Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “How is asking Lucifer to turn you into a demon again safe for me? How is any of this safe for me?” I kept a firm hold on my rising irritation. The ice slid down my throat and into my chest, like the creeping numb chill of Death.

  “I am not demon, Dante. I am A’nankhimel, a Fallen with a demon’s Power. There is a difference.”

  If you would just bloody well talk to me, I would know there was a difference. I thought this over, playing with the rough silk of his hair. “Gods.” My breath hissed out. “I’m warning you, Tierce Japhrimel. You pull another one of those and I’ll….” I wasn’t used to speechlessness. What could I do to him?

  Another tremor slid through him, shocking in someone so controlled. “Fearing for your life is punishment enough, hedaira.”

  I decided to let it rest and touched his collarbone through the coat, he shivered again. “I suppose you hired all those people?”

  “Hellesvront. If we are hunting demons, if makes sense to use the resources available. There will be more if we need them.” He looked like he wanted to say more, his eyes opening wider and a short breath inhaled. I waited, but nothing came out.

  I ruffled his hair affectionately, he smiled again. An unwilling smile touched my own mouth. I’d do anything you wanted if you just explained it to me, Japh. It’s not that hard. “I don’t work well in groups, Japhrimel.”

  “Neither do I, my sweetness. Neither do I.”

  I let it go then. He had never called me that before.

  CHAPTER 22

  You’re kidding.” I braced myself on my hands as I leaned over the table. “This is all?”

  “All we really need.” Vann leaned back in his chair. “Just the nameglyphs for three of them.”

  “Oh, Sekhmet sa’es,” I hissed. “What good is that?” How were we supposed to track down demons with only three runes? Not even their complete names, just the demon version of nicknames, shorthand. Demons kept their truenames a closely guarded secret, which is the reason for all those stories of a quick-thinking Magi solitary using a name to stop a demon.

  I’ve always suspected those stories aren’t anywhere close to the truth. I have difficulty believing a simple word will stop a demon, and I’m a Magi-trained psion. I work my magick by enforcing my Will on the world through words and will, so I of all people have a healthy respect for the magic of names. But still… demons. If you can’t kill it with cold steel, hot lead, or a plasgun, I have a little difficulty believing a simple name spoken by anyone will stop it.

  I never wanted to put it to the test, either. It was one of those questions I could go my whole life without answering definitively. Funny how the older I got, the more of those I had.

  “We know how to deal with demons, ma’am. We have a Magi,” Bella pointed out. “Give Ogami the glyphs, let him work.”

  I threw up my hands. “Great. Just great. Have I mentioned yet how useless this is?”

  “Many times,” Lucas wheezed, looking over some magscans of New Prague. There were a couple of places with enough interference to hide a demon, mostly in the Stare Mesto. “Pointlessly. At great length. Shut up.”

  I subsided. He was probably the only person on earth other than Gabe who could have gotten away with that, if only because I had a healthy respect for him. I might not fear him as much as I had when I was human—but a man who couldn’t die was a bad enemy to make. Lucas had a reputation for professionalism. If he told me to shut up, it was because I was being ridiculous.

  Vann handed the file folders over to the Asiano, who gave me a long dubious look and retreated to a chair next to the fireplace. Japhrimel stood where he had for the last hour, in front of the rain-spotted window, his hands clasped behind his back. He seemed to be ignoring the rest of us, uninterested in events.

  The storm had blown itself out, and the rain was dying in fitful gasps. I poured myself another cup of coffee. The Nichtvren had gone to ground and wouldn’t be up until nightfall. Hell, I didn’t even want to be up until nightfall. Thirty-five years of being a night-walking Necromance was a hard habit to break even after years as a hedaira and only needing sleep every third day or so. My body-clock was all shot to hell, and I was suddenly conscious of time passing in a way I hadn’t been since the hunt for Kellerman Lourdes. I’d grown used to days that ran endlessly into each other, spent with Japhrimel’s steady attention and my books. Now, suddenly, I was in a hurry again.

  I didn’t like it.

  The other nonhuman agent—McKinley—was gone on some errand for Japhrimel. The two of them freaked me out—not human, but no other species of paranormal I’d ever seen before either. They didn’t even smell human, which irritated me on a very basic level. They smelled like burning cinnamon and a faint tang of demon. And McKinley was seriously creepy; he just rubbed me the wrong way.

  The rest of them were getting on my nerves too. I was still scrubbed too raw, all hyped up on adrenaline with nowhere to go. Sex had taken the edge off, true… but I was still twitchy.

  As soon as I realized it, I tapped on my swordhilt, my claw-tip nails making a clicking sound. “Is there a sparring room in this pile?”

  Silence met my words. Japhrimel turned away from the window. “You need combat?” It was a shock to see his eyes glowing green again. I’d grown so used to a human darkness in them.

  An A’nankhimel with a demon’s Power. All the Magi shadowjournals and demonology texts I’d read had never spoken of such a thing. If I was Magi, I’d have a better chance of knowing or guessing. I couldn’t even do what a Magi might and call up another imp to answer my questions. I never wanted to see another damn imp ever again.

  “I think I’d best get out of the way.” I left my coffee cup on the table as I straightened. A waste of good java, I’m too keyed up to even enjoy it. “The only demon I hunted down was Santino, and I already had his trail from Abra. Until we get a direction to go in, I’m just going to fret and pull my hair out. Besides, I think better when I’m moving. Sparring qualifies as moving.”

  Bella glanced at me, her eyes widening. Then she cast a look at Vann, who shook his head slightly. As if cautioning her to keep her mouth shut. That irritated me far more than it should.

  I’m tight-strung enough to hurt someone accidentally. That bothered me. If I hurt someone, I want it to be meant.

  “There’s a sparhall near here,” Lucas said over his shoulder. “You could find something there. Lot of bounty action, psions. Rent’s reasonable, ten New Creds an hour.”

  Relief smashed into my breastbone. A sparhall full of psions—I could rent a cage or a circle and get some action or just work through a few katas. “Thank the gods. Which way?”

  “Due west, gray building on the Prikope. Can’t miss it, got a cage hanging from the side.” Lucas appeared to forget all about me, studying a map of New Prague. He was absorbing this with an incredible amount of equanimity. Then again, he hadn’t batted an eye the time he’d seen Japhrimel with me in Rio. I wondered just what Lucas knew about demons, and how soon I could get him alone to pick his brains.

  Vann’s sad brown eyes flicked from me to Japhrimel and back again, for all the world as if asking for direction. Japhrimel’s face didn’t change.

  “I will accompany you,” Japhrimel said. “It is not perhaps quite safe for you to go alone.”

  As if I was stupid enough to want to wander around alone with demons out looking to kill me. “Sounds good. Let me get my bag.”

  Japhrimel nodded. I headed for the room I’d slept in last night.

  “My lord?” I heard Vann say quietly. “Does she intend to continue—”

  Japhrimel said nothing. I ducked inside the room, grabbed my bag and Jace’s coat, and made it out just in time to see Japhrimel shake his head.

  “No,” he said. I got the feeling I’d missed something. “I will not.”

  “But—” Vann flinched as Japhrimel’s eyes rested on him. “Forgive me, my lord.”

  Japhrimel nodded. “Be at peace, Vann. There is nothing to fear.
”

  Ogami, his eyes wide, stared from his chair. I caught him examining me as if I was a new and interesting type of bug.

  “What’s up?” I asked. Lucas was apparently absorbed in the maps, as if he wasn’t listening. I didn’t believe it for a moment. I think you and I are going to have a little chat, Villalobos.

  “Nothing,” Japhrimel’s eyes met mine. “Vann thinks I am too forgiving of your disobedience.”

  I looked at the brown man. I could almost feel one of my eyebrows quirk. Time to get everyone on the same page about Danny Valentine. “Really? Let me clear everything up right now, then. I don’t obey. I haven’t since primary school.” For a moment, my skin roughened, remembering Rigger Hall. The phantom scars across my back didn’t burn, and I was grateful for that. Maybe I was starting to heal.

  Maybe. “I’m generally reasonable when I’m asked instead of told what to do. But let’s just get this straight: I don’t take orders well. You got a problem with that?”

  Vann’s brown eyes widened as if I’d called his mother something unspeakable. “No ma’am,” he said hurriedly, his gaze flickering over to Japhrimel, who merely looked bored and ever so slightly amused, just the smallest fraction of a smile tilting a corner of his lips up. “Not at all.”

  “Good. I’m going to go and get my head cleared out. When I come back, we’ll try this again.”

  Outside the room, I stalked for the elevator. I had the odd feeling someone wasn’t telling me something, but I chalked it up to being tense and decided to revisit the whole chain of thought once I was cleared out from some hard sparring. I was getting paranoid.

  Then again, paranoid would help keep me one step ahead of the game, wouldn’t it? Paranoid meant careful, and careful was good. I jabbed at the button for the elevator.

  Japhrimel moved closer. I sensed crackling static in the air as his aura covered mine again briefly, a caress. The mark on my shoulder burned, a soft velvet flame. The elevator dinged and opened. I stepped in, familiar nausea and breathlessness rising. Japhrimel followed me, waiting until the doors closed to curl his hand around my shoulder. “Easy, Dante. There is enough air.”

  Says you. I couldn’t spare the breath to say it aloud. There was never enough air in small spaces. It was like some sort of thermodynamic law. Small space plus no windows equals no goddamn air, equals me gasping in panic. What a blow to my tough-girl image.

  His hand slid up and around, warm fingers touching my nape. It helped, but not nearly enough. “I am with you.”

  I swallowed, closing my eyes. “Yeah. For how long?” My voice sounded gasping, panicky. I didn’t mean to say that, I didn’t. Oh, gods.

  “As long as you allow it. And perhaps after.”

  I can’t imagine that. I leaned against his fingers. “I wish I could go slicboarding,” I muttered. That would work all my fidgets out.

  “Do you truly wish that?” A curious, husky tone; my stomach flipped as the antigrav floated us down. He leaned closer, his solidity comforting.

  I shrugged. “It’s okay. I know you don’t like that. I was just talking.” Just shooting my mouth off to keep from screaming, that’s all.

  “If it would please you, I would learn to live with it.”

  I opened my eyes, saw him leaning close and examining my face, his fingers hard and warm against the back of my neck. His eyes glittered green, casting shadows under his cheekbones and drowning me in emerald light. I had always tried to avoid looking him in the eye before, when he’d been demon instead of Fallen. “Too dangerous,” I said finally, as the elevator fell to a stop. The chime rang, couth and discreet, and I bolted out of the cage and away from his eyes.

  Why am I so scared? It’s only Japhrimel.

  That was like saying it was only a hungry tiger. Living with him had only brought home how much more than human he was, and now that he had a demon’s Power back he was something else again. I had been pretending that he was only a man. Bad idea when it came to anything nonhuman. But still, I couldn’t think of him as anything other than human. I couldn’t stand to think of living in a world without his quiet, dry humor and steady hands. Go figure—the one guy I had a bad case for, and it was a demon who had already proved he wouldn’t necessarily tell me things I really needed to know. Here I was, still hanging out with him. How was that for crazy?

  I wasn’t thinking clearly. I couldn’t throttle back the irritation I felt, steady low-burning irritation that was buried rage trying to work itself free. When you live your life on the edge of adrenaline and steel, you can get really jittery. It’s best to clean it all out with exercise, cleanse the toxins from the body and clear the mind.

  I stalked through the hotel lobby, ignoring the normals—guests and employees—scattering out of my path. Japhrimel fell into step behind me, close as my shadow. Just as he had since he’d met me. “You’re running away,” he said in my ear as I gave the door a push and stepped out, blinking, into the pale watery sunlight.

  I didn’t dignify the obvious with a response.

  Cracked pavement and a crowd of normals greeted me. I glanced up to get my bearings and turned to my left, heading generally westward and lengthening my stride.

  New Prague is old, having been settled well before the Merican Era. The buildings are an odd mix of new plasteel and old concrete, as well as some biscuit-colored stone. The shape of the buildings is different from Saint City’s, echoing a time before hovers and plasteel, a time before accredited psions, even though Prague had been a town known for its Magi and Judic Qabalisticon scholars.

  It is also a town full of history. Here was where Kochba bar Gilead’s last Judic followers had been killed by laserifle fire in the overture to the Seventy Days War, and where Skinlin had first learned the process of creating golem’ai, the semisentient mud-things that were a dirtwitch’s worst weapon. This town was old, and I wondered if Japhrimel had ever been here before on Lucifer’s business.

  I wished I could find a way to ask.

  One of the good things about being a Necromance is that even in a Freetown people get out of your way in a hell of a hurry when you come striding down a sidewalk with your sword in your hand and your emerald flashing. Many Necromances only use their blades ceremonially—there’s nothing like good edged steel to deal with a hungry ghost or to break the spell of going into Death. The ones who, like me, deal with bounties or law enforcement are combat-trained. There’s also a subculture of Mob and freelance psions who are generally very tough customers. Most normals are more frightened of a psion reading their mind than they are of the weaponry we carry, something I’ve never understood.

  Jace had been Mob freelance. He’d been very good, but I’d had to hold back sometimes while sparring with him.

  Thinking of Jace, as usual, made a lump of frustrated grief and fury rise to my throat. I slowed down a little, Japhrimel’s soundless step reverberating behind me. He was demon, and all but shouted it now that I was hedaira and peculiarly sensitive to him I could feel the harpstrings of Power under the physical world thrumming in response to his very presence. Part of it was sharing a bed with him, my body recognized him.

  But that wasn’t it, was it? I frowned, trying to figure out why it felt so different. Was it just because he was a full demon again? I stalked along the sidewalk, one little corner of my mind focused on tagging the people around me, cataloguing their various levels of dangerousness. There weren’t a lot of psions out on the streets—of course, it was during the day. Hard to find a psion in the morning, unless you spot one heading home to bed.

  I still hadn’t figured it out by the time we reached the sparhall, a large gray building due west of the hotel with the universal signs of violence-in-training—magscan and deep combat shielding, a twisted sparring cage dangling from a hook bolted into the side of the building high enough that slicboarders could tag it and make it rock, slicboards racked along the front of the building, and the blue psychic haze of adrenaline and controlled bloodlust waving like anemones in the air.


  Oh, yes. This was what I wanted—effort, maybe enough to sweat, a few blessed seconds where I wouldn’t have to think, only move. No memory of the past, no thought for the future, only the endless now.

  Japhrimel said nothing as I stepped inside, but his golden hand came over my shoulder and held the door open for me. I tapped my swordhilt with my fingernails and met the wide blue eyes of a Ceremonial behind the front desk.

  Her tat curved back on itself, she wore a rig with more knives than I’d ever seen before. Propped next to her against the desk was a machete with a plain, functional leather-wrapped hilt. I measured her, she measured me, and her hand leapt for her blade.

  “Whoa!” I lifted my hands. “I’m here to hire, not to drag anyone in.” I didn’t blame her one bit, I was popping with almost visible twitchy lasetrigger anger, and I looked like a demon to otherSight. Not to mention the fact that I was being followed by a very tall definitely-demon.

  Her hand paused. I felt Japhrimel’s attention behind me, drew myself up and leaned back into him. He was wound just tight enough to go for her if she twitched. I didn’t like to consider how I knew or my instinctive response both to soothe him and to keep him away from her. I wasn’t sure I could stop him if he started, but keeping myself in between them seemed like a really good idea. I’d never seen him in this mood before, not even during the hunt for Santino.

  I heard the faint sounds of a sparhall behind soundmuffling—little sounds of effort, the clang of metal, the clicking of staves.

  The Ceremonial eyed me, said something in Czechi.

  Oh, damn. She doesn’t speak Merican?

  Japhrimel replied over my shoulder in the same language. I am really going to have to learn a few new languages, I thought as I caught a flicker of motion.

  The roll of New Credit notes landed on her desk as Japhrimel said something else, short and harsh. I felt the air pressure change, and knew without looking back that he now wore a small chilling little smile.