair. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I am no longer demon,” he repeated, slowly, looking up at me. He was queerly pale under the even golden tone of his skin. “I am Fallen. I am A’nankimel. I have set you as a seal upon my heart; I will not return to Hell.” His arm tensed, and so did his fingers holding my right hand.
My mouth went dry. “Um,” was my utterly profound response.
He waited, patient and expectant, staring up at my face.
I regained the power of speech in a spluttering rush. “You mean . . . what do you . . . I mean, I . . . um, why do you . . . ah. What?”
“I am yours,” he said, slowly, as if spelling it out for an idiot.
“Why?” I could have kicked myself. How do I get in these situations? I’m chasing one demon and I have another kneeling at my feet and oh my dear gods, what am I going to do?
“Because you are the only being in eternity who has treated me as an equal,” he said, his arm tightening a little more. My knees buckled slightly. “You have trusted me; you have even defended me to your precious friends. I have watched you, Dante, in daylight and in shadow, and I have found you fair.”
“Um,” I said again. “Japhrimel—”
“My price for silence to Lucifer is this: Do not send me from your side,” he whispered, still watching my face. “When you have killed Santino, allow me to remain with you.”
“Um,” My brain seemed to be working through syrup. “Ah,
well, you know, I can’t have a demon hanging around.”
“Why not?” he asked, logically enough. “You court Death, Dante. You have found nothing to live for; you walk alone. I have seen your loneliness, and it gives me pain. Besides, it seems you are foolhardy enough to need me.”
It occurred to me that I should protest about this, but it was hard to find an objection in the soup my brain had become. Common sense warned me to be cautious—after all, he was a demon, and demons lied. That was the first rule in Magi and Ceremonial training—beings that weren’t human had nonhuman ideas about the strict truth of any situation. What was in it for him?
And yet . . . He had stood behind me when I faced Lucas Villalobos. He’d tried to follow me into Death. And he’d burned down damn near a third of Nuevo Rio looking for me.
But Lucifer has him by the balls, too, I thought.
“What about your freedom?” I finally asked him.
“When we win my freedom, it is mine to do with as I will,” he said. “I will stay with you, Dante. As long as you allow it, and perhaps after.”
I chewed on my bottom lip, thinking about it. I had no way of knowing if he was telling the truth. “Why now? Why tell me this now?”
“I told you there was a way,” he said. “I wish to give you a part of my Power, Dante, and I must do it quickly, before I become more A’nankimel than I already am. It will bind me to your side and your world will become my domain. There is only a short time for me to bond with you before I fall into darkness and a mortal death.” His arm loosened a little, but I couldn’t have gotten away if I tried, because he rose to his feet, my right hand still trapped in his left. I had to tip my head back to look at him. My heart pounded and my palms slipped with sweat, and I had the lunatic idea that maybe I would start screaming, once I got my breath back. Something about his eyes was making it difficult to breathe.
“Oh,” I said, and wished I hadn’t, because he smiled. It was a gentle smile, and my entire body seemed to recognize it.
His free hand came up, cupped the side of my face. “Courage, hedaira,” he said, softly, his breath touching my cheek. Then he leaned down, and his mouth met mine.