He shrugged. Gods, how I hate demons shrugging at me. “If I told you what I guess, or what I anticipate, it would frighten you needlessly. Until I am certain, I do not wish to cloud the issue with suppositions. Best just to go, and to trust in your Fallen. Have I not earned as much?”
Goddamn it, I hated having to admit he was right. Even I knew that anticipating something from the Prince of Hell was likely to end in a nasty surprise. Japh had never let me down. “I do.” My voice dropped, the soft ruined tone of honey gone granular soothing the last remains of tension away. “Of course I trust you. Don’t you know that?”
I thought he’d be happy about it. Instead, his face turned still and solemn as we looked at each other, the mark on my shoulder pulsing and sending a flood of heat down my skin. “Cut it out.” I could hardly get enough air in to protest. It was as intimate as his fingers in my hair, as intimate as his mouth against my pulse. “Let’s just get this over with.”
A single sharp nod, and Japhrimel offered me his hand. I let him take my right hand, my sword hand; it made me nervous as hell to know that he could very easily keep me from drawing just by tightening his fingers a little.
I don’t want to do this. I don’t. Japhrimel led me out of the room, and the doors closed behind us, silent on their maghinges. But if I have to face down Lucifer, at least I’ve got Japh with me.
It wasn’t as comforting as I’d thought it would be, since Lucifer had killed him once before. Dead, or driven him into dormancy—gods, I didn’t want to try to figure out the difference again. Even with Japh on my side, seeing the Prince of Hell was likely to be hideously unpleasant.
Still, I’d do it. What you can’t run away from, you have to face. Living with the ghosts inside my head had taught me that much, at least.
I just hoped facing this would leave me alive.
7
The town of Arrieto has dozed in the middle of wheat fields and olives for centuries, drowsing in southern sun. We caught a transport in the town square, a piazza still picturesquely cobbled with worn-down stones. Here in a historical preserve of the Hegemony, there was no urban sprawl and no great flights of hover formations—but every sunbaked house had a bristling fiberoptic array and invisible security nets humming. Slicboards were racked outside cafes, and a Necromance was still local news.
By the time we lifted off, me in the window seat and Japhrimel in the aisle, I had already had enough of stares and whispers hidden behind hands. I’ve walked the streets of Saint City, one of the biggest metropolises in the world, and had my armor hold up. But this little town’s obvious fear got to me. Normals always think psions want to read their deep dark secrets, or use mental pressure to force them to do something embarrassing. Not one normal seems to understand that to a psion, touching a normal’s mind is like taking a bath in a festering sewer. Messy thoughts, messy emotions, messy fantasies all stirred together, randomly emitting and decaying; a normal mind was the last place a psion wanted to find herself in. The psions that did take advantage of normals very quickly found themselves subject to bounty hunters and dragged in to answer felony charges.
I should know. I’ve dragged more than a few in.
Still, all the holovids are full of evil psions and occasional psion antiheros, taking down the bad guys while crippled by their own talents. The fact that psions don’t work in the holovid biz only makes it worse.
None of the normals could tell what Japhrimel was, but I had a tat on my cheek, the emerald flashing, and my sword. Only an accredited psion can carry edged metal in transports and guns on city streets. Only an accredited psion or the police, that is. So I stuck out, and Japhrimel blended in.
Sort of. It’s kind of hard to hide a tall, golden-skinned demon in a long black Chinese-collared coat. To normals he probably looked like he’d only been genetically augmented, which was a little odd but not way out of the gravball court. A genescan would show him as a different species but no weirder than a werecain or kobolding. No, it would take a psion to see the twisting black-diamond flames of his aura. They would know what he was. But there were no other psions on the transport.
I leaned my head back against the seat. The flight was quiet, only ten people—we had plenty of empty seats around us in every direction. Nobody would want to crowd me; Necromances have a reputation for being a little twitchy. “So we’re going to get a guide, and go through a door,” I said.
“Yes.”
I wanted this all very clear. “You’ll negotiate our passage, but you’re not going to talk—once we pass through the door.”
“No.” Japhrimel’s eyes were closed. He leaned back into the seat, his mouth a straight line, his hands cupped and upturned in his lap.
“Because that would look as if I was weak.”
“Yes.”
“If you don’t speak and you stay behind me while we’re in Hell, you’re just a bodyguard—and not responsible for anything impolite I do.” Which is bound to be something, since I have the worst manners in the world. Don’t think I’m going to make a special effort for Lucifer either.
“Yes.”
“Don’t touch anything, don’t take anything from the Prince, and especially don’t eat or drink.” I looked out the window. The whine of hover transport settled against my bones. I hated it, my back teeth grinding together before I could make my jaw unloose. “And you don’t know what he wants me for. Won’t even venture a guess.”
“I have my guesses. None of which are pleasant.”
I couldn’t help myself. “Care to clue me in?”
That earned me a quirk of a smile. “If we go to meet death, I would prefer it to be a surprise for you. I do not want you dreading it and becoming distracted.”
I couldn’t tell if he was joking, for once. His sense of humor was a little strange, when it wasn’t mordant black wit or irony it was a particular brand of macabre I was beginning to recognize as purely demon. “Oh, how comforting.” I tapped the sword’s hilt with my fingernails. I’d been painting them with black molecule-drip polish for so long the polish was starting to maintain itself on my nails. I knew how to make my fingers into claws now, I was stronger and faster than any mortal.
Fat lot of good it would do me against Lucifer. Every culture has its stories about nonhuman beings—beings whose beauty didn’t conceal their essential difference, beings who didn’t necessarily believe in the human idea of truth. The fact that we can separate them into loa, etrigandi, demons, or what-have-you doesn’t make them any less dangerous.
The Old Christers had called Lucifer the Father of Lies. I was beginning to think they’d had the right idea, even if their conception of gods was so narrow as to be laughable in this day and age.
“Japhrimel?”
He moved slightly, restlessly. “What is it, my curious one?”
“If I died, what would happen to you?”
One eye opened a fraction of an inch, glanced at me. “There is little cause to worry, hedaira. Even Fallen I am still the one who was Lucifer’s assassin, and that is your safety. There are not many demons who would challenge me, weakened as I am.”
I shouldn’t have felt guilty. I hadn’t asked him to Fall. If he’d told me what he’d intended to do I would have done everything possible to dissuade him, including drawing my sword or lighting out to track Santino on my own. I hadn’t had the faintest clue of what he’d intended when he’d changed me.
Still . . . I did feel guilty. Right up under my breastbone and slightly to the left, the place where my heart still kept steady time. “I’m sorry. That you’re . . . weakened.”
I watched, fascinated, as his right hand curled into a fist. My own right hand had been spoiled and knotted for a good year or so after I’d killed Santino. I’d been unable to draw another sword until Gabe called me in to work on the Lourdes murders.
That thought sent another hot prickle of guilt up my spine. She’d sent some news clips about the murders and some other messages through my datpilot, and I called her as freq
uently as I could stand to. The conversations were usually short. Hi, how are you. Not bad, Eddie’s good? Oh you’re busy? Sorry about that. Okay, well, catch you later.
Ghosts of the words we could never say to each other crowded the phone line, robbing us both of breath. She tried to apologize for bringing me in on the Lourdes case, I didn’t let her. Each time she started, I would tell her not to.
I would try to thank her for performing a Necromance’s duty at Jace’s bedside. She would tell me not to. Everything that lay between us stopped the words in both our throats.
Why was it so damn hard to talk to the one person I could have said anything to?
I wished now that I’d spent more time on the phone with her. I would have given a lot to call her, maybe even use my datpilot’s fiendishly expensive voice capability. But she didn’t even know Japhrimel was alive. I had, for the first time, lied to her when I’d left Saint City. Even if only by omission, it was still a lie told to the one person on earth I should never have misled. Gabe had gone through hell for me.
You can’t do anything about it now, Dante. Focus on the task at hand.
I raised my left hand, threaded my fingers through Japhrimel’s. It took some doing—he didn’t fight me, but his fist was clenched. I finally pried it open, and the touch of his skin on mine rewarded me. “Talk to me,” I said, so softly only a demon’s sensitive ears could have heard.
He let out a quiet breath. His anger could blow the transport to pieces, but no whisper of it escaped. Except for the mark on my shoulder, burning as it twisted its way more deeply into my skin.
“You are cruel and gentle, in the manner of your kind,” he said finally. “You have never treated me as anything less—or more—than human. As one of your own.”
I thought about that for a moment. I had fallen into the habit of treating him just like another human early on in the hunt for Santino and never quite grown out of it. Was that what he was talking about? “It wouldn’t be fair otherwise.”
“Fair?” His hand relaxed slightly. His eyes were closed, but I would have bet hard credit and the emerald in my cheek that he knew the location of every person on the transport and had them evaluated down to the last millimeter. “Life is not fair, Dante. Even demons know this.”
“It should be,” I muttered, looking at my swordhilt.
“I dislike the pain you inflict on yourself.” He stroked my wrist with his thumb, an intimate touch making me catch my breath. “We will arrive exactly nowhere if we do not reach an agreement.”
Memory rose around me. He’d said the same thing in my kitchen, all those years ago, during the first stages of the hunt for Santino. One terrified Necromance bent on revenge and a demon without the sense to keep from falling in love with her, and the Devil pulling all the strings behind the scenes.
“An agreement? How about I try to be a big girl and keep my mouth shut, and you try not to keep things from me from now on?” I’m pretty sure I can keep my half of that bargain if you can manage to keep yours. What do you say, Japhrimel?
His thumb stroked the underside of my wrist again. My breath hitched. “There.” He sounded less tense and more like the Japhrimel I knew. “That is the Dante I know.”
I could have laughed at the parallel thoughts. Instead, I studied my swordhilt. Jado-sensei was an old crafty dragon, and I wondered if he’d given me a blade that could cut the Devil himself. Yet another thing I missed—Jado’s nut-brown wrinkled face framed by long pointed ears. Maybe I did want to go back to Saint City.
The thought made my heart pound. I took a deep breath. “Japhrimel?”
A slight, subtle shift, he leaned toward me in his seat. “What?”
“Don’t hide things from me. Even if you think it’ll scare me.”
“You’re persistent.”
It was like one of our sparring sessions. During the first few I’d held back, afraid of hurting him because he so rarely used a weapon. It was only after the third time he took my blade away from me without even seeming to try that I started to get angry—and I hadn’t held back since. The same sense—of slashing at an opponent who simply melted away from my strikes then blurred in to take my weapon away—was there in our conversation.
“Don’t change the subject.” I kept my temper by a thin margin. “Please.”
“Even if it is for your own good, hedaira?”
I scowled at my sword. Even then, Japh. I’d rather be scared than have you hide something from me. “Who are you to decide that?”
“Your A’nankhimel, Dante. The one who Fell through love of you.”
“I didn’t ask you to.” I didn’t make you Fall. I just treated you like a person. Was that so wrong?
He moved again, still leaning toward me. “And yet, it happened. Enough. I will tell you truth, but I will not bother you with trifles or distract you unnecessarily.”
It was no use. He wasn’t going to budge. It’s going to be goddamn hard to get through this if you don’t tell me little things like “Oh, Dante, the Devil keeps calling and wants to talk to you.” That kind of sounds like need-to-know information to me, Japhrimel. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep the words from spilling out. I was already in a hell of a bad mood.
Not the best way to meet the Devil at all.
8
Venizia lay atop its lagoon, shimmering gilt and pearl. Once, long ago, the city had been at the mercy of a rising sea. Climate control, antigrav, and reactive had changed all that. Now the entire city was mythically beautiful, its buildings arching over canals gleaming crimson as the sun died its daily, fiery, bloody death.
After the failure of the celebrated Gibraltar Locks Project, the Hegemony had funded a massive retrofit to keep Venizia afloat. Everyone was mildly surprised when the Locks architect (an Academy Magi dropout-turned-engineer named Todao Shikai) was assigned to the task, and slightly more surprised when he actually pulled it off. He collapsed and died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage six months after the retrofit was finished. Rumor was he had called up a particular imp after the Locks project failed and bargained away his life for a career success. I’d always discounted the old story—but I was on my way to my second official meeting with the Prince of Hell.
Meeting the Devil does tend to change the way one looks at gruesome old legends—the more gruesome, the more thought-provoking.
The transport floated down, hovercells whining as it held steady above the water for a few moments before gliding onto the dock and landing with barely a thump. Whoever the pilot was, he or she was highly capable. AI decks can’t land without jolting everyone aboard; it takes a human touch.
I sat looking out the window, as everyone coughed and shuffled off the transport. Japhrimel, his fingers warm against mine, said nothing. There was a time when I would have fought tooth and nail to get out of the damned transport as quickly as possible, but for now I was content to let everyone else go their merry way first. Well, maybe not content. Maybe I just didn’t want to get out of the hover.
“We must go, Dante,” Japhrimel said quietly. His thumb touched the underside of my wrist again, the heat flushing through me and washing away sharp cold fear. The man was dangerous to my pulse. “I would ask you something.”
“Hold that thought.” I blew out between my teeth and stood up. He moved too, without relinquishing my hand. We went down the central aisle, my bag bumping against my hip. He had to bend slightly, a little too tall for a human transport. His coat rustled, sounding like soft cloth-leather; he must have been agitated for all his face was calm and his aura perfectly controlled.
We stepped off onto the dock washed with sunset light. I glanced into the sky, looked across the dock to where water glittered and foamed under the antigrav. Shikai had done a good job—the retrofit was seamless; Venizia was now truly a floating city. Unfortunately, that much antigrav meant that the whole city whined with a sound inaudible to most normals. Most psions can’t stand the sound of hovers for long, it settles in the back teeth and rattles the b
ones. I sighed. My shields swirled, taking in the quality of the Power here—people and stone and reactive, a taste like sour oily water on the back of the throat, overlaid with coffee fumes and synth-hash smoke. What would have taken me hours before I met Japhrimel—acclimatizing to a new city’s Power well—was done in seconds, my almost-demon metabolism shifting through the necessary adjustments. “I bet there aren’t a lot of psis here,” I muttered, then looked up at him. “What is it you’re going to ask me?”
Japhrimel finished scanning the dock, his eyes glittering and that look on him again—the look of listening to something I couldn’t hear. His jaw was set, golden skin drawn tight over his bones. I wondered what it felt like to him, to be going back into Hell. Then again, he’d gone last night, right?
I wondered what it was like, seeing what he’d given up for me. Hell was no place to party if you were a human—but he wasn’t, and it was his home. Was he homesick?
Then he looked down, and that rare smile lit his face. I couldn’t help myself—I caught my breath, smelling pollution-dyed water and sunwarmed stone, and a thread of synth-hash smoke. The pilot and copilot of the transport had just come out of their cockpit access hatch, the gold braid on their uniforms twinkling. The pilot had a synth-hash cigarette dangling from her lip.
“I ask you again to trust me, Dante. No matter what befalls us. And I ask you not to doubt me.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I hunched my shoulders, a faint breeze off the Meditterane touching my braided hair. As usual, a lone strand had come free and fell in my face. It seemed the longer my hair got, the more of an independent consciousness it possessed.
“You are.” The smile faded from his face. “A’tai, hetairae A’nankimel’iin. Diriin.” It might have been a prayer, the way he said it, but it wasn’t a prayer I knew. He had only taught me a little of the language demons used among themselves, saying it wasn’t fit for my tongue, and anyway we had time.