Talk your way out of this one, Kismet. “This is one of mine, hellspawn. You don’t get to eat him tonight.”
There are six pounds of center-trigger pull on a Glock and I was at about four and a half. The world had turned into a collection of edges too sharp to be real, all my senses working overtime and amped up into the red.
Shen’s face contorted once, smoothed out, crumpled again. The bruise of her aura tightened like a fist. I watched, waiting. If Shen was more than normally upset at Perry or needed to regain some face in front of her minions and clients, this would get ugly really quickly.
“You are only one, hunter. And we are legion.” The black strings of her hair rubbed against each other, squealing as she subvocalized. Helletöng rumbled through the floor, vibrating against my bootsoles.
“That does not particularly bother me.” I sounded like it didn’t, too. “I’ve killed more in a night than you have in this dining room, Shen.” I paused. “You, Trader. I told you to pick him up.”
The Trader squeaked as if she’d been pinched and moved to obey. I kept both guns on Shen. I might get out of this alive. All hail the poker-faced hunter and her ability to talk smack. Shen took two long strides forward, the fabric of her kimono’s lower half moving in odd ways, silk groaning and stretching. “You will not leave this place alive,” she promised, and the helltainted on every side moved closer. A rising growl slid through them, Helletöng rubbing at the walls. Oh, so that’s the way we’re going to do this? My free hand was suddenly full of Glock. “Outside, Irene. And gently. If he dies, you’re fucking next.” I waited until I heard her start moving, Carp’s shapeless groan as he lay cradled in her stick-thin, dead-white arms, her purple satin gloves now stained with blood. This I took in through my peripheral vision, my heartrate cool and steady, both guns still locked on the mistress of the Kat Klub. “Is that the way you want to play it, Shen?”
Nothing human lived under the skirt of that antique kimono. The scar prickled, a mass of hot needles burrowing into my wrist, and the world got very still again, clarity settling over each edge and curve. The contortionists were still writhing on the stage, joints crackling and sequins scraping.
“Take her,” she whispered. But none of the assembled ’breed or Traders moved. Apparently, right at this moment, even fear of Shen An Dua couldn’t make them swarm me. It was an indirect compliment.
I showed my teeth. My entire body relaxed into the flow of the moment, the absolute chilling certainty of violence taking all indecision out of the equation. “Bring it,” I whispered. My forearms tensed, cords of muscle standing out as I edged toward that last pound and a half of pressure on the triggers. A new voice cut across the warp and weft of the interior, slicing cleanly even if it was loaded with Texas so thick the drawl dripped over the sides. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ. What the hell’s this?”
I almost twitched. Relief threatened to unloose my knees, and the situation tipped from ohmyGod I am not going to survive this to Thank God someone else is going to die with me. Shen’s head turned, a slow movement like a servomotor with oiled bearings. I kept both guns trained on her. I’d once seen her unzip a Trader’s guts and lift a double handful of wet intestine to her plump little candyapple-red mouth. Things like that will make a hunter cautious. Add to that the fact that I’d wanted to question the Trader about a certain stable of high-priced underage sex slaves, and Shen’s calm inscrutable smile as strings of human gut hung from her mouth, and you had bad blood between us. I knew she’d been in it up to her eyeballs, but I hadn’t been able to make any of it stick. I couldn’t prove it to my own satisfaction. I could prove little of what I suspected when it came to her. Which meant I couldn’t kill her with a clear conscience. Or even just a reasonably clear conscience, which, some days, is all you’re going to get in this line of work.
“Hi, Leon,” I said. “Nice to see you.”
“You’ve got crappy taste in restaurants, darlin’,” Leon Budge drawled. “Why don’t we go somewheres civilized where I can get me a got-damn drink?”
Shen surged forward again, and there was a familiar, ratcheting sound. Leon had worked the bolt action on his rifle. “Oh, now, sweetie-pie, don’t do that. Me and Rosita here, we gets nervous when a slope-eyed gal like you gets twitchy.”
Jesus, Leon, how much of a racist cliché can you be? I took two steps, sidling away from the table. Helletöng crested, the sound of skin slipping as drowned fingers rubbed together, chrome flies buzzing in chlorinelaced bottles—the scar sent a wet thrill up my arm, hearing its language spoken. Two more steps. I took a quick glance, made certain I was out of Leon’s field of fire. He stood in a battered leather trenchcoat, plain dun instead of black, his hair a crow’s nest of untidy brown waves, copper charms threaded on black heavy-duty waxed thread and clinking slightly as a breeze ruffled his hair. The wreck of the swinging doors smoked around him, and he held the rifle like it wasn’t capable of blowing a ’breed in half with the modifications he’d put on it.
Chubby cherub’s face, wide shoulders, a body kept in shape by a hunter’s constant training but still managing to give the impression of pudginess. Leon looked like a newscaster trapped in goth-boy drag, an impression helped along by the eyeliner scoring rings around each hazel eye and the clinking mass of amulets around his neck on cords, thongs, and thin copper chains. Four plain silver rings on his left hand ran with blue sparks, echoing the silver in my hair. One of them was the apprentice-ring his teacher had given him.
Leon was smiling under a scruff of dark stubble, white teeth peeping out. “Should I put ’er down, Kiss?”
Don’t call me that, dammit. “If she moves.” I turned my back on Shen An Dua and her assembled footlickers and customers, guns sliding into their holsters. “Or hell, even if you don’t like her hairstyle.”
“It’s somethin’.” The cheerful, thoughtful tone never wavered, and he didn’t blink. The bandoliers crossing his chest held small silver-coated throwing knives, each one sharp enough to take a finger off. Or pop right into a ’breed’s eye and pierce the brain with blessed metal.
“Well, the barber was an amateur.” I shrugged, my knees threatening to buckle with each straight, strutting step.
Rule of dealing with murderous hellspawn: try not to look weak. It gets them all excited.
“You have earned my hatred,” Shen was back to whispering. “Hell and Earth both witness my vow, hunter. You will pay for this. ”
Yeah, one way or another. Sure. “You already said that, most honorable Shen An Dua. Don’t be boring.” I would have pantomimed a yawn if my hands weren’t quivering with the urge to take the guns out again, turn around, and put this murderous hellspawn down like the parasite she was. Leon’s gaze flicked to mine for a fraction of a second. It was a purely professional look, gauging what I was likely to do next. I sounded cool and calm, but something in my cheek twitched like a needle was plucking at the flesh. The glance was also a communication, one I heard as clearly as verbal speech— are you gonna throw down, darlin’?
If I did, he was willing to back me. But Leon knew just as surely as I did it would be a terrible mistake. These hellbreed and Traders weren’t surprised anymore, and they’d had plenty of time to think about how to take the two of us apart. Shen could threaten all she wanted now and still retain some semblance of face, but if we killed her it wouldn’t be a free-for-all that would allow us to divvy them up and pick them off. No, if we insulted her, then killed her, whoever wanted to step into her shoes would have to kill us to prove they were worthy of taking Shen’s place.
Well, Jill, you fucked this up six ways to Sunday. Cool night air poured down the hall, touching Leon’s hair. He backed up, covering me with the rifle as I retreated from what had certainly been a bad idea in the first place.
We made it through the hall, past the crumpled bodies of the bouncers. The hat-check girl was nowhere in sight. Sirens wailed in the distance, and I was suddenly struck by an entirely new feeling. I was used to the sound being a
relief, as in the cavalry’s on its way. Now I felt the way any criminal feels—
like the sirens were baying hounds and I was the fox.
The crowd out front had vanished. Most of them were likely to be Traders and hellbreed, probably thanking their lucky stars they hadn’t been inside.
“Fucking hell. ” I restrained the urge to kick something.
The blood-haired Trader was gone.
So was Carp.
19
Leon drove, of all things, a big blue Chevy half-ton. The interior smelled of grease and jostled as the engine labored.
“This thing needs a tune-up,” I told him. “What the hell are you doing here? Not that I’m not happy to see you.”
“Where the fuck’s your car, darlin’? And I’m here because you called, and because someone’s been trappin’
scurf in my neck of the woods. I wouldn’t mind, since we got enough and to spare, but trappin’ ’em means they have somethin’ planned, and that I don’t like. I tracked ’em over the city limits. We got ourselves a genuine grade-A problem goin’ on here.”
“My car blew up. What do you mean, trapping scurf?” I clung to the oh-shit strap while he took a corner, working the gears like they were going out of style. Beer cans rolled around my ankles and a metal footlocker containing ammo and various other odds and ends rattled, sliding forward to smack my boots. Then Leon did something I hated. He closed his eyes.
Oh shit.
I came back from Hell with a gift or a curse, depending on which way you look at it. My blue eye can see between and below the surface of the world. It is that ability to go between that sets me apart from other hunters—that and my bargain with Perry. Most of us just come back from Hell with some interesting instincts, a grasp of sorcery, and the ability to see through the masks hellbreed like to wear. But some of us return with more.
Leon came back a tracker. You name it, he can follow it. All it requires, he says, is the right mindset. And a healthy amount of Pabst Blue Ribbon to dull his sensitivity the rest of the time. If Budge wasn’t halfdrunk, things were very bad indeed. The only good thing about it was he needed a bathroom about as often as a female hunter does.
Beer does that to you when you’ve got a human metabolism. Me, I can’t drink enough of the damn stuff to even get a buzz.
I didn’t ask who we were following. Leon had seen Carp, unmistakably human and bleeding in the middle of a hellbreed haunt, and had further seen me unwilling to leave without him. Some things are just understood. Leon floored it, and the pickup began to shimmy in interesting ways. “Movin’ fast, and agin the wind.”
Not like wind matters to Traders or hellbreed, Leon. I hung on for dear life as he slammed us through traffic, missing a semi by bare inches and almost dinging the paint job on a showroom-bright black SUV that blared its horn and dropped back. Leon’s eyelids flickered like he was dreaming.
“What do you mean, trapping scurf? ” I repeated. That was bad, bad news on all fronts.
“I mean catching the little bastards and shipping them out of town, both by rail and by water. I didn’t think it was possible—who the hell would want ’em, huh? Hang on.”
Hang on?
Leon twisted the wheel, hard. We cut across two lanes of traffic, he floored it, and I started to feel a little green. It wasn’t the speed, it was the fact that he had his eyes shut tight. Even when you’re used to Leon, it’s creepy.
“You might want to slow down. I’m having some problems up here.”
“What kinda problems?”
Where do I start? “There’s a case. Some dirty cops. They’ve already tried to kill me.”
“Holy shit. ” That snapped his eyes open for almost fifteen seconds, but it wasn’t comforting at all. His dark gaze was filmed as if by cataracts, shapes like windblown clouds rolling over the eyeballs. Wind roared through the half-open window; I didn’t have a hand to spare to roll it up. I was busy hanging on. For some reason, nobody ever says a goddamn thing about the way Leon drives. He closed his eyes again, stamping on the accelerator, and I was seriously considering commending my soul to God yet again that night when he jagged over, zipped into an alley neat as you please, stood on the brakes, and bailed out like his pants were on fire.
I followed, sliding across the seat and hopping out his side. He’d taken the keys with him, so I swept the door closed and pounded after him. He was only capable of human speed, but human speed is pretty damn fast when you’re a hunter.
He plunged through an alley, up a fire escape, zigzagged across a low rooftop and came to an abrupt halt, staring across the street. I skidded to a stop right next to him, gave the street a once-over, and looked up at the granite Jesus glowering at downtown.
“Holy shit. She brought him to the hospital?” I didn’t mean for it to come out as a question. Well, I told her that if he died she was next. I suppose it’s logical.
“That’s one almighty-big statue there,” was all Leon said. He blinked a couple times, his shoulders coming down and the colorless fume of urgency swirling away from him.
“That’s Sisters of Mercy. Used to be Catholic. I thought you were in there once, when Mikhail and you—” I bit off the end of the sentence, swallowed it, and looked for a way down. “Well, let’s go on in, then. I need that Trader and I need that cop, too.”
“He’s a cop?” Meaning, I thought you said they was tryin’ to kill you.
“He’s one of mine, Leon. Move your ass.” I paused. “It’s good to see you.”
And it was, too. Some things only another hunter will understand, and moreover, sometimes you don’t want to be questioned. It didn’t matter to Leon what the hell was going on, if I was in it, he was going to be in it too. Up to the eyeballs, if necessary, and without counting the cost or thinking twice about it. And while we were at it we would find out who was shipping scurf around, for God’s sake. I hopped up to the ledge, but Leon’s fingers curled around my arm. Only another hunter—or Saul—would be able to do that without me instinctively twitching away. “Jill.”
The street below looked quiet. I took a second look, to make sure. “What?”
“You doin’ all right, darlin’?” Quiet, with absolutely no Texas bluster. The street swam with light as if underwater, wavering, and snapped into focus when I made an almostphysical effort to clean up my mental floor. “No. I’m not.” The truth burned my tongue, but you can’t lie to another hunter.
You just can’t.
His hand fell away. “Well sheeee- yit. ”
“I heartily concur. Now come on.” I leapt out into space, pulling etheric force through the scar at the last moment, and slammed down on the pavement, smoke flashing in the air as the sudden violation of a law of physics rippled around me.
Jesus, Jill, what would have happened if the scar failed? You’d be lying on the pavement bleeding, now. I told myself not to borrow trouble and stalked for the entrance to the ER. Leon would find his own way down.
Of all the wonders the world has to offer, a Trader hovering by the bedside of a foul-mouthed homicide detective is surely one of the most uncommon. Carp was beaten up, bruised, and had bled all over Kingdom Come from a couple shallow head wounds and a more serious one on his right thigh that looked like a huge dogbite.
I kept one eye on the Trader while I examined Carp. A phlegmatic Filipina nurse swabbed the hole in his leg. He was shocky but not too bad, and I was worried about being seen here.
Leon crowded into the curtained cubicle, eyeing the Trader in her evening gown and blood-colored hair just exactly as he would eye a critter crawling on his boot before he crushed it.
“You stupid son of a bitch.” I kept my tone calm, low, quiet. “Carp, I should peel your skin off in strips. You idiot. ”
“Mom…” He shivered, mumbling. The nurse— Concepcion, I remembered her name with another one of those wrenching mental efforts—merely glanced at me. They see a lot of me at Mercy, and they’ve long since stopped caring what I do or look like as long a
s I don’t shoot anyone.
Sometimes they get disappointed, but they’re used to that in the ER.
“Kismet?” His tone was too dreamy, and I glanced at Connie.
She shrugged, brushing me aside with one soft shoulder as she handed his wallet and badge over. Her shoes squeaked on the linoleum. “Shock. Head wounds are messy. And this thing. Looks clean, but the edges are ragged. Madre, you bring in some interesting things, no?”
“No other wounds?” Raw disbelief married to unwilling hope inside my chest. I hate those pairings. They usually end up badly. The edges of the leg wound weren’t discolored, and held no trademark candy-sweet corruption. He wasn’t poisoned, thank God.
“They only wanted to play with him before Shen came down.” Irene tilted her head, a tendril of that fantastical hair brushing her flour-pale cheek. “I tried to—”
Leon made a restless movement, as if he couldn’t believe she was stupid enough to open her mouth. “Speak when you’re spoken to, Trader.”
“How soon can I get him out of here?” I gave Connie the full benefit of my mismatched stare. She paled, but gamely rolled her eyes. “Señora, this needs stitching. And he’s in shock—”
“We can fix that. Get some sutures.”
“I am no doctor—”
“Now, Connie.” I said it very softly. I am not going to wait around here for someone to come to finish him off. “Get some fucking sutures and get him ready to travel.”
“Galina’s?” Leon made another restless twitch, and I glanced at him.
“Of course.” There’s no place else in the city I can be sure he’s safe, not after tangling with Shen like that. Jesus. I shot her hair. She’ll really be after me now, and I have to question this Trader. Hard.
The nagging sense of something not-quite-right returned, but I didn’t have the leisure to ferret it out. The Trader chose that moment to pipe up again. “I brought him here, I was worried—”
I barely saw Leon clear leather, his Smith & Wesson suddenly pointed at her forehead. The knife in his other hand pressed its flat, silver-loaded blade against one milky shoulder, and the Trader shuddered. A slight sizzle; the silver ran with blue sparks. Under the smell of Lysol and human pain endemic in emergency rooms, the sweet-pork foulness of burning Hell-tainted flesh cut sharp, a serrated edge. Concepcion gasped.