Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  I was wrong.

  Oh, gods, it feels good. My head tipped back, my loose long hair streaming on a not-quite-wind. The chant bubbled up from the most secret part of me, my voice husking on the high accents, Power leaping to fill the words almost before I uttered them. “Agara tetara eidoeae nolos, sempris quieris tekos mael—”

  So far so good, I thought hazily, then it swallowed me whole.

  Blue crystal light rose above me. My rings spat a shower of sparks, my left shoulder blurring with pain. Riding the Power, the crystal walls singing, I reached across space and steel and vibrating air, hunting. Bits of shattered bone and decaying flesh turned bitter against my tongue. Christabel’s body was no more than an empty shell, no spark of life still housed in the fragile meat, not even the foxfire of nerves dying hours or days after the event. The cold, stiffening chill of death walked up my fingers with small prickling feet, taunting the ends of my toes.

  I opened my eyes.

  It was so familiar I could have wept. The chant poured out of me, sonorous, striking the blue crystal walls stretched up into infinity. I wore the white robe of the god’s chosen, belted with silver that dripped like chainmail in daggered loops. My bare feet rested on the bridge over an endless abyss; a silver stream of souls whirling past, drawn over the bridge by the irresistible law of Death’s renewal. I walked, the emerald on my cheek casting a spectral glow, enfolding me. The emerald’s light was a cocoon, keeping me safely on the bridge, preventing me from being flung into the well of souls. The abyss yawned below, the bridge quivering like a plucked harpstring. I did not have time to see if perhaps a demon’s soul waited there for me. I had been afraid that he would be here in Death’s halls, tied to me. I had been afraid that he would not be here—that mortal death held no place for a demon’s soul.

  How could my own cowardice have kept me from the thing I loved most, the only place I felt utterly safe?

  I raised my head slowly. I could not look, did not want to look.

  Had to look.

  The god of Death’s cipher, His slender dog’s head glossy black, regarded me. The same as He always had, since the first time I had ventured fully into the blue glow. He sat on the other side of the bridge, a dog-shape that was only a mask for His true form; the merciful mask that allowed me to come into Death and face the infinite terror of life’s ending. Though I was Necromance, Death’s touch frightened even me; no finite human likes to face the infinite. And yet, cheek by jowl with the terror was complete acceptance. Death’s touch was cool and forgiving, the laying-down of burdens, the easing of pain, the washing-away of obligation and of memory.

  And oh, how I wanted to feel that lightness, even as I struggled against it as all living things struggle, clinging to a life that is familiar even if painful. The agony I knew, not the mystery of what lay beyond the well, the secret Death whispered to every mortal thing sooner or later.

  I let out a dry, barking sob in the middle of my chant. Power crested, spilled over me, the god reached through me. The place inside me where He lived bloomed again, a hurtful ecstatic flower, and I became again the bridge a god uses to pull a soul from Death.

  Pressure, mounting against throat and eyes and the juncture of my legs, sharp pleasure. My head fell back, and a subliminal snap! echoed dryly against tiled walls. The chill numbness rose in my fingers, creeping up my arms. “Ask… your… questions…” I said softly, fierce joy rising and combating the chill. I had done it. I had done it once again.

  The intercom crackled, Gabe’s voice staticky and harsh, and Christabel Moorcock’s ghost moaned. There was no modulation to the ghost’s voice—of course not, the dead don’t speak as we do. There is nothing in an apparition’s tone but the flat finality of that most final punctuation to the act of living. The longer a body has been in a grave, the more horribly flat an apparition’s voice. People have screamed and fainted when an apparition speaks, and sometimes even other psions blanch. I’ve seen it happen while watching others of my kind work in training videos.

  Nobody likes to hear the dead speak.

  What’s that? Even in my chanting trance I realized something wasn’t right. Christabel’s low flat moan scraped across the surface of my words, tautened the Power holding the chant steady, sent a cold fiery finger up my back. It was wrong. No apparition should sound so… horrified.

  This isn’t right, I thought, but I held the apparition. Held it to the living, the chill starting in my fingers and toes, the cold marble-block feeling of death.

  Gabe asked again, and a feedback squeal ripped against my vulnerable psyche. I screamed, Power tearing through me again, my emerald spitting sparks and my rings crackling, showering golden sparks. Tiles shattered, and glass from a fluorescent tube chimed against the floor. I dug my heels and mental teeth in, the chant spilling and stretching, Power bucking, mental threads tearing with sharp, painful twitches.

  REMEMBER! REMEMBER! REMEMBER!

  For one vertiginous second I felt the caress of cold, mad fingers against my cheek, a blast of something too inhuman to be called thought, carrying undeniable meaning and repeating the single word over and over again. REMEMBER! REMEM—

  I tore away. The ghost screamed and my knife flashed up, cold steel between me and the hungry thing lunging at me, feeding from the Power I carried.

  “Japhrimel!” I screamed hoarsely. My shoulder gave a crunching flare of pain that ripped through my trance. A gunpowder flash of blue flame belled through the air, and my shoulders hit the wall, cracking more tile. Tile-dust and ceramic shards pattered down as more glass drifted to the floor, ground diamond-fine. Sudden dark plunged through the room—only one flickering, buzzing fluorescent remained lit on the far side of the body-bay.

  I slid down the wall, blinking, as Christabel Moorcock’s dead body sucked the last traces of her hungry ghost back into Death. I shuddered, my emerald burning on my cheek, and could not stop the dry coughing sobs welling up inside me. Tears slicked my cheeks, hideous relief and fresh grief welling up from a place too deep to name.

  Japhrimel was not in Death’s halls. Wherever he was now, he was lost to me completely.

  CHAPTER 8

  Fuck,” Gabe said for the twentieth time, rubbing at the back of her neck. “I’m sorry, Danny. Hades, that could have killed you.”

  I shrugged, using the small plastic stick to stir the coffee-flavored sludge with my left hand. My right lay in my lap, useless and discarded out of habit. The sound of the Spook Squad bustled around us, and I heard a Ceremonial on the other side of the partition dictating into a videorecorder about a suspected-telepath bank robbery. “Don’t worry about it, Gabe. I’m a lot tougher than I used to be.”

  He wasn’t there. He’s gone. Really gone. I told that voice to go away. It went without a struggle, but promised to return and taunt me the next time I tried to sleep.

  At least some things in my life were consistent.

  “That’s apparent.” She sighed, looking down at the heaped files on her desk. One stray dark strand of hair had fallen into her face, shocking in a woman of Gabe’s precision. Her sidearm was briefly visible as she rubbed at the back of her neck with both hands, massaging away a constant ache. Her eyes were wider than I’d seen them in a while, but at least she’d lost the cheesy pale color in her cheeks. “Gods. I’m so sorry, Danny.”

  “Don’t worry,” I repeated, suppressing the flare of irritation. She’s worried about me, she’s my friend, she doesn’t deserve my bad mood, I told myself for the fifth time, leaning back in the chair and shifting my gaze to the bottle of brandy. Gabe had offered us all a medicinal swig and I’d taken it, even though it might have been water as far as my new physiology was concerned. Jace had actually taken three long drafts before capping the bottle and handing it back to her. “At least it tells us a few things.”

  Jace took a long slurp of his coffee, holding the plasticine cup gingerly. “What does it tell you, Danny?” He sounded only mildly interested. His face was set and white, blue eyes bloodshot
and livid. The bones on his staff moved uneasily, one clacking against another. Fever-spots burned high up on each cheek.

  I appeared to have frightened them both. I supposed when the feeling of relief and crazed joy at daring the borders of Death again wore off, I would be frightened too. But I didn’t have the good sense or manners to be scared right now. I felt oddly as if I’d won a victory.

  There were only a few things that could turn an apparition into a ravening, hungry, vengeful ghost, most of them having to do with soul-destroying torture before the act of death. Ritual murders—what you might call “black magick,” Power gained through the expense of torturing and killing another sentient being—and genocides were high on the list. So was being attacked and contaminated by a Feeder—a psychic vampire. Among a population where Power was so common and so frequently used, it stood to reason that some would develop pathology in their processing of ambient Power and need to siphon off vitality from those around them, feeding on magickal or psionic energy in ever-increasing doses, until they got to the point where they could drain a normal person in seconds and a psion in minutes, depriving them of the vital energy needed to sustain life. Most Feeders were caught and treated while young, able to live out normal lives as psions with early intervention. When an older psion started to exhibit Feeder pathology, early intervention was key as well.

  But Feeders didn’t tear their prey apart. At least, not physically.

  It looked like a ritual murder to me, but it was too soon to tell. Whatever it was, Christabel Moorcock had suffered something so horrible even her ghost was insane with the echoes of the act.

  “Well.” I propped my boots up on Gabe’s desk, picked a sliver of tile out of my hair, dropped it in her overflowing wastebasket. “It tells us we’re dealing with some serious shit. That’s nice to know. If we can assume we’re dealing with a ritual murder, which would be my first guess, it also tells us that whatever was done to her reverberates after death. So that narrows down the type of magick we’re hunting. It tells us that someone is very, very determined; it tells us that a lot of preparation and time went into this. So there are some clues lying around. Nobody can work a magickal operation like that with surgical precision; there’s always some sloppy fucking mistake. I learned that doing bounties.” I deliberately did not look at Jace, though it was an implicit nod to him. He’d been my teacher, after all; had taught me more about bounties in a year than I could learn on my own in five.

  “Great.” Gabe rested her elbows on her desk, finally stopping the rubbing at her neck. The white rings around her eyes were starting to go away. I smelled pizza—someone must have decided to grab a quick dinner here. It reminded me I was hungry. As usual. “Caine’s having a fucking fit that you destroyed one of his body-bays. The holovids are going to be all over this, Danny. And if word gets out you’re working on it, the sharks will go into a frenzy.”

  “He’ll get tax compensation and the Hegemony HHS will step in since his body-bay was destroyed during a routine investigation.” My tone sharpened. “And nobody cares what I work on.”

  I was surprised by Jace’s snort. He took down half of his scalding coffee in one gulp, reached for the brandy bottle and, apparently changing his mind in midreach, settled back again. The flimsy folding chair squeaked. “Oh, really? You’re the Danny Valentine, world-class Necromance who retired rich at the top of her game after a hush-hush bounty hunt that nobody can dig up any information on except for the Nuevo Rio Mob War. Of course they’re going to eat it up. I’d be surprised if there weren’t reporters covering your house already, Danny.”

  He forgot to mention that I was the Necromance that had raised Saint Crowley the Magi from ashes, as well as worked on the Choyne Towers disaster. And my recent string of bounties had been profiled on a holovid show. Gabe was right, if it surfaced that I was working on the case all hell might very well break loose. Plus, it would be bad for the cops to admit they’d had to bring in a freelancer.

  “Fuck.” I took a long swallow of the scorching mud that passed for coffee around here. Decided to change the subject. Accentuate the positive, so to speak. “So we’ve got more information than we had before, and we have a direction.”

  “What direction?” Gabe asked.

  “Rigger Hall.” I shivered. “Nightmare Central.” Remember. Remember. Remember. The memory of the apparition’s soulless chant chilled me as much as the thought of Christabel’s note. I didn’t want to remember Rigger Hall. I had done very well for years without remembering. I wanted nothing more than to continue that trend.

  Silence crackled between us. The paper on her desk shifted uneasily, stirred by something other than wind.

  “What happened there, Danny?” Gabe looked miserable. The chaos of ringing phones and crackle of uneasy Power outside her cubicle underscored her words. The Ceremonial next door swore softly and started over again, I heard the click-whirr of a magnetic tape relay. “The inquiry was sealed, it would take a court order to open it, and that means more publicity. I’m supposed to keep this as quiet as possible. Once the press sinks their teeth in, we’ll be lucky to avoid a rush of copycats and Ludders attacking psions.”

  She was right. We would be lucky if nobody found out about it and was tempted to do a little cleansing-by-murder. And the first victim had been a normal. If there was even a hint that a murder of a normal had been committed by a psion, people got edgy.

  Most psions were well able to defend themselves from random street violence, even the idiots who didn’t take combat training. But still, it wore on you after a while, all the sidelong looks and little insults. We were trained in Hegemony schools, tattooed after taking Hegemony accreditation, and policed both internally and externally, but normals still feared us. We were useful to the Hegemony and a backbone source of tax funding as well as invaluable to corporations, but none of that mattered when the normals got into a snit. To them, we were all freaks, and it never did to forget that for very long, if at all.

  I said nothing, staring at the brandy bottles and their amber liquid. One bottle was almost empty. Inside it, the liquid trembled, responding to my attention.

  Jace hauled himself up to his feet, scooping up his staff. “I’m gonna go check for reporters outside.” He was gone before I had time to respond.

  I watched him vanish and looked back to find Gabe frowning at me. “What?” I tried not to sound aggrieved, shifted my boots on her desk. My mouth tasted grainy with the glass and porcelain dust from the morgue bay.

  “He’s upset,” she informed me, as if I didn’t already know. “What’s going on with you two, Danny?”

  “Nothing,” I mumbled, taking another scalding sip of coffee. “He stays at my house, does bounties with me. He sticks around, but… nothing really, you know. I can’t.” I can’t touch him. I won’t let him touch me.

  Her frown deepened, the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes deepening as well. “You mean you haven’t…” Her slim dark eyebrows rose as she trailed off and examined me as if I’d just announced I wanted a genderchange and augments.

  “I don’t know what it will do to him.” My left shoulder gave one muted throb that sent a not-unwelcome trickle of heat down my spine. And he’s not Japhrimel. Every time he tries to touch me, all I can think about is a fucking demon. Ha, ha. Get it, fucking a demon? “Can we not talk about my sex life, please?”

  “He gave up his Mob Family for you. Just walked away from it. From everything.” And he’s human. She didn’t say it, but I heard it clearly nonetheless. Even someone she considered a traitor was better than me mourning a demon, apparently.

  “Rigger Hall,” I cut across her words. The nearly-empty brandy bottle jittered slightly on the edge of her desk, paper ruffled again. “I don’t know a lot, Gabe. But what I do know, I’ll tell you.”

  She stared at me for a long fifteen seconds, her dark eyes fathomless, her emerald sizzling with light. Her aura flushed an even deeper red-purple. “Fine. Have it your way, Danny. You always do anywa
y.” She leaned back in her chair, the casters squeaking slightly, and plucked the cigarette from behind her ear. In blatant defiance of the regs, she flicked out her silver Zijaan and inhaled, then sent twin streams of smoke out through her nostrils. A flick of the wrist, and a stasis-charm hummed into life, the smoke freezing into ash and falling on her desk. It was a nice trick.

  I swallowed dryly. “Rigger Hall.” The words tasted like stale burned chalk. “I was there from… let’s see, I was tipped from home foster care to the psi program when I was five. So I would have been there, clipped and collared, for about… eight years before the inquiry.” I shuddered. My skin prickled with phantom gooseflesh again.

  I looked at my right hand, twisting itself further into a claw. It ached, not as much as it had, but still… My perfect, poreless golden skin was tingling in instinctive reaction, my breath coming short and my pulse beating hot and thready in my throat.

  “Hades,” Gabe breathed, a lungful of smoke wreathing her face before falling, dead ash, onto the papers drifting her desk. “Eddie does the same thing. What happened?”

  “The Headmaster was a slimy piece of shit named Mirovitch.” My breath came even harsher. My voice was as dry-husky as it had been right after the Prince of Hell had tried to strangle me. “He was part of the Putchkin psi program. Got a diplomatic waiver to come over and reform the Hegemony program with Rigger as an experimental school. What nobody knew was that he was a Feeder, and had been for some time. He was well-camouflaged, and he didn’t want to be cured. Instead, he wanted his private playground, and he got it.”

  “A Feeder?” Gabe shivered. “Gods.”

  “Yeah. He was slick, and we were just… just kids. It was…” For a moment my voice failed me, sucked back into my throat. I set my coffee cup down on the floor beside my chair, feeling the floor rock slightly underneath me. Or maybe it wasn’t the floor—maybe I was shaking. “It was really bad, Gabe. If you stepped out of line—if you were lucky— you got put in a Faraday cage in a sensory-dep vault. It was… A couple of the kids committed suicide, and Mirovitch made one of the Necromance apprentices sleep in the room that… He went insane and clawed his own eyes out. They wrote it up as an incorrectly-done training session.”