Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  The thing I was chasing bolted across the field on the west side of the house. I jabbed my left hand forward as I ran, making a complicated nonphysical gesture. The bloodstone ring on my left third finger shot a single bolt of thin red light. I’d sunk four or five trackers into this ring, little runespells meant to latch onto a bounty, an unshakeable magickal bloodhound. I was secondarily talented as a runewitch, able to use the runes of the Nine Canons with more accuracy and ease than most; I could make my own trackers rather than buying them from a Shaman or a Skinlin dirtwitch.

  I gathered myself and hurtled forward, following the thin smear of red light, using every iota of demon speed. Heard the whining sound as the tracker slammed home. Then, something shifted.

  POW!

  There was a massive sound like every bell in the world struck at once. I dropped to my knees, all speed gone. Reflex took over, earthed the Power, red crackling along my skin in rippled lines. The Power meridians along my skin burned, subsided as I shook my head, my hair slipping forward over my shoulders. My braid had come loose. I sat there on my knees, blinking, my sword gone dark since I no longer needed it.

  The thing, whatever it was, had done something… strange. Just popped out of existence and thrown the tracker back at me.

  Nothing human could do that. The trackers were meant to hang on to even a combat-trained human psion. I should have been able to follow that thing to the ends of the earth.

  We’re not dealing with earthly things here, Danny. Get with the program, will you?

  I levered myself to my feet, reflexively. If I’d still been human, the backlash would have knocked me out, possibly even burned me physically along my Power meridians. As it was, I shook the stunning sound out of my head, gained my feet, and took a deep breath, my almost-demon body taking a split second to deal with the burning from the snapped tracker. I cocked my head. “What the bloody blue fuck?” I barely even realized I was whispering aloud.

  The whine of hovercells crested with an abused squeal of antigrav, and a massive shattering sound slammed into me. I was tied to the shields on the house, so I felt a sharp pain, like a tooth yanked from its socket, as the layers of energy, both mine and Japhrimel’s, imploded. It would take unimaginable force to break those shields, even with both Japhrimel and me away. Only one thing could supply that kind of force.

  Well, two, actually. A god, which was unlikely—gods just don’t attack people like that. They have other ways to make their displeasure known.

  Or a demon. If presented with a choice like that I wouldn’t even lay odds on it; there wasn’t any point.

  This just keeps getting better.

  I sheathed my sword again, and turned to look back at the house just as fire lanced the sky.

  For the second time in as many minutes, my legs spilled out from under me. A white-hot column of flame boiled up from the house.

  Holy shit. I laid on my side as the shockwave rolled over me. That’s reactive and plas! Blood slid from my nose in a painless gush, my body trying to cope with this new demand. I waited for the aftershock, half my face tingling where it was exposed to the scorching air. The smell of cooking grass simmered in my nose, I felt another wave of fruitless rage rise up.

  Jace’s sword. My altar. My books. Goddammit. Heat boiled over me, then aid hovers began to wail in the distance.

  My brain started to work again.

  Someone had just seriously tried to kill me.

  Lucifer, or one of the demons he said he wanted me to hunt? Which would mean they already know the Devil’s hired me—which means I’m not going to survive for long without Japhrimel around.

  Four of the Greater Flight of Hell, and I’m Lucifer’s new little errand girl. All on my own, without Japhrimel. Who told me to stay in the fucking house and get killed. Goddammit. I spared myself one grim smile and shook my head, rolling onto my stomach and bringing myself up to hands and knees, my sheathed sword braced against the earth in my left hand.

  I made it to my feet in two tries. There’s a limit to what even my body can handle. If Japhrimel’s return to Hell and reclaiming his place as a demon undid my change and made me human again, I was looking at a very short, exceedingly uncomfortable lifespan.

  The mark on my left shoulder tingled faintly. I closed my eyes against a wave of dizziness. Then I patted myself down.

  Bag, knives, gun, plasgun, sword. Everything there. Including all my fingers. Hallelujah.

  I looked at the inferno my home had become, suddenly glad none of the servants had been there. The stone itself was warping and twisting, the structure of the marble weakened by the interaction of reactive and plas fields, the very molecular bonds broken down. This was why you never discharge a plasgun near reactive, why shooting a plasgun at a hover isn’t used even as an assassination technique. The interaction of reactive paint and a plasfield creates a chain reaction that propagates at roughly half the speed of light, burning and warping molecular bonds, leaving giant scars on the earth unless contained and decontaminated. Even after that, the effects linger in living things, trees grow brittle and other plants wither and die. It’s a hugely messy way to kill someone, but pretty effective if you don’t care about being fined for contamination and ecological irresponsibility.

  And if you were pretty sure you could outrun the shockwave.

  “Anubis,” I breathed. My statue of the god, the obsidian statue of Sekhmet Japhrimel had given me, Jace’s sword—probably gone. Had the vision of a dead Shaman been a warning, one my god knew I would heed? “Thank you, Lord Death,” I whispered. “For saving my life.”

  The first of the aid hovers from Arrieto crested the rise, lights flashing. I looked around for cover. They would dump plurifreeze on the flames to keep them from spreading and damp the reaction field, then stamp out any grass fires. I didn’t think any of the attackers would stick around after this, they would think they’d trapped me when the house shields went into lockdown. Gods alone knew what had been loosed inside the house when the shields broke, the reaction fire consuming all evidence and mopping me up if I’d survived.

  Wait in the house, don’t answer the door. As advice goes, Japh, that was terrible.

  I faded into a small stand of olive trees, leaning against one, my hand resting on warm bark. There would be a scar on this hillside until the plant life recovered from stresses in cellular structure caused by the reaction and the heat. More glowing aid hovers crested the hill, some of them already beginning to release a fine silvery mist of plurifreeze. Decontamination from a reaction fire this big would take a while, two days at least. The books Japh had bought me were gone, and gods alone knew if anything else might survive. It wasn’t likely.

  I blew out through my teeth, my free hand coming up to touch the necklace. If his sword was destroyed, this was all that was left of Jace except his ashes, kept safely in Gabe Spocarelli’s family mausoleum as a favor to me.

  Anger rose in me, sharp and hot. Useless fury that I had to turn into cold clarity if I expected to get out of this mess alive.

  I didn’t even know who was trying to kill me yet. The list of suspects was getting longer by the hour.

  Stay in the house. Lock the doors.

  Yeah. Right.

  I sighed, gauged the distance between me and the aid hovers, and disappeared into the night.

  CHAPTER 12

  The first train I could catch from the station rocketed across the landscape on its cushion of antigrav, part of a rail network so old the banks on either side of the tracks have risen to overshadow the sleek trains in some places. That bounced the antigrav back at itself and made everything feel queer and light, but it was a quick way for me to get out of Toscano and to a major Hegemony city—in this case, the great hub of Franjlyon. Once in a big city, I was confident I could hide—but out in the Historical Preserve I stood out like a black-market augment at a Ludder convention.

  In Franjlyon I could catch transport for anywhere and start plugging into the bounty-hunter network. If I c
ould find a few Magi, I might have a fighting chance of staying alive for a little while; I also had a fighting chance of staying out of sight for a few days. If I could find a Magi—circle or solitary—I could persuade to part with a few trade secrets, my chances would get even better. Screw decoding old shadowjournals. I wanted to find out what I was and if I would turn back into a human once Japh was a full demon instead of A’nankhimel.

  I was getting to the point of not being too choosy about how I extracted that information, either.

  I settled myself deeper into my seat, wishing I could find a way to make the carriage a little darker. I wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, with the tat on my cheek, the emerald glittering there too, my sword and guns, and the flawless lovely architecture of my face. I had grown a little more used to seeing a holovid model’s face in the mirror, but it was still a horrendous jolt if I wasn’t ready for it. Lots of normals did double- and triple-takes, as if I was a holovid star gone slumming. Or as if I was a psion. Ha ha.

  It wasn’t so much the overlay of demon beauty that bothered me. It was that every time I caught sight of my face in the mirror, I had a weird double image—my old human face, tired and familiar but changed, turned into loveliness even I had trouble looking at. I hated even catching glimpses of myself in windows, like I was doing now.

  I focused out the window, seeing nothing but strips of orandflu lighting and the meaningless smear that was the ghost of my face. Orange stripes blurred together, telling me the hovertrain was gliding along with no trouble at all in the reactive-greased furrow we still called “tracks” even though no train had run on tracks since about twenty years after the discovery of reactive and antigrav.

  That’s great, Danny. Think about historical trivia instead of how you’re going to stay alive past tomorrow. If demons are looking for you, the world gets really small really quick, and I’m not exactly inconspicuous. I even smell like a demon—good luck hiding.

  Nobody else was in the compartment. I’d been alone since I boarded the train. Not many tourists took the red-eye from Turin Station to Franjlyon.

  My eyes dropped to the silver cuff on my left wrist. It sank into my skin, and the gap between the curved ends seemed smaller. I couldn’t believe I’d fit even my wrist through there. When I’d been human my wrists had been big, corded with muscle from years of daily sword drill. Now they were thinner, looking frail even though they held a great deal of strength in their flawlessly powerful demon bones and claw structure.

  The cuff felt good, though my left hand was frozen around my scabbard. I reached over with my right hand, touched the fluid etched lines. It was beautiful. Japhrimel had never given me an ugly present. Was it from him, or was it something I shouldn’t have picked up? One of Lucifer’s little jokes?

  I wondered if it was a tracking device. But it felt so impossibly right, snugged against my wrist as if made for me. I couldn’t quite bring myself to take it off, despite the uneasy idea that perhaps the bracelet was growing closed around my wrist.

  I looked out the window again. Rested my head against the back of the seat. The black demon blood I’d wiped in my hair smelled like perfumed fruit, absorbing back into black silky strands.

  The trouble with traveling like this was that I had too much time to brood.

  I sat there mulling over the situation and not coming up with anything fresh for a good two hours. The train bulleted through a mountain tunnel, the peculiar directionless sense of being underground raising my hackles. I needed a quiet stationary room and some time to myself—and some food. I was beginning to feel a little strange, lightheaded, as if I was going into shock. The world was going gray, color leaching out of the orange strips outside the window, the blue pleather seat across from me losing its shine, a sort of fuzz creeping over my vision.

  I closed my eyes but that made it worse.

  The train rocketed out from under the mountain, and the mark on my shoulder began to tingle.

  There was no sound but the whining lull of the train and a faraway murmur of other minds, human minds full of the random stink of normal human psyches. I reached up with my right hand, touched the mark through my shirt, rubbed at it. If I touched it with my bare fingers I would see out Japhrimel’s eyes. It was very, very tempting—though if I looked out his eyes and into Hell, would I come away from the experience quite sane?

  The thought that the scar might burn off my skin if he became a demon again was unpleasant, to say the least. I racked my brain for demon sigils and magickal theory but couldn’t come up with anything that applied even vaguely. I didn’t have a clue what would happen, and that was uncomfortable. To say the least.

  I blindly trusted him the same way I’d blindly trusted Jace. But Jace had been human… and Jace had ended up giving up his life for me. Japhrimel had given up his power as a demon, shackling himself to me, and there was a time when I could have sworn he didn’t care.

  Maybe going back into Hell without me last night had made him care again. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered.

  How quaint. I’m pretty much a dismal failure at relationships with two species now.

  No. He’d said he would come back. He had promised. I was just going to have to wait and see.

  Wonderful. My favorite kind of magickal riddle: one where you just sit and wait for the unpleasantness to begin.

  I wasn’t an idiot. I knew I had trust issues. Plenty of bounty hunters do. You don’t go into bounty hunting without being a little paranoid, and if you survive you get even more paranoid. My parents had left me before I was ten days old, my social worker had left me for Death’s country, my friends—when I made them at all—either betrayed me or died as well. Except for Gabe.

  Always excepting Gabe.

  And let’s not even talk about my lovers. I’m overreacting. Who wouldn’t overreact, when Lucifer starts playing with them? Japhrimel will come back, Dante. He promised.

  Still, I wondered. I doubted.

  I rubbed at my shoulder through my shirt, rubbed it and rubbed it. The buzzing, prickling tingle in the mark intensified.

  Then it gave one incredible, crunching flare of pain that ate right through the gray blanket of shock. I sat bolt upright, four inches of steel leaping free of the sheath, disappearing as I shoved the sword back home. There was no enemy to kill here—just one flare after another of deep grinding pain in my shoulder.

  What if the mark vanishes? What will I do then? I tried to focus on my breathing, deep and serene.

  The trouble was, I felt less than serene. My entire body ached for Japhrimel. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep; in fact, I’d probably go insane from lack of rest. I’d survived almost a year without him before, but the bond between us was too established by now. My research, fragmented as it was, told me one thing for sure, I certainly couldn’t break it.

  But with a demon’s power, he might be able to.

  Will you stop it, Dante? He’ll come back for you. It’s just when we have to worry about.

  The pain in my shoulder eased little by little. I tucked my chin, reached up, and pulled my shirt away from my chest. Ropy lines of scarring twisted in the golden-skinned hollow of my shoulder, looking decorative rather than scarlike. They also flushed a deep, angry red.

  An amazing, searing bolt of Power hit the mark, spreading down my skin like oil. My hips jerked forward as my head snapped aside and I gasped, suddenly glad there was nobody in the compartment with me. The hovertrain rocked slightly on its cushion, I gulped down stale recycled air, panting. It felt like I’d just slammed a hypo of caffeine-laden aphrodisiac, pleasure spilling and swirling through my veins, tautening my body like a harpstring.

  The cuff on my wrist reacted, etched lines suddenly swirling with green light. I tipped my left hand over and stared at the design, fascinated, as the lines moved on the metal, shaping themselves into patterns I could almost recognize. They looked like demon glyphs, mutating and twisting, as beautiful as they were alien—and as beautiful as their language
was hurtful.

  What’s it doing? I probed at it delicately with my nonphysical senses, felt nothing. Was it just a decoration, a pretty but useless thing? If it kept glowing I was going to have problems—it would be hard to hide.

  I tipped into a half-trance, looking at the colored lines sway and slide over the metal’s surface, still probing at it. For all magickal intents and purposes, it was invisible. That in itself was strange, as most things have a psychic “echo” of one kind or another.

  The Power continued pulsing down my skin, each successive wave deeper and warmer. It was nice, I supposed—but why? Was Japhrimel reaching for his mark on my skin, trying to locate me? Did that mean he was out of Hell and feeling frisky?

  I will always come for you.

  Was he looking for me? I hoped like hell he was. But staying one step ahead of demon assassins might also make it hard for him to find me.

  This drowsy, dreamy thought occurred to me as I stared at the cuff’s little lightshow. I blinked.

  When I looked again, the lines were frozen into a single symbol.

  Hegethusz, one of the Nine Canons. Shaped like a backward-leaning angular H with a slash through it, a simple stark rune of a simple stark nature.

  The Rune of Danger.

  There was only one door. I rocked up to my feet, reached it in two steps and slid it aside, pressing the lock-lever. Any transport employee would have the keycode for the outside lock, so it would be easy to pick out of an unprotected brain. Just one more reason why people feared psions. If you didn’t mind getting a wash of uncoordinated jumbled filth with any usable information, a psion could probably do all the things normals were so afraid of. The thought of the effort it would take to clean out my mind after pickpocketing something from a normal’s head made my skin crawl.