Which brought up the very first question I needed to ask, the first of many I wanted fully answered. “And who the hell is we, white man?”
I didn’t think he’d get the joke, but he smiled. It was a terrible smile as well, that sadness staining through the expression, and a sick feeling began right under my breastbone. A low, nasty buzz mounted in my ears, little sticky feet probing and tickling all over my face, down my throat, down my aching, immobile body.
“You know who we are.” His shoulders set.
“I don’t know a single—” I began, but my heart was skipping triple time, and his hands were coming forward. He was going to touch me, and everything in me cringed away from the notion. “No. Don’t. Don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I would bear this for you, if I could.”
I strained, black spots dancing at the edges of my vision, sweat rising in huge pearly drops, terror like wine filling my veins. I made a helpless sound, and I hated it immediately. It was the gasp of a very bright, very needy dark-haired girl huddled in her bedroom or shivering on a street corner, a girl under someone’s fists. A girl begging and pleading. Please. Please don’t. Oh please don’t.
“I have been with thee from the beginning,” he said very softly, and his fingers clamped on my head. White light exploded inside my skull, and it hurt.
It was like dying all over again. Or mercifully—or maybe just practically—I can’t now say what it felt like. I can’t remember.
And I don’t ever want to.
22
Hip popped up, heel stamping down, massive lung-tearing effort and the doglike thing spun to the side as I wrenched its head and flung it. Shove at the head and the body will follow; it’s a basic law of anatomy. My whip reeled free, flechettes spilling out with a jingle, and I was up in a hot heartbeat, whip end snaking out and me right behind it. Throwing myself across space to crash into the hellhound at the apex of its leap, whip looping and turned taut, straining. Gunfire popped, bullets splattering behind us, and I wasn’t quite sure why I’d done this.
Then I remembered. Saul.
We hit the shipwrecked desk, and my right hand was full of knife hilt. The blade slid in, twisted, the silver laid along its flat flaring with sudden blue radiance, and the warmth on my chin was blood as the thing snarled in my face. It couldn’t get any purchase; the whip was now wrapped around it and pulled tight, my legs clamped around it too and the tearing in my side was ribs broken, again, dammit, can I just go five seconds without another bone snapping please God thank you—
I bent back as the head snaked forward, teeth snapping near my throat, rank hot breath touching my chin and Henderson Hill shuddering again on its foundations. The knife punctured its gluey hide, cut deep, drag on the blade as unholy muscle gripped it, silver hissing and sparking as it grated hard against ribs. Tearing it free, rolling, splinters shredding against my coat’s surface, the cubbyholes behind the desk exhaling dust as a current of bloodlust foamed up their surface, and I cut the thing’s throat in one sweep.
Arterial gush sprayed, thin black-brackish and stinking. I blinked it away, knee coming up, and realized I’d almost taken the hound’s head off. The neck broke with a glassy snap as I heaved it aside, dusty corruption racing through its tissues; it slumped off the desk and fell.
The voices in the air around me sighed, a hundred little sharp-toothed children all exhaling in wonder. For a moment the Hill pressed down, the psychic ferment shoving against my aura like it wanted to get in.
I pushed air out past my lips, hard, blowing through a thin scrim of hellbreed ichor. The shit was all over me, dammit. But there was that second thing to worry about too, and I was already rolling, dropping off the desk with a jolt, legs and ribs protesting as etheric force hummed through me and I shook the whip, the knife spun and held with the flat of the blade back along my arm. Anya could shoot the fuckers all she wanted, but my forte was knifework, and it was looking like I could take a hell of a lot more damage than she could.
You know what we are, he whispered inside my head.
Mike. What kind of a name was that for what I suspected he might be?
Anya was covering the door. Saul stood, brushing his shoulders gingerly, as if he’d been showered with dust.
“Where?” One clipped syllable, but I said it too loud and the foyer rippled. The spangles of Anya’s aura, their spines popping out and shifting uneasily, roiled as she sighed and slowly lowered her guns. Her coat creaked a little as she did, and the tension humming through her made lines of force swirl in the thickened, dusty air.
“It ran off.” She spared me one swift, very blue, very annoyed glance. “You want to tell me what the hell just happened here, Kismet?”
“Something was in Vanner. It busted free, I slapped it pretty hard and took out the hellhound, and Vanner…Jesus Christ, what was that? I haven’t seen anything like that before.”
“I have. Dogsbody.” Tight and unamused. “Why the fuck did it run off?”
Gooseflesh rippled under my skin before training clamped down on my hindbrain. I shivered. No fucking way. “That was a dogsbody?” Should’ve taken my head clean off. Jesus Christ. “It can’t be. Nobody’s bleeding.” I shut my mouth, realized how absurd it sounded. “Well, except for me. But that’s normal.”
“Take a look. That rag laying on the stairs is just skin. That rookie’s a day-running dog full of hellhound venom now, and we’d better get going if we’re gonna track him.”
“No need.” My mouth was numb. The knife slid into a sheath, I slid my right-hand gun free just in case. Everything inside me was shaking and shivering. An internal earthquake, bits popping and shattering inside my skull, puzzle pieces dropping into place.
Still too much I don’t know.
“No need,” I repeated. The Hall quivered, and a cold draft blew between us, rustling paper trash with a sound like drowned fingers slipping free of their skin. “I know where he’s going.”
* * *
We made it back to Galina’s just as afternoon shadows began lengthening. The heat was a hammerblow, the worst of the day, and Anya was white-knuckled on the steering wheel. The way some of the shadows were twisting oddly, I didn’t blame her. And with Saul riding terribly exposed back in the truck bed, it was a nerve-wracking slalom for me, too. Especially since I could swear we were followed, or at least watched. I just couldn’t tell who was doing the watching.
Anya slammed the absinthe bottle down on the butcher-block table. Venomous green liquid sloshed inside it. “All right. I’ve had it. Talk.”
Galina still kept the Jack Daniels in the cabinet above her ancient Frigidaire. I had to go up on tiptoe to get it, and I left a smear on the fridge’s chilly white enamel. The hellhound’s ichor was drying to a gummy black paste on me, and I was filthy with the ancient dust of Henderson Hill.
Low golden light fell over the herbs in Galina’s kitchen window, and the Sanctuary was in the door watching both of us, her hands tightly laced together. Her tone was soft, conciliatory. “He’s downstairs pacing. Theron is watching him. Gil’s trying to escape through the sunroom, and Hutch won’t come out of the vault.”
“Vault’s a good place for him.” I worked the top free, considered the bottle, and took a long pull. It burned going down, and I could pretend it was the alcohol heat making my eyesight waver. The gem purred on my wrist. “Nervous type, our Hutch. Has anyone told him I’m alive?”
“Jill—” Galina, trying to forestall the explosion.
It didn’t work. Anya Devi had waited long enough. “Kismet, start fucking talking. I’ve been keeping this town on the map since you disappeared, and now this? This? You just vanished and reappeared across a whole fuckload of empty space. Not even hellbreed are that fast. And why didn’t that dogsbody tear you up, huh? What did you do out there?”
The world stopped, and I had a visitation from a hallucination. I grimaced at the fridge. My hair hung in long strings, matted with hellbreed ick, and I didn’t hav
e nearly enough silver to tie into it. “Do you believe in God?”
“What?” My fellow hunter sounded about ready to have a heart attack.
I didn’t blame her. “It’s a simple fucking question, Devi. Do you?” I took another hit off the bottle, to stop myself from saying more.
“No.” Sharply, now. Liquid sloshing inside a bottle. “I believe in booze, and in ammo, and in being prepared. But God? No. Fuck no.”
“Neither do I.” It gave me no comfort to admit it. “I pray like everyone else, when my ass is going to be blown sideways. But I don’t believe. Hellbreed I believe in, and they predate anything we might think of as God, right? By a long shot.”
“I like history.” Anya drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “Really I do. And philosophy’s a great discipline too. Foundation of the humanities. But for fuck’s sweet everloving sake, Jill, not now.”
I held out my right hand. It shook, slightly, the tremor running through my bones making the flesh quiver. I didn’t have a lot of flesh on me to shiver, still scrawny as hell. My stomach twisted on itself, and I was guessing my metabolism was burning as hot as a Were’s for a while to speed the healing. My ribs were tender, and my shirt was a blood-soaked rag.
Also, I needed to calm down. Unfortunately, that didn’t look like it had any goddamn chance of happening.
I stared at the Frigidaire and the smears I’d left on it. I fouled everything I touched, didn’t I. I had from the beginning, from the moment I ruined my mother’s rootless life by being conceived. Then there were her fist-happy boyfriends, and the street boys, and Val. So many shapes of men.
And Mikhail? If I’d been better, faster, stronger, maybe he could have told me about the bargain he’d made with Perry. He wouldn’t have hidden it from me, which meant maybe Perry wouldn’t have been able to jerk me from one end to the other and play me so neatly—and finally, finally trap me.
“I remember what I did now,” I whispered. “I damned myself. Didn’t I.”
“Galina.” Scrape of a chair as Anya stood up. “Give us the room, huh? And keep the boys downstairs.”
“But—” Galina must have swallowed any objection, because the next sound I heard was her bare footsteps shushing away.
They sounded, for the first time, like an old woman’s shuffle instead of a girl’s light step.
Devi approached, softly but definitely making noise. “Something on your mind, Jill? You bleed clean, and I don’t know what that thing on your wrist is, but it isn’t hellbreed. I bet you went out into the desert and played one last game with Perry, and got free the only way you could.” Reasonable, even, spacing out the chain of logic. “That far, at least, I can get on my own. But what the fuck else, Jill? What else happened?”
I blinked, a trickle of warm salty water easing down my filthy cheek. The booze wasn’t doing any good. It might as well have been milk.
I am asking you to play Judas to a hellbreed. Either it was a hallucination who’d bought me breakfast and slipped Belisa’s leash, or it was real. If it was real, I was just given my marching orders, wasn’t I?
But orders from who, and why? And if it wasn’t real, was it because I wanted to go back to the Monde? Or because I was looking for a way out, any way out of what was going to happen next, so I could ease my conscience and go riding off into the sunset with Saul? Leaving Anya to pick up the pieces. If she could.
She’d certainly try. She was hunter.
What did that make me?
“Belisa’s dead.” I weighed both words, found them wanting. The rest stuck in my throat, but I had to force them loose somehow. “I shot her because I wanted to. It wasn’t a clean kill, Devi.”
“Yeah, well.” She paused. I sensed her nearness. “I don’t blame you. But that’s not the point, is it.”
Thank God she understood. But of course she did.
She was a hunter. We commit the sin of murder every night, we who police the nightside. When you’re trained to do that, when mayhem is an everyday occurrence, you have to have something to keep you from going over the edge. From making you worse than the things you hunt.
There’s a lot of words for it, but I’ve only ever found one.
“No. It’s not.” I capped the bottle again. “Perry’s planning something big. The caretaker out at Henderson Hill is in on it somehow. I’ve got to dig further.” The half-formed idea that had been trying to wriggle its way out from under a bunch of soupy terror finally came out into the light, and I let out a long sigh.
Thank God. One card in my hand, at least.
Devi folded her arms, leather creaking. “Okay. What do you need me to do?”
Because this was my city, right? I was the resident hunter. Even if I’d clawed my way up out of a grave and couldn’t remember my own fucking name, I was responsible. There was no getting away from it. If I did drive off with Saul, sooner or later I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.
And we all knew where that ended, didn’t we. With me between the rock and the hard place, where I had all the freedom in the world—but I could only make one choice, because of who I was. How I’d been made.
Oh yes, God exists, even though I don’t believe in Him. He absolutely exists. And He is a sadistic fuck.
I gave myself a mental shake. Focus, Jill. “Tell Galina to keep Saul here. Keep him in the vaults if you have to. He’s going to go nuts, but if you let him outside alone, he’s going to die.” Perry will kill him. Just to show me he can.
He wasn’t even safe with me, no matter how much I wanted him right where I could see him. How craven of me was it to let him come along to the Hill, even?
Self-loathing turned to spurs right under my skin. It was difficult to think through the noise in my head, but I managed.
Anya didn’t hesitate. “Done.”
Well, that was the easy part. “Call Montaigne and have him list Vanner as a line-of-duty casualty. Full honors and a memorial service. We don’t have a body and we never will.” The rag of skin left behind at the Hill wasn’t anything we could bury, and was eaten by banefire now anyway. A thought occurred to me, I went up on tiptoes again to put the JD away. If I kept looking at it I was going to finish the whole damn bottle, and with a metabolism running this hot it wouldn’t do any good. “Get hold of Badger. Have her pull every car Vanner’s owned in the last four years off the DMV and list them for you. Keep my pager, I’ll use that number and Galina’s to check in.” If I’m still alive to check in. If I pull this off.
“Okay.”
I wasn’t imagining it. She actually sounded relieved I’d started firing on all cylinders again. Stop it, I wanted to say. You’re a full-blown hunter too. What the fuck do you need me for?
Well, I was Santa Luz’s hunter. I was also the only damn person who could possibly worm Perry’s big plan out of him.
Lucky, lucky me.
“Get Hutch on the computer.” I couldn’t believe I was saying it, staring at the fresh smudges and smears I’d left on Galina’s cherished icebox. It looked like a thirties-era rendition of a spaceship, all rounded and solid, the Frigidaire logo polished but still showing little signs of age. Rusting and flaking, its chrome giving up the battle. Evan a Sanc can’t completely stop time. “Have him beg, borrow, hack or tap everything he can about Perry. Especially about what Perry was doing in the twenties. Tell him not to worry about anything, I’ll authorize whatever he wants to do retroactively. You understand? Give Hutch the T1 line and carte blanche. Get everything on Perry, but don’t let Hutch leave Sanctuary either, even if there’s books he needs at the shop. Have him find them in some other library, twist whatever arms you have to.”
“Jesus.” It was the first time I ever heard her sound shocked. “All right. What else?”
“Saul. Tell him…”
She waited.
“Tell him I’m coming back. Tell him even dying won’t stop me, and he’s not allowed to let himself waste, because I’m going to need him.”
She said nothing. Maybe she kn
ew it was a lie. But when I finally turned on my heel and looked at her, I found out her cheeks were wet too. Her hands were fists. The scar down her cheek flushed, and for a moment she was so beautifully ugly my heart threatened to crack.
“And you be careful. I’ll keep Perry as busy as I can, but this is likely to be nasty.”
She found her voice. “What about Gilberto?”
My conscience squirmed. I clamped down on it as hard as I could. “Gil’s coming with me. We’re going to visit someone.” If he wants to. If he decides to.
But he was my apprentice. I already knew what he’d say.
23
Melendez still lived on the north edge of the Riverhurst section, where the lawns were green and wide under the bloody dye of dusk. Sprinklers were going full tap among the fake adobes and the few Cape Cods, the expensive mock Tudors and other ersatz-glitz refugees. If you wanted truly antique houses you would go over to Greenlea where the yuppies elbowed each other over twenties mock-Victorians and organic boutiques. Or toward the edge of the suburbs, where there was a belt of poverty-stricken structures from the forties and fifties hanging on from before the blight of tofu housing development started.
Gilberto yanked the hand brake. I didn’t ask where he’d gotten the small black Volkswagen from; in return, he didn’t ask me what we were doing. He kept it below the speed limit, obeyed all traffic laws, and generally piloted the thing like an old granny. He even whistled tunelessly below his breath. Like he was having a good time.
Since Mama Zamba had disappeared, Melendez was no longer jester of the local voodoo court. He didn’t have Zamba’s appetite for gore and grotesque, but he did have a stranglehold on power—and he was in very good odor with his patron Chango. Anyone who parlays with a nonhuman intelligence is suspect in a hunter’s book, but I was living in a glass house at this point. Not only that, but Melendez had been…helpful, once or twice. In a limited sort of way, when he could see his own advantage.