Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Japhrimel fell into step behind me, McKinley said nothing. He was going to stay behind, thank the gods.

  I made it out the door and down the hall, pushing the door to the stairwell open. I would be damned if I’d take an elevator. My nerves were raw enough.

  My footsteps echoed on the stairs; his were soundless. I could have moved quietly, but what good would it have done me? Besides, I was in a mood.

  I felt Japhrimel’s eyes on me as I stalked through the lobby and out through the climate control, into the familiar cold chembath of a rainy Saint City early afternoon.

  Immediately, habitually, I checked hovertraffic and reached out with all my senses to take in the mood of the city. The flux and glow of Power here was so familiar another lump rose in my throat.

  Stop it. You’ve barely ever cried before in your life; stop being an idiot and use those brains you’re so famous for.

  The feeling—which I had to examine thoroughly before admitting it was relief and a sense of being home again—filled my entire body with an odd combination of lightness and a completely uncharacteristic desire to weep-angst like a holovid soap star. I swallowed the blockage in my throat, glancing down Ninth to see the familiar bulk of the skyline lifting its scallops and needles around the bay. I wanted to get to Gabe’s quickly, of course; but still I walked. Japhrimel, saying nothing, walked behind me.

  Three steps behind and to my left, soundless as Death Himself, his presence felt like sunshine on my back. His mark on my shoulder was warm, comforting. The streets were familiar, resounding under my boots. One moment I wanted to dance with crazy joy.

  The next I felt the weight of my bag, with the folder inside it. Then my eye would fall across a slight change—a new building, an old building remodeled, something different— and the change would hit me hard in the solar plexus.

  It was small consolation that with a war shaping up between Lucifer and Eve, and something else in the offing Japh couldn’t be prodded to tell me about, I might not live long enough to see other changes.

  I finally hailed a hovercab at the corner of Fifteenth and Pole, right at the edge of the Tank District. The driver—an Asiano man—didn’t look happy to find out his fare was a psion, but he’d descended and flipped the meter before seeing my tat. Japhrimel gave the driver Gabe’s address in flawless unaccented Merican. His control of the language—indeed, of most languages—was phenomenal.

  Then again, demons like languages just as they like technology, or genetics, or meddling with humans.

  Meddling with humans—but not feeling any affection for them. Or Falling, for them.

  The unsteady flutter of my stomach as the hovercab rose into the sky intensified as I studied Japhrimel’s profile. He stared straight ahead, laser-green eyes burning intently as if they intended to slice through the plasilica barrier between us and the driver, out through the front bubble, and cut the sky with a sword of light. “Japh?”

  “Hm?” As if startled out of his own uncomfortable thoughts. His eyes turned to me, and I found it slightly easier to meet them.

  “Can I ask you something?” My left hand eased on my katana, I even drummed my fingers a little bit against the scabbard.

  “Gods protect me from your questions, my curious. Ask.” Did he smile? If he did it was a fleeting expression, moving over his face so quickly even my demon-sharp eyes barely caught it.

  No time like the present. Since you won’t explain anything else, I might as well ask for the moon. I plunged ahead. “Why did you Fall?”

  I expected him to turn the question aside, refuse to answer it. He would always make some ironic reply before, or simply, gently, refuse to tell me anything of A’nankhimel. Would tell me myths about demons, old stories, tales to make me laugh or listen wide-eyed with a sweet sharp nostalgic terror like a child’s—but never anything I could use to find out what I was, what the limits of my new body were. Nothing about himself, or what his life had been like. He would only talk about things that had happened since I’d met him, and even some of those he wouldn’t speak about.

  As if he’d been born the day he showed up at my door.

  I never knew dissatisfaction before I met you, hedaira.

  Today, he cocked his head. Considered the question. I felt his awareness again, closing around me. His aura stretched to cover mine, the mark on my shoulder staining through the trademark sparkles of a Necromance’s energetic field with black diamond flames.

  When he spoke, it was soft, reflective. “I lived for countless ages as the Prince’s Right Hand and felt no guilt or shame at what I did. I still do not.”

  No philosophy for me, he’d said, during the hunt for Santino. I don’t take sides. The Prince points and says that he wants a death, I kill.

  He was silent for so long, his eyes burning green against mine, that I finally found my lungs starving for breath and remembered to inhale. He’d refused to kill me to gain back his place in Hell. I had it on good authority; better authority than if he’d tried to tell me himself. So what did that mean?

  “Then, the Prince set me to fetch a human woman and use her in a game that would end with the created Androgyne under his hand. I found myself in the presence of a creature I could not predict, for the first time in my life.” He shrugged, a simple evocative movement. “I did not understand her—but knew her in a way that seemed deeper than even my kinship with my own kind. And thus, my dissatisfaction.”

  “Dissatisfaction?” I sounded breathless. What a surprise—I was breathless. Damn hard to breathe when he was staring into my eyes like this.

  “I Fell through love of you, hedaira. It’s simple enough, even with your gift for complicating matters. I don’t want your fear of me; I have never wanted you to fear me.” He looked as if he would say more, but ended up shutting his mouth and shaking his head slightly, as if mocking himself for what he couldn’t say.

  I don’t want to fear you either. “I don’t want to be afraid of you. But you make it so goddamn hard, Japh. All you have to do is talk to me.”

  “I can think of nothing else I would rather do.” He even looked like he meant it, his eyebrows drawn together as he studied me, his eyes holding mine in a cage of emerald light. “I cherish my time with you.”

  That made my heart flip and start to pound like a gymnasa doing a floor routine. All right, Japh. One more try. One more chance. “What aren’t you telling me?” My fingers tightened on the scabbard.

  A long pause. The hovercab began to descend, the driver humming a tune I didn’t recognize. There was a time in Saint City when I would have known all the songs.

  “Like calls to like,” he repeated, softly. “I am a killer, Dante. It is what I am.”

  So, by extension, that’s what I am. That wasn’t what I meant, I wanted you to talk to me about Eve. I thought about this, turned it over inside my head. “I don’t kill without cause.” My eyes dropped away from his, to the slender shape of the katana. Fudoshin. A blade hungry for battle, Jado had said.

  Jado lived in Saint City. I wanted to ask him about this sword. Yeah, sure. Like I have so much free time.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “a killer’s not all you are. If it was I’d be dead too, right?” You’ve never let me down when it counted, Japh. You even stood up to Lucifer—and pushed him back. You made the Prince of Hell back off. He’s scared of you.

  He had no pat reply for that. The hovercab landed with a sigh of leaf springs. He paid the cabdriver. I wondered—not for the first time—where all the money came from.

  Then again, Lucifer had paid me too. Cash was no problem to demons. Some Magi even said they’d invented the stuff. It certainly made sense, given money’s seductive nature and the chaos it could create.

  I decided to push a little more, since he was so willing to talk. “So what’s this Key, and what’s going on that’s changed everything?”

  He didn’t reply for a few moments, watching the cab lift off and dart back into the stream of hover traffic. “Later, my curious. Wh
en we are finished with your Necromance friend.”

  Disappointment bit sharp under my breastbone. I folded my arms, my sword a heavy weight in my left hand. “Japh?”

  “Hm?” His eyes returned to me. “More questions?”

  If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was baiting me. “Just a request. Quit being a bully. Stop keeping me in the dark.”

  His mouth pulled down at both corners. But I’d already turned on my heel and dropped my arms, heading down Trivisidiro just like I always used to do, the click of my bootheels marking off each step. How about that? I think I finally got the last word in.

  I didn’t feel happy. What I felt was uneasy, and growing uneasier by the moment.

  I blinked at Trivisidiro Street and cast around, vaguely troubled. If I hadn’t been so bloody distracted, I would have noticed it right away. As it was, it took me a few seconds before I realized why I was disoriented.

  Gabe’s front gate was slightly open. Not only that, but the shields on her property line were torn, bleeding trickles of energy into the early afternoon.

  CHAPTER 10

  I would have gone first, being accustomed to taking point on any job; it was a habit thirty-odd years in the making and difficult to shake. Japhrimel, however, grabbed my arm in an iron grip that stopped just short of pain and gave me to understand with a single vehement emerald look that he was going first, and if I didn’t want an argument I would be well advised to just let him.

  I was so badly shaken I did. I followed him, my thumb pressing against the katana’s guard, right hand clamped around the hilt. I suppose I should have drawn a plasgun, but I was operating on instinct. A blade is the weapon I find most comforting. Give me a sword and some open ground, a clear enemy in front of me, and I know what to do.

  It’s just everything else in my life that confuses me now. The thought was full of bleak humor. Gallows humor, meant to take the edge off my nervousness but failing miserably.

  My mind turned curiously blank as I followed Japhrimel’s black coat and inky head. As he stepped through Gabe’s gate, soundless, the static of his attention stretching to take in the smallest of details, the bleeding shields on her property line flushed red and began to fizz.

  I calmed the restive layers of energy with a mental touch, deftly binding together holes ripped in the shielding. It was strange, but there was no sense of personality behind the rips and holes.

  If another psion had cracked the shields, there would be a distinct stamp, a flavor to the rents. Something I could track, no matter how good the other psion was. That was part of the trouble with the use of Power, it was so unutterably personal. A bounty hunter, like me, developed a set of psychic muscles and sensitivities perfectly suited to tracking. We had to; it was how we did our jobs. I still thought like a bounty hunter, never sitting with my back to a door if I could help it and seeing the world as a tangle of connections, some chance some not, that if pursued systematically with a healthy dose of instinct would lead me to the person or piece of information I wanted. Nobody—especially anybody who has done something to make someone like me hunt them—manages to get through life without randomly bumping into something or spilling some energy into the ether. Everybody fucks up, sooner or later—and fuckups are mostly what a bounty hunter snags on.

  But there was no flavor to the rips and tears in Gabe’s exquisitely careful, beautiful shielding.

  Japhrimel ghosted over the gravel walkways of the garden. The house shields were still intact, vibrating with distress of a peculiarly remote kind. I would have thinned my shields to try and reach for Gabe—after all, we shared magick and deeper bonds—but the mark on my shoulder clamped down with fearful pressure and I realized Japhrimel’s aura had hardened into a demon-tough shield around me, on top of my regular shielding.

  That was something I hadn’t expected he could do, and I looked around the weedy garden with my heart in my mouth. Tension brushed my skin with thousands of delicately-scraping pins, and copper filled my mouth.

  I felt alive.

  We found her around the back of the house, in the garden near the back wall Eddie had used for his more useful but less happy plants—aconite, horehound, belladonna, poison sumac (for repellant spells and treating slagfever), fireweed 12, wormwood, castor, meadow saffron, foxglove, hellebore, you name it. All the datura had been grubbed up, leaving a rain-softened hole in the dirt, and that was puzzling. If Eddie had died ten days ago, why was his garden weedy? And where had the datura gone?

  Then Japhrimel turned to me. “Go to the front of the house,” he said, but I pushed past him. He caught my left arm, gently. “Dante. You do not wish to see this. Please.”

  I looked, and I saw. It was no use, all the good-intentioned wanting to protect me in the world couldn’t have stopped me from looking.

  Gabe lay tangled in a young hemlock. She bent back as if doing an enthusiastic full-wheel pose for a gymnasia illustration, except for the bloody holes in her dark shirt and jeans. Dead for at least six hours if not more, the Necromance in me thought, tasting the fading tang of what we call foxfire—the false glow of nerves slowly dying. The ground around her was chewed with bullets, white underbark and broken green things glaring through the rainy day. Mist had collected on her face, the angle of her jaw upflung, her hair a hanging skein of gray and black silk.

  Her feet were bare and very white.

  Her sword, blackened and twisted with her death, spilled out of her right hand. Her eyes were closed, and except for the bloody hole in her left cheek where a bullet had ripped through the flesh and shattered teeth she looked peaceful.

  My pulse beat a padded drum in my ears.

  The click sounded in my brain. I looked at her feet, down at the gravel path. Glanced back toward the house. She had to have come over the lawn, barefoot and in a hell of a hurry. Why?

  The part of me that had seen so many murder scenes jolted into operation, like an old-fashioned gearwheel. It slid into place evenly, and I thought quite clearly, I’m going to feel this soon. Before I do, I need to think. Think, Danny. Think.

  I examined the angle of the bullets, where they had torn through plants and dug furrows in the wet earth. The smell of death rose with the perfume of fresh green garden, newly-churned dirt. The computer deck inside my head took over, calculated angles and wounds, came up with an answer. I looked over my right shoulder, up over the wall at a point some twenty feet above. There was a rooftop there, just right for a projectile assault rifle.

  Why was she still lying here? That much hot lead whizzing through the air—someone should have called the cops. Heard something. Done something, especially in this neighborhood.

  Why had Gabe come out here? Her property-line shields were torn and her house shields vibrating, probably with the psychic shock of her death. I was a Necromance, here with a fresh body—but if I went into Death now, I might not come out. I was too tired, too distracted, and too goddamn upset. To top it all off, Japhrimel would have to question Gabe; he might not know the right questions to ask to elicit the underlying logic of what had happened. There were rules to questioning the dead, rules he might not know any more than I knew the arcane rules of demon etiquette.

  More than that, something deep and colored a smoking red in me rose in revolt at the thought of using Gabe’s body as a focus. She had gone into Death, into the halls she’d walked so often before, and into the clear rational light of What Comes Next. If there was any justice in the world, she was with Eddie now. I wouldn’t pull her away from that.

  Admit it, Danny. You’re afraid of facing her after you’ve failed her again.

  A litany of my life’s failures rose before me, all the dead I’d loved. Roanna. Lewis. Doreen. Jace. Eddie. And now a new name to add to that long string. Gabe.

  A long, despairing scream rose inside my chest, was locked away by an iron hand descending on my heart and squeezing, its bony fingers sinking into warm flesh and spreading the cold of stone. Cold. Like the gray fuzzy chill of shock, only
deeper. This was a killing cold, ice to be polished, sharp as my katana and deadly as the demon standing beside me.

  Gabriele. The final echo of the promise I’d made her yesterday sounded a brass gong inside my head.

  Whoever did this I won’t just kill. I’m going to erase them. I swear to every god that ever was, I am going to make them pay.

  “Dante.” Japhrimel’s voice, quiet. “I am sorry.”

  My mouth worked silently for a moment. I considered screaming. Then my jaw shut with a click of teeth snapping together. Harsh dragged-in breath tore at my throat with the smell of fresh dirt. My right hand cramped once, viciously, around the hilt of my katana. Released. I shoved the sword into the loop on my rig. Looked at the statue of Gabe’s body.

  Gone. The word echoed in my head. Gone.

  Failed again.

  The knife whispered out of its sheath. Japhrimel cast me a measuring look, as if weighing whether I would use it on him. I set it against the flesh of my palm and ripped down in one unsteady movement, dropping the blade now smoking with black demon blood.

  I lifted my hand, made a fist. Black blood dripped between my fingers, squeezed so hard I heard my own bones creak. My throat locked around a black well of screaming.

  This I swear on my blood. I will find who is responsible for this, Gabe. And I won’t just kill them. I will make them pay.

  “Dante!” Japhrimel grabbed my hand, a hot pulse of Power sealing the wound even more quickly than welling black demon blood.

  I blinked at him. Gods, does he sound frightened? Never heard that before. I finally found my voice. “Don’t worry,” I rasped. “That was just a promise.” Am I in shock? I don’t feel like it. I feel like I’m thinking clearly for the first fucking time in a long time.

  He studied me. “I am sorry.” His eyes measured me. As if he wanted to express more than sorrow, as if there was something else he wanted to say.