Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Who else do I have to trust? You, Gabe, Eddie. More than I’ve ever had in my whole life. I loved you, Jace; I still do. The very thought was shaded orange with bitterness. Why couldn’t he have stayed with me instead of disappearing? Why couldn’t he have trusted that I could protect myself instead of thinking he had to return to Rio to “save” me? Why?

  I would have taken on Santino, taken on Lucifer himself, for Jace; I would have counted it small potatoes. But now, with the shadow of a demon between us, I could not give Jace what he needed. Whether I could resurrect Japhrimel or not, I couldn’t be what Jace wanted me to be. Who I used to be. The woman he’d fallen in love with.

  Maybe it was time to let him go.

  He looked down at me, his blue eyes dark and his mouth a straight line. “I’ve never seen you the way you were with Polyamour,” he managed, finally. “And I… Chango, Danny. This is all fucking wrong.”

  You can say that again. And I wasn’t doing Poly any favors, no matter what it looked like to you. “I know.” I swallowed dryly. The words I could never say to him, the silences he’d used against me, hung between us; an even bigger wall than the demon who had Fallen and altered me. I settled for giving in. “Fine. Come with me to Sukerow’s. But then I want you to get some rest. If I go back into Rigger-fucking-Hall, I need you fresh. Okay?”

  He nodded. Some weight he’d been carrying for a long time seemed to slip from his shoulders, and he sighed, pushing his blond hair back with stiff fingers.

  It lasted only a moment, the dark caul sliding over his head. I blinked. His face turned into a deathshead, and my entire body chilled, nipples peaking, my breath catching. The stairwell seemed to go dark, the emerald on my cheek spat a single green spark—and the moment passed, my eyes opening, Jace looking just the same. His lips were moving.

  “—Sukerow’s, I’ll catch a few winks. Sounds good.”

  I stayed where I was, afraid to move, staring up at Jace’s face. He looked down at me, his eyes soft, and then lifted his free hand. His knuckles brushed my cheek. “You don’t have to explain, Danny. ’Slong as I get to hang around you, I’m a happy man. ’Kay?” There was no hint of sarcasm or of the anger we used against each other. Just simple tenderness, a tone I’d heard Eddie use with Gabe. My heart rose into my throat, lodged there.

  The stairwell was empty except for Jace and me. There was no breath of threat or magick other than my own pulsing demon-fed Power and Jace’s bright thorny Shaman glow. I swallowed my heart, hearing a dry click from my throat. “Jace, I—”

  “We better go get Hollin Sukerow and see what he has to say,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

  I nodded, turned on wooden feet, and led Jace down the stairs.

  CHAPTER 26

  Sukerow’s home was a ramshackle brownstone apartment building on Ninth. We clambered out of the hover streetside, then the AI deck took the hover up to hold in a parking-pattern. I slid my sword partly free and checked the blade, good bright steel, then blew out a long breath. Moved my head from side to side, stretching out my neck muscles.

  Jace examined me, his fingers tapping his swordhilt. He’d left his staff in the hover, and he touched the butt of a plasgun. “You look like you’re expecting a less-than-warm welcome.”

  No shit. So do you. What else could fucking go wrong today? I winced inwardly. It was tempting Fate to even think that too loudly. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” I glanced up at the building. “According to my datpilot, he’s up on the third…” The sentence trailed off. Hang on. What the hell’s that?

  The third-floor corner apartment had a fine set of shields blending with the physical structure of the building. Sukerow was a Skinlin, and his balcony was green even this late in autumn. He probably rented a plot in a co-op garden, but would grow some of the more common things at home. As I watched, some leaves fluttered on a breeze contrary to the desultory chill wind swirling anonymous trash along the sidewalk. The shields pulsed, a streamer of energy spiraling through them, and I drew my sword, the scabbard reversed along my left forearm to act as a shield. “Fuck!” I yelled. “Call Gabe! Stay here!” Then I bolted for the building.

  I could have leapt for the balcony, but that would mean using an amount of Power that would react with Sukerow’s torn shields, which were quivering and sending out staticky bursts of fear. Instead, I ripped the maglocked security door open with a quick snapping jerk, streaked into the lobby, and started pounding up the stairs.

  Second floor. The tops of my toes barely touched every fourth step, demon speed making me blur. My sword whirled and tucked up behind my arm, the hilt pointing down in my right hand, vibrating with my uneasiness. I reached the third floor, kicked the fire door open, and dove into the hall.

  Sukerow’s door, apartment 305, was slightly open. Yellow electric light leaked out around its borders. I rolled up, gaining my feet, and pounded down the hall.

  The next few moments take on a hazy shutter-click quality. First click—a short hallway, a spreading sticky stain of Power dyeing the air with leprous blue light. Linoleum square in front of the door, a welcome mat of twisted and knotted raffia and strands of plasilica. Each knot held a protective charm, and I shatter every single one of them, the entire rug bursting into flame.

  Click. Down the short hall inside the apartment, my sword up, blue light twisting on the steel. What would have taken me months before Japhrimel altered me—months of pouring Power into the blade, shaping it, sleeping with it, breathing my life into it—is done in a few seconds, sparks popping, the steel made mine, answering to my will. At the end of the front hall, I see hardwood-looking laminate flooring and the edge of a chalk circle. The leprous blue light grows intense, a small starlike point of brilliance.

  I see Hollin Sukerow on his knees in front of a thin, tall shape I had only seen in nightmares for the past two-and-a-half decades. The tall figure stands, elbows akimbo, silhouetted against the light in its hand, something pulled from the yawning mouth of the Skinlin’s shattered body.

  Click. Blood explodes. Footsteps behind me. Raising my sword, the kia sharp and deadly as it had ever been in Jado’s dojo, blowing the glass out of the windows and stripping the light away, making it stream in twisted livid flames. My boots skidding on the laminate as I fling my weight back, trying to stop.

  Click. Jace hurtles past me, his own battlecry ripping the air with thorns, a Shaman’s glow suddenly streaming from him. He moves without thought, heedlessly fast, as if he’s trying to protect me, place his body between me and the shadow-thing that curls in on itself like paper in a hot flamedraft. My left hand drops the scabbard, shoots forward to haul Jace back.

  Click. The shape spins, the light gives a glaring flash like a holovid reporter’s stillcam. The iron smell of blood in the air mixes with a reek of dust, offal, magick, aftershave, chalk, and leather. The scent I know, the scent of my quarry in this hunt.

  I hear a high, thin giggle that dries all the saliva in my mouth and makes the scars on my back reopen. They blaze, sharp agony making my back arch as if the lash and fléchette had just split open my skin for the first time. My fingers close on empty air. Jace dives, his dotanuki blurring upward to slash through the figure.

  Click. A coughing roar. Hollin Sukerow’s last despairing, choked scream. More blood explodes. Jace yells hoarsely, his sword ringing in one awful high-pitched cry of tortured and stressed metal. Backlash of Power fills the air, smacking at the walls. My boots grind long scars in the floor as I am flung back, my left elbow crumpling the edge of a wall and denting the steel strut just under the plasticine and Sheetrock.

  Click. I see the face—pocked with the scars of teenage acne, dark eyes soulless and mechanical, greasy dark-blond hair and the wink of silver at his throat. A pad of fat under each jawline, the ravages of age clearly visible. He looks oddly familiar, though I don’t recognize him.

  Click. The leprous blue light gives one last flare. The stick-thin shadow vanishes. Another burst of that fetid stench—the rancidness
of the Headmaster’s Office—and footsteps run toward the window. A high, piercing giggle drives me to my knees, the gray of shock closing over my vision, the mark on my left shoulder squeezing down and sending red agony through me, shocking my heart back into beating.

  I cough. Time snaps and speeds back up. I hear sirens.

  It had taken only a few moments, all told. I crawled forward, my sword clattering to the ground, and took Jace in my arms. “—oh gods—” My voice sounded small after the thunderclap of demon Power.

  Jace’s blue eyes were glazed and thoughtful, the thorny Shaman tattoo on his cheek stock-still. His body was light—too light—even in my demon-strong arms. Too light because his throat and belly had been torn open, both in one painless gush.

  I reached blindly for Power, my rings sparking, but it was too late. He was already gone. Sometimes not even a Necromance can bring back someone whose internal organs have been yanked out; whose throat has been slashed as well. We are the healers of mortal wounds, we who walk in Death’s shadow, but this wound I could not heal.

  The bathroom stench of a battlefield rose up around me. Hollin Sukerow’s body lay inside a messy, uncompleted chalk circle, the Feeder glyphs wavering and a tide of quick-decaying ectoplasm covering everything in its wet slug-trail gleam, steaming as it rotted away. The glyphs tore and twisted—his hand must have been trembling.

  And standing beside him had been a man whose face seemed only slightly familiar. But if I paged through my yearbook, I knew where I would find the younger version of that face.

  Right next to Kellerman Lourdes’s name.

  And I knew what I’d seen, even if my eyes were blurred with tears. I’d seen the stick-thin figure of Headmaster Mirovitch, his hands on his hips, silhouetted against the diseased blue light. I had smelled him.

  Blood and other fluids bathed my arm. “Jace,” I whispered. His head lolled back obscenely far, throat slashed all the way down to the vertebrae; the wet red of muscle sliced too cleanly for a blade. The flesh had parted like water; I saw the purple of the esophagus, a glaring white chip of cervical spine.

  His sword, the blade twisted into a cockeyed corkscrew, chimed against the ground as his hand released it. “Jace.” My tattoo burned as I drew on all the Power available to me. The room shook and groaned. Books fell off shelves, and glass implements broken by my kia and the welter of backlashed Power from the Headmaster and Keller shivered into smaller pieces. I poured out every erg of my demon-given strength to do what a Necromance should do—bring a soul back, and seamlessly heal a hopelessly shattered body.

  The light rose from him. I could still see it, the shining path made by a soul leaving the body, the foxfire of dying nerves giving a last painless flash. The blue crystal hall of Death rose around me, my emerald drenching the hall in swirling green light as I stood on the Bridge over the abyss. Jason! I howled his name, the crystal walls humming with the force of my distress, and then the God of Death came.

  Anubis stalked to the very edge of the abyss in His full form, the obsidian-black, smoothly muscled skin of His arms and legs gleaming wetly. His ceremonial kilt rang and splashed with light, gold and gems glittering; His collar was broad and set with more jewels. The god’s slender dog’s head dipped, regarding me with one merciless, pitiless Eye, a black Eye that held a spark of crystalline blue light in its orb. He stood at the end of the Bridge anchored in the hall of Death, the Bridge I had walked so many times to bring a soul back.

  His arms crossed, one holding the ceremonial flail, the other holding the crook. His will stopped me on the Bridge, my not-self wearing the white robe of the god’s acolytes, my golden feet bare on the stone. Please! It was an agonized cry, with all the force of my Will behind it—the sorcerous will I had learned to use, used all my life; the will that pushed Power to do my bidding, the will every practitioner had to create and use if he or she expected to cast any spell. My throat swelled with the agony of that cry, a physical ache in a nonphysical space. Please, no! No! I will give you anything, I will go in his stead, please, my Lord, my god, give him back!

  The God of Death looked down on me, His daughter, His faithful servant, and shook His head.

  Bare, laid open, I struggled against that kind implacability. I offered it all: my own life, my service, every erg of power and heat and love I possessed. I could never give Jace what he wanted from me, but letting him go down into Death’s dry country… No. The stubbornness flared, and for the first time in my memory, my god paused.

  One hand extended, one finger, weightless, touched the crown of my head. There was a price for the balancing of Death’s scales. Was I prepared to pay? Was that what he was asking me?

  Anything, I whispered. I will give You anything I have, anything You ask.

  And Death paused again. I read the refusal in His ageless, infinite eyes, and struggled uselessly against it. My cheek burned, the emerald flaring with drenching light, driving back the blue flame for one eternal moment. On and on, the strings of my psyche snapping, tearing, rent…

  I was shoved back, pushed out of the space between worlds, rammed choking and sobbing back into my body. I cradled Jace’s empty husk to my chest, tilted my head back and screamed again, a sound so massive it was soundless, rising out of me like light from a nuclear fission. I was still screaming when the cops arrived, still screaming when Gabe fought through the press of sound, her nose bleeding from the wall of psychic agony. She fell to her knees, taking me in her arms. Her human warmth folded around me while I sobbed, mercifully robbed for a short while of every shred of demon power. I screamed again and again with only a broken human voice while I clutched the breathing, living body to my chest.

  Breathing, yes. Living, yes. But nobody had to tell me that the soul inside was gone. My demon-given Power had mended Jason Monroe’s shattered body in a mimicry of a sedayeen’s miraculous ability to heal, but he was dead all the same.

  CHAPTER 27

  I folded my hands carefully around the paper cup while late-afternoon sun slanted over the street. Gabe spoke softly to someone, they were processing the scene. I huddled in the back of an ambulance hover, a brown woolen blanket around my shoulders, my clothing stiff with dried blood and noisome fluids. I shivered, the black liquid masquerading as coffee inside the paper cup slopping against the sides.

  It had been the middle of the day, everyone at work, nobody home except Hollin Sukerow. Which was a good thing, my scream and the explosion of loosed Power had taken out a good chunk of the building. Debris littered the street, smoke clearing on the air. It looked as if a wandering shark had just cruised by and taken a big half-circle bite out of the brownstone.

  I shut my eyes. Gray shock closed over the darkness behind my eyelids again. Again the spiked warmth from the mark on my shoulder fought it back. Tears leaked hotly between my eyelids, dripping down my cheeks. My tangled hair was full of dust and blood and dirt.

  They had taken Jace’s body to the hospital. He was breathing, his heart beating, everything apparently fine… except it wasn’t. It was an empty shell, an empty house, the soul fled but the housing that contained it intact. All the Power granted me by a demon’s touch could not change Death’s decree.

  My sword, tucked up against my leg, hummed softly. I sat on the cold rubberized floor of the ambulance hover and exhaled softly. The whine of a slicboard rattled over the scene, and I realized my lips were still shaping the prayer to Anubis.

  Anubis et’her ka. Se ta’uk’fhet sa te vapu kuraph. Anubis et’her ka. Anubis, Lord of the Dead, Faithful Companion, protect me, for I am Your child. Protect me, Anubis, weigh my heart upon the scales, watch over me, Lord, for I am Your child. Do not let evil distress me, but turn Your fierceness upon my enemies—

  I stopped, choked on the rising tears, and forced them back down. Just like a kid, crying because a toy had been taken away, sobbing messily and completely.

  No. I was not a child. I would never be a child again.

  “Thank the gods you’re here,” Gab
e said.

  I opened my eyes to see Eddie heeling his slicboard as the cell powered down, ending with the board neatly racking itself against the step of the ambulance hover. “How is she?” For once, Eddie didn’t growl or sneer. Instead, he pushed his shaggy hair back from his face and stole a few worried glances at me in between examining Gabe. He didn’t even glance up at the hole in the side of the brownstone.

  Gabe shrugged, an eloquent movement. “Danny?”

  Both of them approached me, Eddie’s rundown boots scraping the wet pavement. His long dirt-colored coat flapped. His aura, smelling of earth and pines, sweat and beer, meshed with Gabe’s swirling Necromance sparkles.

  I swallowed bile, looked up at their worried faces. Sunlight glittered in my reactive-dry eyes. I blinked.

  “I didn’t grab him in time. He was moving quicker than I’ve ever seen him move. He threw himself at Keller and Mirovitch—” I repeated it through the lump in my throat, my voice barely recognizable. Hoarse and wrecked, the voice of a stunned survivor of some natural disaster on the niner holonews. Change the channel, flip the station. Repeat as necessary.