The Finest in Fantasy from Jennifer Roberson
BLOOD AND BONE
Life and Limb
Sinners and Saints
THE SWORD-DANCER SAGA
Sword-Dancer
Sword-Singer
Sword-Maker
Sword-Breaker
Sword-Born
Sword-Sworn
Sword-Bound
Sword-Bearer*
(The Sword-Dancer Saga is also available in the Novels of Tiger and Del omnibus editions)
CHRONICLES OF THE CHEYSULI
Shapechanger’s Song
(Shapechangers & The Song of Homana)
Legacy of the Wolf
(Legacy of the Sword & Track of the White Wolf)
Children of the Lion
(A Pride of Princes & Daughter of the Lion)
The Lion Throne
(Flight of the Raven & A Tapestry of Lions)
THE KARAVANS UNIVERSE
Karavans
Deepwood
The Wild Road
THE GOLDEN KEY
(with Melanie Rawn and Kate Elliott)
*Coming soon from DAW
Copyright © 2021 by Jennifer Roberson.
All Rights Reserved.
Jacket design and photo illustration by Adam Auerbach.
Photo elements courtesy of Shutterstock.
Edited by Betsy Wollheim.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1878.
Published by DAW Books, Inc.
1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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Ebook ISBN: 9780756416324
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—MARCA REGISTRADA
HECHO EN U.S.A.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
This novel is dedicated to
Candy Camin
Brian and Frances Gross
Tom and Linda Watson
for great friendship;
And always to my editor
Betsy Wollheim
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Jennifer Roberson
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Epilogue
Author’s Note
About the Author
PROLOGUE
Wait a minute.” I did not want to believe Remi’s words. I really, really did not want to believe what he was telling me. “Jack the Ripper? The Jack the Ripper?”
Remi, my Texas cowboy semi-brother, or cousin, or beta, or twin-by-heavenly matter—I still wasn’t quite sure how the celestial genome expressed itself in human terms—nodded, wholly serious.
I let the letter drop to the table. It landed face-up, showing old-style cursive handwriting, nearly indecipherable. Beside it, placed intentionally face-down, the gruesome photograph that had accompanied it in the manila envelope bearing our names:
Gabriel. Remiel. I was the Gabriel half of the pairing. “Nuh-uh.” I shook my head. “No way in hell.”
Night, now, and the Zoo was closed, but had livened up considerably, in a sick sort of way, upon delivery of the photograph and duplication of what Remi had explained was Jack the Ripper’s infamous From Hell letter, and a white styrofoam restaurant box containing not dinner leftovers, but a murdered woman’s kidney.
We were upstairs in the wood-walled common room of the Zoo Club. It was an old tin-roofed roadhouse/cowboy dancehall/restaurant/pool parlor/hotbed of annoying country music that had been assigned to Remi and me, strangers but a matter of days before. Our new home was a rustic, utilitarian apartment built over the dance floor, which meant, to my immense dismay, that the thump and twang of live country music wafted its way up the staircase and shook the floors. Modest bedrooms numbered two, plus kitchen, three-quarter bath, and a den doubled as office and dining room containing table, chairs, sofa bed, TV, books, computer.
I switched my attention from my cowboy-hatted “cousin” to Grandaddy, a tall, bearded man with a cascade of springy white hair, standing beside the table. I appealed to him for any kind of sanity that might be found in what was now my new normal. “No way, right?”
Grandaddy’s lips in the depths of his pepper-and-salt beard were compressed as he lifted the letter from the table, but he said nothing. Did not so much as acknowledge he’d heard a word. I knew better than to believe he hadn’t heard me; when the man held his tongue, the man held his tongue.
Remi’s Texas drawl was pronounced as he removed his cream-colored hat and placed it brim-up on the table. “He did go warnin’ us, Grandaddy did. Legends come to life, I think you said, wasn’t it?” He glanced over, waited for a response from Grandaddy, but none was forthcoming so the attention switched back to me. “Black dogs we’ve met, and demons. These days, what’s to say an infamous human murderer can’t climb his way out of hell? I mean, the Morrigan herself is living in a motorhome but a half-mile up the road. The freakin’ Goddess of Battles.”
But. Please, let there be a but.
When Grandaddy continued to make no answer, still examining the letter, I raised my voice. “Look, I get that things are different now, but the Jack the Ripper? Seriously?”
Whereupon he shot me an annoyed if distracted glance and walked out of the room, taking the letter with him.
“That helps,” I muttered.
Remi decided to play pinch hitter in place of our paterfamili
as—angelfamilias?—as he finger-combed his short hair compressed by hatband. “I think it’s true. That it’s the actual Jack the Ripper. Demons gotta come from somewhere, right? Maybe all of ’em are nasty-bad dead humans like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and what-not, now acting as Satan’s soldiers. Jack the Ripper would have taken the down elevator to the devil’s basement when he died, certain sure. And then those hell vents popped open.”
I ran a hand through loose long hair, shook it back. “Well, if it is and we find him, we can ask him who he really is. Was. Solve the whole mystery. ‘Hey there, Jack, my man—who the fuck are you? People have been guessing for decades!” I yanked out a chair, dropped into it, ignored the queasy roll of revulsion in my gut as I fastidiously pushed the kidney’s clamshell as far away as possible. The box squeaked faintly as it slid across the table’s polyurethaned wood.
Remi raised one brow. “Well, what do you think it is? Some total stranger gaslighting us? Or someone—some thing—that knows who, what, and where we are.”
The answer was implicit. “Demon.” Which still felt a little weird to say so matter-of-factly. “But he doesn’t have to be the Jack the Ripper. Could be just some surrogate claiming the name and the fame—wait. Wait.” But Grandaddy had taken the letter, so I couldn’t check. I sat forward, tapped the tabletop with a stiffened finger for emphasis. “It’s the same one. The same demon. The woman who tried to strangle me out back the other night. She said I could call her Legion, or even Iñigo Montoya, and that’s how the letter was signed. It’s got to be her behind this.”
He thought about it, then shrugged. “Don’t matter. Name’s a name. It’s the actions that count. Be it him, her, or it.”
I rubbed at my scarred eyebrow. “Guess that’s our new assignment. Find this son of a bitch and exorcise the hell out of it.” I preferred to think of it as an it. I remembered the woman—the it—very clearly, considering we’d damn near become very up close and personal in ways generally considered other than evil. “So it’s body-hopping. It’s not really Jack the Ripper.”
Remi was not convinced. “Could be, though. Could just be what’s left of a crazy-bad sicko bastard. If souls are real, maybe that’s what got out. His soul, and now he’s possessing people.”
“And recreating the murders.” Deliberately I did not allow myself to look at the styrofoam box containing what we feared was a dead woman’s kidney.
For an uncomfortable moment I got stuck on the concept that Jack the Ripper had attempted to kill me. Not because he was a guy and the demon who’d had a hand on my junk was most definitely a female—a body-hopping, gender-swapping demon, apparently—but because the idea of nearly being offed by an infamous murderer from another century was hard to swallow.
Remi was aware of my discomfort. “Well then, what else might it be? Grandaddy said demons can make legends real, even actual historical folk. Is the Ripper’s soul possessing people, or is it something else playing around with humans? We’d best know, if we hope to kill it. You’re the folklorist.”
Thus challenged, I ran through possibilities. “Tulpa,” I offered finally. “Could be a thought-form, a figment of imagination.”
Remi’s tone was dry. “Tulpa . . . not Tulsa?”
“Not in Oklahoma the last I heard, no. It’s ancient Tibetan mysticism, primarily, though there’s a small community of people today convinced they can actually make tulpas real with enough mental concentration. The belief is that tulpas aren’t demonic, and they aren’t truly a manifestation of your subconscious. They are created but aren’t an extension, or subject, of the devil.” I thought more deeply. “Hmmm.”
“Hmmm?”
“Well . . . supposedly a tulpa can, at some point, be allowed to possess its creator’s body.”
Remi caught my thought. “Sounds like demonic possession to me.”
I chewed absently at my bottom lip. “Supposedly they’re not real, and certainly not considered dangerous. They’re thought forms. But . . .”
He nodded, looking pensive. “Things are different, now; got made abundantly clear when we exploded two black dogs the other day . . . what did you call them? Barges?”
“No, not barges—they’re not boats. Barghests.”
“They aren’t real, are they? Just folklore, right?” Remi indicated the container with its human body part. “Tulpa or no tulpa, Ripper or no Ripper, might could say that whatever did this is entirely real and should be considered dangerous.”
Yeah, so we might could. And I was done just sitting there. Done debating, even inside my own head. As I rose, I shoved away the chair with the backs of my calves, felt the twinges of a very stiff and sore body—laying a motorcycle down on asphalt tends to leave reminders—and walked out of the room swiftly in heavy biker boots, bent on finding Grandaddy, our resident angel, a seraph, an agent of heaven with a direct line to the celestial Penthouse-in-the-Sky and damn well ought to have answers to these kinds of questions.
Such as how to find and destroy Jack the Ripper.
CHAPTER ONE
I attempted suicide-by-stairs by heading down them faster than a stiff, bruised body could handle comfortably—I felt eighty-eight, not twenty-eight—played a hasty game of grab-and-snatch with a rough wooden bannister, and finally hit the floor upright on the soles of my boots rather than landing on head or hip. It wasn’t a silent descent, but it got me there.
Dim downstairs, and quiet. Dangling string-lights draped at the back windows by the pool tables lent pale illumination. A garland of matching lights stretched along the barback mirror, glinting off glass, copper, and chrome, turned polished wood to liquid. I smelled a melange of alcohol ranging from mellow, tame beer to more robust stout; the thin astringency of wine and the deep, warm odors of Scottish whiskey and American bourbon.
“Grandaddy? You here?”
No answer.
“Grandaddy?” Nothing. I gave the other possibility a try, this time asking for the African god who doubled as a bartender. “Ganji?”
No angelic being. No African Orisha.
The latter, who happened to be Lord of the Volcanoes, was probably up on the once-burned mountain—part of a dormant volcano cluster—behind the Zoo, soothing her with song, promising life after a long sleep. So long as he kept the volcano asleep for a few more centuries, time enough for me to exit the earth in a perfectly normal, boring fashion sans lava or pyroclastic explosions. But I had no idea where Grandaddy might have gone. Or why he walked out in the middle of a conversation while examining the letter purportedly from the Jack the Ripper.
I hesitated a moment because, well, while this wasn’t exactly a horror movie complete with creepy music, after the discoveries of the last few days of my unexpectedly new life I figured all bets were off. Then I mentally shoved that thought aside and crossed the parquet dance floor to the front door, slid the latch and twisted the deadbolt, pulled it open, and looked beyond the porch and its steps into the darkness of an empty parking lot. Not even the big guitar-shaped neon marquee sign advertising live country music was lighted.
The occasional vehicle hummed its way down Route 66 in the darkness, thumping across cold weather expansion seams in the road, but at this time of the morning, an hour, maybe two, before false dawn, things were quiet. The air was markedly cool, unlike the warmth of the summer day earlier, and made me wish for a little something more than thin black t-shirt. I smelled pine trees, the parking lot’s damp dirt, and the heavy moisture of incipient rain.
I reached out. Not physically. But with the—whatever—that made me sensitive to places. All I got back was a sense of the color green, flickering at the inner edges of my vision. The Zoo—the domicile, in some mongrel hybrid of angelic/demonic-speak—had been cleared of surrogates and no longer could any of them just come waltzing through the door and out onto the dance floor. Whoever had sent the letter and kidney had not set foot in the place.
I d
id not shout out into the night, after the “vandalism” of a few nights before, when Remi and I had been set upon by a slew of dead animals. As this resulted in us shooting up the place to take out two demons masquerading as ghosts, I figured it was smart not to go calling attention to myself by bellowing into the darkness. Maybe Grandaddy had an understanding with the police, but until I knew that I wanted to play it safe.
Behind me a light flickered. A second pulse caught the corner of my eye. I spun, hand going at once to the butt of the pistol sheathed in the shoulder holster under my left arm, but I lowered my arm when I realized it very well might be Remi, come hunting Grandaddy as well, or our resident African god.
No cowboy, though. Still no Orisha. Beneath more string-lights, crammed back into his corner near the front door the rearing, gape-mouthed grizzly stared blankly out of a broken black-glass eye. I’d shattered it earlier with a hurled cue ball. A trace of a chill touched the back of my neck, slid halfway down my spine. I suppressed a shiver. The grizzly was nothing more than a stuffed animal once again, but still fearsome to look upon. Especially when he—it—had done a damn fine imitation of an attack intended to slice-and-dice me.
All of the animals had been returned to their displays throughout the Zoo. Bobcat, mountain lion, even Remi’s tusked hava-pig-thing. It was dim enough indoors that I couldn’t tell if the bullet holes in their hides had been patched over, but it was downright spooky to see all those glossy fake-ass eyes staring back. Dead, maybe, but they’d been dead before and damn near did me in.
As I lingered on the threshold, I reached out again, stretched myself, gathering up the interior stillness necessary to lose myself in parts and pieces, in the architecture of my gift. Grandaddy had guided it, had guided me, but for years I hadn’t actually intentionally summoned it the way I had upon the mountain at Grandaddy’s just the other day. For one thing, I’d been in prison less than two weeks before; I saw so much bad shit on the surface of that place that I didn’t care to explore the boiling hostility beneath.
Sinners and Saints Page 1